[Original Novel] Pressure: First Encounter, Part 6

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Previous parts:} 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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 pried 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 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 simultaneously?"

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, no matter what." 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 sooner or later. 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.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 7!}