Into the Drowning Deep

"She said what I was asking was an impossibility -- but that`s not why she refused me. I saw the revulsion in her eyes. She thinks of us as killers, and she wanted nothing to do with us."
"To be fair, she`s not wrong." Michi slotted the last component into place and leaned forward, looking down the barrel with a practiced eye. It was a custom job, designed for picking birds out of the sky over Tokyo. Like most snipers` rifles, it was balanced to her exact specifications. It would be a lethal weapon in anyone`s hands. In hers, it stood a chance of killing gods. "We`re killers. Embrace that. Let it make you stronger."

"If they have a language -- not just one language, but two languages, one spoken and one not -- and if the complexity of their spoken language is anything like the complexity of their signing, they must be sentient," said Tory. She sounded reluctant, like this was the last thing she wanted to be saying. "There`s no way they`re not."
"Cats meow and know what they`re saying," said Olivia. "Birds sing. That doesn`t make them smart."
"There`s a lot of difference between a song that basically says, 'Hey, come fuck me' over and over again and a distinct, signed language," said Luis.

There were those who considered scientists heartless, or cruel, or uncompassionate, because of moments like these: anyone who could turn their back on a tragedy to chase down something seemingly inconsequential like a sonar rig was clearly somehow less than human. What Tory would have explained, if she`d been in a position to do so, was that curiosity was part of what made them absolutely human. Curiosity was the reason humanity had cone down from the trees and spread across the world. Sadness was tempting. Sorrow held more charms than most people liked to think, and it would swallow her whole if she let it. She had been dancing with sorrow since the Atargatis. But that was what made it important that other things happen even when the sad things were already going on.
She couldn`t bring Heather back. She couldn`t change the past. That didn`t mean she couldn`t avenge Heather, and her own sister, for the sake of the people who`d been left behind. Sometimes science was the closes thing to the sword of an avenging angel humanity was ever going to get.

Heather had thought she knew what darkness looked like; had believed the waters of the trench were as dark as it was possible for a place to be. As her submersible slipped below the surface of the Deep, dropping downward at a pace that skirted the line between conservative and ambitious, she realized with slow and dawning wonder that she had never known darkness in her life. Nothing that lived on the surface had.
Humanity had feared the dark since time immemorial, and yet humanity had never experienced the dark, because it wasn`t until recently -- the age of cunning hands and clever machines -- that the dark had been anything more than a whispering legend, a rumor of a nightmare. Biologists and the laws of evolution on Earth said humanity had started, like everything else, in the sea. Maybe that explained fearing the dark. An ancestral memory of this sort of all-consuming nothingness would have been enough to terrify anyone.
The dark passed around her like it had physical weight, like it accounted for more of the crushing danger of the deeps than the water itself. Her submersible`s lights pierced it like spears, so bright that they seemed unbelievable, yet unable to illuminate more than a few feet on every side. She could have turned on every light she had, lit every emergency signal, and still not done anything to brighten the Challenger Deep. This was where darkness went to live forever, growing deeper and more powerful as the eons passed it by.

"You know what I like about the ocean we do have?" asked Dr. Toth. "The part where we`ve dumped so much crap into it that it would be justified in becoming something out of a horror movie, and yet the horror movie it`s giving us isn`t related to any of those things. Not really."
"What do you mean?" asked Tory.
"I mean if the mermaids are real -- and they are -- and if the mermaids are smart enough to be watching us -- which they also are -- they don`t have anything to do with humans. They evolved on their own. They stayed in their own environment until we started sending ships into their living room. To them, we`re the myths. We`re the monsters. We appear out of nowhere, we`ve probably snagged more than a few of them in fishing nets and trawler rigs, and half the things we have on us at any given time are going to be incomprehensible to a preindustrial society with no concept of manufacturing. They aren`t our fault. We didn`t mutate some flatworm into a murderous new form, and we didn`t melt a glacier that freed a prehistoric predator. They exist because they exist. That`s nice." Dr. Toth smirked. "I`m so used to humans being responsible for anything that it`s a pleasant change when we didn`t do it."

"On it." He began unclasping cases, revealing their waterproof contents. He was a blur of motion as he assembled his microphones and clipped them to small drone systems.
Tory, meanwhile, braced her back against the controls and opened her laptop. Less water resistant than the microphones, but protected by as many layers of shielding and plastic as technology could manage, it would continue to work as long as she didn`t actually drop it into the water. "I`ll have the software up in a minute," she said. "You`re clear to do your drops anytime."
Dr. Toth leaned back against her seat and watched them. "The two of you make me tired just looking at you," she commented mildly. "Kids are great, but holy shit, am I glad I`m not one anymore."
"We only have the RIB for a few hours, and even if we had it longer, there`d be no guarantee the weather would stay good enough to let us get our readings. We have to move fast."
"Besides, science should feel urgent every once in a while," said Luis. "It makes up for the parts that drag on and on." He dropped a microphone over the side. "You know, half the time we`re saving the world in slow motion, but days like this, we get the chance to run."

People who thought they were identical simply because they shared a face and a height and a hairstyle weren`t paying close enough attention. Heather had been swimming competitively since the age of twelve, and had the muscled arms and lithe build that came from her athletic choices. Holly, in contrast, was slim instead of sinewy, and often needed to ask her sister to open jars or lift boxes for her. They knew their differences inside and out, had been charting them since the day they began to deviate from their simple synchronicity. Let them be taken as identical in the eyes of the world. They could never fool each other, and that was all that mattered.

"I took this job because people scare the hell out of me."
Tory lifted an eyebrow. "How does that work?"
"I`m scared of you, but there`s a camera between us. That makes you safe. I talk to you, and the camera catches everything you say, and I can review it later, at my leisure, when there`s no pressure to say the right thing or react immediately."
"But don`t you have to do that while we`re talking for the camera?"
Olivia shrugged. "Sure. It`s just that you`re not talking to for-real Olivia when that`s happening. You`re talking to camera-Olivia, who is essentially fake and exists only so for-real Olivia can buy nice things."