[Original Novel] Pressure: First Encounter, Part 3

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When she regained her senses, her first impulse was to check the depth meter. "39,000 feet". She almost laughed. It was nonsensical, the deepest point in the trench was just over 33,000 feet. But the meter just kept going, in defiance both of Angie and apparently of reality itself. 39,640. 39,653. 39, 661. And no bottom in sight.

When the next pop came Angie didn't even react. The web of cracks had grown to the diameter of a dinner plate. A very thin jet of water issued forth. Any wider and the force would produce a stream capable of cutting her apart. Lifting her foot to turn around, she heard a splash.

Angie hunched over and found her feet resting in about an inch of water, some small fraction of the ocean that had finally succeeded in breaching her armor. "POP. POP POP." Both exterior lights had failed, but the cracks refracted the light coming from the pale green depth readout. Nearly the whole bubble was engulfed by the massive, tangled fissure. She knew what to expect.

Like corn popping in reverse. There would be no time to feel anything. Those precious few seconds she had to reflect on her life and emotionally prepare for death were already being burnt through as she sat there ankle deep in water, adding her own tears to the pool. The hull groaned. Mathematically perfect sphere, they said. Useless. A split second later, Angie felt a tremendous impact and closed her eyes to embrace death.

Long, quiet seconds passed. She felt absolute peace followed by the confusion of someone prepared for a death that never came. Outside, the remaining light flickered on and off, jarred back into partial function by the landing. And in fact it was a landing, what little the light revealed was enough. She'd hit bottom.

The sub lay at an angle, tipped perhaps 30 degrees forward, such that Angie struggled not to slide off of the damp seat. Before her, the mortally wounded viewing dome embedded halfway into the muck. All the water that had been pooled around her feet now collected in the lower half of the dome. Taking special care not to step on or touch the dome at all, Angie maneuvered herself so that she could inspect the controls.

A number of blinking red LEDs indicated what she already knew, that the sub was very near structural failure. The ballast switches had done nothing, but surely there was-" THUD. Something struck the upper half of the dome from outside. Angie waited a few seconds. Nothing. By hanging off of the pilot's seat she was able to peer outside through the half of the dome not embedded in the muck, though upside down.

The light, now somewhat steadier, revealed nothing. She could see a stretch of seafloor around the sub that extended maybe twenty or thirty feet. In the distance she could just barely make out the rock wall. By chance a blinking icon on the sonar UI caught her attention. Whatever Eliot had come to show her was now in range and ready to image.

Angie contorted herself to reach the touch panel and began the sounding. What it came back with was ridiculous. At first she attributed the shape on her screen to pareidolia. It's common to perceive familiar shapes in nature. Most likely just a strange rock formation. But with the increased clarity of the second sounding, her airway constricted. It looked for all the world like a human body laying on its side, wedged into the trench. But enormous.

The sonar wasn't even catching all of it, part of the arm and head were just out of the sonar's FOV. Legs, arms, a torso, all in perfect detail. Something was wrong with the anatomy though. Despite her surroundings Angie forgot the danger she was in for a moment and fixated on the shape before her.

The added detail revealed an upper body that was grossly asymmetrical, with a bloated shoulder on one side and an inset joint on the other. The lower body was gaunt, the thighs no thicker than either arm and both terminating in identical appendages that were neither hands nor feet.

THUD. Angie's attention returned to the dome. Angling herself to peer outside once more, she scanned the black expanse for some sign of what had struck the dome. Then, out of the darkness a familiar form approached her. Tiny, beady eyes pierced the ailing glass bubble and met Angie's gaze. It hovered at a distance of two or three yards, then suddenly propelled itself headfirst into the dome.

THUNK. Everywhere it struck, new cracks appeared. "STOP!" Angie began to cry again. Of course it couldn't understand. "What do you want ??" It came around again. THUD, THUD THUD. All senses abandoned her. She hunched over in the rapidly deteriorating pressure hull and waited for the inevitable while the wriggling white thing outside searched for a way in.

"I waited for you." Angie looked up. It was not a thud, or a splintering sound, nor the sound of the hull struggling to hold its shape. The thing was speaking.

"I waited. I was so patient." The pale, strange eel hovered in place just outside, peering in at her. "I waited for so long. But you came."

It was too much. There was a physical sensation of sanity draining from her body. Moreso when she suddenly realized the voice had come from inside the sub. She turned to face the rear seat. As the light flickered, she could make out the form of a grossly emaciated nude man.

His skin was snow white but mottled with blemishes and dark patches. As the light continued to sputter, he slowly, so slowly, turned towards her. Just before she blacked out, Angie caught a glimpse of his face. Sharp little teeth, bony cheeks, and beady black eyes.

Consciousness. The curvature of the Argyro's hull faded into being overhead, and it took a few seconds to fully understand what she was looking at. Her eyes traced the circular frame of the porthole just above her bunk.

That's when memories of the dive returned and she cried out. It was only for a split second. Fatigue, coupled with the increasingly banal nature of her 'episodes' was beginning to desensitize her. If the rest of the crew heard her yelp they chose to ignore it. Sound carried exceptionally well within the confines of this metal cocoon, a boon for safety but not so much for privacy.

She remained in bed until her heart rate normalized, recoiled at the dampness and frigidity of the floor, then set off in search of Eliot and the others.

It took her until she had reached the commons to wonder why the lights were off, and more importantly why the floor was damp. Luckily the furniture wasn't the only thing made of glow in the dark plastic.

Strips of the material ran along the walls at ankle height and around the rims of doorways, permitting safe navigation in total darkness. It brought to mind the bioluminescent plankton swirling about in the dark water as seen through her bunk viewport. Just then Nathan's voice reverberated down through the vertical trunk that led up to the observation bubble.

"We all been here longer. It don't make sense why she's hardest hit. Back when it started I thought it was reachin’ you easier than me ‘cause you don’t believe, but maybe some are just more prone than others." An agitated sigh followed. The next voice was hard to place at first. With some effort she recalled the face of Leonard, with whom she'd had only fleeting contact thus far. "Or maybe it's focused on her. Wants her more than us."

It? What "it"? Without thinking she stumbled towards the trunk, catching herself and adopting a gentler gait when she remembered the ease with which sound might carry. Steadying herself against the trunk entry, she continued to eavesdrop. "The sub records have her talkin' to herself all the way up until she reaches the same proximity Eliot figured out. No coincidence, that's got to be the maximum range."

So it really happened, then. How did they recover the sub? "Still can't be sure, it was napkin math, but it looks like it can reach us at a distance of a little over two miles. I hate to think of what it's sending out that can blast through two miles of sea water, but other than the episodes I've noticed no ill effects."

The body. So that happened too. A tremor came over her as she recalled the massive silhouette returned by the imager. No such creature could exist. Not enough food at that depth to sustain something of that size, and the body plan was all wrong for a benthic organism. Could it have been a structure? But then why call it a body?

She crept into the spiral stairwell and strained to hear the whispers echoing from above. "So, Leonard's episode happened when I was at the midpoint between the bottom of the trench and the Argyro." Sounds of a chair creaking as one of them shifted their weight.

"So what? Why would it hit Leonard back at the argyro when only you were in range?" When had this happened? While they were recovering her sub, maybe? Or before she arrived? "Eliot, listen to me. If it can reach us, touch our minds, make us see and hear things....why not use that brain like a stepping stone to reach another one? Like the relays, Eliot. To that thing, we're the relays."

Angie sunk back against the trunk wall. The body was real. What she'd seen on the imager wasn't a structure. Or at least that was the consensus among the rest. They spoke of it as if it were alive, conscious, with intentions.

It was at once a relief to know she wasn't crazy, and alarming that she was sharing a confined space with three men convinced that the massive corpse wedged into the trench below was communicating with them. And for all she knew they could be right.

Her train of thought derailed when she noticed that the whispering had come to an abrupt halt. She looked up the stair well into the small domed room it led to and saw three pairs of eyes fixated on her. So much for stealth.

A moment later she'd ascended the rest of the stairs, forcibly assisted by Nathan and Leonard. "How much did you hear?" Eliot, the only face she trusted, now glared at her the way one would if interrogating a criminal.

The observation bubble was a hemispherical 'cup' of titanium topped with an identical hemisphere of borosilicate glass, very much like the cockpit of the minisub except fixed to the Agyro as an observation platform. It and the cupola were the only two large windows on the station, all others being portholes 24 inches or less in diameter.

"I saw the body." The tone immediately changed. Elliot went from accusatory to conspiratorial in the span of a second. "How much of it did you see? Did it speak to you? How close did you get?" Angie pried his hand free of her forearm.

"First, explain what happened to me down there and how you recovered my sub." It turned out to be mundane, and she felt foolish for not having figured it out herself. "The rat tail has the same depth capability as the minisub, and the same docking port. With an intermediary coupler, it can mate to another sub. We took one of the two couplers down to the bottom, docked to your sub and brought you back here. Didn't bother retrieving the sub itself as it was on the verge of implosion when we found it. I guess the NOAA's out two million."

Angie winced. "Uncontrolled descent, I just about lost it in there. It appeared to me as Eliot, I just did what he told me to. I'd really appreciate it if one of you could put a name to what exactly is doing all of this to us." All three exchanged glances. She tried to infer from their expressions whether she should panic.

"I don't know if we can even say for sure that it's not folie a deux." Nathan cut in, obviously agitated: "Fuck's sake Leonard, how much proof do you need? We all seen it, it spoke to you same as it spoke to us and you're still talkin' that bullshit like it's coincidence. We can't all be crazy, not the exact same way."

Eliot said nothing, pensively watching the exchange, his eyes briefly meeting Angie's and then returning to Nate. "Well, that's what she's here for." All eyes turned to Angie. A sleep researcher at the bottom of the ocean. The picture had just become clearer. "One thing I don't get, guys."

Eliot leaned forward in his seat, implicitly giving Angie the floor. "Shoot." Since her discovery in the trunk her anxiety had faded. It was a great relief to be in on their secret, but did topside know?

"You found this huge thing, living or dead, in the deepest trench on Earth. Maybe it spoke to you, or maybe it's releasing some kind of radiation we don't understand yet and it's driving us crazy. Why stay here? It's obviously not safe. We've all had episodes, some of us nearly died. What will it take to scrub the mission? We should call it quits and surface." All three looked uncomfortable. "We can't, Angie. That's what it wants."

"Can't believe you got me out here again." A joke, but with a gentle sting to it. "You need to stop letting me talk you into EVAs. For all you know, this is another hallucination." It had occurred to her, but it wasn't a possibility she wanted to openly explore while trudging through the muck half a mile away from the Argyro, her life very much in Eliot's hands.

About 2,400 feet along the power cable linking the Agryro to a nuclear reactor to the east, they located a jagged gash in the insulation. There was no question as to what made it, and no realistic prospect for repair. As they wrapped up photo documentation of the damage Angie stole quick glances here and there to ensure Eliot hadn't vanished.

"I've been thinking....from now on, before any EVAs, we should have a third person present to authorize it. Or the whole crew, I don't know. We need witnesses, so that nobody wanders off by themselves again." By that he meant Angie. "Well, that assumes it can only imitate one of us at a time. What if it can imitate you, Nate and Leonard simultaneously?"

Eliot's garbled laugh sounded over the laser comm. "Well, then I guess we're in deeper shit than we thought. But there's a simpler solution. Just don't go up, no matter what." There it was again. In the cupola, their stern but cryptic warning.

"Why? If it's alive and not just driving us crazy with radiation or something, I don't think it means us any harm. It could have killed any of us easily. We need to bring in someone more qualified to study it, get the marine biology community down here and-" Nate swung around, his search lights blinding Angie.

"No. No more than four people. And none of us can go topside. Listen, I know we're not giving you much to go on here, but it's because we can't be sure what we're dealing with." Sensible. Still, the power failure would force their hand sooner or later. backup air and battery reserves would last only a week.

"So you don't know what it is, but you know it wants us to surface." Static and silence. "Look, Nate has a theory. None of us had episodes until Nate made the first dive and encountered it in the trench. After he came back, the hallucinations spread to all of us. It does something to your brain, turns it into a signal repeater so it can reach out further. If any of us tries to go topside" Angie went cold. "...It could reach everyone."

Angie's EEG gear took up three dry cases, two about the size of a briefcase and one much larger which housed the computers. It was the work of perhaps an hour to unpack all of it and set it up in the bunk room opposite hers.

There was a powerful feeling of apprehension in the air, as all four awaited answers which would either shed light on the nature of their hallucinations or confirm some sort of mental disorder.

The possibility had occurred to her that it was something similar to HPNS. At no point were they directly exposed to the outside water pressure, but deep sea habitation had never taken place over such long periods.

No studies existed, no prior data on anything like what they had experienced and as a result even while setting up the equipment she hoped would resolve the question, privately she wavered between buying into Nate's theory completely and feeling convinced that all four were suffering from a shared delusion.

Truly insane? No, not yet. Even so, the nauseating feeling of uncertainty, like the ground constantly shifting beneath her, seemed an accurate simulation of it. There was no relief. Hours later as she began to take readings from a serenely unconscious Leonard, doubts still swirled in her mind as to whether what they had all seen on the imager could possibly exist down there in the trench.

It was the first time in her life that she doubted her own senses. Never one for drugs, the firmness of her sense of reality and the continuity of experience had always been a source of mild comfort for her. Taken for granted, maybe.

The software chirped, a notification that Leonard had entered REM sleep and that as soon as a stable stream could be established it would begin visualizing. The software was a product of three decades of research, tireless effort into decoding the patterns of electrochemical fireworks that took place in the brain during deep sleep.

All interest in the field shifted focus to the visual cortex when against popular expectations, one team succeeded in extracting recognizable images from the brain of a comatose patient. That the information in the brain should be ordered in a way that a computer could intercept images, and later short bursts of video, was a revolutionary find.

She owed her career to it and ultimately that’s what led her to the Argyro, although at the moment she was understandably less thankful for that. Leonard's eyes fluttered beneath their lids. Moments later the screen lit up and began resolving a video feed.

None of it made sense. She didn't expect it to, dreams rarely did, but usually the setting or those populating it were taken from the subject's day to day experience. She saw no sign of the Argyro or her crew.

Instead, the vista of an ice planet. It moved almost imperceptibly below, a slow rotation, with an enormous gas giant instantly recognizable as Jupiter looming over the horizon. Ethereal and lonely. Before she could reflect on what it might mean, the view tilted violently and then plunged toward the surface.

Though separated from it by a screen, the understanding that all of this was happening firsthand for Leonard made it feel vicariously frightening. On rapid approach to the planet's surface, a ravine came into view and it was soon apparent that he intended to enter it. Despite her circumstances, Angie smiled. It was so appallingly Freudian.

Leonard accelerated, and without so much as pausing to survey the surface he plunged into the frozen chasm. The descent continued for most of a minute, somehow taking longer than the trip from orbit to surface.

Finally signs of water vapor appeared, and then the violent impact of penetrating an air/water interface at what looked to be several times the speed of sound. The bubbles soon cleared and She found herself, or more appropriately Leonard's dream self, sailing steadily downward through a vast ocean beneath the ice.

Although more articulate than Nate, Leonard hadn't struck her as a space nerd. All of it was fairly accurate so far as she knew, such ice moons did exist around Jupiter and what she'd seen so far was an admirably accurate rendition of what a descent into its subsurface ocean might look like. Not bad for an unconscious habtech.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 4!}