After 35 years of marriage my wife passed away quietly in her sleep one night. I have since remarried and though we are extremely happy together, I suffer from chronic insomnia. Often my new wife has asked me what she can do to help my insomnia, sadly, there is nothing that can be done, for there is still one secret I have not shared.
Many years ago while serving in the military, an exciting opportunity presented itself, I could spend a year in an Antarctic research station. The position was very remote, and would require almost a year of isolation from my family. The position was completely voluntary, but included an absolutely insane hazardous duty pay rate, more than double my normal salary.
As a young man, tripling my annual income was impossible to refuse. Above top secret clearance was required, and the process took almost six months to complete with checks and investigations that were absolutely mind-boggling to my young self.
Finally, the day came and I shipped out, excited at the prospect of visiting a new continent, however somewhat melancholy at the prospect of leaving my family for almost a year.
On my arrival at McMurdo station in Antarctica I was shuffled into a briefing room with a few other new arrivals. There we learned that our destination was hundreds of miles deeper into the Antarctic wilderness. A frozen wasteland where temperatures never rise above freezing and even short-term exposure of unprotected skin could result in devastating frostbite.
Finally after several days of briefings and preparation we all boarded a Snow Cat type vehicle for the ride to our duty station.
Upon arriving we were assigned to our duties and our quarters and got to work. But it soon became apparent to me as well as the other new arrivals, the work made no sense. At first we simply seemed to be monitoring temperatures and seismic activity. We had to log every microscopic trimmer every minor fluctuation in temperature every environmental change, no matter how small or insignificant. This data was dutifully logged daily, and transmitted by satellite to a mysterious head office, of which, even today, I do not know the location.
That’s all we did, they were no scientific experiments, searching for medical breakthroughs, no geophysical experiments, nothing that seemed to be of any consequence. We seemed to be there to do one thing and one thing only, watch for something to change. But as for why we were actually watching for we were not told, at least not at first.
For weeks on end, day and night, 24-hour darkness in the winter, 24-hour daylight in the summer, we sat there and did nothing but log incredibly minute environmental changes.
It was an easy job, if somewhat boring. And though we worked a standard three shift rotation, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, off duty our time was our own, and there were plenty of recreational activities and diversions for us to enjoy, a game room, a heated pool, a well-stocked library, and everyone had a personal TV with satellite, a rarity in those days. And we were free to pursue any other leisure activities off duty, at least within the confines of the nearly sealed facility deep in the Antarctic.
But something was amiss; something was horribly out of place there. My first indication that this was not your typical or Antarctic research station was the armory. Yes an armory, but not just any armory, this armory was stocked with enough firepower and weapons to overthrow a medium-sized country. Automatic rifles, machine guns, handguns, explosives, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, almost any device of destruction you can conceive of was stored in an armory that was more than twice the size of the actual so-called research station.
About 6 months into my tour something happened, at first it seemed so insignificant, nothing more than a small earth or ice quake. It was minor, almost unnoticeable, but the ground trembled slightly for almost thirty minutes. But it was during those thirty minutes that something became stunningly clear. Something that strained the very minds of us newcomers; There was something under the ice, something alive, but sleeping. The faces of the long time denizens of that frozen wasteland betrayed their fear. Whatever was under the ice, it was something old, something huge, something hideous, and something so evil that it is beyond the words of mortal men to describe.
But what was even more terrifying than the sudden knowledge that there was something sleeping under the ice was the revelation of the fear this creature had injected into the hearts of all those who knew of existence. It was during those thirty minutes that I learned that there is more to the armory than I knew, more than any of us newcomers had ever dreamed. In a panic, I was given a key and told to prepare for the Omega Directive.
At the back of the armory was a nondescript vault door. Any comments or even suggestions of its existence had been brashly brushed aside by facility management. Before that moment, as far as anyone was concerned it did not exist, there was no door there, the fact that we could see a door didn’t matter, it did not exist.
It was during the thirty minutes of terror, that due to random chance I was on duty for, that I saw what was behind the door. Behind the door were nuclear weapons, several small atomic warheads and portable lunch systems. But even that is not the most terrifying thing I saw. For at the back of the room is a key station two keys mounted about twenty feet apart, positioned in such a way that it is impossible for one person to turn both keys at the same time, no matter how ingenious or determined they are.
Decades ago, Edward Teller, the father of the atomic bomb, conceived and designed what became known as the Gigaton Device. A thermonuclear weapon thousands if not millions of times more powerful than the bombs dropped during World War II, a device capable of detonation with unimaginable destructive force. It is well recorded that Edward Teller’s Gigaton Device would be so destructive that it could, in a single detonation, wipe all of New England completely off the map and, in an instant, utterly devastate almost a quarter of the United States and kill nearly a third of its population, all with a single detonation.
For decades people have slept comfortably in their beds at night knowing that the leaders of the day realized what an absurd idea it would have been to actually build such a device. Thankfully, according to history, such a device was never built. Despite all their warmongering, all their sometimes insane behavior, even politicians had a limit, and no one was mad enough to build such a nightmarish weapon.
The two simple small keyholes in the vault at the secret station in Antarctica betrayed what lay on the other side of the wall. A Gigaton Device had been built, but this device was even more powerful than Edward Teller’s wildest imagination. There, deep in the Antarctic, the Gigaton Device sits in silence, waiting, waiting for the day everyone hopes never comes, for if that day were to come and those two keys were inserted and turned, the explosion would, in all and likelihood, vaporize the entire continent of Antarctica. It is a nightmare scenario, millions of cubic miles of Antarctic ice turned into steam. An explosion so powerful, so mind numbingly devastating, as to possibly crack the very crust of the Earth itself. And there it sets, even until this day, sitting there silently waiting for the day, that one horrible day that those that know of its existence hopes never comes.
But why? What nightmarish Lovecraftian abominations sleeps below the ice? What nightmare lays in respite under miles of frozen wasteland? I was never privy to the answer. But what I do know is that there is something down there, something nightmarish, something so utterly terrifying to the hearts and mind of man that humanity has created a weapon, just in case. A weapon that they hope will never be used, but a a weapon they hope would kill whatever it is sleeping below the ice, And a weapon so powerful, that if it were to ever be used, would devastate not only Antarctica, but the entire world. The aftermath of such a detonation would flood coastal cities around the world, with sea levels rising many meters literally overnight. A weapon so powerful that it is entirely conceivable that the possibility exists of it shattering the Earth’s crust itself, so that the mantle could spill forth from within, a weapon so powerful that it would cast enough debris into the atmosphere as to generate a decades long nuclear winter, possibly ending civilization as we know it.
So now, decades later, I lay awake at night, wondering about those young men and women that, even now, are at that remote research station in Antarctica, watching, counting the days, and hoping that the beast never awakens.