The White Singularity: A Choose Your Own Adventure

Chapter 8. An Underwater Disaster

"I want to look at that hole," you say determinedly. "Why else are we here but to investigate? After all, we own the only submersible that can do this in the first place. If we never get funded again, I want to say that we accomplished something on our one and only dive."

"I agree with that!" Zell answers gleefully, punching the air. "Onward, partner!"

You take over the manual controls and head slowly for the aperture, gathering more information about the surrounding ocean floor as you cruise along. You see several more examples of weird abyssal life, including a few you've never seen or heard of. 

There's a roiling mass of luminescent tentacles that looks like a jellyfish without its head and even a giant, bug-eyed, bat-shaped ray or fish that flaps silently by. Fortunately, the cameras and passive sensors are all rolling continuously, so you have evidence of everything. You're pretty sure that you've already discovered at least three new species. You would love to get actual specimens, but Zell is too tender-hearted to capture creatures that would most certainly not survive a trip to the surface.

When you're just a few hundred meters away from the hole, your wife suddenly grabs your arm.

"Do you hear that?"

You close your eyes and listen. A low-pitched rumbling seems to be coming from all around you, steadily increasing in volume. The ship starts to shake, first gently, then violently. You look outside. All of the mobile life on the bottom seems to have vanished.

"What's happening?" Zell shouts.

"I think it's an underwater earthquake!" You yell back, trying to retain your composure. An alarm starts to sound belatedly, and warning lights flash. You thrust your wife back into her seat and scramble into your own. You both strap yourselves in and scan the screens frantically.

"The proximity detector," Zell mutters. "We're nearing one of the trench's walls."

"It's because of the movement of the water!" You look out of the portholes. Sure enough, the ocean floor outside seems to be slewing crazily from side to side. "I'm going to take us back to the center before we crash."

You try to maneuver the Singularity away from the wall, inadvertently hitting the floor several times as everything around you continues its wild trembling. You've never felt so slow and ungainly in your life. "Just a bit more—"

The proximity detector wails again, just as something massive hits the ship's roof with a deafening clanggg! You tilt to the right so steeply that you would have fallen to the floor if you hadn't been strapped in. Zell shrieks in fright and surprise. When you look up, there is a dent in the ceiling! Most frighteningly, though, the topside porthole has a hairline crack, barely visible but undeniably there. Quietly, you try activating that porthole's backup shield, but nothing happens. It appears that it was damaged as well. You wonder uneasily what other systems could have been damaged.

"It's a boulder!" Zell yells, trying to stabilize the ship. She points ahead of you. "Look, there!"

You stifle a curse as you peer out. Sure enough, an enormous, jagged shape falls soundlessly outside after bouncing off your hull. Once it hits the ground, it rolls off ponderously into the gloom. The earthquake must have dislodged it from somewhere high up above you.

But no one ever said that there would just be one.

"Take over the controls for a moment. Continue heading for the center. It's still the safest place."

Zell hastily transfers control of steering to her panel. "What are you going to do?"

"We have to have a better warning than the proximity detector. The boulders are falling too fast. We need at least a few seconds to move out of the way."

"You're turning on the active sensors?"

"It's all I can think of right now," you thumb the last key and ask for a dynamic 3-dimensional diagram like before. While waiting for the sensors to collect the data, you close all the other portholes, as you don't need to see out of them now anyway, and the shields should provide additional protection.

When the hologram is projected in front of you, what you see chills your blood. There are dozens of rocks raining down from the walls. There are big and small ones, but you're afraid that the Singularity can't take another hit, especially if it's in the same area where she was struck the last time. You glance up apprehensively at the hairline crack on the porthole; if it blows, it's all over.

It's hard to believe that barely a minute has passed since the earthquake began. It feels like hours.

"Darling," Zell says quietly. "Can't we just turn on the forcefield and ride this out?"

You hesitate and ask for a damage report, which you'd delayed because you knew what it would say. As you feared, the onboard AI tells you that the magnetic field generator, located just aft of where the boulder struck, has been compromised. This means you can create a reverse singularity, but whether it can be channeled to your antigrav system is questionable. If the generator fails, the ship will simply explode.

"What are the chances of an explosion?" you query the computer. The answer comes back: 50 percent. Great.

There's another problem, and you ask for an estimate of your power reserves now that the active sensors are on continuously. As you feared, they will drain the batteries so much that you might not have enough power to get to the surface if they remain on for much longer.

Your wife, who has been frantically reviewing options with NESCA, finally turns to you, struggling to remain calm. "OK, these are our options. We can either just wait here in the center and hope that nothing else hits us, head for a crevice and try to hide in there,  try our chances with the damaged antigravity field in the hopes that it can protect us from another strike, or..." she looks around you and sighs. "If you think the Singularity is a lost cause, we can abandon ship and try to escape in the emergency pod."

"None of those sound very promising," you say, your heart sinking.

"I know, but I asked NESCA, and that's all we can think of." Zell drops her head in her hands, her fingers trembling. It would be asking too much of her to make this decision. It's up to you.