Black Box: Book Three

23 ~ The Deepest Part of the Ocean

The Ocean has its silent caves,

Deep Deep, quiet, and alone;

Though there be fury on the waves,

Beneath them there is none.

Over the course of the last few weeks of training I'd memorized nearly every facet of the Tuscany - every dial and every readout and every knob and screen and nuance of structure - and the quality of the personal submarine's craftsmanship never ceased to astound me. It was a remarkable feat of engineering, this little beast; designed with such care that even the equipment on the hull could withstand more water pressure than the sea could muster up at any achievable depth. It was my Pegasus. My Trojan Horse; my very own Apollo 11 - and inside this matrix of layered syntactic foam I would follow the ballasts to the gratuitous and unexplored depths of Higgin's Maw.

I began the separation sequence, and the deep-diver fell away from the escort and dipped beneath the surface of the Pacific with silence and grace and a few knots of speed, and then I was consumed in a whole new world - albeit one I'd frequented - that of the sea. Schools of fish swam on by me, and when their cloud passed through a sunbeam it glinted silver, and beneath them swam rays that rolled their wings to the beat of the current, and out in the rocks crawled the crustaceans and sat the plant life that spruced up all the white-washed stones there like holiday ornaments. But I had an appointment to keep, and the oxygen tank was a demanding clock, so I dove right on past the old reef and out into the open waters where the seabed couldn't be seen for many, many miles yet.

"The Maw," Reuben had said. "Fifty thousand feet below the surface, Booker. Fifty thousand. Do you know what that means?"

"Means its a whole hell of a lot deeper down than the Challenger Abyss."

He'd nodded at that. "Are you ready to make history?"

Was I? I thought I was. I'd prepared for this lonely dive and nothing else, for some years now. It was the culmination of a lifetime of work and study in the field, and so tight was its grip on my mind that I often dreamt of it in my sleep; of what I'd find at the bottom, and what it would mean. And what monstrous things might take offense to my presence there.

No. No. I shoved that thought aside. Tuscany was all the protection I needed in that regard; it offered technology on the bleeding edge in lieu of a heavy hull, and that was enough to withstand enough water pressure to crush bones beneath skin and inches of steel. What animal had jaws more powerful than the ocean itself at fathom?

So I hit the thrusters, and down I went, like a bullet to the pitch. I eyed the depth meter as much as I did the sea. One hundred feet. Two hundred. Sharks and turtles and uncountable fish swept past me. Three hundred feet. Five hundred feet. Seven hundred. A thousand. Twelve-fifty - the inversed height of the Empire State building. Fifteen hundred. Sixteen.

The water began to blur and grain up and darken as the sunlight struggled to push on through. Two thousand. Twenty five. Three thousand. Thirty two - where the light no longer shines.

And soon all the light I had to spill glow to the path ahead and down, were the lights of the Tuscany.

I continued the descent for hours. The pressure meter ticked up in spasmic bursts, but up it went, up, up, up, soon ticking past the point where the weight of the sea would've crushed the steel of another vessel. One mile down. One point three. One point six - where even Sperm Whales hit their lowest dive. I could now claim with confidence that no mammal on earth was as deep down at that very moment as myself. And still I dove. Two miles. Two point one. Two point two.