The Anatomy of Drowning (ONC 2022 Longlist)

7.Early Spring, 1985

Vera sat, alone in the dark, until the office started too close in around her.

Her words to Reed echoed through her head, a terrible, reverberated symmetry to them that continued to bite at her thoughts. I have to know. I have to know.

I have to.

She pulled the coffee cup closer, tucked it into her chest, and settled herself further into the large chair. It tethered her to the room. Settled her breathing. Her hands that still shook, now from nerves and less from the shock of having slipped between waking in a dream and waking against a wooden desk top.

Vera pushed her fingers into her eyes. It was a mistake to mention anything to Reed. The postscript could have stayed a secret and she could have explained away the need for the computer beyond just the ability to insert the disc. Easy lies to cover harder ones.

But the truth had sounded so small in her mouth. The confession slipped out from between her teeth and then it wasn't her own truth anymore. It belonged to both of them now, but only Vera was left with the burden of opening Schroeder's box.

It could be nothing.

It could be everything.

Vera pulled her hands from her eyes and unfolded herself from the chair. The cold cup of coffee forgotten at the edge of her fingers. She tapped the computer awake and watched it click open. The screen ready and on it a prompt: Open Transcript.

"Transcript?" She read aloud, "from what?"

She hesitated for only a moment before pushing her finger into the left mouse key.

The computer unfolded, blinking open a new window in the process of downloading the file. A bar of black slipped across the screen completing i't sun through in increments of twenty.

When it reached one-hundred the bar froze and the window dissolved into a full screen window filled with black and white text, spaced in single lines. Sentences flowed into simple three word commands all aligned to the left and neatly organized by speaker, command and radio interference or structure.

Vera reads through the first few lines trying to understand the context. The transcript wasn't whole and there were pieces missing, beginnings that ran into middles that began other things. But none of it was redacted, the endless jumble of words were plain for her to see and read, if she could understand it.

During the Etruria Expedition there wasn't cause for her to relay more than the ordinary to the crew to her team. Those reports had been mostly verbal and never anywhere near a radio. The ship was too large. There were too many people and it would have gotten crossed somewhere and the work she'd been doing wasn't all that important in the grand scheme of a ship in the ocean surrounded by icecaps.

A few more lines of back and forth communication went by before Vera stopped and leaned her body into the desk. In the light distorted by the lamp and the overflow of light from the room beyond the office, Vera's face paled. On the monitor, in four neat lines of communication that looked to have taken place forty minutes after twenty-three hundred hours. Midnight.

> We have debris. It looks to be covered in sand, moving around the obstruction.

> Copy. Standing by.

> Um, someone might want to get John. He'll want to see this... Intelligible... Found something.

> OSN 390, Please repeat. We lost your communication.

"Command. We have a shipwreck," Vera breathes, her voice a little frayed at the edges. There's a break in the transcript after that. Silence over the radio.