Mariana

The Mariana.

 She was built to be the world’s deepest human operated submersible; a single occupant technological marvel, made from some super rare metal alloy that had only recently been discovered, she was the lab’s passion project; their baby. Mariana was going to let humanity finally see what we’d never seen before: the bottom of the world.

And me? I was the driver.

You can fake a lot on official papers if you know what people are looking for. It’s easy to turn a failed college career into a shiny rookie position at an upstart marine science lab if you knew the right words to use, and the right people to avoid, of course. And so I worked from the shadows, learning and progressing until Mariana was finished. It was all very hush-hush, to be honest, some of us suspected the higher ups were doing something illegal, but so long as I got a paycheck in the mail I wasn’t about to snoop in something that wasn’t my business.

And now I’m the lucky son of a bitch that gets to ride with Mariana on her maiden voyage.  

The goal was to make it to the bottom of what we were tentatively calling the Quiet Zone: supposedly it was a rift that had opened up on the ocean floor that was deeper than any human had ever been able to explore. They wanted Mariana to get down there and see what was going on, see what new species were inhabiting the hellscape.

The thing they don’t tell you about deep sea exploration is that it’s slow as hell. Mariana doesn’t have any real windows - something about glass and water pressure - so all my visibility comes from these specialty cameras mounted to her exterior and some tiny little screens jammed in front of me. The sub is small; too much open space would give her too much room to collapse in on herself if things go to shit, so I’m crammed in with about a dozen little screens and various other machinery that does most of the work for me. I spent the first hour or so using the radio to keep in touch with the surface, and watching the screens.

Something else they don’t tell you is that the ocean is dark. Like, really dark. As I descend, the sunlight filtering down from above me vanishes bit by bit, until I’m left with only what the lights on Mariana can see, which isn’t a lot. I’m down alone in the dark, almost two hours from the surface. I don;’t know how deep I am, how big are kilometers anyway, how do I make sense of that? The guys upstairs are keeping me entertained well enough, and I’m thankful because I don’t have jack shit to do down here in the dark.

At some point the radio stopped working. I guess when you get deep enough the signal just isn’t strong enough anymore. Thats fine, I can handle it from here. She does most of the work herself anyway.

But then it gets dark inside Mariana too.

See, there’s all these safety precautions when you go submarining. All sorts of “What to do in an Emergency” type scenarios. What they don’t prepare you for is that when the systems start to fail, the emergency oxygen supply in Mariana is about 3 hours max. And I’ve been going down for nearly four at this point. They don’t prepare you to face the reality that no matter what happens from this point on, you don’t have enough air to make it back to the surface; the operating systems began to malfunction because submarines - even specially built - weren’t meant to be this far down.

I’m cold, I’m probably in shock, I have three hours left, its dark, and Mariana’s not moving anymore. If I’m lucky they’ll figure out that something’s wrong and at least my family will have a body to bury.

There isn’t much to do in this tiny little death trap, but the cameras still work, thank god for external battery life I guess. So I watch the screens; Its darker than the blackest nights I’ve ever seen, and I know darkness, I grew up on a farm in Tennessee.  

I wonder what the official story will be, if they’ll call it submarine failure or if they’ll think I did something to break the damn thing. I wonder if they knew something like this could happen, and if, by extension, they sent me down on purpose. Maybe they’d figured out I wasn’t supposed to be here, or maybe they’d just decided that I was the most expendable should something go wrong. Who knows?

I catch movement on the cameras, and I’m not alone down here. I knew I logically wasn’t, but whatever is out there is large, and I know how god awfully terrifying some of the creatures that rome the darkness can be. I keep an eye out for more movement, and its there, long sinewy shapes weaving through the black; cutting flashes of carnival bright colors across the screens. I have no idea what I’m looking at, but whatever’s out there, there’s more than one, and they’re circling.

I’m mesmerized by the colorful streaks, watching them slip across the different screens like an old computer screensaver. It’s almost easy to forget that I’m running out of time. I probably have an hour, a little less. I’m not a religious person, but I wonder if I ought to start praying anyway. The things outside just keep circling, I think they know I’m in here; I wonder if they’re trying to find a way in.  

Thats when the banging starts happening. I don’t scare easily, but down here in this alien darkness, with creatures circling me like some weird underwater version of vultures, it’s too easy to curl up in on myself and wish it would all stop. It moves up the body of Mariana, up to the hatch, the only way in or out of the vessel, the only thing keeping me from being crushed by tons and tons of water. Maybe I won’t suffocate in this metal tomb after all.

What happens next is something of a blur. A nightmare really. They must have found a way to open the hatch. I was in the water, or the water was in the sub. When you’re thousands of feet underwater, its colder than anything you can imagine. Its as if the blood in your veins is freezing, but you’re still alive and you have to feel every single piercing crystal of ice in your veins. It’s not something people think about because water pressure will kill you before hypothermia even gets a swing at you. I don’t know how I wasn’t to crushed death down there in the inky blackness; by all rights I should’ve been. I should’ve drowned, or been eaten or any other horrific ending.

But I didn’t, and I wasn’t.  

The longest a human can hold their breath is about two minutes, and even then the all too rapid pressure change ought to have killed me. It fucked me up for sure, landed me in a hospital and a wheelchair for months - I may never walk properly again, they say - but still I survived that. I survived.

I quit as soon as I was recovered enough to hold a pen, wrote an angry fuck you to the bastards who sent me down there on the way out too. I don’t regret a second of it either. Mariana is still down there, apparently, they weren’t able to recover her. It’s a bit of a shame really, she was expensive.

People ask me how I did it, how did I manage to survive something like this. I tell them the truth, I don’t know. One minute I was ten minutes from disaster, the next I’m breathing fresh ocean air and my crew are screaming. It’s a miracle, they’ll tell me, and I agree.

But I’ve never told anyone what I saw down there, what I really saw. They looked like us, to a point. They had two eyes like us, and a nose and fingers like us. They had tails, bight flashy colorful tails that to a dying man resembled more wings than anything. Powerful tails that could carry me up thousands of feet in minutes. They were utterly beautiful, and I swear I could hear him tell me that it would be alright, that I would survive, as he carried my body toward the light. Nobody would believe me anyway.

I don’t go out on the water anymore, an experience like that does something to you, fucks with your brain, and I can’t bring myself to do it. I wish I could though, what I wouldn’t give to see them again, those beautiful creatures. Every culture has stories of mermaids, of sailors drowned by women with fish tails and seaweed in their hair. And to think something like that is the reason I’m alive; incredible.