As the vessel finally passed by me in its entirety, I waited until its lights faded into the blackness before asking for my external lights to be turned back on. Next, I instructed my Jet Propulsion 500 back to the medium speed setting. “How much farther to the surface?”
“At your current rate, it will take around another two and a half hours to go the 3,422 meters to the surface,” responded the A.I. computer through the speaker in my helmet.
“So, over 10,000 feet before I’ll get to see any light.” I sighed and began swimming along with the jet propulsion device. “Hey, what was that?”
Turning off my jet propulsion device, I directed myself toward the direction of what I had just seen, my headlights illuminating the gloominess ahead of me. The last ray of light caught what I thought to be a tail.
Turning around slowly, I swallowed hard when a shark came into view. Frozen, I didn’t know whether I should keep my headlight on or turn it off. A blunt nose and round eyes that shone almost with a blue tinge investigated my direction once. Following the line of the fish’s big body, I counted six gills on its side resting before triangular shaped pectoral fins. The shark swam past me, staying outside my range of view. Easily about the same size as me, I couldn’t help feeling a bit of fear as I waited for it to come back into the view of my headlight.
Another tail waved into my view followed by one more. There were certainly more than one of them out there. As I pondered what to do, one came fully into my headlamps and inspected me curiously.
A few feet before it reached me, a flurry of tails filled my view as the sharks darted past. I threw my head backward in their fleeting direction to see four of them hurriedly swimming away.
“What was that?” I wondered aloud, then thinking on impulse, I instructed, “Expand my field of view to twenty feet ahead of me.”
The headlamp expanded its light, but the strength of the beams decreased. Sweeping my head in either direction, I searched for the sharks, but they were gone.
My heart dropped down to the seabed as I realized something had caused those sharks to disappear. Whatever it was, it was big and predatory enough to scare them away. I decided that whatever it was, I was getting out of there. “A.I., turn the propulsion device to high speed.” I unthinkingly turned to face the direction in which the sharks had fled.
I soon regretted that last movement.
Ahead of me, there was a colossal creature with oversized sharp teeth and a wrinkly body. It had no eyes and the body seemed to be dominated by its head. It resembled a sick cross between a gulper eel and an anglerfish, but way larger than either of them were. Pale in coloration and lacking both a lure and eel-shaped body, it looked like nothing else I could identify with. All I knew was that its gaping mouth was many times larger than my entire body.
Terror gripped my gut the moment I laid eyes on it and I was grateful, although not prepared for the jerk of the jet propulsion device kicking into gear. Jetting away at break-neck speed, I struggled to hold my head up against the water colliding with my skull, as I was jettisoned through the water column. Marine snow zoomed blindly past my view as I rocketed through the deep sea, hoping against hope that the creature couldn’t follow me.
My heart continued to beat so fast that I could hear the thudding in my chest and feel the reverberations in my body. I decided to keep my lights on and the propulsion device at maximum speed until I reached at least the photic zone. I compelled the A.I. to keep me company in order to stave off a panic attack.
Eventually, I couldn’t hold my neck up against the water anymore and reluctantly slowed my momentum. At long last, the beating of my heart returned to a steady rhythm in my chest. “A.I., about how far are we from the surface now?”
“We’re 1,408 meters from the surface.”
I leaned my head back and sighed. It had been a long journey up to this area, but I still had so far to go. “Now that we’ve passed that sea monster far behind, I wish I could see something less threatening while I wait.”
“Turn off your lights.”
“Huh?” I wondered in blatant confusion.
“If you turn off your lights, both internal and external, and you’ll be able to see some animals,” returned the A.I.
“Okay…external headlight and internal lights off.”
Time passed slowly as my eyes acclimated to the darkness. I wasn’t quite sure what the A.I. thought I would see.
Then, there it was.
Scattered dots of azure and other blues with a faint tint of green surrounded the sea around me. Each cluster of dots lay far apart from the others, but were distinct in their patterns. Many of the clusters moved incredibly slowly, so much so that I wondered if they were moving at all. “What are these?”
“They are creatures…marine organisms that use bioluminescence to create light in the black of the abyss.”
I continued to stare around, commanding my jet propulsion device to stop so I could see the lights better. “They’re all shades of blue.”
“Yes, because blue is one of the only visible lights in the deep sea. All the warm colors—reds, oranges, yellows—do not penetrate this far into the water. Blue and green are the most visible colors.”
Marveling at the dancing clusters of light, I became increasingly eager to know what sorts of creatures made these lights. “I wish I could see the animals creating the bioluminescence.”
“If you truly wish to see them…ask for your Sea-Vision to
