Please Avoid Open Water

It took us a while, but eventually we figured out how to get near them. The trick, we found, was to kill the running lights and let the sub basically go dead in the water. The only things we'd leave running were the absolute bare bones, the things we couldn't turn off for any reason. Once we did that, they'd come closer. The first one that did it was a fascinating shape. Like a square with little triangles cut out of it in arbitrary places. All right angles with no other form. It came up to the sub and circled it a few times, and we agreed it was checking us out. It paused in front of the camera at one point, and we got some amazing shots of it. At that distance, we could see that whatever it was, it had almost no density. It never turned it's 'back' on us, because the positioning of the cut-outs didn't change. No matter what angle we viewed it from it always looked the same. When we attempted to touch it with one of the arms, it took off. Not terribly fast, but at a good enough clip that we realized it had to have some kind of propulsion. What that was, we still don't know.

They're sensitive to electricity, I think, but they got bolder the more we were down there with them. And they started to follow us as they realized we weren't a threat. We started referring to them as 'Pollys' because we didn't know what else to call them. We started playing little games with them. We'd have them follow us to the surface, where we'd move the sub around and have them chase us. We got really fond of them, even though we didn't know what they were. We didn't have a clue. But they seemed to pose no threat to us or anything else. They were almost cute.

On a mid-afternoon dive, a school of bait fish came through the area while we were interacting with one of the Pollys. The school went around us, but a few fish got separated and passed right by us. As we watched, one fish broke off from the rest, and swam very calmly right up to the Polly. It almost seemed like it was lured to it by something. And the second it hit the surface of the Polly, something happened. The Polly gained density, that's the only way I can describe it. The fish fell into the Polly, and in a fraction of a second, it was crushed by some unbelievably great force into nothing. The only thing I've ever seen like it is the footage of the crab being sucked into a millimeter-wide crack of a pipe. One second the fish was there, the next it was compressed and was gone. Needless to say, we were both intrigued and alarmed. Looking back on it, I'm sure this was a deliberate display of what the Polly was capable of doing.

Things began to go downhill from there. Several physicists were called to help us, because we all agreed that whatever had taken place was way beyond anything we'd ever seen. No one could explain the footage we'd shot. There was a lot of talk of some kind of weapon, that it was something man-made. I'm not sure if we failed to notice it before, or if we were allowed to see it, but the Pollys started popping up everywhere, and much more frequently. When we dove to the sea floor, we'd find them laying flat on the sand, capturing and crushing whatever got near them. They'd float by us in the water, never coming close but always staying within sight range.

And they began to get bigger.

Soon, we were seeing Pollys bigger than the sub. Bigger than seals. Bigger than some species of whales. The variety and sizes were endless, never the same. People on the project started getting scared. The Pollys never attacked us, but we began to get the sense that we were being surrounded. There were so many. We were losing count of how many we were seeing. They were devouring the bait we'd bring down, opening themselves up and crushing the things inside them in fractions of a second. We started bringing rocks coated with a frozen layer of chum to see what would happen. The Pollys crushed them with no problem. We tried the same experiment with steel. Concrete. A very small piece of industrial-grade diamond. Everything we threw into them, they crushed.

The last night of the project, there was an accident.

As the sub was lowered into the water, a member of the crew got too close to one of the lines, and they got snagged. On the camera feed, we watched them hit the water. Another crew member threw a life ring down, and I moved the sub away as quickly as I could. As I did this, the camera arm moved, and the screen was filled with that color. That impossible Stygian Blue. The Polly, which was twice the size of the sub, rushed up from below me and headed straight for the crew member, who didn't see it coming. I radioed surface to get him up, to get him out of the water, but in the fraction of a second it took to do that, the Polly touched him. I watched his leg fall into the Polly, where it swung as if suspended in air. And in a fraction of a second, it was gone. The stump of his leg was wrinkled, like the end of a sausage. I don't even know that he had time to feel it before the Polly took him in up to the chest. It crushed him, and from the surface I could hear people screaming. I didn't see his face, but from what I gather, the force was so great that in the instant the Polly crushed him, what remained of his lungs was forced up out of his mouth. The pressure must have been immense, all of his remaining blood and tissue rocketing up into his throat, blasting out the sinus cavities and into the brain. I have to believe he was killed instantly. The rest of him collapsed down into the Polly, and in the split second I saw his head, I saw the scalp was split open at the top. And then he was gone, and the Polly sank back down until I couldn't see it anymore.

We haven't been allowed to dive anymore since then. We're heading back to the mainland, where we'll probably be debriefed. I can't imagine they'll let us keep our footage. And I imagine we'll all be required to keep tight-lipped about this until we know exactly what these things are. At night, when I go out on deck and look down, I can see them following us, just below the surface. It's amazing how clearly they stand out from the water. I would never have known that there could be anything darker than the ocean at night.

Until we know what they are, until we can figure out how to keep them away and we can confirm that they don't exist anywhere else, I don't know that I'll feel safe. Because from what we can tell, they don't need water to survive. From what we can tell, the only reason they're in the water is because that's what covers most of our planet. I really, really hope we're wrong. But for now, all I can do is warn everyone and advise that whatever you do, you avoid open water. Please. Please avoid open water.