Claim

August 8, 2043. Hour 8. Descending.

She remembered her first descent every time, without fail. As yet another sub smoothly sank into the heavy ocean waters, her thoughts would follow – deeper into her memory, to the first time she manned a vessel on her own. Water rising in the ballast tanks at each side of her, slowly claiming the submersible as its own with every lap, drawing and mixing it into itself. The air forced out, rushing through the valves, as the sub seemingly bid farewell to the atmosphere. The fascinating science of sinking: simply let the ocean in and let it take you, pull you down with its own boundless mass.

She saw it clearly as she closed her eyes: the once-light buoyant tanks partaking of cold waters, becoming one with them, their contents indistinguishable from the rest of the immense weight once the arrogant water-proof shell of them is breached. And, as she floated further and further down, movement traceable only by the world growing darker around her, her cabin remained the only thing carrying the image of the world above, light and air. The thick undisturbed dark rose toward her from the bottom, avoiding the external lights only to surround the transparent dome at all sides, from above. Her long descent into the Twilight zone – an absurd name for a place that never knew birght daylight to begin with, no matter the position of the sun far, far overhead.

And below that - an endless night. Still, persistently suffocating, pulling her down into itself with the invisible merciless fingers of its weight.

She opened her eyes, resurfacing in the gently humming ambiance of the engine room, the heart of a submersible so different from the sphere that had carried her down to the seabed over 20 years ago. This one was bigger. One of the new designs, not yet abandoning the allure of two-passenger pods, but adopting a few features of the clumsy missile-shaped military giants. More mobile and capable of withstanding greater pressure than the latter, designed to accommodate more people than the pioneers of deep-sea exploration. The one under her feet big enough to house a research group of four and a place for them to rest. Carrying capacity for four days worth of rations. Unparalleled life support system. Enough oxygen for 140 hours in case of an emergency, if the sub does not rise within the mandated 72.

She thought of the three other people on board. Her co-pilot, his eyes currently glued to the panel as he was managing the thrusters, orchestrating their otherwise effortless, natural fall to the bottom of an ocean trench – a narrow gaping crack running 20,000 feet deep. The two scientists, each on their own mission. As the sub carried its electrical light to the deepest, least explored parts of the surface of the planet, pushing against the incomprehensible dark to claw its mysteries out of it, they were to watch and document and sample. Observe the underwater currents and temperature, the breath of the planet at its very inception, foretelling the future changes in climate – a fascinating echo of ancient divination, conducted in the dark, in the presence of overpowering nature. And search for life – whatever alien life was possible that far away from the nurturing warmth of the sun.

Bringing light to the darkest places. Making the farthest corners of the world known. Four of them, this time. Not just one. Sharing the air dispensed by a complex of systems, monitoring the atmosphere, generating breathable gas in needed proportions, all powered by the gentle steady hum of the engine, the vibrating heart sending steady streams of electricity – the lifeblood of the sub, warm metallic veins glistening and pulsating with its golden comfort, enveloping the crew in a cocoon of life and light.

She closed her eyes again, her eyelids heavy under the pressure of memories, felt the vessel shrink around her, felt the silent electrical whirr at her fingertips as she curated her lone journey, all those years ago. All measurements dictating her survival laid out clearly on the panel in front of her, powered by the same pulse of the massive battery at the core of the globe-like submersible. The source of the light surrounding her, of the light she would shine on the seabed, still far beneath her feet. The light colored blue by the waters' patient, steady attempt to disperse it, to swallow it, starting with the warmest end of the spectrum. The lone speck of it in the overwhelming thick pressing darkness.

So easily quenched.

There was a stutter in the steady, soothing hum. Beyond her eyelids, the world went dark.

And then it shook.

***

The hull was loud, frantic, bursting with the shaking, crackling voices of the crew, trying to drown out the panic with questions and demands. They crowded in the belly of the half-dead submersible, their faces pale and sickly in the dim emergency lights. Looking in helpless fearful doubt at the walls whose pulse was now only slightly beating, as the metal husk dragged them down to the bottom with it.

She retreated back into the engine room as soon as she could, with orders given, emergency protocols refreshed in everyone's memory. She knew she was supposed to be out there, comforting, reassuring. But the pathetic flutter and bustle of the hull haunted her with the acute knowledge of the overwhelming, muffling, heavy silence stretching far, far above, below. She saw her crewmates' words escape their mouths in bubbles, carrying their hopeless plea to the distant, unreachable surface, as the ocean swallowed the sound and filled their lungs in its flowing, patient demand. She needed to shake the vision.

The engine room was dark and quiet. She touched the comatose walls, on a life support of their own – the emergency battery working overtime, pushing its surges into the body betrayed by its core. The moments it took for the back-up to kick in were enough for the thrusters to go silent, leaving the sub to hit the bulging steep side of the trench, damaging the maneuvering mechanism on the left side, leaving her companion back in the hull powerless. The vessel was left at the mercy of the crevice, which thankfully remained wide enough – for now.

Time was dripping through her fingers. With every minute the weight of the water and metal was pulling them further and further down, leaving behind more and more uneven, treacherous terrain to cover as they try to rise to the surface.

She whispered to herself what she had told the crew: 140 hours of breathable air. Four breathing apparatuses with their names on them. Equipped with top-notch rebreathers, too. And the mother ship waiting far above, keeping a close eye on the schedule, ready for rescue.

But the dark had crept closer as the external lights went out, and the fissure of the ocean floor loomed and bulked from both sides, hard and unrepenting against the peeling metallic skin of the sub, suddenly so thin, so tearable. Her heart beat fast and loud in her ears, the ebb and flow, the tidal dance of past and present turned into a hypnogogic slide show. She felt the edges of her seat dig into her body as she curled in the clear vulnerable hull of her first vessel, in the dark, fingers pulling at her hair. Darkness flowing into her pod from the outside, overwhelming the buzz of the panel, leaving her to float aimlessly to her doom.

The past rushed towards her, gripped her, pulled her into a whirlpool of sensations forever burnt into her psyche, fear pulsing in her brain just as powerfully. She gasped for air, as if stealing her last breaths from the compressed oxygen tanks her life was hinging on. In the midst of an overwhelming fit of hyperventilation, she felt anger – a hot, solid, smoldering magmatic cluster at the core of her being. Anger at the memories that would not leave her alone, prophecies and curses inviting trouble in. Memories that flooded her brain, pumped adrenaline through her veins, screamed to the biding, patient darkness, marking the easy frightened prey.

Somewhere beyond the panic and anger, rose the single, chilling thought, a hand reaching for her heart, ready to grasp it, stop it. Perhaps this had always been her fate. Perhaps the ocean had been waiting to claim her since her first descent, since the first time she had entered its immeasurable weight, was held tight by the tons of water above, a heavy grasp pushing the vault tightly shut and sealed, making escape impossible, even if she could've survived the crushing mass of dark breathless waters above her. Perhaps she should have surrendered to them back then, as the primary battery of the first submersible she took to the bottom gave out.

The battery...

With her back against the cold dying wall, her heart hammering in her chest, she grasped intuitively at a subtle, thin thread of hesitation. Something wasn't fitting, the scrambled puzzle pieces of her fractured panicked memories forced together in shapes they were never meant to create, the edges of them bulging, the picture distorted, choppy.

She drew as steady a breath as she could manage and went under, to the day she could never forget. Gripping her fists, gripping the thread. A diver on a tether.

***

She is crouched in one of the two seats of the sub, falling toward the forever night of the ocean depth through empty waters, nothing outside the hull to indicate the movement by. She is suspended in an endless descent, two hours stretching into days and decades.

Her head is between her knees, eyes shut. She's trying to escape the lights of the panel powered by the massive battery whirring quietly in the depth of the vessel, beyond her feet.

Steady, sure battery. The hot liquid center of the tiny pale electrical sun of the sub, dimly glowing as it floats in the boundless pressing space.

She has turned off the external lights, then the ones in the cabin. She has closed her eyes and hid her face, allowing herself to grow ignorant of the measures and depths. And now, she's floating.

She's floating, as one with the dark as she can be, and pretending the power is out. The battery has hummed it final murmur. The glow of emergency lights is low, weak, indistinguishable from bioluminescence. And then it is gone, too. Perhaps she's been floating for days. Perhaps the emergency battery has all but exhausted itself, shutting down every function but the vents filtering air into her bubble. Perhaps even that will soothe soon. Perhaps the bubble itself will burst, too, and there will be nothing between her and the boundless heft of cold and burning water covering, pressing into the earth crust.

Claimed finally, irrevocably.

She imagines why she has stayed here, forever. The emergency battery jettisoning system has failed, its dead weight still holding her firmly down in the grasp of the ocean. She can't drop the ballast: something is jammed. The buoy is useless: you came here on your own, remember? There are no other vessels on the surface, for miles and miles around. No mother ship to the safe embrace of which to return to. Never has been. A legend, an archetype – the soft and nurturing to hide in from the boundless, ancient dark. A nice, but made-up story.

No mother ship. No surface, either.

No, there is only her. And there is the ocean. The ocean that has recognized her as its own and pulled her in. Its clammy, heavy fingers are licking the insides of the ballast tanks – the deathless lungs of the submersible. Through them, they're reaching. To find their way inside, into the bubble of air, to grasp and press and absorb. To fill, like water fills all in its path, in its unyielding, natural flow. Cold fingers feeling for their way into her lungs, as well.

She imagines. Blending into the vast. Partaking of the liquid breath of the world, the uninterrupted waving stratum enveloping the planet. The contents of her lungs tangibly one with everything within the ocean's grasp. Water – a flowing fluid monolith – making her body its home.

She lets herself float and be taken. Be one with the vast and persistent.

And then she exhales into the maintained, breathable atmosphere of the sub.

She sits up and looks at the panel. She should stop her descent soon.

She thinks of the titanic whales filling their mouths with the cold and salty and alive, fed by the matter they float in, their unbearable mass carried by the supple currents. She thinks of the way they keep water at bay, exhale it, to continue their journey, to be a part of the boundless, bounteous, blue. How they rise to the surface and swallow their portion of light buoyant air before descending back into the deep. Their dance between two worlds, the border growing blurry, perhaps nonexistent.

Water vapors feeding the sky overhead. Skies raining down to replenish the oceans.

She thinks about how she will return. Time after time, certainly. A whale coming up for air only to dive back into the supporting hold of steady waters.

She turns the light on.

***

She knew what to do. She let the memory carry her, claim her, succumbed to its pull. She understood why she'd always needed that: the quiet, lone times by the engine, the persistent tow of the past. And now, she was ready to relive it.

They could not repair the engine. They could not rise on the buoyancy of air in their ballast tanks alone, with the unpowered thrusters not there to assist them. They needed to loose weight.

She considered the fantasy of the past. It was time to jettison the battery.

The four of them huddled in the hull, breathing masks tight against their faces.

They sat in the dark, the metal floor of the submersible cold and dead under their fingers. They were rising. Hopefully.

She thought of the air in the ballast tanks. Their natural urge to the surface. To reunite with the atmosphere they felt a oneness with. To be home.

The ocean was rejecting them once again, pushing them out of itself, propulsing them upward, toward the different, distant stratum.

Hopefully. If her calculations were right.

She did not bother to look at the dead, powerless panel. She squeezed her invisible crewmate's hand one last time, reassuringly, and took hers away.

She felt the cold metal beneath her palm and closed her eyes, even though it made no difference. She thought of the ocean that took her in so readily, time after time. Of its unchanging reclamation, the certainty of her belonging.

She thought of sinking, and the oneness.

She thought of what it would be like to breathe shared air again, the cycle, winds, evaporations, plants and their respiration. The oxygen released by the waving mass of the world ocean.

She thought of whales' dance, and her countless returns.

She thought of the boundless darkness outside, matched by the darkness inside, and the ocean's rightful demand for extinguishing lights in the name of their short-lived unity.

She smiled.

And she prayed.