The Abyss

Harry Roberts was sinking into an abyss – no, it was more on the order of a void. The flickering headlamp on the submersible had sputtered and died long ago – replaced by a blackness so complete, that eyes open or closed, Harry couldn’t see a damn thing. It was close in the sub; close as a coffin, and Harry was lying prostrate, hands on his chin. He stared out a window that could only yield more and more darkness.

He thought about how he’d got into a situation like this – a total failure of every computer and backup system, an ordered and rapid series of total and disastrous failures. Murphy himself wouldn’t know what to say about this one. The radio didn’t even provide Harry some white noise to save his beleaguered ears from the torture of listening to his own breath. The breathing – he’d been listening to it for how knows long – just thinking about it triggered a nervous hitch. Breathe in, breathe out… take it nice and easy and don’t lose it. But the air was already getting stale and laden with his exhalations.

Is that what’d do him in? Suffocating after dropping like a three million dollar stone through the great black ocean, passing the places the sun’s rays had never touched, light-years away from rescue, adrift in some nether void, its denizens lurking in reaches he couldn’t see? What bothered him most about the whole thing wasn’t the claustrophobia, wasn’t the back near to breaking, wasn’t the total blackness, wasn’t even the breathing or the assurance of his own screaming death in a metal tomb half-buried in the silt of an ocean he wanted out of – it was the fact that he couldn’t feel his own descent. No vision to judge it, and no sensation of motion: he might actually be suspended in some black hell. Who knew how long he’d drop – after all, he was exploring a trench that put Marina to shame.

He could only imagine the fall to be continuing, a slow-motion spiral through dark. Until somebody flicked a switch, and the lights came on – the sub remained pitch dark, but outside in the void, twinkling lights came on. They came into view soft and pulsating, in biological blues and greens and fantastic purples. It was a slow-motion fireworks display, star bursting through the thick medium. With a brain starved for color, this was overload. Harry wondered if what his eyes told him to be true could be trusted at all- maybe this was the swan song of his asphyxiated brain, convulsing with colors and lights. Just as he considered their reality, the lights scattered, racing away into the dark waters, the afterimage of their departure blissfully burned onto Harry’s eyes. When do I hit bottom? He wondered. Harry tried counting aloud to himself, but with no reference point to hold it up against, even time, that immutable and ever-marching monolith, turned to quicksilver, shifting and changing in his hands. Harry stopped counting.

Back to blackness. He started singing a song, but a few verses in he realized it wasn’t a song he knew, or even recognized. It was just a song floating in space, constructing itself with materials unbidden but for the silent call of completion. And then a long time passed, a time longer than civilization, long as the damned abyss itself. Sometime within that eternity, something clicked. Something about the black mutated, changing in subtle tones that Harry were not sure existed. This did not make sense. That space vacuum black, yielding to a deep blue – had to be hallucinations.

That is what he thought, until Harry saw a fish come top to bottom in his window, until Harry realized he could see out that window, until Harry realized he was going up. He started laughing, loud and hysterical. And then he was crying, taking in the shapes of dozens of fish, schools of fish, oceans of fish. The water kept on rising in hue, eventually turning to a blue Harry remembered from a swimming pool long ago. And then, wonder of all wonders, Harry felt the sub break the surface. He waited a few long minutes, rocking in the waves, considering the fact that in spite of a pair of dead engines and no way of rising, Harry found himself on the surface of an ocean. Perhaps he owned Murphy a devotion. But the ocean suddenly felt wrong. Tentatively, he popped open the hatch and poked his head out into the atmosphere. Harry Roberts found himself under an alien sun in a foreign sea.

-2005