Final Frontier: The Atlantis Chronicles

Chapter One

The sun rose above the north Atlantic ocean, warming the waves and bringing warmth to the surface. A thousand feet below, however, the light from our sun does not shine as brightly. Here the water is much colder, the sea floor much darker.

Yet it is not lifeless: fish in a thousand different colors chase each other through the water and marine mammals like dolphins and whales cruise through the waves looking for fun and food. Crustaceans of every kind scuttle across the thick sediment coating the ocean floor, picking through it to find their next meal.

Above it all, tethered to the bedrock and looking very much like strangely shaped trees, sits the city of New Atlantis: The fourth largest underwater city, and the wealthiest. Large plasteel domes shelter over a million people, and pods and private homes are anchored to the sides of some of the larger habitats. Algae and coral have started to grow across many of them, painting their dull surfaces with bright colors and adding new places for fish to hide and live. Here and there divers exit airlocks, swimming across pods and climbing down rungs to do repairs or harvest algae or chase away a troublesome eel. Higher up, cargo ships routinely dock at the surface hub, bringing trade goods to the city while private submarines cruise around the domes and bubbles of the city, ferrying people and cargo to different locations as well as heading out to various shanty towns and scientific outposts located deeper in the Atlantic ocean.

It is on one of these submarines that a young girl got her first look at this strange sight. Staring out one of the large portholes she was stunned into awed silence at the sheer strangeness of New Atlantis. Of course, she had seen the city in pictures, on brochures her mother had shown her, and on the vids that everyone watched, but seeing it in person - seeing it for real - was entirely different.

"Isn't it wonderful, Samantha?" A voice behind her asked. "Our new home!"

Sam wrinkled her nose in distaste. She was twelve and she had told her mother more times than she could count that she didn't like being called Samantha. All her friends called her Sam, why her mother still refused to was a mystery.

"What do you like about it most, Sammy?" Her father asked, sidling up behind mother to peer through the window with Sam. Resisting the urge to roll her eyes - Sammy was better than Samantha, but still not as good as Sam - she glanced at her father before replying. His hair was starting to thin, showing a shiny bald patch of scalp through the gray strands. He had glasses that were constantly sliding down the bridge of his nose and he always wore a sweater that hung loose on his skinny frame. Sam knew her father felt bad for always being at work, and was trying to make up for it by attempting to show more of an interest in his daughter's hobbies.
"I like the colors, daddy." She said, turning once more to gaze out at the city. "The outside has so many different colors."

Her father chuckled, and immediately began to launch into an explanation on the different types of algae and aquatic plant life that clung to the outside of the habitats, creating different colors.

Sam sighed. She knew he didn't mean to be boring, in fact, things like that weren't boring to him: He loved everything to do with marine plant life. It was part of his job was and that's why he was so good at working. It was the reason they were being moved from their home in North Carolina to live in New Atlantis.

Tuning her father out, Sam stared as a cloud of silvery fish scattered past the submersible and disappeared around another small pod. What she wouldn't give to be a fish.. To be able to swim away and go back home to her grandparents and friends and her school. She missed it all terribly and it had only been a few days. She already knew she was never going to see them again.

"And that's why they're so important! They regulate this entire oceanic biome!" Her father finished excitedly. "Isn't that incredible? They're so tiny, yet they're so important."