WheneverI find myself at sea I will always look off the edge outward. There is a certain feeling of awe that I feel while looking toward the horizon, unable to see the land that huddles in secret just below it due to distance. The feeling of how far the rest of the rest is making me shudder with delight.
I stood up from the bow having just done my cursory stare and think and went toward the center where all the work was to be done.
Professor Yit and a worker, a local to the Cape named Johnson, stood by the large mechanical beast that sat in the dead center of the entire boat.
“So what exactly does this do Doctor?” Johnson asked Professor Yit while moving a box of small replacement parts on a dolly.
“It translates visible light waves into ultrasonic light, this ultrasonic light is then sent out in mass into the water an-” Johnson quickly cut the professor off.
“No I get that but what is it for?” Johnson asked.
“Oh, sorry, it will give us an incredibly clear picture of the sea floor up to four thousand meters, in tests it has been shown to give a clear enough picture to be able to accurately species marine plants up to and slightly exceeding that depth on the bottom and is capable of give a clear picture through obstacles such as animal schools, sand clouds, and large creatures as long as they are above fifty meters above the floor,” the professor explained.
“Ah, cool,” Johnson continued to do his task and placed the box of parts in the captain’s lodge, and then came back.
Professor Yit looked back at me, “Well Donny, time to show off your little project,” he said, handing me a small switch that I quickly inserted into its proper place, right where I designed it.
I took my place on a little ledge and began a short speech for the moment, a decent-sized wave proceeded to knock me on my ass before I could talk.
The professor kept in his laughter but Johnson and Williams, another worker but one that we brought from California to do this research with, started to absolutely die.
“Har har, let’s just get this picture show on the road,” I said, holding my should after I slammed it into the ground.
I sat down at a small panel that had a control tablet so I could start the process.
“So what this is going to do is take one-hundred pictures over the course of one second, they will then transfer this to the laptop over there to review, we will do this several times throughout the day and then catalog our findings on the way back,” I said, giving an individual quick glance to the other three people behind me.
I pressed the start button and in about the time it takes to have a breath a notification bar came up saying “Shoot complete,” I went back to my laptop and saw that the transfer had been done and all the pictures were visible.
Johnson came up to me a few minutes afterward while we were waiting to take the next few pictures.
“So you made that behemoth huh?” he said while idly snacking on a peanut butter and banana sandwich.
“Yeah, I had to consult with a few people on camera equipment and most of the science outside of the physics of how the ultrasonic waves would interact with the water,” I said, messing around on my computer to pass the time.
“What’s so important about it? I don’t doubt that it is, I’m just having some trouble seeing the bigger picture,” he said before taking another, overly-longwinded bite of his sandwich.
I opened the program and pulled up one of the pictures before I began explaining.
“Well it can get kind of hard to explore the ocean floor in some places, especially at depths we’re dealing with here, we have to focus on using drones, which while they are good for pinpoint information, they are not fantastic at general information, this camera allows us to learn more things about the sea floor that techniques we have used before just can’t,” I said, then fully pulling up the picture.
“Like this for example,” I pointed at one of many long thin lines that ran roundly on what I thought was a piece of rock at the bottom.
“We would have no idea that is what all this would look like, those little lines are small but being able to get such detailed work so fast is instrumental in further studies,” I said excitedly.
“Well I’ll just leave you to it them Donny,” Johnson said, walking out of the room.
Just for fun, I began going through all of the pictures until I noticed something. The boat was at a standstill when the pictures were taken, but it seemed like over the course of two or three pictures they had shifted, and once I got to the last picture the lines were feet away from where they were before.
I went back out to the camera to try something different. I started fiddling with the panel a bit and the professor came up to me.
“Whatcha doin’ down there Donny?” he asked, holding a bottle of rootbeer in one hand and a research paper in the other.
“Adjusting the settings real quick, gonna try something different,” I said messing with the settings.
“What’s the thought?” he said, getting down to my level.
“Well my plan is to lower the rate to thirty pictures a second but run the camera for ten seconds,” I said continuing to fiddle.
“Ah, making a film, what exactly are you going to do with ten seconds of the sea floor?” He asked puzzled.
“Check something,” I said, Professor Yit backed away slowly from me to let me work.
I set up the camera, let it take the pictures, and went back inside to the computer. I put all the pictures into an animation software and played the entire thing.
I sat in horror, over the court of ten seconds I watched the stone move, faster and faster, until it revealed something below. You cannot tell the color in the pictures but the shape was detailed. It was smooth, almost glass-like except for lines that branched into others and went across the whole surface, and a black void in the center of it all where none of the light came. It was likely hundreds of meters large.
I, glued to my chair, had a realization, what I thought was rock, was skin, and below, an eye large than the boat we were on.
I charged back outside within a second and with lighting speed set everything back up and took another set of pictures. I ran back and watched, what looked vaguely like the pupil was different. I went back out and asked Johnson, who was also our captain, how much we had drifted in the minutes before my second set of pictures and my third.
“No more than a few feet in any direction in that amount of time, especially with how placid everything is now, why do you ask?” he said.
“Nothing, just checking,” I replied back, exasperated.
He seemed like he wanted to ask me what was wrong but I went back to my workspace before he could.
What had scared me so much, what had terrified me even more than the eye in the first place, the pupil had moved, it had centered onto the camera.
Just to check one more thing I took another ten seconds of video, just to check, just to make sure of one more thing.
I watched back, and for only a moment but the blood in my body became cold, then hotly boiling in my head. The eye was getting bigger, the picture clearer, whatever this creature was, it was coming up.
I knew we only had a few minutes before it would make it to the surface so I bolted out of the door and yelled at Johnson.
“Start the fucking boat and get us back to land right fucking now!”
“Uh, okay, give me a minute so we can stabilize everyth-”
“Not a minute! NOW!”
The boat started in just a second and we moved, easily far faster than this boat was made for as I could hear mechanics in the bottom being thrown about and unsecured items being tossed out the back.
I went to the back of the boat, to watch, to see. The professor and Williams came to me.
“Donny, what the fuck is going on?” Williams asked, pissed sounding, as he likely had been tossed by the sudden start.
I simply pointed my finger out, and almost on cue a giant wave burst up in a mess of bubbles in movement almost seismic in proportion, and on just the tail end, a massive cruiseliner-sized tail slapped the top of the water, leaving the two as terrified as me.
“Williams…” I said out of breath.
“Yes Donny?” he replied in the same tone.
“Throw the camera overboard,” I replied, falling onto the ground.
“Yes Donny,” he said stunned in place.
We were able to gut and throw the camera overboard before we got back to shore. I don’t know what else may be down there, and if that camera somehow exposes us to it, to the creatures that should not be known of, beasts of another world with which humans could never congregate, it is better off at the bottom of the sea with them.
As we got off the boat onto the dock, I stared off into the horizon once more. Into the blue, cold, empty sea, and I shuddered with terror.