Terminal Run

8

A little more than five hundred nautical miles east-northeast of the foamy spot in the sea where Piranha had vanished from the surface, the Atlantic was tossed in the wind of a storm that had rolled off the North American coast two days before. The sky was a leaden dark gray, the sea a darker blue punctuated by whitecaps as the wind whipped the tops of the waves. From horizon to horizon there was nothing but the clouds above, the sea below, and the wind between. No shorelines interrupted the seascape; no merchant ships’ running lights penetrated the drizzle. The clouds opened suddenly, the rain coming down in sheets, the sky darkening further, the raindrops barely visible on the surface of the running waves.

Below the surface of the stormy sea, the waves seemed less majestic. The noise was still a roar, but with the wind gone, it was a more muted sound. Light filtered down into the warm summer waters to a depth of fifty feet, and would have penetrated much deeper had it not been for the dimness brought on by the storm. The waves above could not be made out — the water was not that clear — but there was light to be able to see thirty feet in any direction. At fifty feet, the water’s temperature was still warm, the ocean filled with life, a fisherman’s dream, the light slightly dimmer. Deeper, a hundred feet beneath the waves above, the sound had calmed, the water was darker, the diffuse light from above dying steadily, perhaps only a five-foot radius discernible. At a depth of 150 feet, the ocean became much darker, but the sea life still crowded the environment and the water remained warm. But fifty feet deeper, in the complete darkness of the deeper sea, the water went from the balmy summer temperature suddenly to the refrigerated cold of the deep. This was the layer depth known to oceanographers since a thermometer had been lowered into the sea. The top two hundred feet of the vast Atlantic were stirred by the winds and the waves, the warmth added by the burning sun, the water warm enough to swim without a wet suit. But beneath the layer, as the light went out, the sea’s temperature fell to thirty degrees Fahrenheit, two degrees below the freezing point of freshwater, the salinity allowing the water to get even colder without turning into ice. From here to the ocean bottom two miles further down, the sea was uniformly frigid, the cold keeping much of the ocean’s swimming inhabitants away, the life that could survive the deep cold of a much different variety. At three hundred feet beneath the surface, the light was completely gone, the darkness profound, the same dark of a two-mile-deep mine shaft At this depth the noise from the waves above was gone, the sound bouncing off the layer above and reflecting into the warm water layer. The quiet was interrupted only by the occasional sound of the mournful howling of a whale, which could be 50 miles away or 350. Deeper still, six hundred feet beneath the waves, the weight of the heavy water above made the pressure immense, the force squeezing any surface at two tons over every square foot. Few ocean creatures could take the pressure, making the sea relatively empty. The cold, dark, silent, pressurized water waited.

The motion came before the sound. The water divided, driven by the force of something immense, an object, a rounded elliptical bullet that had soared quietly into the seawater and pushed the water aside as it silently and swiftly came into being. The thing continued, no longer an elliptical starting point but now a giant cylinder, fins protruding on either side, but still perfectly cylindrical, and now a slight rushing noise of its passage could be heard. The skin of the object was not rigid but sharklike.

The machine had no movements inside, no life, not even any light, just the silent hum of rotating machinery and pumped fluids. A trillion corridors carved in silicon admitted the rush of electrons at the speed of light. A cubic meter of human brain tissue immersed in cranial fluid listened and watched and smelled the data surrounding it. It watched the narrowband and broadband sonar arrays that reached out to the infinite reaches of the sea to hear the noises of manmade machinery. It watched the acoustic daylight imaging arrays that searched for close and distant contacts, using the ambient noise of the ocean as a sort of light. The disturbances in the ambient noise field were akin to the variations of a light field caused by an object, sensed not by an eyeball’s retina but by a flat electronic sensor wrapped around the girth of the moving object in the sea. The thing moved on, its computers and processors and brain tissue monitoring the outside and the inside of itself. One portion of the tissue’s action was to record a narrative of what was happening into a hardened sector of a computer called a history module for later use by the humans who had created the object. The stream of conscious thought might be considered the organism’s thoughts as it moved through the sea, but the creators called it something different: the Command and Control Deck Log, or the command log for short. It was this portion of the brain tissue that was most active at the moment as the metal object searched for another object.