There be monsters

 The ping of the sonar came back, forming the same bright blue image on the monitor of the same trench as it had countless times before. An oblong bowl shape with a tiny dot in the center where their boat lay listless. As she’d taught herself over these many weeks, she consciously blinked before the next ping went out. Before she’d trained herself to do that the strain and dryness had started to become unbearable – the regularity of the pings was a great reminder. Now, that forced blink was a matter of survival, of sanity, it was a way to measure that time was still moving forward. Because the image formed by the ping had always come back the same. A deeper blue than normal, with them right in the middle of the bowl, unable to move no matter what they’d tried. They were well past having run standard procedures to account for any conceivable equipment or crew failure. All systems were seemingly normal, but they just couldn’t get the boat to move out of that bowl. They stayed a dot at the center of an oblong bowl. The only clue had been the different tone of blue their sonar had come back, indicating the sonar was moving through the water surrounding them at a different speed than normal.

     The XO had sealed the bridge when the captain failed to return from his third excursion to try a new solution. Their routine patrol mission had changed when they suddenly hit turbulence then plunged several thousand feet, at a rate previously unknown before settling here in this dark blue bowl. They’d been stuck here for so long she’d lost track of anything but her screen, unable to move. Everyone had performed professionally. A standard check of all boat systems immediately after had been completed as if they weren’t sitting thousands of feet below the depth at which the boat should have been compressed into scrap, the crew becoming fodder for bottom feeders. Just more pieces of the detritus making its way to the unexplored ocean floor.

     Her eyes opened from an intentional blink that could have lasted an instant or an hour. Pressure shuddered along the hull in a now familiar sound that would have set them to alert before the plunge but now was just a regular companion. The ping came back and there it was, a slight curve off the port bow. There for an instant, not even the full ping as if it was something moving so fast it didn’t even get the full ping before it was gone. In the past weeks, most of them spent watching this same screen, she’s seen nothing change outside the ship.

Her mind raced to decide whether to report it. This time she didn’t blink as the ping went out and came back. The image was the same as it had always been, how long had she closed her eyes during her last blink? Had she missed a ping, fallen into the rhythm of it all? Another blink and another ping and there was nothing again. The image the same as it had always been. The memory of the ensign locked out of the bridge came again. He’d reported hearing the captain over the comms after comms had been dead for three days. No one else had heard it, there was no captain, and after a day the ensign’s pleas and taps on the bulkhead had stopped. She was glad they’d stopped, the whale song of pressure along the hull and the ping were the only sounds she needed anymore.

She returned to her blinks, keeping her eyes open through three consecutive pings had felt like an eternity. With her next blink, she remembered the routine of the academy. Those years had felt so long and so important at the time but now they were a lifetime ago and in the end felt like one long routine. Since the captain had gone the XO seemed to have stopped trying. There was no more discussion of other options. There were no creative solutions. They stuck to their routine, monitoring systems as each piece of technology slowly faded, then failed.

No matter what systems they cycled through, no matter what changes the crew made, they didn’t move and slowly one by one the systems and the crew seemed to fade like memories. Only the bridge remained, only her eight fellow crew locked in here taking turns at stations. Monitoring and cycling through systems even after those systems stopped registering their work. Too frightened or maybe just too weak to do anything but follow the comfort of the routine. The XO was capable and competent, but he’d given up on solutions and knew only to cycle through their routines.

The next time she blinked she was in the bunk she hadn’t seen in weeks. The blink after back home in her bed. She longed even just for her bunk, comfortable compared to hunkering down on a bulkhead at the back of the bridge with the sing song of pressure along the hull. She wondered just for a second what was in her bunk now or was it even still there. It felt like an old dream, back when she had dreams that weren’t just that blue bowl on the screen. She watched it ping back all day then it stayed with her all night. Her dreams of past and future were all in that same blue haze pinging back. The easiest way to tell when she’d slept was if she remembered seeing things other than the blue bowl in that haze. Pasts that didn’t happen, futures that could have, had she chosen differently. When she woke it was back to the screen and back to the choices she had made. Choices that left her stuck reminding herself to blink as each new ping went out.

     “Stations report,” the command from the XO indicated it was time to cycle through reporting out each system in turn. Another routine that hadn’t changed in days even if it no longer had a real purpose. She thought again about the curve but she still wasn’t sure and it hadn’t returned. It was as real as those dreams in that hazy blue. The intermittent taps of the ensign had been real enough, so she kept her report the same.

     The captain had been gone 6 sleeps. The XO kept track of their shifts and she had no real way of knowing they were still on the same schedule save faith the man wasn’t creative enough to change their routine. At this point there was nothing to do save follow his commands and trust that he would stick them to their routine. The captain had been different but that had been earlier too, there was still hope of a solution. They’d tried their ballast in every combo that dive control could think of and could barely get the ship to pitch or roll with no dive or rise. It just sat there stuck in the same depth and position, the engines unable to move the boat forward or back. It was as if the water no longer mattered, that it was perfectly balanced so moving it in and out of the tanks did nothing, running through the engines did nothing. And eventually after countless cycles the controls had just stopped responding. They’d been fixed twice. Comms had failed just before the second time and the captain returned from engineering that expedition. Then he left for the third time and hadn’t returned.

     One by one crew had gone to find him and they’d not returned. Finally, the XO had decided on a desperate change. The last deviation he’d allowed from routine. The officer mess was close enough to the bridge, he’d sent two sailors to procure as much of the food as they could and return. They returned to report no other souls along their route. Calls to lower decks met only echoes. They returned and after that he’d sealed the bridge for good. The only time it had been opened had been to send that communications ensign to engineering to check what he’d heard. But they hadn’t responded to his knocks. There was nothing outside the bridge for what was left of this bridge crew, just the six of them now.

     As she thought about the Ensign her thoughts drifted back to her graduation from the Academy. How much seemed before her, a whole career, a whole ocean of wonder. She’d hoped then she’d see the whole ocean floor mapped. The last frontier of this planet finally conquered. She knew it was a memory not a dream because it wasn’t in that same blue glow. The sonar screen stared back at her, the ping came back and showed them in the middle of that same blue bowl, oblong with a wider end behind them as if they faced the stem of a pear. A whole ocean floor was out there somewhere but this was the last she’d see of it.

     As a child she had looked at old maps with wonder, read of the age of exploration, and seen maps with sea monsters in the big, blue empty spaces at the edge. She’d hoped to fill those spaces, to report back on boundless ocean floors with wonderous structures and life. She wasn’t so sure anymore that it was the only time she’d seen that curve though. It had never lasted more than a single ping. If it was real it moved so fast the sonar barely caught it. Now, its movements made her think of a scavenger circling a potential meal, waiting for their final throes. Reporting that would get her cast out of the bridge, and though the routine and the blue bowl were slowly driving her mad they were what she knew. Outside the bridge, out there was too uncharted even for an explorer like her. In here they might yet find some way out.

     Weeks ago, the captain had been on to something. After they’d tried every standard procedure he’d had the engineers and the scientist aboard start working through some non-standard procedures. Everything that should work failed so they started to speculate about what it could that could be holding them there. The sonar said they were still floating amid water in the bowl, and they’d felt no contact with anything solid after settling softly into their current position. Their depth gauges had stopped working around the depth they’d previously thought should be the ocean floor but then they’d continued to plunge, unable to stop their descent, surprised as they dove deeper that their boat continued in one piece.

     After trying everything they could, they’d sent divers out the torpedo tubes to confirm what the sonar said, to see if they could confirm their position. The divers never came back, the pressure sounds from the hull sounded – different - for a moment after they left. Then nothing.

     She held her eyes open through three pings as the curve settled into a clear set of curves, an ‘s’ backwards. It stayed still through three whole pings for the first time, more distinct than ever. Then it was gone. She still didn’t report it, she couldn’t explain even if she tried.

     A week after they’d sent divers, she’d gone with the captain to hear a report from the engineer with a theory. It would explain why the sonar image had changed its hue – the sonar was moving through the water at a different speed than standard salt water. The hue was the only way their instruments could tell them something was odd beyond the fact that none of their controls, none of their attempts to maneuver through the water, were successful. It was also the only explanation anyone had of why they hadn’t been crushed thousands of feet ago. As they started to shift the crew and reroute systems to try the engineers crazy plan it was the first time they’d noticed crew missing.

     She’d always wanted to explore, to fill in those charts. She could have been a scientist, she could build sea floor charts from satellite technology. There was the capacity now and surely she could have improved it to probe even depths this deep. But the Navy offered something being a scientist in a lab couldn’t. The chance to dive deeper than anyone, to explore the edges of those charts herself and get as close to the ocean floor as possible. It meant months closed off in a submarine, away from family, away from a normal life but it also meant she’d get to go down and confirm there were no monsters in those dark blue spaces.

The curve had returned on the sonar as an ‘s’ again. Five pings this time it sat and waited off the starboard side undulating and changing which way the ‘s’ faced each ping. It was taunting her now; she couldn’t stay silent. It wasn’t circling any more, it was just settling in to watch. It wasn’t worried about being seen because it knew they were stuck for good. It stayed there but why would she even report it knowing that it only showed itself because they were at their end.

She could have been that scientist, gone to a university instead of the academy. She might have met someone nice and been married instead of facing the constant harassment. She could be in a lab now reviewing charts. Would it be that different to see scans gathered remotely than it was to sit in this bridge? Just her and three other submariners at the bottom of the ocean waiting to die? She’d been unhappy in the Navy now for so long, but she didn’t know what else she’d do. She’d come so far in her career and a few more years she’d earn her pension and could have the freedom to do anything she wanted. While the Navy offered the opportunity to spend more time near the ocean floor than any other opportunity, there was no freedom to explore. And as an officer on an experimental sub, all the charts she produced were classified. But if she hadn’t made these choices, she’d have never been able to come this deep, to see that blue bowl. She would have never encountered a hole in the ocean floor full of water that didn’t behave like water. Would she have been happier never knowing, even if no one else ever would?

The curve closed in, just off the hull. Five pings, ten pings, twenty. It just stayed; it was with them now. She had to report. “Sir,” she turned from her screen, her eyes felt so heavy looking up – when was the last time she’d held them open through twenty pings. Everything else was near dark, bathed in blue and green light of a few fading instruments. She looked to the door that now stood open, how had she not noticed everyone else was gone?

She remembered the last time she’d been through that door. That was weeks ago and now she stood alone in a dark bridge looking at an open door, she looked back at her screen and the curve was gone. She watched for five more pings before she got up to go to the door. She called out into the gloom; the sound didn’t even seem to move through the air right. She shone a flashlight into the corridor, the light didn’t go as far as it seemed like it should. Even the beam of the flashlight seemed still this deep. She shut the door and turned its valve tight. Locking herself in, as she walked back to her screen, she looked at the food stuffs for a moment. Though it had been long past meal shift she wasn’t hungry for food. She just wanted to see that blue bowl. She’d come all this way; she’d made these choices. It was the only thing she could do here that she wouldn’t have been able to do anywhere else. Watching that screen was the only way to make the most of the time that remained with the choices she’d made.

The curve was gone now, there was only the bowl. She settled in as the boat creaked with pressure. Before the plunge any one of those sounds would lead one to believe the hull was ready to implode, now they were just white noise, so routine they sang you to sleep when it was your turn.

She thought back to the morning before they’d set sail. She could walk out and resign her commission. Go stay with her parents and figure out what to do next. She could go be a sailing instructor in the tropics, explore shallow reefs. How different was that from the deep ocean floor in the end? A scientist, a pilot, a teacher, or anything else. It was too late for any of that.

It was loud now and as the water poured into the vessel all she could do was admire that screen, that blue bowl she’d come so far to see even if she’d never get to understand it. It pinged one last time as the screen flickered and died and the cold water lapped at her ankles, her feet had long been numb. The sonar wave went out and the image of the blue bowl and the curve off the bow from the last ping faded ready to be replaced by the image the next ping gathered. The screen died before that ping returned, the sound registered by no new image formed. But as the water started rushing in, she knew exactly where that curve was. The song of the pressure was gone and she could hear it tearing at the hull. The boat’s carcass was finally dead, just one small creature left moving inside and that too would be dead soon enough.

END