The Rising Sea

THE SERPENT’S JAW

The gray submersible traveled slowly across an aquatic paradise. Sunlight filtered down from above. Kelp beds waved in the current. Fish of every conceivable size and shape darted about. Off in the distance, an ominous shadow loomed in the blue infinity; a huge but harmless whale shark, its mouth gaping wide as it strained the water for tiny clouds of plankton.

From the command chair in the nose of the submersible, Dr. Chen marveled at the stunning array of life around him.

“We’re approaching the Serpent’s Jaw,” a female voice said beside him.

Chen nodded at the information and kept his eyes on the world outside. This would be his last view of natural sunlight for a month and he wanted to savor it.

The submarine continued across the kelp bed until it gave way to a band of coral and then a V-shaped canyon. At first, the canyon was no more than a fissure, but it widened as it ran off into the distance, and from above resembled an open mouth.

The Serpent’s Jaw.

As they traveled out over the canyon, the seafloor dropped precipitously.

“Take us down,” Chen ordered.

The submersible’s pilot manipulated the controls with utter precision and the submarine, filled mostly with supplies, nosed down and descended into the steep-walled canyon.

Five hundred feet down, they lost the light. Nine hundred feet later, they found it again. Only, this time, it was artificial in nature and coming from a habitat anchored to a sidewall of the canyon.

Chen could make out the small living space and the stack of additional modules lined up beneath it. They went all the way to the canyon floor, where a tangle of pipes and tubes could be seen snaking into the ground.

“I trust you can handle the docking,” Chen said.

“Of course. Stand by.”

For the first time, Chen turned to study the pilot. She had wide, expressive eyes, smooth skin and plum-colored lips. It was a pretty face, but her designers hadn’t given her any hair and in places the mechanics of her operating machinery were on full display.

He could make out bones of titanium and polished gearing where the joints of each arm connected to her torso; tiny hydraulic pumps and servos along with bundles of wires that ran like arteries until they vanished beneath white plastic panels sculpted to look like human curves.

The body panels covered her chest, midsection and thighs. Similar panels covered her arms but gave way once again at her wrists. Her fingers were pure machinery; powerful and precise, made of stainless steel, with rubber tips to facilitate grasping.

As an engineer, Chen admired the mechanics of her form. And as a man he appreciated the attempt at human beauty. That said, he wondered why they’d given her such a pretty face, soft voice and attractive outer form without finishing the job. They’d left her stuck halfway between human and machine.

A pity, he thought.

He turned back to the view port as the submersible eased up against the docking collar, bumped it softly and locked on. With the docking confirmed and the seal in place, Chen wasted no time. He stood, grabbed his pack and unlocked the submersible’s inner door. The pilot neither looked at him nor reacted. She just sat, not moving and staring straight ahead.

No, he thought, not half human. Not quite.

Entering the habitat, Chen passed other slow-moving machines traveling on caterpillar tracks. Distant cousins of the submersible’s pilot, he thought. Very distant.

These machines were more like self-driving pallets crossbred with a small forklift. They would unload the supplies and equipment from the submersible and take them to the appropriate storerooms, all without a command from anyone at the station.

At the same time, other automatons would load the sub with the ore extracted from a deep fissure beneath the seabed.

Such a plain word for it. Ore. In truth, the material was unlike anything that had ever been mined before, an alloy trickling up from deep within the Earth, stronger than titanium, a third of its weight and imbued with other unique properties not found in any existing alloy or polymer.

He and the others — and there were very few others who knew of it — called the alloy Golden Adamant, or GA for short. The submerged mining facility had been constructed in secret to excavate it.

To keep that secret, and to maximize the station’s efficiency, it had been built to be almost fully automated. Only one human was stationed there at a time, directing the efforts of two hundred automated workers.

The machines came in all shapes and sizes. A few had humanoid form, like the submarine pilot; others were referred to as mermaids, since they combined human-like grasping arms and a spherical camera-filled “head” with a propulsion pack where a human swimmer’s legs would be.

Others looked like the classic ROVs of aquatic exploration, and still others resembled heavy machinery at a construction site. Most of the later models worked on the seafloor or within the deep borehole itself. All of them operating on batteries recharged by a compact nuclear reactor that had been repurposed from a Chinese attack submarine and secured in the lowest module.

On his first visit, Chen had been in absolute awe of the station. He’d spent time in every nook and cranny. His second posting had been exciting as well. But now he rarely left the upper level, the only section of the habitat truly designed for humans.

He arrived at “the office,” his home for the next thirty days. Inside, he found the man he was due to replace. Commander Hon Yi of the People’s Liberation Navy.

Hon Yi was packed and waiting, his duffel bag resting beside the door.

“I see you’re ready to go.”

“You’ll feel the same after another month down here with no one but machines for companions.”

“I find some of them interesting,” Chen said. “Our submersible pilot in particular. And some of the dive robots have expressive features. I understand they’re working on a full human replica to keep us company.”

Hon Yi laughed. “If they make her too real, you’ll be fighting over who should make dinner.”

Chen laughed with Hon Yi, but he wouldn’t have minded a robotic companion that looked human, providing they could eliminate the eerie dead stare that happened when the machines settled into an inactive mode.

“What’s our status?” he asked, getting down to business.

“I’m afraid the recovery is faltering,” Hon Yi said. “Worse than last month. Which, as you know, was worse than the month before.”

“And the month before that,” Chen added with a grimace. “It seems the yield is falling off a cliff.”

Hon Yi nodded. “I know how valuable this ore is. I know what you and the engineers say it can do, but if we don’t find more of it or a more efficient way to extract it, someone in the Ministry is going to be brought up on charges for spending all this money.”

Chen doubted that. The Ministry had endless money. And in this case they were partnering with the billionaire who’d developed the robots. He doubted either group would miss their pennies, but when he looked at the numbers on the computer console, he was surprised by how little of the Golden Adamant had been processed. “A hundred kilos? Is that all?”

“The vein is played out,” Hon Yi said. “But don’t think I’m going to tell our bosses that.”

The intercom crackled. A human-sounding voice, male this time, spoke. “TL-1 reporting. Deep-basin injectors ready. Harmonic resonators charged. Impact range, Z minus one hundred and thirty.”

Far below the station, the robots were getting ready for the next phase of the mining operation. By the sound of it, they were targeting the deepest section of the fissure.

Chen looked at Hon Yi. “You’ve gone to the depths.”

“Ground-penetrating sonar indicates the only remaining vein of ore runs straight down. If the operation is to continue, we must excavate the deep vein. The only other option is to shut down.”

Chen wasn’t sure about that. There were known dangers in mining too deeply.

“Shall I give the order?” Hon Yi asked. “Or do you prefer the honors?”

Chen held up his hands. “By all means, make it your order.”

Hon Yi pressed the intercom button and spoke the order in the specific manner in which they’d been trained to command the robots. “Proceed as scheduled. Overriding objective: maximize ore recovery and speed. Continue operation until ore recovery falls below one ounce per ton unless otherwise directed.”

“Confirmed,” the TL-1 replied.

A distant humming sound filled the station seconds later. It was a side effect of the mining. It was so constant when the operation was running that Chen knew he’d forget about it in a day or two, only to be reminded when the machines took a break to repair themselves, reevaluate the process or switch batteries.

“The station is yours,” Hon Yi said. He handed over the command keys and a tablet computer.

“Enjoy your ride to the surface,” Chen said. “It was sunny when I came down.”

Hon Yi grinned at the thought of sun, grabbed his duffel bag and hastened out the door. “See you in a month.”

Chen was left alone. He immediately looked around for something to do. Of course there were plenty of reports to read and paperwork to shuffle — they’d yet to build a robot to handle those chores — but he had plenty of time for all that and no wish to rush into the monotony.

He put the tablet computer down on the desk and walked over to the fish tank. Several types of goldfish lived in the tank: fantails, bubble eyes and one lionhead. Hon Yi had suggested they get a beta and put it in a separate tank on the shelf, since betas couldn’t live with other fish. But Chen had talked him out of it; there was enough solitude going on down there as it was.

Looking through the glass, Chen noticed that the fish were darting about the tank. They always became agitated when the excavation first resumed. To calm them, Chen picked up the shaker of food and sprinkled some in. As soon as the flakes hit the water, the fish raced to the surface to eat it.

Chen couldn’t help but smile at the irony. A tank within a tank. One kept fish alive in an air-dominated environment and the other kept him and Hon Yi alive in the depths of the sea. Both groups with nothing to do but stare out the window and eat. If the pattern held, he’d be ten pounds heavier when he returned to the surface.

Chen sprinkled in more food, but the fish stopped eating and went still without warning. All of them at the very same instant. Chen had never seen that before.

They drifted downward. Their fins weren’t moving, their gills were flat. It was as if they’d been stunned or drugged.

He tapped on the glass. Instantly, the fish began darting around, racing from one side of the tank to the other. They seemed panicked. Several of them slammed into the glass walls like bees trying to get through a window. One went to the bottom of the tank and began burrowing in the gravel.

As Chen stared, ripples formed on the top of the tank and the gravel at the bottom began to jump and dance. The walls of the habitat began to shake as well.

He stepped back. The vibration of the mining operation was growing louder. Louder than it should have been. Louder than he’d ever heard it before. Books and pieces of decorative coral began to vibrate on the shelf. The fish tank fell and smashed down beside him.

He pressed the intercom button. “TL-1,” he said, calling out to the command robot. “Cease mining operations immediately.”

TL-1 responded calmly and immediately. “Authorization, please.”

“This is Dr. Chen.”

“Command code not recognized,” the robot replied. “Authorization required.”

Chen realized instantly that robots were listening for Hon Yi’s voice. He had yet to log on the computer and replace Hon Yi’s authorization with his own.

He reached for the tablet computer and tapped the screen furiously. As he typed, a deep rumbling sound became audible, like boulders grinding against one another. The pounding grew louder and closer with terrible speed until something hit the station.

Chen was thrown to the floor and then the wall. Everything tumbled end over end. A jet of water burst through a torn seam in the metal, slamming him with more force than a fire hose. It broke bones and gouged flesh and crushed him against the wall as easily as a speeding truck would have.

In seconds, the module filled with water, but Chen was dead long before he would have drowned.

Outside the habitat, the submersible had just detached from the station when the shaking began.

Hon Yi heard the rumble through the walls of the sub. He saw the destruction coming from above as huge slabs of rock fell through the glare of the work lights higher up. At the same time, clouds of sediment were exploding upward from below.

“Go,” Hon Yi said to the pilot. “Get us out of here.”

The pilot reacted with mechanical efficiency but no true urgency.

The avalanche hit the top level of the station and sheared it from the rest of the structure, the impact sent debris raining down on the submarine.

Instead of waiting for the robot to sense the mortal danger it could never perceive, Hon Yi reached over and grabbed the controls. He tried to push the throttle to full, but the robot’s grip was unbreakable.

“Relinquish command.”

The robot let go of the controls and sat back impassively. Hon Yi pushed the throttle to full and turned the valve to blow the ballast tanks. The submersible accelerated and began to rise.

“Come on,” he urged. “Go!”

The sub pushed forward. A wave of pebbles hit the outer hull, sounding like hail. A fist-sized rock slammed against the canopy, chipping it. Larger stones hit the roof and dented the propeller housing.

Hon Yi attempted to guide the sub away from danger, but with the propeller housing bent, he couldn’t get the craft to move in a straight line. It turned, even as it accelerated, and wandered right back into the danger zone.

“No!” he shouted.

A second wave of tumbling debris hit the sub square on. The canopy shattered. A boulder crushed the hull like a tin can and the avalanche of debris drove the submarine downward, slamming it to the bottom of the Serpent’s Jaw.