Speaker 1: The rv ARC light was about as glamorous as you
would expect from a deep sea survey vessel, a flat,
gray hole stained from salt spray, a deck cluttered with
rigging and cable drums, and a permanent smell of hydraulic
fluid that seeped into your clothes no matter how many
showers you took. We were out past the continental shelf,
hundreds of miles off shore, crawling a forgotten stretch of
the Abyssal Plain. No shipping lanes or geological features marked
on the map, just endless, featureless sea floor at four
thousand meters down. My job was simple enough. I was
part of a five person science crew operating bathymetric sonar
sweeps logging data to the cloud array below the bridge.
We flew an ROV twice a day, a heavy steel
framed unit about the size of a golf cart, rigged
with high h intensity lights, manipulator arms, and a suite
of still and video cameras. Everything was backed up twice,
raw feeds dunted into redundant cold storage banks, reviewed nightly
over instant coffee and bad jokes. Most days blurred together.
We would lower the ROV follow a tight grid programmed
into the system and then scan every inch of mud
and stone for anomalies like burrows, sediment plumes, or lost
straw nets, anything that broke the monotony of silt and darkness.
There was an unofficial contest among the crew find something
worth naming. It was usually a thermal vent or a shipwreck.
Occasionally someone would discover an unidentified rock formation. If it
wasn't on the database and past the checks, you got
to propose the desert nation. It was a dumb bragging, right,
but when your world shrank to forty meters of ship
steel and the endless screaming of the sonar puls you
took what you could get. I remember the day it
started because it had been a bad morning for the
ROV team. The wind system had glitched during recovery and
nearly dumped two million dollars of hardware into the deep.
We were tense and distracted. Still, protocol said to keep
the scans running. All repairs were underway. The bathymetric sweep
came in, slow, layering soft outlines across the workstation, monitors,
rows and rows of nothing, until sam our sonartec leaned
forward and frowned, Hey, you seeing this, he piped the
signal to the main screen. There, against the background noise
of the plane were clusters of depressions, hexagonal, about three
meters across each, shallow but precise. At first we thought
it was sensor noise, maybe a misfire from the multibeam ray,
but the pattern was too clean. They repeated with eer irregularity,
spaced at near perfect intervals, stretching outward for what looked
like miles. No obvious elevation changes, no ridges or venting nearby,
just those shapes plunged into the seabed with surgical precision.
Sam ran a calibration check while the rest of us
crowded around. The readings came back normal. The array was
working fine. Could be polygonal cracking, Lucas offered. He was
a junior geologist fresh out of postdoc. You know, desiccation
features from sediment drying back in the plister scene. No way,
said Marla, our RV pilot, shaking her head. Not this
uniform and not down here, too deep, too much pressure.
We logged it like any other anomaly, file, stamped coordinates, noted.
Nobody said it out loud, but you could feel it
in the room. The slight thrill, the unspoken possibility. Maybe
this was the thing we could get to name. We
decided we would send the RV back down first thing
after repairs, take a closer look, maybe bring back a
sample if the manipulator arms could manage it. Later that night,
lying in my bunk with a ship's soft creaking all
around me, I kept replaying the sonar image of my mind,
most perfect hexagons stretching into the dark, waiting. By noon
the next day, the r of V was repaired and
pressure tested. No major damage, just the fried relay in
the tether winch that the engineers swapped out with a
spear from the parts locker. Marla ran the pre dive
checklist twice, cross referencing with the top side crew thrust
this green cameras clean, manipulators responsive. The fiber optic tether
hissed through the winch as we lowered the RV down
through the ghostly blue haze of the operation. I sat
behind the monitor array in the control van, sipping bitter coffee.
Or The depth counter ticked upward five hundred meters a thousand,
two thousand by three thousand, eight hundred metres. The sunlight
was gone only the faint scatter of bioluminescent creatures spun
past the camera, looking for all the world like disembodied stars.
At four thousand, one hundred and twenty seven meters, the
ROV's altitude warning chimed. The bottom was close, coming up
on the target grid. Marla announced, hands steady on the joystick.
She feathered the vertical thrusters, easing the RV down with
practiced grace. Twin led rays flared to life, pushing a
stark directional beam across the dark sea floor. The feed
resolved slowly. Fine sediment kicked up in lazy clouds as
the RVs skids brushed the bottom. When it cleared, the
formations came in to view, I leaned forward unconsciously. They
were even more precise than the sonar had suggested. Wide
hexagonal trenches, each one about two meters were carved into
the substrate with impossible symmetry. The edges were sharp and clean,
not slumped or rounded as expected from erosion. They were
arranged in a pattern too regular for any known natural process.
Between some of the hexagons rose thin spires no more
than a meter high. They were narrow, almost needlelike, tapering
to sharp points. The floodlights revealed the surface was not
natural stone at all. It absorbed the lights strangely, reflecting
only a dull sheen material composition, I asked. Lucas checked
the spectrum to read out low reflectivity. Looks basaltic at
first glance, but the density is wrong. No magnetic signature either.
Could be synthetic. Synthetic that made my stomach titan. There
should not be anything synthetic four kilometers below the surface.
Marla maneuvered carefully over the field, the manipulator arms tucked
in close to avoid disturbing the formations. No visible life.
Sam noted from behind me. He was monitoring the low
light auxiliary cameras. Too deep for anything beyond extremophiles, maybe
some amphipods or microbio mats. There was something strange about
the water chemistry too. The conductivity probe picked up faint
electromagnetic readings, tiny surges barely above background noise, but steady.
Could be geothermal, Lucas offered, but he did not sound convinced.
I kept my eyes glued to the forward facing cameras
as we moved deeper into the cluster. Every trench, every
spire was placed with mechanical position, no collapse, no drift.
It was as if the entire field had been set
out according to a blueprint we could not see. At
the edge of one of the frames, something shifted a
blur low to the ground. I jerked upright heart stammering.
Marla pan write. She nudged the stick, swinging the ROV around.
Nothing just sediment curling in the beams. Probably a fish,
Sam said, but he sounded uncertain. There were some species
of snailfish, rat tails, and amphipods that could survive at
this depth, but nothing that would move with that kind
of speed. Another movement, this time at the far periphery
of the overhead camera. A flicker too fast to focus on.
Could be debris stirred up by the thrusters. Marla offered
she was trying to stay calm, professional, but her voice
was tight and her headset. We liked the coordinates of
the anomalies and swept the immediate area for more readings.
Nothing consistent, just those endless trenches, the eerie towers, and
the faint sense of something just beyond the reach of
our lights. By the time we winched the ROV back
to the surface, my nerves were humming under my skin.
I sat in the dry lap the next morning, staring
at the overnight scans until my coffee went cold in
my hand. The multi beam bathymetric data had finished rendering
stacking into shimmering blue topography grids on the analysis monitors.
I pulled three sweeps baseline twelve hours later and twenty
four and laid them together to check for any sea
floor changes. At first, he looked clean, identical patterns, no collapses,
no disturbances. Then Marlas slid into the chair next to
me and pointed with the stylus at a cluster near
the site's northern edge. Doesn't this look weird to you?
I leaned in six depressions, all hexagonal, arranged in a
loose arc. Another seven clustered just below them, five more
to the west. I ran a quick measurement to all
over them. The distances between the pits varied a little,
but not enough to call random. There was a rhythm
to it. Coincidence, I said, mostly to convince myself pariodolia.
Our brains want to find patterns. Marla wasn'tconvinced. She chewed
her pink cap and tapped the open ship's internal manifest,
a digital diagram showing crews, quarters, lounges, labs, and shared spaces.
She tilted her head, humor me look. She overlaid the
manifest atop the bathymetry render. It was not perfect, but
it was close enough to stiffen the hair along my arms.
The largest grouping on the seafloor roughly matched where the
gallery and the wreck rooms sat on the ship. The
five smaller pits aligned roughly with the forward cabins, my
bunk among them. We sat there for a long time
without speaking. By lunch, word had spread. Half the crew
jammed into the lab to look at the Scan's opinion
split fast. Some said it was pure chance, that it
was just rocks, debris filled shape by currents we didn't
yet understand. The others grew silent, thinking about how the
ship creaked at night, how the sonar would sometimes ping
back false returns. The tension was palpable. Meals grew quieter.
You could feel it shift in the air, heavier, harder
to shake. Conversations stayed locked on surface topics, instrument calibrations,
generate cycles, and food rations. Nobody spoke about how the
walls seemed to hum when you were alone. Sleep came hard.
I woke once around three a m heart hammering, cold sweat,
soaking the sheets. In the darkness, I thought I heard
something tapping rhythmically against the hull, distant and slow, like
something running the pads of his fingers down the ship's spine.
No one admitted to hearing it when I asked around
in the morning, but no one denied it either. Then
came the update from the overnight automated RV mapping run.
A new structure had appeared. It had not been on
any previous pass, verified by timestamped footage and sonar sweeps.
It was shaped differently, no perfect geometry this time. Instead,
it was slight, irregular, almost an atomic hare, a stretched
oval embedded into the silt, taxtured and away. The data
could not fully resolve. Marla printed out the overlay and
pinned it up next to the others. She added a
sticky note underneath it, it's watching. Nobody laughed. We launched
the second r V dive just after sunrise under a
sky smeared thin with silver clouds. No one ate much
that morning. Even the engine noise seemed muted. As we
craned the RV back overboard, letting it sink into the
depthless dark. The cable unspooled in measured words from the
A frame, tension sensors ticking numbers into the console by
my knee. We dropped fast, fallowing the same descent vector
as the previous night, straight back to the mapping site.
At about three eight hundred meters. The lights kicked on,
cutting long cones through the water full of swirling silt.
The first glimpses of the seafloor came seconds later. The
original formations were still there, silent black trenches, neat towers
of map material, but now something new sat among them.
It did not look natural. Manning the camera controls beside me,
Marla zoomed in, carefully nudging the pan with a slow,
steady hand. The new structure rose out of the silt,
maybe three meters high, much more complex than the clean
exagonal pits. It looked skeletal, almost bony in its angles,
thin arches into twined at strange geometries that no natural
basalt or limestone formation would have made. At its base,
embedded in the seafloor, something caught the light. I leaned forward,
squinting at the monitor. The spiral deeply etched into the
silty plane. Now more than etched, it had dimensionality and
stood raised, shallow ridges of black material rising into the water,
curling tightly into a pattern. Mala cursed under a breath.
I toggled the data overlay on the screen. The plotted
course of the arc light from the last three days
appeared in green lines. It matched perfectly. The spiral mirrored
the ship's path through the survey area, down to the
minor course corrections by the auto nav. We had not
transmitted those paths outside the vessel. There was no broadcast,
no relay. That pattern should not have been accessible to
anything except our internal systems. The realization hit like a
cold slap. Whatever was down there, he was not just
reacting to our presence. He was tracking us. He was learning.
Marla swung the RV in closer, aiming to capture a
better angle of the spires. The feed stuttered as the
RV shadow passed over the new structure static blade across
the screen. Status lights on the pilot board flickered, a deep,
vibrating harm rattle through the ship's deck plates. Backer off,
I barked. Marla immediately reversed the thrusters, pulling the RV
to a safer standoff distance. The noise eased, but not completely.
Instruments and the read out panels pulsed faint red warnings,
vaultage drops, minor system faults. It was not damaged in
the traditional sense, it felt closer to interference or corrosion
happening in real time. Marla muttered, scanning the status lights,
it's like it's eating the signal. A keyed into the
shipboard internal channel. RV team to bridge, we are getting
electromagnetic disruption at the dive site. Ad just passive scanners
and PRESP for possible early retrieval. Copy that RV team
monitor vitals and advice. We floated the ROV higher, switching
off unnecessary systems to conserve power. The feed cleaned slightly
enough to get one lass pan over the field. The
new skeletal structure was not alone. Further out, just at
the edge of floodlight range, another small formation began taking shape.
It bulged out of the silt dark and ridged the
way barnacles first cling to a ship's hull. I locked
the timestamp, noted its coordinates, requested retrieval. The hour of
e rose steadily whining as it climbed through the cold
weight of the abyss. As the winch hauled it back
onto the deck, I caught Marla watching the monitors a
second longer than necessary. Did you see it? She asked,
voice low. See what She hesitated, then shook her head.
Never mind, but the look in her eyes told me
she had seen something move. The mood and the arc
light soured. By the next day, the meals were even quieter,
Conversations clipped at the edges. No one said it out
loud yet, but the divide was growing. Marla paced the
lounge and short sharp burst, arguing with Ethan, our senior hydrographer,
we should pull the anchor and get the hell out.
She snapped, voice cracking under the strain. This isn't natural,
It is not geology, it's not life as we know
it either, Ethan. Ever, the opportunist folded his arms and
shook his head. You realize what this could mean if we,
the first did document a non biological scent in structure,
do you understand the weight of her careers are made
of less? His voice had a note of desperation. I
remember the early days of the voyage, how we used
to joke about finding the next challenger deep, about naming
some underwater canyon or thermal vents after ourselves. The competitiveness
was baked into the blood of every research ship crew.
Now it sounded pathetic, hollow. I said nothing. Instead, I
chewed my breakfast slowly, watching the tensions strangle the room. Later,
while rerunning bathymetric sweeps, I caught Sam Arsnartk staring too
long at the screen, jaw slacked. He pointed at the
data traces, deep harmonic ripples that had not been there before,
slight deviations, faint signatures repeating deeper and deeper in the
water column. Feels deeper than it should, he mumbled, feels
like falling. No one was sleeping much. Whenever I did
doze off, I dreamt of those spirals, dreamt of standing
barefoot on the seafloor, staring up at towering black spires
that stretched forever into a starless sky. No water, no pressure,
just the endless sensation of sinking. We launched another RV
dive that afternoon. None of us wanted to say it
was stupid, but every glance said it. The ocean was
calm above, with the field looked different again. When the
r V hit the bottom, a new structure stood near
the original cluster. Marla controlled the RV with tight, nervous
flakes of the joystick, angling the floodlights to frame it fully.
The spire was taller than the others, irregular. Where the
other ones had a machine symmetry, this one bent slightly,
top heavy, almost humanoid. There were jutting shapes where arms
should have been, a rounded dome where a head might be.
The radio crackled. Marla's voice came thin and wired from
the control booth. You're seeing this. Ethan hovering behind her, whispered,
it's copying. No one dared breathe too loudly. Marla nudged
the r OFV closer, attempting a slow orbit around the
figure for better imaging. The starboard thrusters engaged, humming softly
through the deck. Halfway through the sweep, the r of
E jerked to a sudden halt. Red arms blinked across
the piloting console. Tether tension spiked, damn it, tether snag.
Mala cursed, hands flying over the controls, trying to reverse
the motors. The RV barely budged I switched to the
rear camera feed, squinting. Something had latched on to the
tail end of the vehicle. Nothing mechanical, nor a net
or debris. It was something organic. It looked vibrous, like
strands of thick kelp, but the way they gripped and
flexed against the pressure was all wrong. They merged seamlessly
into the black material of the surrounding structures. We ran
emergency retrieval protocols, tugging manually through the winch, but it
held fast. We could not rip it free without risking
the whole tether system. There was no real choice left.
The RV was stuck hard teth at tension red lining,
and we could not afford to abandon it. Not just
because of the equipment cost, though that was astronomical, but
because it was our eyes, our only clean set of
them down there when no human belonged. The problem was
we had no back up unit. There was only one
other way. The arc light carried a single two persons
submersible in case of emergency retrievals or close proximity geological surveys.
The seeker, the sphere shaped titanium pod bolted with manipulator
arms and a single narrow viewing slit. It had been
loaded on board almost as in afterthought and nod to
redundancy in the paperwork, but nobody had touched it yond
maintenance checks since the voyage began. Only Ben, our junior
pilot and maintenance tech, was rated to operate it. He
volunteered without question. I can get it loose, he said,
tapping the side of the sub's hull. Get close, use
the starboard arm to pry it free. Marlow was pale,
but nodded. Ethan and I ran rapid systems checks on
the seeker's life support ballace controls and thrust the calibration.
No time for real redundancy checks. If the field was
shifting daily. We had no idea what the r VM
I record or what it might provoke if left attached
too long. We sealed Ben into the sub, gave him
a thumbs up behind the thick view bought glass, the
white lights from the hangar floor flashing across his face.
The winch lowered the Seekers slowly into the churning black
until it disappeared under the surface, leaving only the faint
crackle of the tether COM's line trailing back up to us.
Descent took nearly an hour. From the command deck, we
monitored his telemetry. The seekers on board sonar pulsed dutifully
slow pings, rebounding off the abyssal plane. At four one
hundred meters, he hit the bottom. Marla switched the external
floodlights on the screen, filled with particulate haze, like slow
snow drifting through eternal darkness. Shapes loomed through the gloom.
First the old structures, spires rising like broken teeth, mat
and ancient, and then the new one, the irregular figure spire,
the one that bent to the shoulders arms askew. Ben
approached cautiously, thrusters whispering in minute bursts, keeping him neutrally
buoyant a meter of the sea floor. He swung the
seeker around the tangled RV, the manipulator arms who used
the probe the fibrous strands wrapping the equipment. On the
video feed, it looked almost fungal. A slick membrane had
sprouted over the r of V chassis. Pulsing faintly, Ben
grunted over the combs, feel soft, almost like tissue. None
of us spoke the soa blurched telemetry spiked, depth indicators
ticking down in jerky fits. Something's pulling. Ben's voice broke
through roar and panicked. We saw it on the monitor.
The Seeker was sinking, not falling freely, but being dragged downward.
The ballast control flashed critical thrust, the screaming against an
unseen force blow tanks. Ethan shouted into the combs, but
it was useless. Ben was already trying no response. The
final seconds of the feed were a blur. The Seeker's
exterior lights swept the sea floor, illuminating the figure spire again,
but closer, now distorted twisting inward. The r V appeared
briefly in the frame, still cocooned in that alien growth,
and behind it, with the trench dipped into darker folds,
more shapes waited, larger ones. The feed cut to black.
Chaos rippled across the arc light. Ethan and Marlas scrambled
at their stations, shouting across the deck as the last
telemetry from the seak of flat lined. The small submersible
stepth indicator had frozen at an impossible number beneath a
designated operational range, and then blinked out. No visual feed,
no external sonarping, only the droning emptiness of the abyss
beyond the hull. I stayed glued to the ROV console.
The tether was still functional, but barely. Battery drain warnings
pulsed at the corner of the monitor, the autonomous systems
fighting to stay alive. I twisted the joystick, panning the
external camera one slow, deliberate sweep across the field of formations.
Something caught the edge of the frame. Where before the
spires had stood in jagged randomness, there was now a
new structure, right on the fringe of the disturbed trench
where Ben had been pulled under. It was still forming,
Not rock, not coral. No slow geologic patience here. This
was something birthing itself from the seafloor, extruding and reshaping
in real time, tendrils of black and material writhing inward,
knitting together. We watched in horrified silence as it thickened
and took on contour and form, the beginnings of a
figure coming into shape. Marla cursed, softly, backing away from
the screen. Ethan stood there, arms crossed, white knuckled against
his own ribs. This cannot be natural, he muttered. I
tried to turn the camera again, angling toward the last
no position of the seeker, hoping maybe Ben had escaped,
hoping there would be a light and moving object, anything
to suggest he had somehow gotten free. Nothing, only blackness.
I rotated back to the formation, instinctively scanning for landmarks,
but the figure was gone. The sea floor was bare again.
The rfv's battery warning flashed critical red. I powered down
the external lights to conserve energy for the tether systems.
Across the deck. Ethan was flipping through the passive sonar array,
rerunning diagnostics. We could not use active sonar now, not
with certainty that Ben or whatever remained of him, was
not near the hole. The shockwaves from an active pin
could shatter a man submersible if it was close enough.
Ethan leaned into the console, frowning. I've got something, he said,
A faint contact, A return on passive sonar. It was
moving toward US fast. No surface ships within range, no
known subs, no other research vessels were in this quadrant.
We were supposed to be alone out here for another
two weeks. Marla grabbed the emergency flare protocol and hovered
near the distress beacon switch, but I shook my head,
no sense signaling. Whatever was coming, already knew where we were.
The contact was smooth, steady, gliding without turbulence, closing distance
too cleanly. Ethan adjusted the gain. An outline began to
coalesce on the sonar projection, a shape nearing the arc lights.
Hull small compared to the ship, but just the right
size for something like the Seeker. Marla excelled sharply, almost
a sob. It's ben, she whispered. I kept my hands
clamped tight on the edge of the console to stop
them from shaking. If it was him, if somehow he
had gotten free, he would have radioed by now. The
seekers coms were silent, completely murderously silent. The contact reached
the vessel docked. The ship lurched slightly, a vibration through
the steel underfoot that carried the moonpool all the way
to the bridge. The crew instinctively turned toward the axis
corridor that led down to the moon pool bay, leaving
to see what had docked. I stayed at the console,
the black screens offering no guidance, no comfort. The r
of V was dead, now severed from us, blind and powerless,
only the sonar lingered behind an occasional soft ping from
Ethan's station, trying to resolve an image that would not come.
Marlar's voice cracked through the intercom from below, tight and strained,
contacted the submersible. Doc it's the Seeker. Looks intact, no
visible damage through the deck speakers. Marla's voice again, higher pitched.
He's Bend's here, just stepped out. Looks normal, says He's fine.
I stayed frozen in my chair, staring at the dead
r V feed. A flicker of movement caught in my eye.
The passive onar was still active in the corner, and
there was a side utility window no one had touched.
An object was drifting past the ship's bow, slow and aimless. Curious,
I toggled the camera, hoping for a glimpse before the
power fully died. Static and distortion bloomed, but one shape
pushed through a body, bloated, skin, pale and slowing away
under the crushing pressure of depth. His uniform was torn
and trailing in the water, but there was no mistaking
the orange patch stitched to the chest, the color used
for Junior's. A chill went through my veins so fast
it left me dizzy. I stood hard enough that my
chair clattered to the floor. No Ben was still on
the seafloor, which meant whatever I had just climbed aboard
was not him. I sprinted across the deck, shoving past
the storage cart, nearly losing my footing on the grating floor.
Half Way to the hatch leading down to the docking level,
I grabbed the first heavy object. I saw, a rusted
steel emergency pry bar, long and pitted from years of
salt exposure. He weighed heavy in my hand. I barely
registered it. My boots hammered down the stairwell below. I
could hear laughter shout, the casual tones of a reunion
around the corner into the docking bay, my heart trying
to climb out of my chest. Ben what wore Ben's
face stood surrounded by Marla and Eathan. They were patting
him on the back, half laughing, half crying, disbelief and
joy muddling into one chaotic scene. They turned at the
sound of my footsteps, saw me coming in fast. Pry
bar raised. I screamed, without words, a roar that tore
out my throat. Ben turned confusion flickering across his face.
Marla shouted my name. Ethan moved to intercept. I barreled
through both, shouldering them aside with every ounce of terror
and momentum I could summon. The first blow caught Ben
square in the side of the head. He staggered a
and going up defensively, mouth opening in a protest that
sounded wrong. The cadence too clean, the tone pitched half
step too high, the consonants dragging unnaturally for someone with
blunt head trauma. I did not stop another blow and another.
Ethan tried to pull me back. I wrenched free. Ben
clapped to his knees, hands trembling, mouth working in a silent,
broken mimicry of human distress. I raised the pry bar
one final time and brought it down across the top
of its skull with every fiber of strength I had left.
The head cracked open. The sound of liquid bursting across
the floor silenced the room. Ethan stumbled back, hand clamped
over his mouth. Marla simply froze, eyes wide, making a
keening sound low in her throat. They no longer fought
me on my decision, after seeing what'spilled out from what
looked like Ben. A gush of thick, briny water explodedaded
across the deck, plating puddling across the Decking strands of
green filament, slick and twitching, spooled out of the ruin
of its head, writhing weakly against the metal before falling still.
The air filled with the sharp, stinging reek of deep
salt and rot. The thing twitched once more, then stilled silence.
Only the low, steady drip of salt water from its
body remained. I dropped the pry bar. In the aftermath,
none of us moved for a long long time. In
silent agreement, we pushed whatever looked like Ben off the ship.
Wearing multiple layers of protective gear, we cut the line
to the rov. The considerable loss was much more palatable
after seeing the consequences from below. We called it, ended
the mission and returned home. All reports were wiped and
Ben was documented as missing at sea. We co operated
a story about his reckless behavior and repeated it enough
until it was believed