Dark Transit

Prologue

The power and heat had died thirty minutes ago. The space rapidly cooled to the freezing temperature of the ocean floor. Inside, under ineffective thermal blankets, four figures shivered, their breathing marked by vapor clouds, clouds invisible in the coal mine darkness.

The youngest, a first class midshipman in the U.S. Navy, stopped shivering as he began to lose consciousness, barely aware of the blurred border between wakefulness and a coma. In the carbon dioxide-infused compartment, he had experienced a clawing drowsiness dragging him into sleep, and he had fought it as long as he could, too cold and frightened of dying to be able to think of anything but the next breath, but soon he slipped further into the grogginess and sleep came for him.

As he lay there, his heartbeat slowed and his breathing became shallower, and it would not be long before there would be breathing no more. And not long after, suddenly he was alert and awake, standing — no, more correctly, floating—ten feet away from his body, watching himself and the other three people he’d tried to rescue complete their last moments of life.

Perhaps the oddest thing about existing apart from his body was that it didn’t feel strange at all. He felt a calmness and a deep focused awareness unlike any reality he could ever remember. It couldn’t be described except to say that everything he’d ever experienced, wondered about, thought about, it all now made sense. There was a feeling that all was right with the universe, that everything that had happened and would happen was meant to happen. He could feel himself somehow fitting into a place where he was supposed to be.

He looked through the darkness, sensing the equipment inside of the deep submergence vehicle that he had climbed into as the floodwaters rose to the hatch coaming. His body lay beside the other three bodies. He floated closer, looking at the other three, seeing their heartbeats and the functions of their lungs, watching their brain activity slow. His own body seemed to struggle for life, a slight twitch kicking at the blanket, but then it went still again.

He widened his awareness and moved outside the hull of the deep submergence vehicle into the free-flood space between the deep submergence vehicle and the hull of the stricken submarine Piranha, which lay at a list on the rocky bottom almost two miles beneath the surface. He faded farther back away from the sunken submarine and saw the frantic robotic arms of a submersible diamond plasma arc cutting the two-inch thick high-yield steel of the hull, melting it away as if it were butter. The lettering on the side the submersible read BERKSHIRE — HMS EXPLORER II. His spirit moved inside the submersible and saw the sweating operator of the robot arm. He could read the man’s thoughts easily — near panic and empathy for the trapped submariners inside of the Piranha. He wanted to tell the man it was too late, but not to worry, that there was nothing to fear about dying.

A moment later a patch of steel was lifted away from the hull, the flickering lights of the submersible revealing the curving hull of the deep submergence vehicle nestled inside the submarine. The submersible worked frantically releasing the vehicle, then began an emergency ascent to the surface. He went with it, floating outside the DSV as it rose out of the black depths of the cold Atlantic. The sea became lighter as they approached the surface, eventually the form of the undersides of the waves visible, shimmering and silvery. The DSV and the submersible broke the surface and broached. He could see the overcast and the heavy rain, the DSV and the rescue submersible bouncing in the waves in the winds of the storm. Strong crane arms reached out over the water, cables and robot grappling arms pulling the DSV up to the deck, the submersible after it.

Back inside the deep submergence vehicle he could see that all four people prone on the deck were in cardiac fibrillation, their body functions beginning to shut down. Rescue techs in air-fed facemasks rushed in and pulled out the bodies, gurneys waiting for them, the medics rushing them into the ship.

The gurney with his body arrived in an operating theater, where it became surrounded by doctors, nurses, corpsman and equipment. He watched a monitor showing one last feeble pair of heartbeats, then a flatline. The corpsman paddled the midshipman’s chest, shocking him to try to restart his heart, but it didn’t respond after seven attempts. The lead physician shared resigned glances with the corpsman holding the electrical paddles and shook his head. A nurse snapped off the monitor, its humming alarm going quiet.

The doctor picked up a clipboard, scribbling into it the time of death.

“What’s his name?” he asked. The nurse found the top of the patient’s coveralls that they’d unzipped to shock his heart. Above his left pocket, block letters of his nametag spelled MIDN. A. PACINO. The dead body had belonged to Midshipman First Class Anthony Pacino.

At the moment of the first paddle shock, on the other side of the operating theater, a black dot appeared and grew wider, opening like the petals of a flower, until it formed an opening resembling the end of the Horn of Plenty, except this funnel-like opening was black and perhaps thirty feet wide, and where it was wider than the height of the overhead, the reality of the structure of the operating room faded away, the black object more real than what almost seemed like a projection of the room around him.

The black funnel led into a long tunnel, which he could tell because the undulating walls of the tunnel seemed to be made of dark thunderclouds that lit up occasionally with lightning, the flashing giving the gloom inside the tunnel shape and form. The funnel pulsed as if trying to get his attention, but he turned away from it and floated down the hall as the corpsman who had tried to revive Pacino told Pacino’s step-mother, Colleen, that the attempt to save his life had failed. That Midshipman Pacino was dead. Colleen swept her raven-black hair off her shoulder, wiped tears from her face, and asked to see Pacino’s body. She was led down to the passageway outside the operating room where they had wheeled Pacino, a white sheet placed over him while someone had been sent for a body bag.

Colleen reached for the sheet covering the body’s face, but before her fingers reached the linen of the sheet, the black funnel pulsed again, and this time the spirit belonging to the body who had been named Anthony Pacino was pulled into the tunnel made of thunderclouds.

He floated into the dimness of the tunnel and felt himself move away from the opening, gliding into the depths of the tunnel. He watched as the light from its opening got farther way with each moment until the rescue ship’s reality completely faded from view and the only thing that existed was the tunnel, its storm cloud walls lighting up eerily every few seconds. For the longest time, he felt like he was absolutely stationary but the tunnel was moving around him, pulling him in deeper. He continued floating for what seemed hours, seemingly covering miles. The tunnel extended infinitely in each direction. Finally, after a long time, the tunnel stopped moving around him and he floated at a stationary point, and it came to him that he was waiting for something.

Then he heard the sounds. Voices. No, not sounds and not voices, but thoughts that communicated. They were indistinct and the words or ideas couldn’t be made out, just that a conversation was happening on the other side of the tunnel wall where he floated. He remembered nights as a young child, lying in the back seat of his father’s sedan at night after an evening of his parents’ socializing, when he’d lie sleepily on the seat on the way home and he could hear his parents talking or arguing, their words blurry but their meaning clear from the tone of voice each used.

Here in the tunnel, he could hear one dominating voice, louder than the others and deeper. There were what seemed half a dozen others talking with the deep-voiced one, their voices softer and more feminine. The father figure, if he could be called that, was insisting on something, but the feminine beings were arguing together against his intentions. The words became clearer until he could understand the point of the argument going on, some of it lost on him, but he gathered that the females wanted to admit him to the other end of this tunnel, to what they called “the world,” which seemed strange to him, since he had just left the world — or perhaps that was just his world and the one on the other end was a different one. Then it came clear to him that the destination was to these beings the real world, which would make the one he’d just departed what? A virtual world?

The females insisted that the life that had been chosen for Anthony Pacino was too hard for him, that the suffering of it would crush him. The father figure roared his response, which seemed to be that Pacino had to go on, that the plan — they said it as if it were capitalized, The Plan—needed Pacino and what Pacino would do in his future.

The argument seemed stalemated until the father figure made a picture appear on the wall of the tunnel, with images that Pacino could see, and he imagined that the arguing entities on the other side of the tunnel wall could see it too. It was more than a two-dimensional projection. He could see it in full three dimensions, but there was more — he could sense the thoughts and emotions of the person in the projection. It was an image of Pacino in scuba gear holding on to the hatch of the submarine Piranha. He was locking out of the ship and about to ascend to the surface only thirty feet overhead to rendezvous with a boat that would take him to shore, because he had been ordered evacuated from Piranha because the submarine was sailing into a combat zone and had search-and-destroy orders for the hacked and compromised robot drone sub that was searching for her. Now watch, the father figure commanded. You watch this.

From the darkness of the ocean an object could be seen traveling absurdly fast until it impacted the submarine’s hull forward of Pacino and a tremendous explosion shook the ship, and as the blast was rocking Pacino, another speeding object sailed in and exploded a hundred feet aft of Pacino. He gripped the side of the hatch desperately as the shock waves rolled through him, and he could hear the thoughts of his past self, thinking it was a miracle that the explosions hadn’t killed him. They had, however, blown off his scuba mask and pulled the regulator out of his mouth.

He watched his past self look upward at the waves overhead and he could hear his thoughts that he could just push up and away from the torpedoed submarine and swim to safety. But then the figure hanging on to the hatch looked back down into the hatchway. The youth seemed to freeze for a long instant, then he looked at the surface again and shook his head. He purposefully pulled himself back into the submarine’s escape chamber and pulled the hatch shut after him.

The male spirit stopped the movie, or whatever this image was. Did you see that? Did you see what he did? He didn’t try to save himself. He deliberately swam back into a sinking submarine to try to help his friends! Or to die with them! He knew what he was doing the entire time! Do you seriously think The Plan continues without this soul living his full lifetime? Do you?

The female entities were quiet for some time, and then one softly said the word, agreed, and suddenly he was moving again in the tunnel, the projection screen fading behind him, his motion back in the direction of where he’d started, his velocity increasing until the tunnel walls sped by him dizzyingly, until he could see the circle of white light that opened into the rescue ship’s passageway, and he came to a stop floating a few feet behind Colleen as she reached for the sheet covering his dead body’s face. As her hand moved to the sheet, he suddenly was pulled into his body so fast that the shock of it made him tremble and he opened his earthly eyes to find himself staring directly into Colleen Pacino’s light brown eyes. He blinked and coughed weakly.

“Medic!” Colleen screamed. “Doctor! Midshipman Pacino is alive!”