LINK to Part ONE
LINK to Part TWO Vilhjálmursdóttir and Ibarra were the first to rationalize away this unnaturalness. They were scientists, after all, and if some phenomenon breaks natural laws, then those laws are at fault, not the phenomena. While unprecedented, they claimed, this illumination could easily be the result of an undiscovered microorganism or bioluminescent plankton. While this explanation assuaged Dr. Ramfield; Rydern, Lukasc, and I remained unconvinced. Those two would lose the most if this mission went disastrously wrong, so they tried to salvage it the hardest. We all heard them in the night, conspiring on how to live their lives together, running away from any bureaucrats or military tribunals. They were in love, and had their whole lives ahead of them, even I wasn’t cruel enough to deny them their hope. Even though I agreed with them at the time, I think that for all its savage absurdity, the truth of the situation was better than their alternative. After all, better for their dreams to die fiery, hot, and passionate than be slowly frozen and chipped away. We proceeded even further down in the next month, our craft seeming to proceed slower and slower as the days dragged by. Lukasc isn't coming out to eat with us anymore, and Rydern doesn't speak to any of us when he does. They’ve both retreated to their joint quarters, to try and assuage the boredom and ennui through silence and separation. The event which presented itself most strongly from this period might be the day we reached the Bathyal zone’s halfway point. Ibarra tried to pull out a celebratory drink—pure obligation at this point—when she noticed a very odd fact about the walls surrounding the cabinets. The steel that made them up, and in fact all the steel on the submarine, had gained some strange, malleable property, bending and twisting to our fingers while somehow retaining its strength and structural integrity. We descended deeper and deeper, each day encountering some strange new property of this deep water. Fish and other creatures numbered less and less, and the days dragged on longer and longer. Time meant less down here, near the bottom, and while I would rationally believe it was the unchanging light and long work-hours, I knew somewhere deep within me that it was time itself changing, not I. With a fully unceremonious THUNK the Pandora hit the bottom. None of us could recall exactly how long it had been since we’d set off. A month? Six? Twenty-four? Only by the continuity of our bodies could we tell it had been under five years, but I doubt that our judgement was anywhere near as accurate as we had thought. We had just travelled further than any craft before us, manned or unmanned. I would say that the Pandora would fall into both those categories—manned and unmanned—because what we saw that day transformed us—we entered the trench with hope, dreams, and optimism, but returned as hollow as our craft. Like a cup placed over a sunken candle, the magnificent and terrible truth of our journey vacuumed up any fibre of soul which we might have possessed into some other, hollow dimension. We were barely able to move or think now, through the thick sludge the world called water, and so took more than a few minutes to regain out bearings. We finally comprehended it though, minutes after our collective train of thought departed in steam and oil-smoke: we were no longer explorers, we were GODS. We could shape the future for millions to come, bringing back and controlling all the knowledge humanity had of this massive trench. Like Prometheus, we could take fire from the gods—or rather hydrothermal vents. After what seemed like a rapid century, we finally decided what day it was, to celebrate as a holiday both personal and (later) national. Every city would have parades in honor of this glorious mission, and we would be the gods, exalted by the people in the backs of massive cardboards floats. It's telling, though, that for all the minutes we spent in celebration and self-congratulation, it took us even longer to look out the window, and see what we were celebrating. At first, I thought we had hit some large underground oil deposit—thought us now richer than all the kings of all the oil kingdoms in all the post-colonial backwaters in the world. As you’ve probably noticed by now, I'm a bit slow on the uptake. Esther was the first to notice, I think, she screamed out in horror once it all fit together in her head. I think she bore the worst of it, the truth hit the rest of us with at least some warning at its nature, she had nothing, the full magnitude of her reversed expectations crushed her at that epiphany, without the slightest warning. Heiðrún was next, they always were very similar. She started screaming along with Esther, only a few seconds after, and then sunk down to a fetal squat, clutching at her knees in some vain hope to ground herself through physical sensation. It was Rydern next, the Dr. Ramfield—too busy commenting on the lack of ocean life to ruminate like the rest of us—and then Lukasc. Finally, as I strained my neck back and forth, giving myself literal and figurative whiplash in trying to understand why my whole crew had suddenly gone mad, I found myself gazing down in utter confusion. Confusion only at first, however, because as I was looking down at my hands, staring intently at my palms for lack of any other place to stare, I truly saw, and everything finally clicked together. Outside, inside, all around us, inside us, was not water, oil, or even blood. It was paint. Cheap, acrylic, art-store paint, the type my mother bought for me in Kindergarten. I slowly walked towards the window, which all my crew had turned away from, and for the first time looked down. Everywhere I looked, I saw my own atoms deceiving me—I saw brightly-colored paint. I saw paint in every direction, except for straight down. No, when I looked straight down it got worse. When I looked straight down, I saw people looking back.
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AuthorMy name is Sam. I like writing, reading, and watching (good) television and movies. I'm also very bad at self-description. Archives
January 2017
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