DEEP TROUBLE
Jonathan Maberry
I
It was built to never be found.
It had no official name.
It didn’t even have a real code name. Nothing that was ever devised by a committee or used in budget meetings. Certainly nothing on the Net. Back when there was a Net.
Now there was that big silence except for the propaganda flash-news. Theirs. Ours.
Nothing about the facility ever made it into those media bursts.
Not one word about what we built at 47°9' S 123°43' W. Aside from that, there’s nothing to see for thousands of miles. We built the facility near the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, which is the point on the South Pacific most distant from land. One of the reasons it can’t be found is no one would ever think to look there, and even if they did, why would they waste resources to search so vast an empty space of ocean? More to the point, why would they haul UUVs or manned DSRVs all that way and risk losing them in parts of the sea floor no one has ever bothered to map? After all, there is no strategic value to that part of the ocean. The war wrapped itself around the whole world, and the few skirmishes that took place in the nearest continents of Antarctica and South America were minor and of no real strategic importance.
So, no one ever found our facility.
I wonder how the war might have gone if they had.
II
My name is Thomas Hope. And, yes, the irony of my surname is not lost on me. It’s been a source of humor since college. More so since the war.
I was brought to the project in the war’s fourth year. After the Battle of Toronto. New York was still burning back then, and D.C. was six months away from becoming the glowing hole in the map that it is now.
I was still down in Bunker 182, on a research project for the Unified Nations Department of Defense when a couple of creepy feds in suits showed up. They took me to an interview room, locked the door and placed a cloister network in all the corners, around the door, and by the window. It was a new generation of that anti-intrusion tech, and it essentially put us in a bubble. Nothing we said could be heard by anyone.
The two agents were different genders and ethnicities, but there was something oddly uniform about them. Beyond the dark suits, white shirts and ties. Both had a somewhat sickly pallor—an olive complexion that was almost a faint green, as if they spent far too much time under fluorescent lights and none at all out in the sun.
“Dr. Hope,” said the Colombian, “thank you for agreeing to talk with us.” She gave her name as Agent Blanco, her partner was Agent Black. White and Black. Cute.
“Sure,” I said, and left it there. I learned long ago that the less you say to these types, the better.
“One of your early reports came to our attention,” said Agent Black.
“Oh?”
“It was the one you wrote for the class you took on Alternative Strategies for Extreme Responses.”
I almost smiled. “I took that class as a joke.”
They looked at me but did not smile. At all.
“That paper was definitely a joke,” I protested.
“We found it to be quite intriguing,” said Agent Blanco.
I did smile then, waiting for the punchline.
“Quite intriguing,” said Agent Black.
“Are you out of your fucking minds?” I said. Or maybe yelled. “It’s a purely hypothetical treatise on upping the game in an otherwise no-win scenario—”
“Like the current military situation,” said Blanco. The Unified Nations of the Americas and the Euro-Asian Grand Alliance are beating each other to death.”
“Sure, I read the news, but—”
“The death toll has not gone below one million deaths per week in three years,” said Black.
“Believe me, I know,” I said. “Half the guys I went to Harvard with are dead, or MIA. Or in some rad-burn ward or biohazard away-camp. Why do you think I applied to work here? But, guys, that paper is an intellectual exercise. I was exploring the ethics of extreme reaction in an otherwise no-win scenario. It has no basis in reality any more than if I suggested sacrificing to war gods like Ares or Xipe Totec, Agasaya, Cao Lỗ, or Nehit and . . .” I paused and studied their faces. “You do know that those are gods from dead religions, right? I mean mythological gods. Not actual historical figures?”
They had the kind of poker faces you only see with top level feds.
“Wait,” I said, “what the hell’s going on here?” I demanded. “There’s nothing in that paper that goes beyond the hypothetical. I mean . . . anyone can see that.”
“Unless there is,” said Blanco.
“Unless there is,” agreed Black.
III
There’s probably a joke in there somewhere. Something with a punch line. But I wasn’t laughing. Neither were Blanco and Black.
Actually, I can’t recall the last time I heard someone laughing.
A real laugh, I mean. One with good humor, innocence, a sense of shared lightness.
No. Try as I might, I really can’t.
“It’s just a myth,” I said. “Worse, it’s something some idiot dreamed up over a century ago. It’s not real. It’s fake.”
Blanco and Black stared at me for a five count.
“Or not,” said Blanco.
Black just smiled. One of those kinds of smiles feds give you when they know a lot more about something you don’t want to know any of.
I tried to compose an adequate response. By summoning all of my years of education, my high school captaincy of the debate team, and two PhDs, I did manage a rather hearty, “But . . . but . . . but . . .”
IV
The agents took me that afternoon. It was ostensibly by my choice, or perhaps a lack of a demonstrable objection. Frankly I was too shocked and scared and confused to object. I just went.
They didn’t take me back to my flat.
“Your stuff has been packed and forwarded to the ship,” said Blanco.
“Ship? Wait . . . what? You did that already?”
“We had faith that you would agree to accompany us, Dr. Hope,” said Black. “We took the liberty of sending a team to take care of things.”
I was angry, offended, and terrified in about equal measures, and it took a whole lot for me not to blow up at them. Fear kept it all clamped down. So, what I said was, “Aboard what, though?”
Their answer was a matching set of bland and uninformative smiles.
Their Buzz was a killer. A late model hard-shell jetlift with some kind of max-thrust package. It lifted from the parking lot with an almost eerie silence, swung around above the faux Raman noodle shop that was the cover over our bunker in Chula Vista, and then shot like an arrow through the skies toward the Camp Pendleton joint-use base. The trip should have taken half an hour, but there was no traffic slowing us and the AI pilot had the pedal down. We landed on a pad surrounded by automatic sentry guns as well as a foot patrol.
During the short walk from the Buzz to the sea transport, I could see troops running in formation as their sergeants called cadence. It was disheartening to see how many of the soldiers were too young for this, but the Joint Presidents had agreed to lower the draft age to fifteen, and there was talk of going to fourteen if we kept losing battles like Anchorage and Seattle. Right now, despite the preponderance of AI drones, smart-tanks, Boston Dynamics mecha-wolves, and orbital missile platforms, we had a standing army of over seventeen million. Sounds like a lot, but it’s not nearly enough. Not by a long mile.
Nobody actually said that we were losing the war. Not out loud. But there was no other way to count the numbers. The EAGA had forty-three million human troops. Our only edge was better AI and drones, but now that Germany, Korea, and Japan had joined their side, they had all those tech geniuses cranking out generation after generation of mechanized combat machines and next-gen exoskeletons. And they had the bodies. India and China alone were bad enough, but now the Novyy Sovetskiy—the New Soviet Union—was edging out of neutrality and was almost certainly going to join EAGA.
We were, to put it in precise technical terms, fucked.
I say all this because it’s important to understand how desperate we were. This was the Fourth World War, and the second in forty years. The world had taken severe damage during WWIII but had just begun to show signs of recovery. Fewer superstorms, only eight F-5 tornados in the States, and some yards gained in repairing the bigger of the four ozone holes.
World War Four, though . . .?
Fuck.
There was no trace of either side giving a cold, wet shit about the environment, the ozone layer, the air quality, or anything else except winning.
What was that old line from Albert Einstein? “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
So, he was off by one war. If we do manage to survive this one and if there’s another, it will be between retro cavemen bashing each other with clubs. No doubt. Earth is resource poor, diseased, battered, suffering from existential PTSD, and probably past fixing.
Yeah, proud to be a citizen.
I boarded the sea transport, the USS Whipsaw, which was one of the newer expeditionary fast transport craft. This generation of EPFs could skim over the waves at a mind-boggling sixty-four miles per hour. But it’s a teeth-rattling and spine-jarring trip, and we had three hours of it before they handed what was left of me and my possessions over to the crew of the USS Hagfish, a Tate-class fast attack sub.
The Hag, as she was known by the crew, went deep and stayed deep for a long damn time. Thousands of miles. It was a boat designed for combat, not for comfort, and we spent weeks in that metal coffin. Luckily claustrophobia isn’t one of my fears. I have plenty of others, though, and discovering that some of them were valid was no damn joke at all.
We reached an island that did not exist.
Well, I mean it did, but it was ten years old, a spike of land shoved up by tectonic activity miles beneath the surface. In an area where the depth should have been a consistent three miles, it’s staggering to contemplate the force of nature required to lift an entire mountain range from the seabed and push the highest peak ninety feet above the surface. The other peaks were stacked down in a winding row, and most were deep enough that shipping would be safe. If, in fact, any ships ever came out here. Which they did not.
You see, this spot is truly a pole of inaccessibility. It doesn’t lead from anywhere to anywhere along any sensible current, wind pattern, or line of convenience. No one crosses it on the way to some even moderately useful destination.
Except now it was itself, the destination.
V
I had a lot of time to think on that trip.
Maybe too much time.
The paper I’d written back in college had started out as a joke. Something I proposed to my fellow grad students during a very drunken night at The Thirsty Scholar on Beacon Street. Not everyone at our table was familiar with the source of my proposal, but enough of them were that the idea caught fire. We handed it back and forth as the beers and shots came and went. By the time I staggered out to find an autodrive cab, I had the whole thing in my head. It seemed both funny and clever.
In the morning, nursing an epic hangover but still enthused, I began wondering if it would be right for the Alternative Strategies for Extreme Responses class. Our pending assignment was a bit of a challenge. War was already brewing ever since Europe entered into a union with Asia, resulting in a substantial reduction in trade with the US and its own partners in North and South America. We’d already formed the Unified Nations of the Americas, with the kinds of trade deals that were a natural part of such an agreement. EAGA—the Euro-Asian Grand Alliance—was really no different, but how many times has the human race needed a truly inarguable reason to go to war. It’s always land, resources, money, or religion.
The assignment was to take a worst-case scenario of such a conflict, imagine the costs and penalties for losing a world war of that kind, and propose a Hail Mary play that would completely change the conflict’s dynamics, more than level the playing field, and have the effect of a total cultural shock to the other side. Theoretical assignments like that usually result in a kind of Fantasy Football for warring nations. I read some of the other papers, and there were things like using weaponized Yersinia pestis; using a time machine to bring General Patton, Alexander the Great, or Hannibal into the mix; or introducing Godzilla or the Transformers. Stuff like that. And mine was no different.
Or, it should have been no different.
When I asked how in the hell the military ever got hold of my paper, let alone read it, Blanco and Black seemed to suddenly go deaf. When I tried the same question on the captain of the Hagfish or the facility’s liaison who was to conduct me down to the underwater platform, both played the “you’ll be briefed at the appropriate time” card.
And so, still terribly confused and more than a little terrified, I sat in the sub as it descended.
VI
The island was not where we were heading, though.
The military had wasted no time bolting together some prefab units that had been built for general undersea research but had been abandoned when the war started. Even so, it was impressive as hell. After a night of clinging to the island with the devoted passion of someone who’d spent far too long in a submarine, I finally got some sleep and was more or less human in the morning.
A smaller submersible took me down below the sun-kissed waves into the crystal clear Pacific waters. We left the sunlight and blue sky behind soon, though, and descended into the deeps. Darkness sooner swirled up around us, almost as if the sub was floating down into a sea of liquid shadows. The effect was highlighted by the big LED screens inside, which gave the illusion of picture windows. High-def cameras designed to work in ultralow light allowed me to see everything.
And what I saw took my breath away.
The mountain range that had been thrust upward from the sea floor was not in any way normal. That was obvious from the beginning. Gloriously or terrifyingly obvious, and it wasn’t at all easy to decide where I landed on that.
The upper part of the range seemed composed of a mix of porous volcanic rock blended with chunks of granite. But very quickly it became apparent that the granite was not natural. Instead of sections of living rock ripped to pieces by the incalculable forces of tectonic movement, there was a strange and unnerving sense of order to what I saw.
First there seemed to be towers. That’s the only word that fit. Massive spikes of stone whose pattern was too orderly, with precise angles and the suggestion of arches. However these were so heavily encrusted with coral, barnacles and other sea growth that the rational mind kept wanting to assign a natural cause to them. And it called to mind other such finds, such as the submerged structures discovered off the coast of Cuba at the beginning of the new millennia. Sonar images showed pictures of great symmetrical and geometric structures covered an area of almost two square kilometers, and at a depth of about seven hundred meters. The skeptics—and there are always legions of those vying to be talking heads and voices of reason on news programs and documentaries—said that the site could not be what it looked like. That it was too deep to be a lost city and moreover far too old, because for any city of human design to have sunk that low in the water would have taken at least fifty thousand years. This, despite ancient tales passed down by Maya and local Yucatecos of an ancient island that vanished beneath the waves.
And in the early 2000s, off the west coast of Bimini, side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiling revealed a line of rectangular blocks thirty meters down. It’s similarity to the Cuban structures sparked a lot of debate about the discovery of a lost civilization, possibly even Atlantis. The skeptics galloped in to insist that they were merely towers of natural rock that collapsed in a straight line. And yet it was a very straight line, and the blocks were unusually—some might say inarguably—orderly. And these, too, were dated to about ten thousand years ago.
However the similarities between these ruins paled into meaninglessness as the sub went down. The pilot turned on powerful floodlights that revealed great shapes that no wave or erosion could possibly have formed.
There, stuck into the slopes of the newly formed mountain range were blocks of colossal size. They were astonishing—far bigger even than those found at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or the massive blocks discovered at the rock quarry near the Temple of Jupiter in Lebanon—the largest of which was over one thousand tons. None, in fact, of history’s megalithic structures came close to the sheer scale of what lay broken and tumbled along the slopes of this new mountain range. And that scale was difficult to comprehend. The mind rebels of things on that scale. Sanity teeters on the edge of belief because something that monstrously huge plunged one’s own sense of self and worth into the infinitesimal. The first astronauts to do an orbit around Jupiter must have felt as I did then. We are not prepared for anything like this. Some of the blocks were fully three-quarters the height of the Empire State Building.
And as we descended, the scale increased.
There were other shapes, too, and I became aware that what I beheld was not a single structure but a city.
A city.
And such a city!
The shapes and order of the buildings spat in the eye of Euclidian, spherical, or hyperbolic geometry. It insisted on existing in its own warped set of mathematics. And in doing so offended the eye and the mind because of some frightening inconstancy. A dish-shaped rock viewed one moment seemed to lose its concavity when view from another angle, and became convex so thoroughly that the beams of light traced it as such. Pillars were immutably solid until whale sharks swam through them, but beams of light were stopped at the spaces through which they passed.
I began hyperventilating, and the first mate rushed to my aid and fitted me with an oxygen mask. He even held my hand as if I was a child awakened by thunder.
“Take it slow, Doc,” said the mate. “It hits everyone like that the first time.” He paused and looked at the cyclopean walls and arches. He had that same greenish sickly pallor as Blanco and Black, and now I wondered if it was an actual medical symptom shared by those who had witnessed what I just saw. No doubt my own complexion was likely that of sour milk. “Second, third, fourth, twentieth time, too. And don’t think closing your eyes will change it. It’s always going to be in your head.”
I looked at him as he said this and saw that his eyes were a bit too wide and unblinking, and his face had a greasy sheen of fear sweat on it. I slowly withdrew my hand, mumbling a vague thank you. In truth, though, he scared me. The man looked more than rattled. He looked like he’d stared into Nietzsche’s abyss and had gotten the full stare in return. That’s what I saw in his face and I did not doubt that I was right. Instead of becoming familiar with what lay outside, he was being driven mad from constantly having to see the thing.
And I recalled a similar look in the eyes of the captain.
We spoke no more until the sub reached the platform.
VII
In any other moment in my life I would have been absolutely dazzled by the platform. It was a wonder of modern mechanics. It had lovely curved lines and was brilliantly lit—but after what I’d just witnessed I barely registered something ordinary man had constructed.
The sub docked, and there was some business with pressure adaptation and medical exams. It might have been part of a dream, though, because now my only reality was what lay beyond. Even with the windowless steel walls I could feel it there. Not merely the stunning size of it but all of the thousands of unanswered questions that crowded through my brain like gophers trying to flee a flooded den. My thoughts clawed and scrambled and fought with one another because everything on the other side of the wall was simply not possible.
Blocks of that size could not have been quarried by human hands. There was no way. And it recalled to my mind that many of the megalithic structures we already knew about—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Sphinx, the Catal Huyuk, and others—were built by methods that modern science has yet to understand.
But this . . .
As a scientist it is against my faith in empiricism to use the word “impossible” to describe anything I can see or which can be measured. And yet . . . I looked upon something that even the most extreme hypothesis could not begin to explain.
And it was here.
Here.
Goddamn it. Here.
I wish I had never written that fucking paper. I wish that I’d been a more sober student at the time and not indulged in juvenile pranks of that kind on my professors. The fact that it was well written and supported by as many sources and quotes as was possible did not help. It had been written as a joke.
Just a joke.
And now I—along with every other thinking creature on this planet—were the butt of a greater joke.
When the doctors were done with their routine examinations and I was left alone to get dressed in one of the facility’s nondescript blue jumpsuits, I found I could not summon the energy to dress. I sat there in my underwear, fingers knotted together in my lap, and stared at the wall. Seeing the thing as clearly in my mind as if looking through a porthole.
“God almighty,” I breathed, offering a prayer to a god in whom I have long since ceased to believe. “God save my soul.”
VIII
They gave me time to recover without asking if I needed it. That alone said much about their own reactions—initial and ongoing.
Then an officer came to escort me to the main observation deck. There were two people there—a scientist and a soldier.
The former was Lieutenant General Malcolm Spears, who introduced himself as the Defense Department’s director of special strategies. I didn’t like the sound of that title one little bit. The latter was Dr. Carole Cantu, and she did not name her field of expertise. That worried me, too.
And both looked sick and greenish and haunted. I couldn’t blame them.
“Tell me this is all a dream,” I said.
Spears gave a thin smile. “Of a kind, I suppose. I mean, given the state of the world we’re all living in a nightmare.”
“You’re not joking,” said Cantu bitterly. “Weekly death tolls greater than the total losses in any given war. An environment past the point of repair . . .”
“Sure,” I said, “but this?”
We all looked at the massive flatscreens. Whatever cameras were feeding the image had to be hundreds or even thousands of meters back from the city in order to show so much of it. Tiny dots that I realized were submarines drifted through its sunken avenues.
“I can’t believe you found a city,” I said.
“The city,” said Spears. “And we found it because of your paper.”
“But it was a joke.”
“Or,” said Cantu, “it was inspired.”
I shook my head, but she wasn’t joking. “You’re serious? I was drunk and passed out and dreamed it. I woke up and searched for stuff online and just borrowed it from an old short story. That’s all. I never believed it was real.”
“You dreamed it,” said Spears.
“You dreamed it,” said Cantu.
In exactly the same way.
“It can’t be real,” I protested. “It’s from fiction.”
Cantu looked at me with large, watery, unblinking eyes. “The writer dreamed it, too.”
“No,” I said.
They both smiled at me, then Spears said, “I suppose you’re wondering why we brought you here.”
“Of course. I’m a structural engineer and physicist. This is . . . so far beyond me.”
“You dreamed it,” repeated Cantu.
“Okay, but it was me drunk. It’s not . . .”
“He sent the dream to you,” said Spears.
I froze.
“What . . .?”
“You were given an incredible gift,” said Cantu. “Others received it. Writers, artists, filmmakers. Many others.”
“Most dismissed it,” said Spears. “Many went mad. A few turned it into art.”
They looked at each other and smiled identical grins. Very large, with lots of wet teeth.
“The hell’s going on here?” I demanded, backing up a step.
“Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn,” said Spears.
Now the whole moment seemed to freeze.
“What did you just say?”
“You were given the greatest gift,” said Cantu. “You, at least, did not waste it. Your paper was included in the Department of Defense database along with all of your school records. We found it while doing a database search. And . . . we were so happy. Somehow the fiction and the images and the movies were so thoroughly buried in the arts that they were dismissed.”
“Hidden in plain sight,” said Spears. “Forest for the trees.”
“But yours was there to be found,” said Cantu. “As it was found.”
Spears said something under his breath that seemed to be all consonants. An ugly word that belonged in fiction. Not in the real world.
“This is a fucking joke, right?” I cried.
“You were given the gift,” said Cantu.
“Will you please stop saying that. It wasn’t a gift. It was just a—”
“A prophecy,” they both said in perfect and horrible synchronicity. “And we honor you for it.”
“Your name will be spoken with reverence for ten thousand thousand years,” said Spears.
“I—”
“Statues will be erected of you,” said Cantu. “Thomas Hope, the great dreamer.”
“No . . .”
“A saint of the oldest faith whose whisper has been heard by the Dreamer.”
“No, this isn’t about me, it’s about winning the war.”
They gave me that bright-eyed grin.
“The war doesn’t matter,” said Spears. “It’s the last war anyway. Who cares who thinks they won?”
“What are you talking about? Of course we care. How could we—”
“The Dreamer will end all war,” said Cantu.
I stabbed a finger toward the drowned city. “Are you out of your minds? You think that will bring peace?”
They looked at me in puzzlement, then they spoke together again.
“Peace? The Dreamer doesn’t care about that. It’s a human concept. He brings an end to your wars, your hunger, your pollution, your intolerance and hatred. All of that ends now. It’s gone.”
I kept backing away. “You’re crazy.”
“No,” they said, “we’re dreaming.”
Beneath my feet the whole facility suddenly shook. I crouched down, terrified, as sparks exploded from computers, the overhead lights flickered wildly, and the steel walls buckled with screams of torture metal.
“The war is over,” said Spears, his head cocked to one side as if listening. “All war is over.”
“We need to get to shelter.”
“We are sheltered in the arms of the Dreamer,” said Cantu.
Then they both burst into tears. Not of pain or fear of the impending structural disaster. They clasped their hands in front of their faces and wept for joy. Sobbed with an exultation more profound than anything I have ever seen. It was so intense that it horrified me. Their eyes were so round and glaring. Their lips and teeth wet. Their skin an even more pronounced green.
“He wakes!” they cried. “The long dream is over.”
There was another massive shock to the facility. On the screen, I could see massive towers falling, impossibly huge stones cracking apart. Mud and silt exploded upward and the whole core of the city seemed to burst apart in strange slow motion. Only it wasn’t slow, it was simply that the city was so massive.
Then I saw something move within the crumbling city.
It rose. Unbearably titanic. And I knew—knew—that it was not more debris. This was something alive. And it rose, shaking off the thousand-ton blocks as if they were fleas. It rose and rose and rose and rose and filled the ocean. It was a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.
And even as I thought those words, I knew that I had read them years ago, in a short story. Not my words, nor maybe even the words of the author of that story. Or, perhaps, he had in fact dreamed them, too.
As I had.
God help me.
It rose and towered over everything, and nothing that beheld it could comprehend its sheer size and power.
Power.
Cantu and Spears were on their knees, laughing, beating their hands together, striking their own faces, tearing at their clothes in an unholy ecstasy of love and joy. Around the big room I saw soldiers, sailors, and technicians doing the same. And I heard their voices crying out in prayers. Not in English, or Spanish, or any language made to fit on the human tongue.
“Iä! Iä! fhtagn ph’ ah,” they shrieked.
The dream is over.
I knew what those words meant.
I knew.
Because I was shouting them, too.
Iä! Iä! fhtagn ph’ ah.
Iä! Iä! fhtagn ph’ ah.