Thalassophobia

The main camera feed clips seamlessly down through the surface of the lake, giving a well-illuminated view of its depths. As it moves, I can see Isabeau’s arms strike out in front of her as she goes deeper and deeper. Secondary feeds from the side and back of her diving suit rest at the bottom of my field of view, showing up as circles of nothingness delineated by neon orange outlines. Isabeau, our team’s best diver, has already been to the bottom ten times, and the initial shock we had on only her fourth venture has still not subsided. The feeling of awe and terror like the world has opened underneath you to a hollow and alien sky that yearns to swallow you in its vastness, a sublime far beyond what even Wordsworth could imagine. Alien life. Not even microscopic, but a small silicon-based beast like a ten legged spider, there for her on the dark rocky floor, trapped in a tube for observation. That creature, and a few more like it, are in a separate tank back at the outside lab, a minute recreation of the lake environment. The lake is large and, according to scans, two hundred and sixteen meters deep at its lowest point, like someone took a whittling knife and gouged out a hole from the crust. This planet and its twin are earth sized, and various sensors have indicated it has various layers of rock cores, mantle, liquid, and solid again like the Earth, but the atmosphere has a low oxygen concentration, and the lakes are filled with hydrocarbons, this one largely methane. Isabeau’s well-insulated swim suit looks like the fins of some great beast in the soft, eerie luminance of the suit’s own lights. She is too deep for light from the surface to pierce her human eyes, and even if she were, what light there is is weak and far away, even at day only as bright as a moonlit night. 

Presently, the faint outline of the lake bottom becomes visible beneath her, first a darker, blurred smudge against the murky depths, that then becomes more visible as she gets nearer. “Do you reckon this is your fastest time to the bottom yet?” I ask, knowing it is. Her laugh is a rush of bubbles rising from underwater, real water from the ancient brine of Earth’s seas, not the light, impurity-stained stuff here. The camera in her helmet tips down as she pulls a scoop out of her suit’s front pockets, and then further down as she leans closer to the gravel. Sound outside of her helmet is muffled from the fluid pressing down on her, but I still imagine the muffled thud as she kneels on the lake bottom. This time, she does not focus on the surface, but presses the scoop down, digging into the dark flecks at the bottom.

 I take off my virtual-reality headset, leaving me with just my microphone and earpieces, and I switch to viewing the camera feeds separately on the thin monitors set up around me. Using the linked control pad, I uncouple the surround feed from the multiple video recorders in her suit, and adjust the zoom on a single camera to get a better picture of what she’s digging up. I let this image occupy the main monitor, and put the side cams on smaller ones. Technically, I could continue to use the whole headset, but it’s easier to adjust the cameras when I can see what buttons I’m pressing, and having the screen pressed up against my already space-warped eyeballs was starting to make them feel slightly microwaved. 

On the high-definition screen, distinct grains of gravel are easily visible, and compared to the size of Isabeau’s still-moving arm, they seem to be a few millimeters to 1-2 centimeters in length, comparable to the samples already taken in our lab. Testing (by yours truly) indicated the gravel had been at the bottom of the lake long enough to be mostly smooth-surfaced, and was comprised of obsidian, suggesting that the mountain the mothership was stationed on had once been a volcano. The relative smoothness suggested little to no turnover of material, which was perhaps unsurprising given we had been focusing our research on the depths at the center of the lake. On this planet, the boundary between wet and dry was an extremely volatile thing, the tides rough and traitorous to their home turf, loyal instead to the twin lying above us in the sky. Castor and Pollux. The bulk of our mission lay ahead of us, and the astronomers, engineers, and scientist who had planned it so meticulously had intended our focus to be on Pollux, the divine twin, with its high volcanic activity and greater proportion of seas. We were still on the mortal twin, Castor, life’s beckoning tendrils ensnaring our wits and pulling us deeper into the frigid wastes. 

Beneath the first layer of sediment, the stones are larger, which is not altogether surprising. They appear to be slightly more difficult for Isabeau to move, as well; she has replaced the scoop in her suit pocket and is now manually shifting the rocks. She reaches up to adjust a button on her suit, and although the feeds do not give a good view of what she is doing, I have the diving suit enough times to easily conceptualize it, twisting a yellow knob over her chest to increase the brightness of her suit lighting. There is a limited amount of material she can bring up, due to both pocket space and the limitations of her suit’s swim bladder, but she stores six of the rocks—which appear similar in composition to our previous lab samples—and continues to dig. Presently, a timer dings on my apparatus, and an automated broadcast says “one fourth of diving oxygen has been consumed”. Isabeau continues, the rocks forming little walls around the hole she digs. Further down, there is also some finer sediment that has managed to sink to the bottom, which she takes a few samples of. Then, she gasps. I lean over towards the large screen, but I can’t see anything out of the ordinary. “What is it?”

“Look at the little white specks. They’re moving!” I squint, and I do see specks, small and curved and round, somewhere between a bean and a crescent in shape. They do appear to be moving over the sediment slowly. Isabeau carefully traps a few with the sampling capsules, and I try to get a better focus on them with the camera. As I’m pressing buttons, I notice that there are a few chromatic aberrations in the camera, regardless of how I adjust it, and that there are also some issues on the side cams, particularly the one meant to focus on Isabeau’s left. I inform her of the situation. “There’s something happening with the camera feeds.” 

“Don’t worry, I’m almost done as is.” The cameras have several transparent coatings to protect them, and an error like this has not occurred before on any part of our mission. Various errors have occurred with the cameras in mission preparation, but this does not have exact resemblance to any of them. The corrupted feed appears to be getting worse as I watch it—most of the left cam is now stained with a red hue in the center that creates a spectra before a rim of the expected gray-green at the edges. In the case of damage to the cams, there are enough spares to replace every camera twice over back aboard our ship. However, if damage from the cameras leaks—“Please resurface now. If the cameras are damaged, it might leak into the rest of the suit.” 

“I’m done, and coming up.” The cameras offer me no view of Isabeau’s face, but I suspect she is not smiling. They do, however, show that she is leaving the lake floor. Liquid methane has a low enough density that her suit is rigged to a pulley on the surface that should winch her back up. I try to readjust the main camera to have a longer focus range. “I think I see something.” The quietness with which she says it only makes it more unsettling.

 “Where?”

“To my left. It looks…” She trails off, but I don’t wait for her to finish before I start expanding the view of the left camera. It’s red-dyed and static-addled, but there is a distinct dark shape there. I can also see it, and somewhat better, in the main cam “Engage the propulsive aids!” the shape is getting closer now, and it looks like a group of mirrors, or a forest, or a ray with many wings. I try to increase the speed of the pulley's winch. As the shape gets closer, the cameras become less and less accurate. “Propulsive aids engage!” Isabeau’s voice crackles through, and I hear fizzling noises over the increasing background static. The propulsive aids are rotor jets that should boost her upwards. The shape’s distance doesn’t seem to move, or if anything, it gets closer. “Is it working?”

“It’s trying to, but it keeps shorting out! I think wha—” sound cut off completely for a few plainfully long seconds “—with the circuits!” 

“You’re phasing in and out! Can you manually activate the propulsive aides?” The shape is certainly getting closer, but the cameras are only getting more dim. I try to see if I can remotely activate the propulsive aids, but I do not expect it to work given the general breakdown of remote communication. Over the increasingly grainy cameras, I see Isabeau frantically working on something at her suit, presumably trying to activate the aides, but I cannot see if it is working, and then the feeds cut out entirely.

 I am left in the dark relay hub with the monitor lights flashing traitorous green, as I wait to see what the pulley will dredge up.