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Previous parts: 1, 2, 3
Angie's eyebrow elevated and she mouthed 'at first?' to Eliot, who nodded. "Nathan was next, had an episode in the airlock. Got in a suit and tried to surface with it. I went out in the Rat Tail and held him down until he came back to us. Only he remembered the whole thing with the small difference that in his version, Leo was with him and he saw the Arygro implode. Dream Leo told Nate to make an emergency ascent in the suit, and that's when I woke him up."
Nate glanced at Leo, who was staring intently at the remains of breakfast. "It's like we're sleep walking. At first the dreams were short, abstract, we never remembered 'em and often stayed in our beds. But after Nate and Leo's episodes they just got more and more real, we remembered everything, each time it was someone else in the dream doing things it turned out they never did once we woke up."
Angie scanned their faces one by one. All seemed sullen, Leo possibly ashamed. Eliot pushed his tray aside and set one elbow on the table. "I know how it sounds. But we've all seen it happen, unless there's some severe folie a deux going on, I don't-" Angie cut him off. "I believe you." Nate muttered "It's your job to believe us."
Eliot scowled, but Angie was unphased. "I recognize some of what you're describing. There's ample precedent, although I will admit that it's unusual to see it manifest identically in more than one person in the same place. That alone suggests some common factor, most likely something physiological related to your time spent down here."
Nathan piped up again. "Show her Wormwood." Eliot whipped around and glared at him. "What’s wormwood?" Angie looked around, but nobody seemed forthcoming. Finally, Eliot spoke up, but his answer only created new questions. “He means the body”. She waited for further clarification but none was forthcoming. "What body? What are you talking about? Did someone die?"
It took some doing to talk her back into the sub. The uncoupling process sent a powerful lurching sensation through her body, and it took several seconds for the hull to stop vibrating. The ocean seemed violently frustrated that they had cheated it out of an opportunity to penetrate the Rat Tail and Arygro.
Angie's eyes strained to make out the docking collar receding into the darkness as the sub pulled away. It was alarming to think that a minute earlier, she'd been standing there. She'd passed safely through that hatch, in breathable air and comfortable pressure, where now there was only frigid black death. "We can only stay for a few minutes. The effect becomes more powerful with proximity, and with the number of people."
Leonard and Nate had stayed behind in the Argyro, she had last seen them watching other intently over the kitchen table. Twenty feet below, relays lined the lit-up path she vividly recalled having explored with Eliot, although if what they had told her could be believed, no such thing ever happened.
"The sonar system is mil spec, resolution is phenomenal but it requires multiple passes. You get a fuzzy image at first that gets clearer with each sweep. Feel your way around the UI, it'll be a few more minutes before we're at the trench." It was straightforward enough, and by the time they arrived she’d taken several test soundings of rock formations just out of range of the lights.
The screen was autostereoscopic and she could make out bumps and ridges with sufficient clarity that in some cases she could identify what sort of animal had coincidentally drifted into the picture. "Have a look. We'll begin our descent after I call Nate and Leonard to let them know we made it."
There was nothing to see. A row of lights followed the contour of the trench for a mile or so on either side, but the trench itself was such pure blackness that she could just as easily have mistaken it for an unlit stretch of seafloor. When they began to sink into it, a feeling of panic came over her that she struggled to conceal. It was not so much like physically entering anyplace real, but instead plummeting slow-motion into oblivion.
The lit up path, final familiar point of reference, rose out of view as the Rat Tail sunk past the edge of the trench. Arc lamps illuminated the wall, which did nothing to restore an appropriate sense of moving through a solid, physical space but instead created the illusion that they were hanging solitary in an endless black expanse with a round patch of rock in front of them.
It seemed called into existence by the spotlight rather than revealed by it. The panic returned at once when the tiny sub rotated to face down the trench and the spotlight left the wall entirely. She was now without any outside point of reference whatsoever, and unable to inhale until forcibly averting her gaze from the viewing dome. "Is something wrong?"
She wished he'd turn to face her when he said that. It wasn't enough to stare at the wall, only partial relief from whatever was crushing her heart and lungs. Her whole ribcage felt compressed, a false sensation made devastatingly real by the anxiety of being alone in a seven foot metal sphere that was now almost a full five miles from sunshine and fresh air. Of course she wasn't alone, was she? And on a rational level she knew that she was safe in Eliot's hands, that the sub would-...
Eliot was gone. Angie blinked. Then looked back at the wall for a moment, then back at the pilot's seat. Still gone. "No no no no NO". She stood up, as much as the confines of the hull would allow and tried to pry the seat loose, turning over the three small supply bags as if he could somehow be hiding under them. "Eliot? ELIOT? ELIOT??".
Forgetting her fear of the black expanse she leaned all the way into the space afforded by the curvature of the dome and peered back at the body of the sub, or as much as she could see of it from that vantage point. But what for, she thought. He could no more have climbed outside than he could be hiding under those bags.
There was simply nowhere he could have gone to. The hatch was shut tight, with all of a foot and a half of space beneath the 'floor' and the bottom of the hull, which was packed with pressure sensitive electronics that couldn't be mounted outside. Eliot was simply gone. Angie choked on her own frantic cries, pawing at every inch of the hull's interior.
But of course, no secret door, no hiding place for him to pop out of. He’d vanished. In a moment of clarity she wondered if she was having a dream. It was an appealing prospect, but after a fit of slapping and pinching herself, she gave up on it.
Years of volunteering for various sleep studies had familiarized her with the signs that one is dreaming, and a dream this was not. She ran her hand again along the cold metal wall. Real, or beyond her ability to tell the difference. That's when she heard the first faint pop.
It was hard to place. Vaguely familiar, but not enough so that she was able to figure it out until the second and third, louder than the first, alerted her to the source. The sub continued slowly rotating on the way down, like a plane spiraling out of control.
As it came to face the trench wall again, it provided the contrast necessary to see a tiny Y-shaped crack in the dome. Small enough that she could cover it entirely with her finger, which she did for a moment until resigning herself to the reality that doing so would not make it vanish. That, and the fact that the moment she touched it, another branch in the fissure appeared with a loud crackling sound.
It was supposed to get stronger under pressure. Borosilicate glass, arranged on a molecular level to compress in the deep sea so that an impact that would shatter it on the surface would instead bounce off harmlessly at 33,000 feet. Yet in spite of what she had been told as a matter of unassailable fact, the crack continued to grow before her eyes.
She could not scream or cry, she still felt hoarse from before and could only fixate helplessly on the spiderweb of fissures as it grew from the diameter of a penny to that of a quarter. Each time new fissures appeared at the periphery, it was accompanied by another pop, or crackle, the sound of borosilicate glass splintering under the terrible pressure of the deep sea.
Almost as an afterthought she glanced at the depth reading. 24,000 feet. It had only been a few minutes. The descent had accelerated. "Come to your senses. Do something." It was like she was shouting inwardly at someone else, like watching a hapless idiot in a movie whose decisions she had no control over. All of a sudden her body responded and in a flash she was in the pilot's seat, scanning the vast array of toggle switches for anything related to ballast.
Stay Tuned for Part 5!