[ WP ] Unknown depths of the sea : you 're part of an armada of colossal submarines descending into the abyss ...

There is a darkness you reach at a certain depth that is absolute darkness. The only light you can see is the light reflected back from the little flakes of decomposed marine life that float down through the water like snow. The deeper we got, the less decomposed flakes there were. And as we saw fewer and fewer flakes, they began to look like stars, and us, in the middle of space, floating down through the cosmic darkness further into darkness. 
 
 There had been signals coming up from the depths of the sea. Strange, alien signals. Ones we could not interpret or understand. The military feared they were Russian in origin, that the Russians had conquered the depths of the sea before us. After some skeptical communications exchanges with the Russians we came to the conclusion that it was not them down there sending up the signals. They had no part in it. Our government contacted all the world's governments. No one had any guesses about the origins of the signal. All we knew was that it hailed from the deep -- much deeper below surface than any manned submarine had ever gone. 
 
 When the media got wind, both of the signal, and then of the government's uncertainty regarding its origins, they had a field day. Or rather, a field month, publishing the idiosyncratic speculations of anyone who could form an idea in a sentence. The public was hooked. Everyone wanted to solve the mystery, to tease out the truth of the matter with reason or imagination. Everything from hidden alien portals to the strange articulations of some deep sea monster, awakened after its millennia-long slumber was on the table as a possibility. Scholars and government analysts were hooked too. They had their hypotheses, published them in journals, and spoke academically to one another in stuffy rooms. Everyone, it seemed, was working overtime to figure out what the signal was and what it meant. 
 
 In the midst of this feverish atmosphere of rampant speculation and excitement -- and that's what it was, for how often do we, in this day and age, get confronted with genuine mystery? -- the United States government began building a fleet of the most advanced submarines ever conceived. It is in one such submarine that I was in, plummeting through the unfathomable darkness towards the answer, closer and closer to the signal. 
 
 `` That's strange,'' said Captain Row, the captain of our submarine, which was the first in the formation. He clicked on his speaker. `` Is anyone else getting a pressure drop?'' 
 
 I looked out the window at the glimmering flakes suspended in the water like distant stars, galaxies, quasars. 
 
 `` And a rapid temperature drop, too,'' said a voice on the speaker. 
 
 `` Rodger that,'' said another voice. 
 
 It was indeed getting cold very quickly. And I felt lighter and lighter. I felt almost as if I could float. 
 
 `` Let's kill the engines for a minute and recuperate,'' said Captain Row nervously. I could see his breath. There were water droplets on the outside of the submarine that had frozen. Some little shards of ice had broken off the hull and were floating away, through the blackness, towards the glimmering flakes, like stars. 
 
 The captain slowed the engines, but it did n't feel like our momentum changed at all. 
 
 `` Captain,'' I said. 
 
 `` Yes, yes,'' he said, rapt in concentration. 
 
 `` Captain,'' I said more forcefully. 
 
 He turned his head and saw that I and the rest of the crew were floating. 
 
 `` What the --'' 
 
 His eyes went wild. He pressed the speaker button. 
 
 `` All ships need to turn around. Turn around now! Do you copy?'' 
 
 There was only static. 
 
 `` Turn around now! Do you copy?'' 
 
 There was no response. It was getting cold, very cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones. 
 
 `` Let's turn this around,'' he said, fiddling with his controls, ramping the props back up. But he knew, as I did, that the propellors were built to move us through water, but would be useless in the empty vacuum of deep space. 
 
 -- - 
 
 /r/lalalobsters 

