Pressure

No amount of reassurance that the interior of the sub would not change pressure on the way down could stop Angie from popping her ears. It was compulsive; She’d been diving only once in her life, a brief touristy hand holding affair in Cozumel back in ‘26. It had gone well enough, but while everyone else adjusted to the underwater environment within minutes she had spent the entire dive pinching her nose, yawning, struggling to equalize. Of the 4 crew members, she was easily the least qualified in a technical sense and felt minor guilt for taking up a seat on the mission she knew very well had been fought over ferociously by marine biologists, geologists and various other academics in applicable fields. Why the NOAA saw fit to send a dream researcher to the bottom of the Pacific was a mystery to everyone, and many had told her so by email.

 

That she had accepted the invitation came as a surprise to her family, but friends closer to her seemed intuitively aware of her reasons. “This is going to be big for you”, they said. Yeah, that was the idea. She’d been stuck in what was essentially indentured servitude for six years under Mike Hargrove and two other senior scientists with the only potential way out being a job offer from a pharmaceuticals company that made sleep drugs. Put you to sleep, keep you from sleeping, stabilizing your sleeping patterns, keep you from wetting the bed, make you wet the bed, who knows what all. The commercials were incessant, three quarters of which consisted of the narrator hurrying through the long list of side effects. She had no moral compunctions about taking the position, but the wording of the offer made it clear that she’d be transplanted from one dead end to another, and at 33 she was beginning to feel as though she should’ve accomplished more by now.

 

So, to the abyssal plain. The email included a photograph of the station, which looked to be a large central pressure sphere with four pill shaped cylinders extending from it. The spherical hub was supported from below by thick steel pillars, although it was more accurate to call them restraints; A sphere with that volume would be tremendously buoyant and it was only four hundred tons of pig iron in the ballast tray that held it down. “Argyro”. Named for Argyroneta Aquatica, the diving bell spider. Co-funded by NASA as an experiment in assembling modular Mars colonies, but on the ocean floor. Angie recalled the “History of Man in the Sea” DVD she’d gotten in the mail as part of the prep packet; all prior undersea labs had been in pitifully shallow water on the continental shelf and sunk as a single preassembled unit. Argyro was a historical first in that it was assembled module by module in a process intended to mirror how a base might be constructed on other bodies in the solar system. That was NASA’s angle, NOAA’s interest was in putting scientists on-site near a cluster of black smokers and very near the edge of the Mariana trench so that subs could be deployed into it frequently and regardless of weather conditions. It was the most valuable research site you could hope to find for such an outpost, and in spite of the ongoing industrialization of the sea floor for mining, drilling and fish farming it had been an uphill battle to secure funding.

 

The pilot coughed. Lost in her own thoughts until that point Angie began to feel self conscious. It had been just the two of them in the tiny metal sphere for nearly an hour. Perhaps 7 feet in diameter, the sphere was the only portion of the much larger submersible that actually held out water pressure, and space was at a premium. The docking hatch lever was at just the right height that she'd banged the top of her head on it several times when the sub swayed unexpectedly, but there simply wasn’t room to move; backpacks and dry cases surrounded her, and the duffel bag containing her clothing took up the remaining space on her lap. "Claustrophobic?" The pilot, whom she'd learned on the boat was also the crew's microbiologist, didn't bother to turn as he addressed her. It was rhetorical, but he had guessed wrong, so she answered anyway. "Actually not at all. I love confined spaces. When I was young I used to build make believe space capsules out of cardboard boxes. You know, stick some pillows and a blanket in there, cut a porthole, and I'd hang my tablet on the other side showing a slideshow of photos from the James Webb. It was my place to get away." The pilot nodded. More than he'd asked for, but it was standard practice to feel out new crew members as decades of data on human interaction in isolated, confined conditions made very clear the importance of understanding each others' quirks. "I was the same way. My cardboard boxes were all submarines, though." Both smiled. "I'm Eliot by the way. I study the bugs. Thermal vent organisms, extremophiles, I'm sure Lizzie told you topside." In fact she hadn't. She'd spent all of ten minutes on the boat before they'd hurried her into the sub and sent her on this long descent. "I know a little bit about that, from the DVD. I saw a documentary on it once but I don't remember much." It didn't escape her notice that he was an exceptionally handsome man, save for a pair of barely noticeable bags beneath his eyes. An occupational hazard in any field of research. Just then, the station came into view.

 

It looked astonishingly similar to the Tiangong space station. Banks of floodlights blasted forth in all directions, spotlights swept through the murky void and came to bear on their vessel. "They should be calling us momentarily." Angie raised an eyebrow. "I thought you needed a tether for that? Water's pretty much opaque to radio waves." Another tidbit from the DVD. "That's true except for ELF, but the Argyro uses neither. Just watch." So she did; Seconds later a shimmering turquoise beam appeared, and slowly tracked their movement until it shone directly on a large patch of what she now figured for photosensitive material just under the left pumpjet. "Blue green laser. Goes further than you'd think in sea water, and it's silent. Doesn't disturb the critters." Sure enough a video feed replaced the sonar readout on the small screen just above Eliot's seat. "Took your sweet time. Getting to know the new girl probably." Eliot fumbled for a moment before his hand came to rest on the comms controls. "Haha, easy. You watch out for him though, he hasn't seen a woman in three weeks." Of course, none of them had. She expected this sort of shit, having been cooped up with a tent full of undergrads during an expedition in the Summer of '29. She was there to study their sleep cycles; they seemed to think they were there to study her.

 

The spotlights and laser stayed pinned on their little boat as it slowly positioned itself for docking, as though the lights were tractor beams, or lassos physically shifting the sub into place. The actual moment of mating was startling, a loud clang reverberated through the hull signaling that the docking collar had received them. Whirring followed, the collar clamps pulling the rim tight for a good seal. It was one of many small reminders that they were surrounded by cold ocean water exerting a terrible force on the hull, constantly trying to get in. Joining two pressure vessels in a safe manner such that comparatively fragile animals could pass between them in a dry, one-atmosphere environment three miles underwater is a feat in many ways more impressive than landing on the moon. That anxiety was replaced with relief as the hatch swung open and a rusty ladder slid down and locked into place in the center of the cabin. A brief shower of residual water hit Angie across the forehead. "We...we have a dry seal right?" Eliot laughed. "Yeah, that's normal. Didn't mean for you to get rained on, I guess I should've warned you but it's not like you can avoid it." Arms belonging to some unseen person reached down through the hatch, like the hands of God descending from the clouds in a pillar of sunlight. "Toss me something. Let's get you out of there." Once all of her gear was unloaded, she shimmied around the side of the ladder and looked up into the interior of the Argyro. The light was almost blinding, her irises having adjusted to total darkness on the ride down. The same set of hands grabbed her by the wrist and helped her up the ladder. She discovered at the top that they belonged to Leonard Snyder, the crew's habtech. "Hope the ride wasn't too rough. Eliot flies a sub the same way he drives." She searched the men's faces for hostility but their identical lopsided grins suggested the sort of recreational antagonism typical of brothers.

 

After brief introductions with Nathan, the Argyro's marine geologist, Angie turned down the grand tour and opted instead for a hot meal. The sub had been dry but frigid, as it ran on battery power which had to be conserved for the lights, motors and electronics. She'd been told that she might want to get into her thermal suit up on the boat but she shrugged it off, only discovering after 1,000 feet that the Rat Tail was nothing like the tourist sub she'd been on in Cozumel; No heating, no reclining seat, nothing but the bare essentials. "It really was a bit of an ordeal". Angie sat with the others around the table that dominated the large central room, noticing that they all shared Eliot's haggard appearance. The walls were all painted white, as were the cabinets, with the table and chairs being a light green plastic she later learned would glow in the dark in the event of a power failure. "I was crammed in that little steel sphere for...how long was it?" Eliot looked up from his tray. "Total travel time was one hour, 23 minutes. And it was titanium, same as the Argyro." Of course. She recoiled inwardly, realizing the mistake might've colored their impression of her competence. "Right, titanium. I remember from the DVD that the Arygro hull is a mathematically perfect titanium sphere." Leonard nodded. "Cost a fortune, but still came in under the ISS. And they'll never need to deorbit this tub." Eliot snorted, his mouth full of rehydrated mashed potatoes.

 

The beds were stacked, three on either side at the very end of the cylinder. She'd seen an additional six bunks in the cylinder opposite. "Why just four of us? There's twelve beds." "If you can call these beds. But yeah, twelve." Nathan looked across the central kitchen/lounge into the far cylinder. "Normally there's a crew of twelve, you just missed the NEEMO guys. Eight astronauts doing a simulated space mission, they left a few days ago." Astronauts. It still seemed strange. She understood the principle, and had been struck herself by how similar the station looked in a superficial sense to the Tiangong on their approach, but it still seemed like an odd pairing. "Do they do EVAs?" The picture in her head was of men wearing space suits exiting an airlock, but that couldn't be right. Those would only protect against a single atmosphere differential, and in the wrong direction. As if sensing her confusion, he guided her to cylinder 3, which was sealed off from the rest of the station by a large circular hatch. "We keep the newt suits in here. They're a lot like space suits, use most of the same life support gear, but the armor is an inch thick and made from some nanoengineered shit that was expensive enough per pound that they could use it on the suits, but not the hull. They creak a little outside but are supposed to hold up even another thousand feet down. You can't take them into the trench, but for basic sample gathering and sim activities outside they're a lot less confining than the sub." It dawned on her that the sub was still docked. She'd been making a mental inventory of every last cubic foot of space available to her as for the next five weeks this would be her entire world. The surface was so unreachable that it may as well not exist, and only this bulbous titanium cocoon held out the cold black death of water pressure that constantly probed every seam for a way inside.

 

"We'll put you in the top bunk. It's a little bit of a hassle to get into, but it has a viewport." Sure enough, just above the bunk and roughly where her head would be, there was a round six inch window into the featureless black expanse. "For what? There's nothing to see. I'd be a lot more comfortable without any windows." Eliot laughed and propped her duffel bag up against the hull. "Don't say that until you've seen the cupola. And you'd be surprised, when you turn the lights out it's quite a show. Lots of bioluminescent critters out there, and even while the lights are on you get the occasional ghost shark or jellyfish." There was a larger viewport at the very end of the capsule, but that was less unsettling than having one directly over her face as she slept. Three miles of water laid above and around her, the unimaginable weight of an entire ocean pressing down on the station, struggling to crush the invaders' stronghold. The light show did occur as promised at 11pm; The exterior lights shut off, and as she dialed down the light level in her own capsule (the remaining crew was fast asleep in the opposite capsule, having elected to give her some private space) what looked like a night sky speckled with gently swirling stars appeared through the small window overhead, and at once she understood the rationale for its inclusion. The view was alien, but also kind of magical, and soon the hiss and hum of the station's systems lulled her to sleep.

 

Morning brought the familiar confusion of waking up in a strange bed along with the rather less familiar confusion of seeing complete darkness outside. Day 2 in the world without sun. Breakfast was something convincingly egglike in the same tan plastic tray as the meal she'd been given on arrival. Eliot finished first. "I'd like to take you out in the suit today." Angie spit out some egg before regaining composure. "It's absolutely safe. I've done 112 EVAs without incident. When it's over you'll feel right at home. The other day you were just going through the normal acclimation anxiety, and in my experience this is the best way to be done with it all at once." A brief argument ensued but Eliot was handsome and persuasive. Men like that were the kind of trouble Angie couldn't help getting into. Without fully understanding how he'd talked her into the suit, she soon found herself staring at the outer door of the airlock through a transparent dome, feeling around for support with metal fingers not her own, but controlled by them. She wiggled her fingers one by one in the unseen cavity at the end of each arm. She felt slight pinching from the small three-hooped harnesses that translated the movement of each finger wirelessly to the corresponding robotic digit mounted to the outside of the arm's swivel-jointed hull, about where her hand would be if it could poke through. "Touch this" Eliot shouted, struggling to be heard through the suit. She turned cumbersomely towards him, and he gestured at a small panel labeled "HEAT EXCHANGER" on the wall. To her astonishment, upon touching the panel she felt heat. "Resistive heaters on the finger harness. So you can tell if your grabbers are closer to the vent's plume than they ought to be. Neat huh?" Somehow, whatever strange power Eliot's big stupid grin exerted on her was not reduced by the bubble's distortion. "I must look ridiculous through this dome", she bellowed back. "It gets worse when you're in water. The refractive index does it, the dome acts like a lens. But eventually your eyes adjust and you don't notice it."

 

Angie stumbled in shock when the water began pouring in. A metal hand gripped her shoulder, steadying her, as if calming a spooked horse. "Just stay still. You don't have to do anything, the suits don't float, you might feel the joints loosen as the pressure compresses the armor a little. Just relax." He was difficult to hear over the sound of rushing water but she felt his message more than heard it anyway. Soon the water was up to her face. It was alarming to simply stand in place as the water rose over her head, even though she felt water on no part of her body and knew on a rational level that she was encased in $1.7 million dollars worth of life support equipment. Then the suit began to creak, and that rational part of her suddenly switched off. She fell against Eliot, who propped her up as inside the hulking suit of armor she quivered and began to sweat. "That's just the suit adjusting to the pressure." She pushed away and regained balance. He sounded completely different. No longer shouting through his suit, but the same voice she'd grown accustomed to since yesterday and had privately begun to enjoy. As promised, she found the joints of the suit were much looser and she was able not only to steady herself but also to walk; She took a step forward and looked around. "How are we able to....?" In silent reply, he pointed outside. Without her noticing, the outer hatch had swung open and two faint blue/green beams shone in through the silicone rimmed hole, terminating in bright green spots on their armor. "The suits are photosensitive. Most of them, something like 90% of the surface area. Come on, let me show you how the relays work."

 

It was quite like walking on the moon. Or at least what she imagined walking on the moon must be like. Banks of floodlights illuminated the seafloor in round patches perhaps a hundred feet in diameter. The arrays were set up on tripods every few hundred feet along the path to the trench, some of them angled to create a parabolic stretch of illuminated seafloor at sites of interest. It vaguely resembled a country road at night, in the winter. The soft ground beneath her was just as white as snow and her boots sunk in several inches. "Let's get moving, I want to show you where the lasers come from." She obliged, noticing on the way that the beams tracked them perfectly as they trudged through the muck. Angie attempted to jump, expecting it to be something like the footage from the Chinese moon landing but was disappointed when she couldn't manage to get both feet free of the muck at the same time. Eliot laughed. "Here, watch this. But don't you dare try it until I clear you on the sim." Just as she thought to ask "what sim", Eliot took off. For a minute or so he sailed around overhead, ignoring her barrage of questions until he swooped in and landed. "Thruster packs. Like the EVA packs Astronauts use. Except for us it's all micro pumpjets, not compressed gas." Angie immediately intuited that the control pad to one side of her thumb, which she had neglected until then, was the thruster control pad. A gentle lurch forward as she tapped the pad confirmed her suspicions. "I said don't mess with it. We'll put you in the sim when we get back to the station. For now just leave it alone."

 

The first relay was mounted on the same sort of tripod as the lights. The emitters were clustered together facing outward in a circle, eight in total. Two thin wheels of photosensitive glass above and below received incoming laser transmissions, and the emitters doubled as LIDAR so that one emitter could perform tracking duties for either of the two lasers it was adjacent to. "They're stackable in case we ever get more suits and need to network more than two at a time, but with the funding situation now that's unlikely." As Eliot spoke Angie could just barely perceive slight fluctuation in his beam's brightness. She was witnessing the sound of his voice being sent as concentrated light through near-freezing ocean water at 10,000 psi. It was sobering. "If our suit lasers can transmit to these relays, why don't we just use them to talk to each other?" Almost as soon as she'd said it, she knew it was another newbie question. "Limited range. They run on suit batteries, you don't want those to run out since you also need them to run your rebreather. You have 12 hours of compressed air and a passive backup CO2 absorbant, but if we ever wind up using those we probably have bigger problems than not being able to communicate." So the short range suit lasers talked to the nearest relay, and the relay carried the message via other relays to where the other aquanaut was working. The optical equivalent of cell phone towers. "What do you do if you go someplace off of the path and you need to call home?" Eliot paused for a moment as he wiped some detritus from the relay's emitter. "...Don't leave the path."

 

"Don't leave the path. Don't use the thrusters. If I check my boots am I going to find training wheels?" She was joking, but got a stern reply. "It's your first EVA. I mostly just wanted to help you acclimate. Don't you notice a difference? You seem a lot more comfortable now." He was right. She was moving confidently with the suit, her ear popping habit had vanished and if anything she felt invigorated. "I imagine your field is mostly men." Eliot didn't know how to take that. "I'm not making any accusations, but it seems possible you're in the habit of assuming that women need your help." Eliot shrugged invisibly within his suit. "You'll get over it." He started back towards the station and with something between a laugh and a shout, Angie began pursuit. He proved unexpectedly quick though, and before she realized it he was out of sight. There was a fog-like effect in the distance and the dropoff was severe. "Eliot? Eliot, I've lost you." Her beam shone forth into the darkness but she received no reply. Shortly afterward the tracking readout for the laser changed from "Searching" to "Target lost". Impossible. The range was at least a thousand feet. There was no way he had gotten so far ahead, so quickly. Unless... "The thruster pack", Angie thought. "He's having some fun. He lifted off somewhere ahead of me and is going to be waiting at the station with a smug, shit eating grin. Or he's going to come swooping down at me from above. Something." She kept walking a ways, but soon noticed that she hadn't seen a relay or light for some time. Her suit lights were the only visible source. That wasn't right either, she had been able to see the lit up path for hundreds of feet from the station, why would-

 

A loud thump sounded against her helmet. Something was swimming at the dome and striking it repeatedly, it was a blur of white that was moving too quickly to make out. It darted around the suit, thumping over and over against the hull, as if searching for a way inside. "GET OFF OF ME YOU FUCKING FISH", Angie shrieked as she flailed her metal arms ineffectively at the creature. The thrashing sent her off balance, and the next thing she knew she was laying on her back in the muck surrounded by a cloud of silt. She caught her breath, searching the cloud for some sight of the creature. Right on cue, it slowly approached the dome to investigate. She stopped breathing entirely when it came into view. It was easily six feet long, as thick as her arm, and extremely pale. Bordering on translucent. Some kind of eel maybe, but with a face she could neither look away from nor bear to look at. It resembled nothing more than the face of an old man. Tiny, beady eyes inset in a skeletal face with a bony jaw that evoked memories of her grandfather's final days. Regaining her wits, Angie screamed at the eel and jammed her thumb on the thruster control. It sent her suit spinning wildly across the ocean floor, then down a steep embankment. It was a rough ride, thrown to one side of the suit then the other as it tumbled down the hill, but Angie's thoughts were dominated by the image of that creature's face. Finally the suit came to rest, face down in the muck. Having appparently waited for the worst possible time, her lights went out. With no small effort she pried herself up out of the sludge, and flipped over onto her back. Her heart was thumping wildly, the stench of sweat filling her lungs with every breath. Inside the hand cavity she fiddled with the joystick that controlled the heads up display until she found the option for turning on the backup lights. They flickered to life revealing the creature's face looming above her, a thousand feet wide.

 

Angie fell out of bed screaming in a tangle of sheets. Within moments the rest of the crew had gathered around her. "No, no no no...Not real, not real..." Tears soaked her cheeks and matted her hair against them as she violently struggled to be free of the sheets, blanket and other bedding. "It was, it was some kind of animal. It was small, then it was huge, I was out in the suit with Eliot-...Where is Eliot??" It was all the three could do to restrain her until she recognized that Eliot was among them. "Angie, shhh." he said. "You went ahead, I lost sight of you, I think I went off the path and got lost and then-" Eliot stroked her hair and gestured for the others to leave. "Angie. I didn't go out with you." She went silent. "We found you about half a mile down the path in one of the newt suits. You were passed out on your back. Brought you in about an hour ago, you were babbling in your sleep right up until you woke just now." A deep sob escaped her body as she clung to him. It was still fresh in her mind. The terrible, bony little face. And its gargantuan twin, staring down at her from above. Of course it had been a nightmare, sleep walking, something like that. Nothing else made sense. Eliot stayed with her until her bed was restored to a usable condition, and then lingered at the door. "It was so real. I've never had a dream like that. Everything was so detailed, I felt it all. You showed me the relays, and-" Eliot turned. "The relays?" There was a moment of startled recognition between them. "Angie, how do you know about the relays? They're a new addition. I was going to explain them to you tomorrow." For both of them it felt as if all the heat had left the room. A moment of intolerable, oppressive silence followed. "Am I crazy?" Angie seemed too willing to ask, peering at Eliot through tears from under a pile of blankets taken from the other bunks. "No Angie", Eliot sighed. "You're not crazy. We've all been having dreams like that. It's why they sent you here."

 

Breakfast was a silent affair. The deceptively painted walls created a spacious, cheery impression that did nothing to prevent Angie from feeling the full force of the outside water slowly compressing her skull. Nathan spoke first. "I got hit first. Then it was Leonard, Eliot was last. It took us a day or two to make the connection that it was affecting us in order of arrival." He looked back down at his tray, evidently expecting one of the others to pick up where he left off. Leonard looked up and glanced at Eliot, whose eyes gave quiet approval. "There's records of the same thing happening to past crews, but none of them stayed down this long. It never got severe enough that they recognized it as something other than mission fatigue. One day we found Nathan sitting in the Rat Tail fumbling with the controls as if he'd never seen them before. He fought like a cornered dog when we pulled him away, only to snap out of it with no recollection of anything since he'd gone to sleep. Whatever it is, it happens while you're sleeping. At first." Angie's eyebrow elevated and she mouthed 'at first?' to Eliot, who nodded. "Leonard was next, had an episode in the airlock. Got in a suit and tried to surface with it. I went out in the Rat Tail and held him down until he came back to us. Only he remembered the whole thing with the small difference that in his version, Nathan had been with him and he'd seen the Arygro implode. Dream Nate told Leo to make an emergency ascent in the suit, and that's when I woke him up." Nate glanced at Leo, who was staring intently at the remains of breakfast. "It's like we're sleep walking. At first the dreams were short, abstract, we never remembered 'em and often stayed in our beds. But after Nate and Leo's episodes they just got more and more real, we remembered everything, each time it was someone else in the dream doing things it turned out they never did once we woke up." Angie scanned their faces one by one. All seemed sullen, Leo possibly ashamed. Eliot pushed his tray aside and set one elbow on the table. "I know how it sounds. But we've all seen it happen, unless there's some severe folie a deux going on, I don't-" Angie cut him off. "I believe you." Nate muttered "It's your job to believe us." Eliot scowled, but Angie was unphased. "I recognize some of what you're describing. There's ample precedent, although I will admit that it's unusual to see it manifest identically in more than one person in the same place. That alone suggests some common factor, most likely something physiological related to your time spent down here." Nathan piped up again. "Show her Wormwood." Eliot whipped around and glared at him. "What’s wormwood?" Angie looked around, but nobody seemed forthcoming. Finally, Eliot spoke up, but his answer only created new questions. “He means the body”. She waited for further clarification but none was forthcoming. "What body? What are you talking about?"

 

It took some doing to convince her to get back in the sub. The uncoupling sent a powerful lurching sensation through her body, and it took several seconds for the hull to stop vibrating. The ocean seemed violently frustrated that they had cheated it out of an opportunity to penetrate the Rat Tail and Arygro. Angie's eyes strained to make out the docking collar receding into the darkness as the sub pulled away. It was alarming to think that a minute earlier, she'd been standing there. She'd passed safely through that hatch, in breathable air and comfortable pressure, where now there was only frigid black death. "We can only stay for a few minutes. The effect becomes more powerful with proximity, and with the number of people." Leonard and Nate had stayed behind in the Argyro, she had last seen them watching other intently over the kitchen table. Twenty feet below, relays lined the lit-up path she vividly recalled having explored with Eliot, although if what they had told her could be believed, no such thing ever happened. "The sonar system is mil spec, the resolution is phenomenal, but it requires multiple passes. You get a fuzzy image at first that gets clearer with each sweep. Feel your way around the UI, it'll be a few more minutes before we're at the trench." It was straight forward enough, and by the time they arrived she had taken several test soundings of rock formations just out of range of the lights. The screen was autostereoscopic and she could make out bumps and ridges with sufficient clarity that in some cases she could identify what sort of animal had coincidentally drifted into the picture. "Have a look. We'll begin our descent after I call Nate and Leonard to let them know we made it." There was nothing to see. A row of lights followed the contour of the trench for a mile or so on either side, but the trench itself was such pure blackness that she could just as easily have mistaken it for an unlit stretch of seafloor. When they began to sink into it, a feeling of panic came over her that she struggled to conceal. It was not so much like physically entering anyplace real, but instead plummeting slow-motion into oblivion.

 

The lit up path, final familiar point of reference, rose out of view as the Rat Tail sunk past the edge of the trench. Arc lamps illuminated the wall, which did nothing to restore an appropriate sense of moving through a solid, physical space but instead created the illusion that they were hanging solitary in an endless black expanse with a round patch of rock in front of them. It seemed called into existence by the spotlight rather than revealed by it. The panic returned at once when the tiny sub rotated to face down the trench and the spotlight left the wall entirely. She was now without any outside point of reference whatsoever, and unable to inhale until forcibly averting her gaze from the viewing dome. "Is something wrong?" She wished he'd turn to face her when he said that. It wasn't enough to stare at the wall, only partial relief from whatever was crushing her heart and lungs. Her whole ribcage felt compressed, a false sensation made devastatingly real by the anxiety of being alone in a seven foot metal sphere that was now almost a full five miles from sunshine and fresh air. Of course she wasn't alone, was she? And on a rational level she knew that she was safe in Eliot's hands, that the sub would-...

 

Eliot was gone. Angie blinked. Then looked back at the wall for a moment, then back at the pilot's seat. Still gone. "No no no no NO". She stood up, as much as the confines of the hull would allow and tried to pry the seat loose, turning over the three small supply bags as if he could somehow be hiding under them. "Eliot? ELIOT? ELIOT??". Forgetting her fear of the black expanse she leaned all the way into the space afforded by the curvature of the dome and peered back at the body of the sub, or as much as she could see of it from that vantage point. But what for, she thought. He could no more have climbed outside than he could be hiding under those bags. There was simply nowhere he could have gone to. The hatch was shut tight, with all of a foot and a half of space beneath the 'floor' and the bottom of the hull, which was packed with pressure sensitive electronics that couldn't be mounted outside. Eliot was simply gone. Angie choked on her own frantic cries, pawing at every inch of the hull's interior. But of course, no secret door, no hiding place for him to pop out of. He had vanished. In a moment of clarity she wondered if she was having a dream. It was an appealing prospect, but after a fit of slapping and pinching herself, she gave up on it. Years of being a subject herself for various sleep studies had familiarized her with the signs that one is dreaming, and a dream this was not. She ran her hand again along the cold metal wall. Real, or beyond her ability to tell the difference. That's when she heard the first faint pop.

 

It was hard to place. Vaguely familiar, but not enough so that she was able to figure it out until the second and third, louder than the first, alerted her to the source. The sub had continued slowly rotating on the way down, like a plane spiraling out of control. As it came to face the trench wall again, it provided the contrast necessary to see a tiny Y-shaped crack in the dome. Small enough that she could cover it entirely with her finger, which she did for a moment until resignining herself to the reality that doing so would not make it vanish. That, and the fact that the moment she touched it, another branch in the fissure appeared with a loud crackling sound. It was supposed to get stronger under pressure. Borosilicate glass, arranged on a molecular level to compress in the deep sea so that an impact that would shatter it on the surface would instead bounce off harmlessly at 33,000 feet. Yet in spite of what she had been told as a matter of fact, the crack continued to grow before her eyes. She could not scream or cry, she still felt hoarse from before and could only fixate helplessly on the spiderweb of fissures as it grew from the diameter of a penny to that of a quarter. Each time new fissures appeared at the periphery, it was accompanied by another pop, or crackle, the sound of borosilicate glass splintering under the irresistable pressure of the deep sea. Almost as an afterthought she glanced at the depth reading. 24,000 feet. It had only been a few minutes. The descent had accelerated. "Come to your senses. Do something." It was like she was shouting inwardly at someone else, like watching a hapless idiot in a movie whose decisions she had no control over. All of a sudden her body responded and in a flash she was in the pilot's seat, scanning the vast array of toggle switches for anything related to ballast.

 

"BANG!". She jumped in her seat. It was so loud, but muffled, definitely originating outside the sub. As it turned to face the wall again she noticed the illuminated area was dimmer and to the left of center. She felt herself beginning to lose control. A quick glance outside revealed that the right arc lamp had imploded. The depth meter read "31,000 feet." It was too fast. She felt certain such a rapid descent would be noticeable. She glanced outside again in the hopes of getting a sense of speed from the rock wall, but the sub had once again turned away to face the abyss. "POP". Her focus shifted back to the radiating web of cracks, which had expanded considerably while she'd been distracted. Nausea overcame her. Tears began to well up, but she would not yet scream. If she could find the ballast controls, maybe she could still- "YES! OH GOD THANK YOU!" She lunged for a pair of switches labelled "L" and "R" under "Purge ballast". In the span of a few seconds she went from dread to elation, imagining her safe return to the Argyro and how she'd tell the story of what had happened. But nothing happened. She flipped the switches again. Then each one individually several times. Then both. "Still no reaction". Angie brought her fist down on the control panel, screaming incoherently, finally letting herself cry. Then the lights went out.

 

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 had begun to spray forth. Any wider and the force would produce a stream capable of cutting her apart. She lifted her foot to turn around and heard a splash. She 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. What little time she had to reflect on her life and prepare for death was already being burnt through as she sat there ankle deep in water, contributing 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 completely prepared for a death that had not come. 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 rest at an angle, tipped perhaps 40 degrees forward, with Angie struggling 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 red LEDs most likely 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 stuck 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 sunk into the trench floor, 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. Contorting herself to reach the touch panel, she began the sounding. What it returned was ridiculous. At first she attributed the shape on her screen to pareidolia. It's in human nature to see familiar shapes in nature. It was most likely just a strange rock formation. But with the increased clarity of the second sounding, her airway constricted. It looked for alll 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 noticeably asymmterical, with a wide set 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. "I waited. I was so patient." The pale, strange eel hovered in place just outside, peering in at her. Was it speaking. "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, she 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 heartrate 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 pulled 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'd 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 at once?" 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." 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 eventually. 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 had 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 it had led her to the Argyro, although 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 biologist. Her first inkling that something was amiss came minutes later, as the seafloor rose into view. Leonard, or rather dream Leonard, entered a slow approach towards a shadowy mass. Around it, bright spots speckled the seafloor where magma boiled up through fissures from the molten core. Whatever it was, assuming the thermal vents were roughly the same size as those she'd seen in her briefing video, the mass was huge. In that moment, well before the fuzzy black mass took on a recognizable shape, she knew. Her spine stiffened. Her tongue withdrew into her throat as if to choke her. There on the screen, just as it was in Leonard's mind, appeared the massive body she'd seen on the imager. No longer crudely represented by glowing green silhouette, but rendered by Leonard's mind in a clarity which increased with each passing second. She tried to bolt for the door, to bring Eliot in and show him, but found that her body would move only in small increments and not as commanded. She murmered in distress, unable to take her eyes off the screen. Closer and closer, ever increasing detail, impossible anatomy and skin which left unresolved the question as to whether it was dormant or deceased. The same mottled grey flesh she had seen in the sub. The same translucent quality, the same dark grey patches. The same face. Just then, a pair of arms came into view. As if Leonard, within his dream, had thought to gaze at his own hands for reassurance that everything around him was real. Only, they weren't leonard's hands. Distended, skeletal grey limbs swayed in the currents before her, a tangled mess of long thin bones at the end of either. The same hands, or poor imitation of hands, that she'd seen in the trench. Of course, of all the stupid assumptions. This perspective wasn't Leonard's. It wasn't even Leonard's dream.

 

"I think what we're dealing with is something like a criminal." Light from the monitor flickered across Eliot and Nathan's faces as they watched the recording of Leonard's dream. "So this really came out of Leo's head, huh?" Angie sighed. "You're not listening. I don't think it evolved here." Nathan snorted. "No shit". On the monitor the last of the dream played out, with a clear view of the creature's body just before the pair of pale, bony hands came into view. "It uses us as relays because it can't get a signal up through the water. That's why they put it here, to keep it from reaching anyone." A faint beep sounded as the recording looped back to the beginning. The men seemed unsurprised by the footage, yet it was proving a chore to convince them of the obvious. "Who, Angie? Who put it here?" Fair question. "I don't have an answer for that. But something put it deep underwater to keep it from reaching intelligent life. Probably long before there was any on Earth. And there's another one like it on Europa." It felt bizarre to be speaking so matter of factly about alien life. If it was alien. Every so often they glanced at each other, as if hoping someone would restore sanity to the discussion. 'Of course it's not alien', they'd say, everyone would laugh and they could get down to the business of discussing what it might actually be within sensible constraints. But nobody spoke up. There would be no such easy out. Instead, Eliot asked a question Angie hadn't anticipated. "What happens if they contact each other? Like, an unbroken connection between here and Europa. What if they connect?" They sat quietly, the hull still dripping around them. Eventually someone would have to repair the dehumidifier. For the time being nobody budged. All four hunched over the kitchen table, picking at their oatmeal, silently contemplating what had been said.

 

Nathan's session came next. Anxiety kept him wide awake for a good ninety minutes or so, but whiskey and warm blankets did the trick and soon his dreams were playing out before their eyes. All were aware, on some level, of the intimacy of it; Each in turn exposing the contents of their subconscious to the rest. On the screen before them laid the long gash of the Marianas trench. The trench walls receded into darkness, but one could vaguely make out a moving form. Side to side it swayed as it grew in size, a dark blob silhouetted against the blackness of the abyss. Soon the shape resolved itself; it was the creature, slowly and strenuously climbing the trench wall. Angie gasped and began to stand, but Eliot gripped her shoulder and gestured for her to keep watching. The black fog gave way to grey. As the image widened, it became clear that 'dream Nathan' was on the surface, standing on an endless foggy beach. The sand was littered with seaweed, bits of wood and decaying jellyfish. Soon, a silhouette appeared out to sea. Impossibly huge, and unmistakeably humanoid. Each step seemed labored, its asymmetrical body struggling to locomote out of water. Dozens gathered on the beach alongside Nate. Then hundreds. Then seemingly thousands, crowding the shoreline as far as the eye could see in either direction. They left their homes, businesses, even cars in the middle of the road as though struck by a shared epiphany. The shambling mass halted, still shrouded in fog. Suddenly a pair of long, narrow eye slits lit up in a deep, piercing red. Beams of this sickly red light shone forth through the fog, and swept over the gathered masses. Their bodies quivered, then quaked, but did not collapse. Those nearest Nathan began gibbering. Then a loud, low pitched hum sounded. It had a powerful impact, even through the computers' speakers. Something about it gripped Angie's heart. Everyone on the beach calmly did an about face, and marched back towards their coastal town. In the distance the figure resumed its slow march to shore. The hum grew louder as it approached, becoming a blaring monotonous din.

 

"I'd just rather not." Of the three, Angie figured Eliot for the bravest. But she was hardly objective, and after witnessing Leonard and Nathan's dreams it was difficult to fault his hesitation. "We all saw the body, but obviously none of us could've experienced what was in those dreams. And I refuse to believe any of that came from Leo or Nate. It's coming from outside." He glanced over Angie's shoulder, probably not in the precise direction of the trench but his meaning was received. "The body in the trench. Sleeping, or dead? If it were decaying, the fish would eat it." A brief silence. "Would you?" She was in no mood to appreciate the joke. All around them the hull dripped, and it was beginning to stink; increased humidity invited bacterial growth. The central table had become their neutral ground, planning center, someplace to touch base and make sure everything they'd seen and heard in the past hour actually happened. Nobody was forthcoming with a plan as tension continued to accumulate. Eliot finally spoke. "There's the Belusarius." He'd been the defacto leader and they'd all assumed he'd be the first to suggest a course of action. Took his sweet time, though. "What's the Belusarius?" Next to Angie, Leonard fiddled with a smartpad, then handed it to her. On its screen, a sprawling complex of pressure vessels and tunnels sitting on supports of varying lengths slowly rotated in glowing green relief. "Wait, this...this really exists? This is down here? Where is it?" The Argyro slid into view just next to it. A mere speck by comparison. "Little over a mile from here, further down the trench." Angie visibly spasmed. "THEY BUILT A CITY DOWN HERE? THERE'S GOING TO BE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE LIVING RIGHT NEXT TO...Oh god, I...I can't breathe..." Eliot reflexively steadied her. "Not thousands. Six, seven hundred or so. And it's not complete yet, it'll be running a skeletal crew. Officially it doesn't exist, I wouldn't know either if not for a buddy of mine on security detail. I figure we should head over and warn them." Angie struggled to regain her composure. "We have to, given what we know. But before we send anyone over, I really want to see what the machine makes of your dreams." He was already halfway to the docking collar. "No time. We'll do that when we get back. Leo, Nate, prep the Rat Tail." The two exchanged worried glances with Angie, but complied.

 

"We really gonna let him reach the Belusarius?" Nate leaned on Angie as she brought up the Rat Tail's control interface on the terminal. All three were huddled together in the cupola, watching the Rat Tail gracefully slide away from the docking collar. "Of course not. It must think we're idiots. The Belusarius is the closest population of humans outside the Argyro. We won't let it surface, so it's on to plan B." Onscreen, a blueprint of the Rat Tail overlapped a layout of the relays dotted along the ocean floor. "What if you're wrong? What if that's Eliot in there and we kill him? And how are we gonna get topside if you...?" Angie shook her head. "I'm not going to destroy the sub, just cripple the propulsion. We'll still be able to ride it up, once we figure out what we're going to do about you know what, but it won't be able to reach the Belusarius. I'll make sure of that." With a few keystrokes, green icons representing the relays lit up and began to rotate. Outside the emitters quietly came into alignment, targeting the Rat Tail's battery pods. "Each laser is only a few kilowatts. Alone, none of them could do much damage. But together..." She clicked on the slowly moving dot representing the sub, and the icons went red. Outside, hundreds of blinding green beams pierced the darkness and the spot where they converged erupted with burning electrolyte, bubbles and molten metal. A dimmer beam of the same type shot back to the Argyro, and 'Eliot' appeared onscreen. "Angie! What's going on out there? I'm losing power, and...and I think I have a hull breach!" Nate and Leo looked sincerely worried. Angie just sat back and smirked. "Yeah, I bet you're really fuckin' worried. Maybe you should come on back to the Argyro." His expression underwent a subtle change that did not escape their notice. "No, I'd...I think I can make it the rest of the way." In that moment any remaining doubt left them. Whatever that was aboard the Rat Tail, it wasn't Eliot.

 

Leo whispered to Angie, "What happens if he's hurt? Does it also hurt the...the thing? Could we kill it?" Angie responded coldly, without taking her gaze off of the screen. "No, I don't think so. We're all seeing this, right? But we're wide awake. It's not a hallucination or a dream, whatever's happening to us has progressed to some new stage. Now it can make us all see the same thing at the same time. Or it can replicate us, I don't know. What we do know is, that's not Eliot in there, just some kind of projection. That's why he wouldn't use the machine. That's why he was in such a hurry to get to the Belusarius. This will be hard to watch, but remember, that's not him." Onscreen Eliot looked confused and frantic. He'd been right about the hull breach; an inch or so of water sloshed around his feet. "What are you talking about? Why are you...I'm right here! Don't talk about me like I'm not here! The Rat Tail is...I think the scrubber shut off. Air pressure's building up, so is CO2." Angie leaned in and smiled lazily. "Like I said, bring the sub back so we can patch it up." Eliot went from frantic to angry. "You did this, didn't you? You fired on me. You crazy bitch! I'm going to put all of this in a report when I make it to the Belusarius." She remained deadpan, and with a small movement of her index finger the relay icons once again turned red. "No Eliot, you won't." Blue-green beams lit up the abyss, and battery pod #2 exploded in a glowing, foamy mess of chemicals and melted steel. Eliot's screams came in garbled as the sub's laser comm system faltered. She knew backup power would keep the basics running, but they'd need to bring in the sub manually using the newt suits. Onscreen Nathan howled and writhed as the water rose past his waist. A voice completely unlike his, impossibly deep and hoarse resonated through the spherical cabin: "Release...me...." All three looked on dispassionately. "Releeaaaaassseee......mmmmeeeeeeeeee....." his voice reached through the terminal and shook the walls around them. The water was now at his chest. The cockpit lights flickered, and in between those flickers Eliot was briefly visible in his true form. The pale, sickly creature Angie recalled from the sub incident thrashed in perfect sync with its illusionary human counterpart and the two men watching gasped. That's right, Angie thought, this was the first time they'd seen it. Just as the water rose to his neck, the cabin lights went out completely. It took several seconds for the meager backup battery to kick in, and when the red emergency lights came on the cockpit was empty.

 

"You sure fucked up the Rat Tail. Hope it can be salvaged." The trio emerged one by one from the cupola, their relief palpable. "If that's our biggest problem, we're in good shape." Leo looked concerned. Pre-empting his question, Angie swung open the hatch to the bunk room. There on the bed, asleep and oblivious to everything that had just transpired, was Eliot. "How did you know?" Angie smiled. "I didn't. I only remembered he was in here after that thing in the sub vanished." Nate ran one hand over his hair, and whistled. "Reckon it blocked the memory?" Laughter. "Could be, could be. Or maybe I'm just a ditz. I do remember now, Eliot slipped past me as I was on my way to the kitchen. Said he'd put on the electrode cap and wait for me." Eliot's eyelids fluttered. All three gathered around him, and as he slowly regained consciousness he asked the natural question. "What are you all so happy about? Did I miss something?" Angie squeezed his arm, Nate averted his eyes and Leo let out a low whistle. "Man, you...you could say that. Real glad to see you though." Understandably this confused Eliot, as he'd gone to sleep not an hour ago and it didn't occur to him that they might've forgotten where he was. "Well whatever. Did you get anything good with the machine?" In all the excitement they'd forgotten about the dream imager. It should've been running the entire time, and sure enough when prompted it began to play back the most recent recording.

 

 

A barren wasteland stretched out before them, partially engulfed by a rolling fog. The soil was dry and peppered with rocks. Save for the tangled remains of long dead trees there were no signs of life. Angie and the others huddled tensely around the display, but for most of a minute nothing happened. Then, as in the last recording, a silhouette appeared in the mist. At first it was easily mistaken for a quadruped, but as the form approached it was clear that the massive creature was the same one they’d seen before on a much larger scale. The bioform crawled very slowly and with no small amount of effort, suggesting perhaps that it couldn’t support its own weight on two legs at this size. With each ponderous advance the ground shook, and as each claw came down it sunk deeply into the soil even though at close range it appeared firm and rocky. The familiar bone-rattling hum reverberated through the air, and its eyes opened.

 

The hazy red beam swept the landscape like a prison spotlight. Everywhere it fell upon a ruined building it lingered, waiting for unseen prey to emerge. A jarring transition followed, suddenly the view was not of the surface but a network of caves; various angular buildings hung by cables from the cavern roof, linked by walkways which jostled with traffic as figures in strange uniforms made frantic preparations. Just then, the caverns shook with a low hum recognizable as the sound of the bellowing creature far above. Small rocks came loose and showered the buildings which rung briefly like bells on impact. One figure shouted to a group in an adjacent structure in some guttural language unlike any known to Angie or the others. Having apparently understood it as a command, the uniformed figures toggled a series of switches on a crude, unfurnished console before them and in response a great aperture in the ground yawned such that once fully ajar a missile could be seen rising from it. It was halfway recognizable as an ICBM except that the design was unusually ornate and geometric; The fins terminated in sharp points and protruded at a sharp upward angle. Six of them completed the weapon’s frightening radial symmetry at four points along the fuselage. Once elevated into full view it was truly a sight to behold.

 

The view again became hazy. When it cleared, the new cavern it depicted was even larger than the first. Hospital beds of a strange design filled the dimly lit chamber, arranged radially around a tremendous metal shaft. The few unoccupied beds afforded a better view of their curvilinear metal frames punctuated by blinking red lights, whereas the lights on occupied beds glowed a steady green. Each patient, if indeed they were patients, wore a skull cap comprised of electrodes and was hooked into machinery integrated into the frame. Beyond that, the beds were themselves networked with a writhing mass of cables strung along the ceiling, all leading to a large steel pillar at the very center of the room. There was little opportunity to reflect on what purpose it might serve as a moment later a violent tremor sprinkled the networked dreamers with dust and pebbles from the cavern ceiling. Overhead lights flickered, a few bulbs burst in a shower of sparks, and frantic voices rang out. Some grand project was near execution and the sense of urgency could be felt through the screen.

 

On the surface, the creature had begun to dig. the sheer weight of the thing made its work easy, as even while walking it had to struggle not to embed itself too far into the earth. The excavation was swift, as although the creature’s movements were ponderous it displaced so much in the way of rock and soil with each motion of its gargantuan claw that by the time the missile launched it had visibly unearthed the uppermost point of the subterranean complex. Mangled steel shielding shone through even as the creature continued to dig around it. Overhead, the exhaust plume of the rocket glowed a brilliant pink hue. The lower stage separated and fell away. Then the next stage jettisoned, and finally the payload sprang forth and unfolded into an angular metal blossom. For a moment it simply hung in the air, not quite motionless but rather at the point where it was running out of upward momentum and preparing to fall. What followed was pure insanity.

 

Thousands of brilliant blue/green beams cut through the foggy air, emitted both from dishes on the ground and from distant unseen sources in the sky. All converged on the satellite, now radiant and pulsing with energy. This finally warranted the creature’s attention. It turned its dull red gaze from the hole towards the blue/green point of light above it and bellowed one last time. When the satellite fired, combining every beam which shone upon it into a single pillar of light, it did not burn the creature but rather split it instantly in half. The injury was bloodless, and just a few short seconds later both halves had healed to form two new creatures exactly half the size of the original. The single beam followed suit, splitting in two, each focusing on one of the regenerated twins. They split further, and so did the beam, rapidly subdividing the monster into and ever increasing number of smaller and smaller copies. The satellite was now in freefall, but keeping up with the division nonetheless. As the monsters increased in number and diminished in size they appeared more and more lethargic, the smallest ones struggling just to move their heads. Finally the satellite struck the ground, sending up an impressive fireball.

 

A tense silence followed. Collapsed creatures laid strewn about the arid landscape, a few twitching or whimpering but the rest completely motionless. Soon the silence gave way to a dull roar in the distance, which gradually resolved into cheering as an elated mob approached. There was no controlling it; uniformed figures of all kinds descended upon the creature’s remains, beating them furiously or discharging various weapons into them with no effect. Even in their weakened state, the healing was too rapid. When the pandemonium settled down, the crowd dispersed to allow an orderly procession of yellow suited figures access to the bodies. One by one they placed thick lead helmets over the creatures’ heads, secured to a restraining harness such that if any of the creatures should recover, they would be unable to move or use that strange red gaze against their captors.

 

Just as the battle seemed won, an alarm sounded and in the distance a bizarre spectacle played out; dozens of creatures had recovered just enough from their stunned condition to lunge towards each other, fusing into a mass of flesh which then assumed the same form but doubled in size. The revelers who only minutes before had been dancing excitedly among the monster’s remains were now either fleeing in terror or standing their ground, firing their weapons fruitlessly into an ever-growing mass of pale flesh. On all sides, strange weapons spat flaming death at the seething white mound but they simply couldn’t burn it away faster than it was growing. A head began to form. The mouth tore open and roared in pain. Soon the eyes would open, and all would be lost.

 

A new form emerged from the mist. He looked far less threatening than any of the soldiers, clearly unarmed and unclothed except for a flowing hospital gown. On his hairless head sat perched an electrode cap, and on his face a look of powerful determination. Behind him another patient emerged from the fog, then dozens followed and soon thousands, each trailing a long thin cable attached to something not yet seen. When the last silhouette came forth, a hulking steel cylinder recognizable as the machine to which they were all connected, the mass of flesh took notice. Its eyes began to open, but much too late to turn the tide. Every one of them stopped, closed their eyes and quivered in place. As if in response the machine then hissed, billowing plumes of steam jetting forth from cracks now forming at ten degree increments around the curvature of the cylinder. When the ‘petals’ opened the entire machine fell from the bed of the vehicle which carried it and came to rest on the dusty grey earth, technicans on either side rolling it with great effort to face the recovering monster. The second blast finished it. The creature did not split as before, but collapsed with a thundering impact, finally beaten.

 

 

“They look human”. Leo waited for a response from Eliot. For his part he remained silent, staring intently at the screen. Angie did the same. “This doesn’t look like Europa either. Where is this?” They shushed him. Onscreen, a great vessel departed from shore with the decaying remains of the monster strapped to its deck. Once out to sea, a missile fired from shore struck the ship and sank it, ‘cargo’ and all. “They must’ve thought it was dead”. Shushed again. As the recording concluded, the view was of a rocket being loaded up with restrained creatures, a few weakly resisting but to no avail. The rocket launched with a deafening roar, climbing dramatically into the sky just as the stream cut short. That was all. Whatever great struggle had taken place, the thing out there in the trench had lost, its other half now sealed away beneath the icy shell of Europa.

 

“What the fuck did we just watch?” All four sat, stunned, trying to absorb and interpret the contents of the video. “They looked human.” This time, Eliot nodded and answered back. “They did, but that didn’t look like Earth. No part of it I know of.” Nate shrugged and headed for the door. “It’s all right there in Revelations, Eliot. Wouldn’t kill you to read it.” The rest stayed put and continued mulling over what they had seen. “I feel more confused than when we started. I’ve never seen uniforms like that. And the weapons too, as best I know we have nothing on that level.” It was true, with one exception. Angie had in fact recognized their skullcaps as functionally identical to the one used to record the dream, although the connection between the patients who wore them and the weapon they seemingly powered was unclear. EEG only recorded brain activity. Somehow it was the key to crippling the monster in the trench three miles below, but no method she could think of would turn it into a weapon. Whatever the nation or race of the army that had defeated it the first time, their technology was beyond understanding. Or beyond Angie’s, at least.

 

The crew sat sullen and quiet around the dinner table. Food was an afterthought. Nate had prepared enough for everyone after leaving the lab, but nausea made eating it a chore. “Could just be dreams.”  Leonard again, the voice of reason. Nate looked annoyed but said nothing. He’d kept quiet since the video. “We’ve all seen the body, we know what it looks like. Just because it’s in all our dreams doesn’t make it-” Eliot pounded the table, rattling the bowls and flatware. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but that’s enough. I’ve been thinking about my dream, and I can’t make sense of it. I can’t say for certain what planet that was, but those were obviously human beings. Nate, your dream showed a coastal town. I don’t know which one but that was certainly Earth, those were human beings and although I can’t say when it took place the houses and cars looked essentially modern.” Leo let it sink in, and then responded. “What are you getting at? You think the dreams are real? Things that actually happened on other planets?” Eliot shook his head. “No, if I had to say one way or the other then I guess I do think that was Earth in both dreams. And I suspect Nate’s dream is more or less what will happen if we let it reach the surface. What I can’t decide yet is whether my dream took place in the future, or the distant past.”

 

Angie’s sleep was fitful, but mercifully dreamless. When she awoke she found Eliot and Leo already dressed and sitting on either side of the table. “I want to talk about yesterday.” Neither replied. “It just got a little crazy. We talked about things that seemed to make sense at the time but now that I’ve slept on it, the more I recall the more fantastical it seems. I want to discuss other possibilities.” Still, both remained silent. When one spoke, it caught Angie completely off guard. “Nate’s missing.” In fact, he was. She hadn’t noticed but from her position she could see into all four cylinders and Nate wasn’t in any of them. “The cupola? The minisub?” Eliot shook his head. Leo spoke next. “One of the suits is gone. He never mentioned an EVA, no idea where he went or what he’s up to. Last I saw him he was pacing in the galley, quoting scripture to nobody in particular. I think something’s not right with him. for all we know, he tried to surface.” The dread was palpable. At that very moment, if he’d really gone to the surface, whatever strange influence the body in the trench exerted over them would be spreading to the topside recovery crew. Once in range of shore, it would spread to the mainland. The dreams had gotten stronger, more vivid with every additional mind it touched, to the point that Angie’s ‘infection’ had taken only hours and somehow empowered the creature to deceive them while awake. All that with just four brains. With dozens, it would become a nightmare beyond the possibility of control. With millions, the dreams she’d seen the day before would be fulfilled.

 

Their quiet reflection was interrupted with a sudden banging on the airlock door. Everyone jolted upright and stared at it in unison, Angie most of all. “I swear that hatch was open literally five seconds ago.” Eliot was the first to act and one swift motion he was at the control panel initiating decompression. “Eliot, stop.” He carried on as if he didn’t hear. “Eliot, look at the cradles.” On the panel two icons showed an illuminated outline representing the alcoves into which the suits locked while not in use. One was gone, as expected. It took him a moment to fully understand the significance. Even if not in the cradle, as long as the suit was within range and line of sight it would communicate those vitals to the cradle’s systems. If Nate were inside the lock, his suit would show up on the display but it wasn’t there. “Yeah, okay. I see it.” Eliot canceled the cycle and backed away from the controls. The banging continued for a few seconds, then abruptly stopped. They waited some time for it to resume but there was only silence.

 

“I’m going out to look for him”. Nobody argued. Leo knew Eliot well enough to have anticipated it. Angie couldn’t bear the thought of another EVA and was relieved that Eliot offered first. It took half an hour to suit up, but soon the inner door was closed and repressurization was underway. The two crew members remaining aboard the Argyro watched from the cupola as the third trekked across the ocean floor to find out what had become of number four. It seemed a very real possibility that he wouldn’t return. For the next four hours Angie laid in her bunk alternating between looking through the porthole just above and averting her eyes, mildly nervous that something might be looking back. Leo sat pensively at the laser comms station waiting for word from Eliot. But when it came, he wasn’t alone.

 

“I can’t understand him. Adjust the gain, I think his suit battery is low.”  Angie loomed over Leo’s shoulder as he fiddled with the comms interface, very much the backseat driver. “This is the best we’re going to get. You’re right about the battery, it’s showing 18 percent. It’s broadcasting at full power, but we’ll only get coherent audio once he’s closer.” It was agonizing. “How much closer?” Through the cupola dome they could barely make out the figure of one newt suit lurching towards the base, dragging another behind it. “Keep your pantyhose on. at this rate he’ll be at the airlock in six minutes, we’ll have clear audio then.” The overhead lights flickered. For the first time in two days Angie took note of the worsening condition of the station. Long stains ran down the walls in some places, water damage or rust from sea water trickling down them. The bedrooms were fairly dry but in the main chamber if you paid attention you could catch sea water dripping from the ceiling once every minute or two. And every so often, the long, low groan of the hull adjusting to pressure reminded her where she was. Coming up on four days of backup air, and maybe half that in battery power. She began to dwell on the idea of spending her final moments in cold, damp darkness. That’s when Eliot’s voice, clear as day, came in over comms.

 

“Nate’s hurt, let me in.” They looked at each other and hesitated, both afflicted by the same doubts. “Could you answer some questions, Eliot?” A pause followed. “I don’t have time for bullshit. Nate’s suit blew a seal, he’s been slowly taking on water for hours. Life support’s still running but he’s up to his knees in frigid sea water and his suit could implode at any second. Open the outer door.” Sounded like Eliot. Looked like Eliot, too. The tiny camera inside his helmet sent back a familiar face, albeit contorted by stress. “Eliot. You know we have to ask. I’m going to open the inner door, but I won’t depressurize until you confirm some things for me.” He made muffled sounds of frustration but obligingly climbed into the airlock as the outer hatch swung open. Once both were safely inside, Leo confirmed on the display that both suits were showing vitals. “The suits are real, at least.”

 

“Leo, don’t play games with me. Nate’s hurt, start depressurizing now.” Leo looked tempted, but held firm. “That may not be your brother” Angie muttered, one hand gripping his shoulder. “Don’t tell me what I already know. He’ll stay out there until he answers my question.” Inside, the dim green lasers from both suits flickered randomly, their battery power on the verge of giving out. “Eliot, on my eighth birthday mom gave me a gift. It was something I wanted more than anything else in the world. What was the gift, and what color was it?” The brightness of the laser connecting the airlock’s emitter to Eliot’s suit fluctuated, matching the intensity of Leo’s voice as he spoke. Both waited breathlessly for his reply. “It wasn’t yours.” Leo raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?” one elbow on the console already, he leaned further in so as not to miss Eliot’s answer. “Mom didn’t give you the tricycle. She gave it to me. It was green. You cried because you wanted a trike so badly, but she gave it to me instead. I hated green, and I hated to see you cry. I gave you the trike and told you that you’d owe me forever.” Angie looked at Leo, waiting for a reaction. Suddenly he grinned. “Initiating decompression.” But as he reached for the controls, Angie seized his hand. “Leo, look at the vitals.” Eliot’s suit read 14.7 psi, surface normative. Nate’s read 9,860 and the internal temperature was just above freezing. “Eliot, how’s Nate?” It took a moment for him to check and report back. “He’s weary, but breathing fine. Says he’s scared. Why?” Angie’s body became rigid, and in a faltering voice she whispered back: “Eliot, I don’t know what’s in that suit but it isn’t human, and I’m not letting it inside.”

 

In the lock, Eliot struggled to parse the message. He went over it several times in his head before the meaning clicked for him. Chills ran through him as he looked down at his injured friend, meeting his gaze through the thick borosilicate viewport of the damaged suit. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t they draining the lock?” It looked and sounded exactly like Nate. For a moment he wondered if Angie could be mistaken. “Something’s wrong with the pumps. We need to wait outside while they fix it.” He’d never been a good liar, least of all under stress, but the thing masquerading as Nate seemed to buy it. “Help me up, let’s get this over with so I can get inside and have a hot cup of coffee, haha.” Eliot didn’t laugh. Inside the suit he’d begun to sweat, hauling Nate’s suit out of the lock but also struggling to touch it as little as possible. It was right next to him. Whatever it was down in the trench, it was also here, very much in physical form and separated from him only by two layers of armor and a few inches of ocean. Not nearly enough.

 

“I thought we had to wait outside”. Eliot halted on his way back to the outer hatch. His mind raced as he formulated a reply. “It’s dangerous. The pumps are acting up, depressurization would be uncontrolled. I’m just going to stand on the open hatch so I’m in laser range, I want a play by play of the repairs.” Nice. He’d felt more confident that time. Deceit was not his strong suit, but he was learning quickly. “I want to wait inside with you.” His stomach turned. “No, no, you stay out here. If the hatch closes I can get clear in time. You’re hurt, it’s a bad idea.” It was beginning to look like he’d overestimated his skill. Nate’s voice became frantic, with a subtle hint of anger. “Don’t leave me out here. I’m so cold, don’t leave me alone Eliot, don’t let me die.” He began to crawl towards Eliot, who instinctively jammed his thumb on the thruster control and made a beeline for the open hatch. Nate cried out, his voice audibly wavering between it’s normal pitch and a barely concealed inhuman screech. Eliot glanced at the rear view video feed. He had a solid lead but Nate had entered pursuit and was slowly catching up. More battery left? Out of the corner of his eye he saw the outline of Nate’s suit fade into something else, a large black silhouette which grew more distinct as it closed in. Finally it took on the form of an enormous, pale face with beady black eyes, and a wide open mouth full of sharp little teeth. Eliot convulsed but kept his thumb on the hat switch. It was no use, on the suit’s HUD he saw his velocity dropping precipitously as the batteries finally went flat.

 

With a loud reverberating clag, the outer hatch closed. Seconds later the entire station rocked violently as whatever had been chasing him impacted the airlock. “Eliot, what the fuck was that? Are you okay?” He wasn’t, his heart threatened to explode and his lungs felt like they were on fire but he lied; “I’m fine Angie. Drain the lock and depressurize, now.” It took twice as long to get the suit off because Eliot couldn’t stop shaking. “Are you that cold? Let me feel your face.” He brushed her hand away and struggled to free himself from the cumbersome exoskeleton. “I’m not cold. It’s fine. Boil water, I need some tea.” Even with a change of clothes and a warm cup of earl grey, his hands still visibly shook.  “Angie, if you don’t get that thermometer away from me I am going to break it. That’s warning number two.” She’d tried to sneak up behind him but somehow he knew. “I really wish you’d tell us what happened out there. You look terrible.” He smirked. “That’s some bedside manner.” She wanted to fire back but resigned herself to being pleased that he was making jokes again. “Well, I’m not that kind of doctor anyway. But if you’re really okay, get some sleep. Tomorrow, we need to start taking steps.” He didn’t ask what she meant as it was implicit. The thing in the trench was becoming desperate, each new attempt on the station bolder than the last. It was only a matter of time before it got in.

 

“What does it want? It’s been in here four or five times that I can recall, disguised as someone different every time.” Eliot shook his head. “Those were illusions. It was never physically inside the station with us. But it badly wants to be, and I think I know why.” That caught their attention. Before Leo or Angie could ask, he gestured towards the dream imager sitting beside his bed. “That’s not everything, I think. It’s one half of the weapon we saw in my dream. I don’t know if we have the other half, but it obviously thinks we do.” Leo started in with fear evident in his tone. “But it never tried to hurt us before, just trick us into surfacing. I don’t think it means us any harm.” In retrospect it was true, the creature had focused up until recently on convincing isolated crew members to break protocol and head topside. Eliot’s episode outside the airlock was the first time it had shown openly malicious intent. “We’re down to two days battery and less than four days oxygen, and I think he knows. We’re no good to him dead, he needs live brains to carry the signal.” Angie cocked her head. “Him?” He sighed. “Him. Her. It. Whatever. It needs living brains between here and the surface to get a signal topside. But we know all it’s tricks now, there’s no way it’ll get one of us to surface at this point, and that makes us as useless to it as if we were dead. All that’s left is to finish us off and wait for the NOAA to send replacements, so it can try again.”

 

“Who says those were lasers? Could’ve been anything.” Leo and Eliot had spent the better part of an hour following the EVA arguing animatedly over possible methods to kill the creature. “They sure as hell looked like our comms lasers from what I saw.” Angie paced in the background while Nate sat hunched over at the table refusing to acknowledge the discussion. “Okay, so how are you gonna lift it out of the trench so that it’s in range of the array? On battery power, the sub lasers might just give it a blister.” He seemed to enjoy playing the contrarian foil, even under these circumstances. It no longer frustrated Eliot; he’d come to value the moderating influence. “I still say we dump the reactor on it. Not as if it’s doing us any good.” The evidence was all around them. Several days on emergency power had depleted the battery bank to near empty and the air storage indicator had read zero since morning. Only the fact that the Arygo had been engineered over spec kept them alive. “You keep saying we should dump the reactor on it, and I keep telling you we have nothing that could budge it. The reactor’s what, five hundred feet from the edge? And it’s at least a dozen tons negatively buoyant. The minisub is a backup, not even sufficient for research needs, it’s a glorified elevator between here and topside. It couldn’t tug a mussel off the hull.” It was by this point a very familiar feeling, to be completely out of options. Nate wouldn’t eat; Angie had given up pleading with him when he told her the average human could survive for a month without food and it was doubtful whether they had even a day left.

 

“We could try talking to it.” Nate jolted upright. Angie took notice only because of Nate’s reaction. When it became apparent that Nate had nothing to say and was in fact waiting anxiously for Leo to continue, he did: “We keep discussing how to kill it. I dunno if it can hear us while we’re awake or only while we’re asleep or both, but look at us from it’s perspective. Who knows how long it’s been lying down there, crippled and alone? The argyro crews have probably been it’s first contact with intelligent life in what, centuries? More? And all they do is flip out and think up ways to kill it.” Eliot interjected: “He’s the one trying to kill us!” Nervous glances ricocheted through the chamber. “I’m not sure. For the most part it’s just been trying to trick one of us into surfacing. It does seem to be getting desperate lately, but who here can say that they didn’t at least give passing thought to killing it the moment they first saw it on the imager? Another volley of worried looks were exchanged; Angie recalled that moment in the sub when she’d received soundings of the body. Leo was dead on, something primal in her had convulsed at the sight. Almost instinctively.

 

“Cute, Leo. Enough devil’s advocate. We need to start seriously discussing how to get out of here before-” Nate, who’d gradually settled into his chair while Leo spoke, once again bolted upright and interrupted: “You said it. You named him. I know what you’re going to say but you named him just now and that’s exactly what we dealin’ with here.” Eliot cradled his brow in one hand, from which Angie inferred that he knew something she didn’t about Nate’s meaning. It became clear before long. “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” All eyes were locked on Nate, unblinking and glazed over in confusion. “He ain’t done shit ‘cept lie to us whole time we been down here, right? If he wanted to talk he coulda said hi, first contact with an alien race, erryone’s happy. But he didn’t, right from the get go all he does is trick us. Ain’t any honest intention in that, just one illusion after the next. And why not? He’s the father of all lies, even appeared to Angie as a serpent. Ain’t that right Angie?” An awkward silence stretched thin the air between them. “Nate, I don’t think Leo literally meant that-” Nate started forward and pounded the table. “Don’t. Don’t you patronize me Eliot. You done this from the moment I set foot on this tub, from when you saw the Bible in my bag and when I prayed over our first dinner. I dealt with guys like you erry step of the way up the ladder, fags who thought I wouldn’t do my job right ‘cause I’m a man of faith. Well here we are, maybe three miles above the devil or whatever’s so close to the devil you can’t call it nothin’ else. Now’s not the time, Eliot. Now’s not the time to call me the crazy one for believin’ in what’s right down there in the trench, same as what it says in scripture. I see you tryin’ to find some place to stop me and tell me to shut my fool mouth but I ain’t gonna. You sit there and listen till I’m done. We seen it in the dream, it fell from space just like scripture said, and God sealed him away in the deep until the stars are right. Well, maybe now the stars are right, Eliot. Maybe that’s why we down here and got no choice left but to go up. We ain’t here to keep it trapped. We here to set it free, so the end can get started, just like in my dream. We gotta set it free so all that’s written can come to pass.”

 

He stood absolutely rigid for a few moments following the end of his tirade, possibly to gauge reactions or just for added effect. Either way he didn’t wait for questions. Angie, Leo and Eliot were left speechless, all eyes on Nate as he climbed up into the observatory. The hatch was left slightly ajar but it was plain to everyone that he wasn’t interested in company. The remaining three parted ways. Angie spent the next two hours pouring over the dream recordings while Eliot went to manually measure the remaining oxygen, and Leo prepared supper. She couldn’t figure out when he’d had the chance to do it, but when Angie opened the hatch to her bunk she found a small written note from Eliot which said simply “Keep an eye on him”. An implicit alliance. Perhaps Leo was given a similar note. It wasn’t clear yet whether they’d have to do anything about Nate, but it did seem as if Eliot’s EVA encounter was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Some straw, too. After a moment’s reflection Angie decided she couldn’t find it in herself to blame him, and that at some point after supper she’d set aside some time to talk him down.

 

“I need to speak with you. Privately.” Eliot’s eyes said as much as he pulled her by one arm into the engineering room. “It’s fine, I got your note.” He seemed elsewhere, peering both ways through the narrowing gap as he eased the hatch shut behind them. “There’s more. The last team through here weren’t astronauts.” Angie laughed despite everything. “No Angie, listen. They were Navy Seals. It was a Seal exercise.” Before she could connect the dots, he did so for her: “There are guns onboard. High pressure models, supercavitating rounds, designed to work with the suits. I’ve told Leo, and now you know, but Nate doesn’t. At least not to my knowledge. Do you want to know where they’re stored?” She was by this time wide eyed and stiff. “I....I don’t know, do I? Eliot, are you planning something? Nate’s not that far gone, let me talk to him.” He shook his head and grimaced. “I don’t think it’ll come to that. But if he does go for the guns, and he figures out you know where they are, he might hurt you until you tell him. I’ve never known him to lay hands on a woman that way, but he’s not in his right mind. That’s why I want you to know where the cache is. So if he goes after Leo, and Leo tells him where to find it, you can get there first.”

 

A few things struck her in sequence as she inched her head around the corner, peering into the galley. First was the subtle stench. Some patches of wall were visibly discolored by the early beginnings of a microbial film. The meager illumination from the emergency lights was apparently enough, along with the now intolerable humidity, to start a bacterial garden on the inner hull. Momentarily overcome, Angie realized that in a few days’ time the bacteria, algae and other growth might be all that survived within the Argyro, slowly growing over and feeding on their remains. Just briefly her legs wavered beneath her, but recalling her purpose she quickly regained composure. Inwardly, she reviewed the most likely scenarios; The first, that nathan was reachable and only temporarily unstable because of fear and stress. It was not an unfamiliar condition. The next, that Nathan had selectively interpreted his dream and the others in a way that confirmed, for him, an apocalyptic narrative of which he could not be disconvinced.

 

Angie had met through friends working in more traditional areas of neurology a handful of individuals who satisfied that description; A few believed they were messianic figures, one of which ran off and started a commune in the Arizona desert. Another believed world leaders to be shape shifting reptilian extraterrestrials, something that had seemed a whole lot more far fetched before her recent encounters. The last spoke very convincingly of an ability he believed he had to perceive ‘false humans’ walking among the general populace, spying on everyone else and reporting to monstrous, inhuman masters. In each case every piece of news, every article and scientific study they came across was in their minds further proof of their worldview and anything to the contrary was a sinister deception orchestrated by enemy forces. For a tense moment, Angie wrestled with the idea that she might be under the same spell.

 

While lost in thought, she’d wandered down the staircase and into the engineering section. It was more brightly lit and a cursory glance around the room revealed the souce. Banks of LEDs were hung from overhead netting, plugged into what looked to be a suitcase sized utility battery. Someone had set these up. Was it Nate? “Eliot came down here earlier to check air and power levels, it could just as easily have been him.” The possibility was mildly comforting, but her gut suspected the worst and was vindicated when a powerful hairy arm slid around her neck and tightened.

 

“Looking for tools, right?” In the moment where she might’ve cried out before the meaty forearm compressed her windpipe, Angie instead gambled on plan B. “Be quiet, Eliot will hear us”. A painfully long ten seconds passed, then the arm loosened and offered no resistance when she pulled free from its grip. “Don’t scare me like that. I might be the only friend you have on this tub. What were you going on about earlier?” Nate’s face hovered in the sweet spot where one side was illuminated by the harsh LED lights, and the other was cloaked in shadow. His eyes stayed trained on Angie but only barely, wavering with the telltale signs that he’d been drinking before a look of sudden comprehension overtook them. “Wormwood! You saved, Angie?” She was ready for the question and answered without hesitation. “I gave my life over to Christ when I was twelve. I had a hard home life and it was only the strength given to me by God that saw me through it. I don’t know scripture like I should, but I want to. Tell me about Wormwood.” It was as if, faced with an elaborate and impossibly convoluted lock designed to stymie thieves, she had inserted a matching key which depressed every pin to the precise degree required. “I saw it in you. You got the spiritchal understandin’ to get what I told Eliot and Leo. They’re spiritchally dead, always have been, some just ain’t meant for the kingdom of God. I knew you was different, there’s a light in your eyes.” He caressed Angie’s cheek, now moist with nervous sweat that he would hopefully mistake for humidity.

 

“It’s just like you saw in the dreams. Leviathan risin’ up out the ocean, Gog here on Earth and Magog waitin’ up in that ice moon. What d’ya think happens when they come together, Angie? What happens when the two come together?” She widened her eyes and uttered “Wormwood”. The key rotated, and the deadbolt fell away. “We saw it. All just like Revelations, the faithful left on Earth after th’ rapture strikin’ down Satan under the banner of Heaven.” The connections were so tenuous it took several seconds to pin down which dream he meant, and how the elements matched up in his mind. It was eerie, like all at once being forced to look through a uniquely distorted lens at what seemed like madness before, yet seductively plausible so long as the lens remained in place. Tearing it away was like once again lurching between alternate realities. Disoriented, whatever portion of her brain categorized ideas as fantasy or reality began sorting through everything anew. No. No, what little she knew of scripture didn’t describe what she’d seen in the trench. Nathan saw what he wanted to, and she’d been right to scoop a small handgun out of the locker behind her while Nate was distracted. It felt like the telltale heart, burning a hole in her pocket, crying out to catch Nate’s attention. Natural paranoia mingled with what she knew were the early signs of hypoxia on the way up the staircase. Nate had been whispering scripture to her the whole way, none she knew offhand but all of which had vague parallels to their dreams. Carefully picked from memory by a man she suspected was building, in his mind, a justification for something terrible. Intuition told her the time was drawing near when she’d have to decide what to do with him, and she once again became uncomfortably aware of the pistol jostling around in her coat pocket.

 

 

LONG DESCRIPTION:

 

“Four miles beneath the waves, the crew of the Argyro deepsea research station studies benthic life in a world without sun. None could've realized what waited for them in the trench below...until it reached out to their dreams.

 

It spoke in a language we could not understand, and in words impossible to ignore. So the topside powers sent a sleep researcher to make contact, our small minds feebly answering it's call. Had we known what it wanted, we'd have remained silent.

 

When that motive is discovered by the crew of the Argyro, their mission will change from one of peaceful contact from the surface world to preventing it at all costs.”

 

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

 

“In the dark, frigid world of the deep sea, a presence unlike anything we know waits with inhuman patience to be discovered.”