CHAPTER 40
When Penny stepped into C-lab, it was as if she had entered a completely darkened room. She’d been outside for hours, with the June sun still coming at her strong at eight in the evening. The glare from the water made her wish she had brought her sunglasses, and the double shine had contracted her pupils to pinpoints. Nonetheless, she stepped into the lab confidently, knowing by now where everything was.
Malcolm always insisted on keeping the lights low, but her eyes were getting used to it. As she walked up behind the others, familiar details began to materialize, like returning ghosts. Nearly everyone had made this meeting except Matthew. He was taking his watch on the bridge, but could listen in by intercom if he wanted.
Malcolm was obviously dying to get his hands on the video. He pushed his hair back from his eyes and said, “She’s all set to go, Lieutenant.”
Chiffrey reached into his jacket, slipped out the disc and handed it to him. “Lock and load.”
Malcolm took the disc and with minimal foreplay slotted it in.
The screen barely registered the deep blue, almost black, color, but Penny recognized it right away, having seen deep undersea images from her father’s explorations since she was a child. She looked briefly at Chiffrey, who was leaning back on a stool, a look of absorbed contentment on his face. Without bothering to look, he waved his little finger at her indicating he was not so engrossed as he seemed. Once he began to speak, however, he was fully engaged with his audience.
“This, of course, is the video the Navy got when they were right in the middle of the circle that Penny discovered on the charts. Got it sucked down in no time with the sat-phone and new setup I got on that last resupply.”
He winked at Malcolm. “Yes, got my own link now. I’ll let you have a look at it later.” Before Malcolm could comment, he continued. “I was given a basic explanation and read some notes that came with the download, but you’ll have to bear with me as narrator because I haven’t seen the video yet, myself. As I implied, it was taken by an ROV controlled from the surface. Pipe up if anything strikes you as noteworthy.”
“In case it’s not obvious to everyone,” Malcolm said, “the readouts on the side are, in order, depth, temperature, and pressure. Depth is the green one on top. It’s set up a different from ours…”
Malcolm droned on. The image on the monitor was almost changeless. There wasn’t anything for the robot’s cameras to see at this depth.
“How’s she doing, Malcolm?” Chiffrey asked.
“About a third of the way to the bottom, from the notes. What we are supposed to be looking for?”
“Let’s just wait.”
“Okay,” Malcolm continued, “we’ve still got—”
“Stop!” her father called out.
Malcolm instantly hit pause. “We’re only at two hundred and twenty meters, not even halfway down.”
“That can’t be the bottom,” Becka said.
“It’s not,” Malcolm said. “But what we are seeing from the cameras isn’t showing up at all on the basic sonar readouts to the side. See there? It shows the bottom at four hundred and seventy-seven meters. There should be nothing but water for almost two hundred and sixty meters more.”
“Advance a little, please,” her father said. Soft circles of light from the ROV’s floodlights, bouncing off an undulating surface, became smaller and brighter. It was getting closer to something. “Again—stop!”
“Is that coral? A reef?” Becka said. “Looks solid. And the ripples. Doctor Bell?”
“Convoluted like coral, certainly, but I’ve never seen anything monolithic like this. Sloping down now, is it?”
“Seems to be,” Chiffrey said. “Look at that color.”
“Magenta,” her father said.
The hair on the back of Penny’s neck stood up, a sensation she trusted more than words or reasoning. This was trouble. Of what kind she didn’t yet know, but trouble was looking right back at her from the screen.
“Not the bottom,” Emory said. “Definitely not.”
“No,” Chiffrey said, “even I can tell that. Wait. The notes say the camera moves along a tad, then sweeps across the surface.”
Becka said, “It’s curving down now, isn’t it?”
“Sure looks that way,” Chiffrey said.
The ROV stopped for a while, and from the way the floodlights bounced off the imaged surface, it looked like its tethering cable was being rolled out so it could get closer again. The convolutions continued and did not seem to alter in any significant way, but the surface was beginning to slope down, steeper and steeper. The ROV glided along, until a dark opening appeared.
“Pause,” her father said. But the video abruptly ended. “A cave? Or maybe a vent. Lieutenant, did they estimate the size of what we were looking at?”
“The notes I have here say the operator was able to make some good estimates based on the size of the circles the lights were making on the surface and the distance covered. They think four hundred and fifty to five hundred meters across. Super-sized.”
The convolutions fit together in an intricate way that had the feel of some complex geometry but still seemed a thing of nature. The patterns seem to be always repeating, yet never in quite the same way.
“Does anyone have a clue what we were looking at?’ Chiffrey asked. “The floor is open.”
Becka looked at Malcolm. “Could you play it again?”
“Yeah, sure.” The frames flashed by as Malcolm said, “Okay, we’re moving across, in the same direction, but I’ve slowed it down by half. It’s sloping down, looks like it’s heading toward vertical. Like half a ball and we’re almost at the bottom. It’s like a big Jell-O mold my mother had, like a giant raspberry. Sometimes it would even be that color. The Jell-O, I mean…”
“Yes, appears to be a half sphere,” her father said, “but we’ve only seen one small part of it. Although I have no idea what it is, I can say with some certainty that it’s not Jell-O.”
Malcolm looked hurt. “I didn’t mean—”
“There!” Becka shouted. She pointed at what looked like a depression in the surface. It had already gone to static. “Can you back it up a little?”
“I can do better,” Chiffrey said. “Malcolm, can you find a freeze frame of the final image somewhere on there? It’s in a separate file, if these notes are right.”
“What happened there at the end?” her father asked.
“That’s when the power went out,” Chiffrey answered, “but they can’t figure out why. They were able to manually haul up the ROV and once they got out of the circle, it checked out fine. They’re doing more testing, so let’s wait on that issue for now. Good, Malcolm’s found it. As you can see, this image has been digitally enhanced, so it’s much clearer than the video.”
“Does looks like some kind of vent,” her father “but the image is still not clear enough draw any conclusions.”
Chiffrey looked resigned. “You’re right, of course, but you know, I keep coming back to why doesn’t this thing show up on the side-scan sonar? The sonar showed nothing there, but what we just looked at is close to five hundred meters in diameter. Why didn’t it show up? Somehow, I doubt this thing being hard to find was simply a matter of chance.”
“I agree,” her father said, “There is clearly intelligence behind all this, but we don’t yet know on what level, and we should not jump to conclusions as to motives. Whatever it is, it has abilities we can’t at the moment even begin to reckon.”
Chiffrey rocked back on his stool until he rested against the bulkhead. “You think it’s natural?”
Her father glanced at Andrew, who paused only a moment before saying, “Don’t know enough to say.”
Penny could tell by the look on her father’s face that he agreed. “However,” he said, “this does look to have an organic nature. Not artificial. Coral was mentioned.”
“It’s coral?” Chiffrey asked, incredulous.
“No, but the immense size suggests it could be
a colony, rather than an individual.”
“Like honey mushrooms,” Penny suggested.
Chiffrey looked at her, slightly puzzled. “Sounds delicious.”
“No, no, it’s a kind of wild mushroom. There’s a colony in Oregon that covers acres, estimated to weigh over six hundred tons, and to be more than two thousand years old. Some well-credentialed experts feel it is a single organism, and lately there are more scientists making the case for classifying whole groups of interdependent species as one organism, or at least something like it. The point is, the distinctions made between species in the past may be more about our need to sort things into categories than how life truly organizes itself.”
“Imposing an order, rather than perceiving the underlying reality,” her father added. “An age-old conflict.”
“Right,” Chiffrey said. “Run up against it everyday in my work.” He smiled, then looked puzzled. “And you think that’s what we have here? Something like a huge underwater beehive?”
“Maybe,” Penny said, “but I wouldn’t get too fixated on that image.”
“Okay, but I still don’t see how any kind of natural organism on its own could have the capabilities we’ve seen demonstrated. Advanced technology is surely a given.”
“Nothing new under the sun,” Andrew quoted, with no sign of adding more.
Her father laughed. “As true now as it ever was.”
“I’m not much of a churchgoer anymore,” Chiffrey said, “but I know my Bible. ‘All is vanity.’”
“Which is the point,” her father said. “Look outside any suburban window, and you’ll find tiny birds that weigh next to nothing but nonetheless manage to migrate thousands of kilometers every year, and replicate themselves, to boot. That, in its own way, is surely as amazing as anything here. We’re just too used to it. There’s an analogue in nature for almost any technology, if you look hard enough.”
“But surely this is of a different order entirely,” Chiffrey protested.
“Just because it seems to have capabilities beyond ours, does not mean that it can’t be part of the natural world.”
Malcolm was dying to speak, so Bell gave up the floor with a wave of an open hand.
“I’m not a physicist, but I read a lot…” Malcolm prefaced.
Penny readied herself for another of his rambling monologues by slumping back against the only free bit of bulkhead in the cramped lab.
Malcolm looked around as if he didn’t completely believe everyone would listen, but went on. “Well, at one point, I considered going into physics. I was interested in the implications of quantum mechanics, where it might go. This stuff sounds completely crazy to most people, I mean parallel worlds, entanglement…”
“That’s great,” Chiffrey said, “but where are you trying to point us?”
Malcolm’s face scrunched up for a moment, then he moved his hands as if he were trying to mold the perfect words from the air itself.
“Okay,” he said, “I don’t know what we saw on that video any more than you do, but what if it is the source of an intelligence that is not only able to perceive how things really work in the universe, but can manipulate those forces as well? I’m talking the whole enchilada, you know, what underlies all energy and matter, stuff we can’t even conceive, right? And what if this intelligence is able to manipulate those forces as easily as we use the principle of leverage to open a can of soda?”
Penny stood upright and took a small step forward. “Then what about the people on the Honey Pot and Matthew’s fishing boat? And the Navy divers? For that matter, why have so many of the people on this ship been affected the way they have?”
Malcolm pointed at her and nodded in agreement, as if she had just solved a charade. “Because we were caught in a lens effect. You know, the way a star can bend light because of it’s massive gravitational field.”
Chiffrey arched his eyebrows.
“It is like we’re under different laws now,” Malcolm continued. “Deeper, more foundational laws. Closer to the way things really are.”
“I don’t think so,” Penny said. “More like we’ve been caught up in the wake of something powerful and churned about. Maybe there is something to what you’ve suggested but, if so, it seems more to me like some people here have been besotted with imagined insights and a sense of meaningfulness and connection where there is none. That could be simply a side effect, and I don’t see any reason to believe any of it is real.”
“How can you be so sure?” Becka asked. “And aren’t you the one who used to tell us we should be willing to discard outgrown beliefs and assumptions?”
“I didn’t mean we should replace them with fantasies. But perhaps Jack could set me straight.”
Malcolm waved his hands like a referee. “Hold it, please!”
Her father held up his hand just enough to gain attention. “At this point, we can’t really step outside it all and make an accurate observation to determine the truth. A pity to be sure.”
“I’ve only been theorizing,” Malcolm said.
“Had a go at quantum mechanics once,” Chiffrey added. “No matter how hard I tried, it remained just a scribble of Greek on a whiteboard.”
“I didn’t say it was quantum mechanics,” Malcolm said. “I only used that as an analogy. I mean, physicists hate it when people who don’t know what they’re talking about—”
“I’m sure they do, but some of my people are quantum physicists, and they’re looking into that aspect. Has to be some explanation, after all.”
“Great,” Malcolm said nodding. “And I know you have a highly qualified science team that you consult with but, since your having trouble, I’m sure I could help you get a grip on the essentials.”
“Later might be good, Malcolm.” Chiffrey covered a yawn. “Really.”
Her father stood up. “We’ve probably got enough to digest for now.” He looked around the lab, taking his time. “When we get to the site, we’ll have a more thorough look at whatever is down there and, hopefully, have much more to go on. At some point, we may even have the opportunity to go down and have a look.”
He glanced at Penny and said, “But only when—and if—we’re sure it’s the right time, so no worry.”
“Yes, because you’ve already decided,” she added.”
He smiled but didn’t reply.