There is Light Below

A pair of divers uncover the terrible secret of an abandoned undersea colony

¹
“What’s with these questions?” The guy on the phone told me it would be an offshore sat job. I was excited to finally dive something other than water towers and sewage tanks.

They sell you on the expensive certification course with these gorgeous photos of divers in Kirby Morgan Superlite 17s doing welding on an oil rig support surrounded by a radiant blue expanse.

Shit, sign me up. That’s what 19 year old me thought when I got started. The pictures looked like I’d be paid to do what I go on vacation for. The reality turned out to be somewhat less glamorous.

This would in fact only be my second open ocean dive in three years. If it was for real, anyway. The voice on the other end of the phone turned out to be some kid not much older than I was when I got certified.

“Mental health. The site you’ll be diving is...unconventional, and the conditions will be stressful. The Institute felt it would be wise to screen out anybody who might snap under the pressure. Both literal and figurative. The fellow I worked with before is in a nuthouse now, so don’t take that question lightly. We want you to know what you’re getting into.”

He identified himself only as Zach. No last name. Likewise, his employer was simply “The Institute”. Either some serious skull and dagger shit, or somebody was yanking my chain.

The questions at the bottom of the multiple choice sheet read “Are you a substance dualist? (Do you believe in immaterial phenomena such as ghosts, demons, banshees, etc.)”

I don’t pry into what people believe. When you’ve gotta spend weeks slowly offgassing with three other guys in a deckside deco chamber, bringing up politics, religion or sports is simply poor survival strategy.

Sex is the fourth one on that list if we’re talkin’ Thanksgiving dinner or something, but this line of work is basically all male, so political correctness never enters into it.

Dirty jokes are A-OK. Arguments over anything near and dear to your heart? Probably a bad idea unless you’re on the last day of the deco cycle.

I checked “no” and slid the sheet over to him. He scanned my answers, nodded approvingly and packed it into a manilla envelope. “Zach” whipped out a flip phone. Hadn’t seen one of those in years.

“He’s ideal. No red flags that I can see. What? Oh, certainly. Professor Travigan’s death was hard on all of us, though. Great friend to me as well, thank you for the kind words. Is the boat ready? Excellent. Where are you now? Swing around and pick us up, then.”

A minute or so later, an archaic but well maintained car turned the corner and came to a stop at the curb. I’m a car guy as well as a diving gear guy so it didn’t take me long to narrow it down.

“1941 Pontiac Torpedo, isn't it?” The kid looked baffled. “I don’t know. I guess? Maybe? On the outside at least.” He climbed into the rear seat, as did I.

The windshield and both front side windows were tinted. A barrier between the backseat and the front obscured the driver but an intercom system allowed him to speak to us.

“Welcome, Mr. Cressman. We’re quite pleased to have found someone with your particular set of qualifications. Do not concern yourself with provisions. All necessary gear is waiting for you on the boat.”

I balked. “We’re leaving now? As in, right now?” Zach laughed. “No time like the present! Depending on which scientific paradigm you buy into, anyway.”

Weird guy. I began to have second thoughts until he withdrew a stack of twenties from under the seat. “The advance we agreed on. One quarter of what you’ll receive if everything goes as planned.”

That last part gave me the jeebs. If something “doesn’t go as planned” a thousand feet underwater, it’ll be a closed casket funeral. Very little humans do to earn a wage is as severely unnatural as trudging across the continental shelf.

Hot water supplied by hose from the diving bell pulsing through capillaries in their suit, peering out through an acrylic faceplate while breathing Heliox. Or Hydrox for the really deep dives.

More than once I’ve been seized by an intense feeling of how strange it was that a savannah dwelling ape should, by evolution and economic circumstance, come to be in such an environment.

Not unlike space, except that space is beautiful. Down there, impenetrable black fog envelops you. A bleak, starless expanse hinting at immense swimming masses, circling just beyond the reach of your lights.

I remarked that it was awfully quiet for a diesel. “Oh, it doesn’t run on petrol”. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen an exhaust and when we pulled away from the curb there was a subtle electric whine instead of the familiar flatulent grunt of a conventional gas engine. “Oh rad, this thing runs on batteries?” He furrowed his brow, searching for words. “No, not batteries. The motor is certainly electric though.”

“Oh, so it’s a fuel cell then.” He shook his head and gestured over his shoulder. I looked behind me and in the space where I expected another set of seats there was instead row after row of jars containing some kind of glowing blue gas.

Clear tubing strung from jar to jar carried the gas to something resembling a glass pyramid with alternating layers of metal foil and cotton embedded inside of it.

One metal terminal protruded from the top layer, another from the bottom with an alligator clamp attached to each, one red and the other black. Cables leading from those terminals vanished through a hole in the floor. Going to the motor presumably.

“I’ve never seen anything like that.” Zach, busy texting, muttered “I’m sure that’s true.” The drive to the coast took roughly four hours. We stopped a few times for snacks and bathroom breaks.

I plied him for more info about the contraption in the back of the car but he just sat there texting. I felt mildly tempted to have a look under the hood while he was in the shitter, but thought better of it.

The ship was a real beaut. Forty foot catamaran, no sail oddly enough. The reason for that became apparent when we boarded. The rear of the ship was for the most part taken up with glass jars, filled with blue gas.

The cables, in this case, ran to a pair of electric boat motors. The main difference here was the presence of a ten foot metal antennae of some sort, resembling a tuning fork, folded neatly into an alcove in the floor.

I looked at Zach and raised an eyebrow. “Resonant vibration receiver”, he said matter of factly. “Tunes into the Earth’s vibrational frequency, uses harmonic resonance principles to extract useful energy from it. Not enough to run the motors directly but it’ll power the orgone accumulator. No shortage of that stuff when you’re at sea.”

The stack of bills in my jacket pocket kept me from backing away and running for it. Why the song and dance earlier about screening out wackadoos? Then again, I guess the real headcases don’t know they’re crazy. No idea what was actually powering those motors, but nor was I being paid to care.

“Zachary! You made it!” a grey haired portly man in an odd uniform emerged from the ship’s cabin. Zach embraced him, then did some strange handshake. “Is this the guy?” Zach slapped me on the back.

“Sure is. Highest negation potential we were able to find within his field. For the profiles we have access to anyway. I don’t anticipate running into any projections down there to be honest, but better safe than sorry. Let’s get underway, shall we?”

The motor sound was like a waterfall. Not really the sound of the motor per se, but the ocean’s howls of protest as it was chopped up by the whirling props.

The weather was nice and I savored the salty breeze as I watched the shoreline recede. I wondered how they’d react if I poked around a bit and found the battery bank I was certain they’d hidden somewhere on this tub. Fruitcakes.

“How far out are we?” The skipper throttled down the motors and fiddled with the nav console. “Six miles now. I suppose that’s far enough. Spin up the Philadelphia drive.” The what now? Zach entered the cabin and I followed. Conventional for a boat this size with a fridge, microwave, marine toilet/shower combo and fold-down table for meals.

...And a metal sphere about a foot in diameter with a tangled mess of flexible black hoses trailing from various points on its surface up through a chute in the ceiling. The parade of weird shit never ended with these guys.

Zack withdrew a key on a necklace from beneath his shirt. The skipper did the same. Both inserted their keys in a console next to the nav display and turned them in unison.

“You got the coordinates right?” Zach peered nervously at the skipper. “I don’t want a repeat of Tonga.” He scratched his head, looked sheepish and scanned the nav display one last time.

“I still say that was a software glitch. I triple checked though, we’re all set for displacement.” Oh. Displacement. Of course. Either the charade would break down shortly or they had some parlor trick prepared to spook me.

The metal sphere on the ceiling shuddered as some heavy mass inside suddenly began to spin. Aside from feeling the torque when it began, there was also a low pitched, barely audible hum.

“Four thousand RPMs. Ten thousand. Twenty six thousand RPMs. Amperage looks good. Displacement in ten on my mark. Mark.” Zach flashed a maniacal grin. The first of many. “Hold onto your nuts.”

I should’ve. When the ten seconds were up, everything kinda dropped out from under me. I puked up my breakfast and watched it billow away from me in a slowly spreading cloud of weightless spherical blobs.

The ship was still there but everything around it was an incomprehensible fractalized mess of kaleidoscopic facets. Like a funhouse mirror times a billion.

Suddenly we were back at sea. The puke, hanging in the air a moment ago, now fell and splattered the deck. When Zack saw it, he groaned. “That better not stain. I’ll get you a mop.” I stood dumbfounded, clutching my still quivering stomach, wide eyed and terrified.

“What the fuck was that!” Zack turned and took a second to realize what I meant. “The jump? Don’t worry about it. Saved us weeks of travel time! You know what they say about gift horses.”

That wasn’t going to cut it. “No, you tell me what the fuck that was.” I didn’t mean for it to come out so menacing but honestly I’ve never felt so shaken. He took it in stride. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, blah blah, you’ll know what I’m cleared to tell you and nothing more.

You might say that we’re collectors of lost technologies, forbidden arts, valuable secrets buried by the passage of time and unfavorable politics of the day. You’re still good to dive, I hope?”

I laid down in the cabin for the next hour, fighting to keep my insides on the inside. Holograms maybe? Or they’d slipped me drugs. But when? The more I asked the kid, the more he insisted I didn’t need to know that in order to dive. A reminder of the pay waiting for me after we returned to shore did a great deal to restore color to my face.

“How much Orgone is left?” I was up and about, prepping my dive gear while the two traded nonsense phrases. Glancing at the glass jars, the glow did seem to be dimmer now. “Damn, 34%. Did we really go that far? Oh well. Looks like we’ll get some use out of the accumulator after all.”

Zach sighed. “This is why I said we should have taken the vimana.” The skipper gestured dismissively, eyes wide. “Not with me piloting it. If you’re willing to set foot in something powered by Vril you’re braver than I am.”

The big aluminum tuning fork dealie folded up out of the floor, then extended telescopically another ten or so feet overhead. I felt a slight pressure on my inner ear as it activated. Curiouser and curiouser. If it really was all for show, they’d put quite a lot of money and work into making it convincing.

“This is the spot. Gear up, you two. This thing will take at least an hour to refill the jars, but you’ll have maybe half that time at depth. It’s deep enough that your bottom time will be fairly short according to my dive table."

The old fart knew more about diving than I would have guessed. Below 21 feet or so the pressure starts dissolving nitrogen from your air supply into your blood.

Takes time to force enough of it in there to be dangerous on the way up though. That’s what dive calculators are for. Tells you how long you have at a given depth before the nitrogen in your blood reaches unsafe levels. You can stay longer than that, if you have a deco chamber. But I didn’t see one on the boat.

“Any provision for decompressing?” The old man’s eyes lit up and he hurried into the cabin, returning with a duffle bag. “Inflatable model. Used only once before, works like a charm. The pump's in a separate bag, I’ll set it up while you’re down there.” I don’t gamble with my life and I said so. “No, you’ll set it up now. I’m not diving until I’m sure you have the means to return me to pressure if I need it.”

It was the work of twenty minutes to get the compressor, hose and inflatable sac hooked up and confirm it was in good working order. I worried I might’ve alienated them somewhat by the demand, but the saying in my line of work is that there are two kinds of divers: The bold ones, and the old ones. There are no old, bold ones. If you don’t play it safe, you don’t last long.

“The sticker says last inspection was two years ago. You’re supposed to get it checked every year. Ever heard of the Byford Dolphin incident? Pressure differentials do not fuck around.”

He seemed to take it personally and fell all over himself to assure me the seals were immaculate. Zach was less apologetic. “If you want to go back, we can take you soon enough. That’ll mean another displacement event, though.”

Way to call my bluff. ‘Displacement’ event, huh? Fuck that. I’ll take my chances in the water. I suited up and walked the kid through his dive checks. Made me nervous that he was so green. When asked, he produced a PADI card for open water diving. Good enough for me but only barely. They never told me I’d be babysitting.

“You gonna clue me in to what we’re looking for down there?” He tested his regulator. It puffed satisfactorily. “Oh, don’t worry. You’ll know it when you see it. We’d go by sub except it’s being serviced at the moment.”

Oh, they have a sub. Naturally. But then, if they have a fucking mystery space-boat of light and wonder, I supposed a sub wasn’t such a stretch. Who are these guys exactly?

Splashdown was invigorating. The water was some of the warmest I’d ever dove in. The vis was astonishing too, easily 200 feet. This is the kind of water I pay good money to dive in when I’m not working and kicked myself for leaving my camera at home. Then again, the vague sense of what these guys were involved in led me to suspect they would’ve confiscated it in the car.

Zach immediately headed down and as I turned to follow, I at once understood what he meant earlier by “unconventional dive site”. The details were hazy but I could make out a shallow ravine below, lined with corals.

And nested within that ravine, a sprawling complex of glass chambers connected by enclosed passages. The shock nearly made me spit out my reg.

We had to stop a few times on the descent so the kid could equalize. I took the opportunity to soak in the beauty of it. Architecturally, the buildings somewhat resembled ornate Victorian greenhouses.

Whoever designed the place clearly valued aesthetics and wanted a nice view of the surrounding ocean. One of the structures within view even had trees growing inside.

A seafloor arboretum? Surely now I’ve seen it all. Again I reached for my absent camera. Oh well. Nobody would believe the photos weren’t doctored anyway, I thought. Sour grapes.

We came up under the floor of the nearest structure. They were all elevated somewhat off the seafloor on pilings. I could see the corner of what must be the ballast tray those pilings attached to protruding from the sand.

So these things were weighed down by sand. They must’ve floated them out here, sucked up sand from the bottom by dredge pump to weigh them down, then connected them to each other with the passages.

A project like this would’ve employed no small number of engineers. How could it have been kept a secret? I could see why it didn’t show up on sonar, situated down in this little ravine as it was.

Strange feeling, looking at the placid surface of the water from below, when you’re a good hundred or so feet below the actual surface. Like a rippling mirror. We poked our heads up through it and took off our masks.

I smelled the air and, once convinced it was fresh, signaled for Zach to remove his regulator. He had a coughing fit. “Salt water down the wrong pipe, huh? God damn would you look at this place.”

We were relatively deep as conventional scuba diving goes but shallow enough that, with a bit of squinting, I could see the surface undulating gently far overhead. It cast down the most entrancing patterns of light on the floor. I set my watch to timer mode, and entered 30 minutes.

“What is this place? Who built it and how come I’ve never heard of it? Or can’t you tell me.” Zach eased off his tanks and set them against the wall. Only when he’d removed as much of his gear as he intended to did he answer.