Ancient night. A cold place that has never known the sun. In the years that took man from the trees and gave him speech, this trench, this deep wound, has remained undisturbed. Nothing but slow currents and slower still, the grind of continental plates. Seven miles of dark water stand above these rocks. Seven empty miles.
“Careful now, you’re getting close.”
“Like I’m going to crash it.”
The Pandora rides the gentlest of ocean swells. Occasionally the waters slap against her iron hull, the only sound on a midnight ocean, starlit and calm.
“Careful!”
“Yeah right. Because I’m really going to drive my baby into the seabed after seven fucking hours getting her down there”
In a small cabin crowded with PCs, printers, spare propulsion units, power cells and a robotic arm that has never worked, two men peer at a monitor showing live video feed.
“OK, I can see the rocks now. Going neutral.” Kim Green looks too young for the beard sprouting from his chin.
Seven miles of fiber-optic sheathed in buoyant polyester joins his terminal to Prometheus. A delicate umbilicus pulsing with images and other less tangible data. The robotic mini-sub maneuvers a yard above the floor of the ocean trench.
“Registering good telemetry.” Daniel McKay is older, a solid thirty. Earnest, reliable.
In the ancient night the Prometheus glides over a sterile landscape of black rock. The narrow beam of the nav-lamp scans the seabed.
“We should try the flood lights.” Kim thinks his beard makes him look like a young Cat Stevens. It doesn’t.
“Main lights are charged for go.” Daniel flicks two red switches on the console before him.
The Prometheus moves through cold still waters. Its electric engines whirr. In the deep places there are things older than man, things that cannot be forgotten and so are better left unknown. In a street at the heart of Prague’s old town a witch-woman moans in her sleep. An old woman in the East End of London turns over tarot cards, Death, Tower Struck By Lightning, The Fool. A mystic in New York bleeds from her tear ducts and starts to scream.
The Prometheus chugs along its course. In the ship above, Kim reaches for his coffee. He sips from a bitter cup.
“Lights are go.” He types the code.
In the darkest place a thousand watt blub explodes with a white blindess of photons. Capacitor banks sigh as they release their charge. The shadows race away and a new day is brought to the depths. The first day.
“Neat.” Kim is pleased.
Over a forest in the Ukraine a vast flock of starlings starts to die. Their bodies fall in a light rain, by the hundred, and then by thousands in a deluge that paints the ground black.
“Keep recording.” Daniel stands and stretches his back. “Gotta go to the head.” He’s learned the nautical phrases already. Two weeks at sea and he’s Mr Sailor.
Kim watches his monitor whilst Daniel sets off along the central corridor to answer nature’s call. At the helm the Pandora’s captain smokes a cigarette and watches the compass spin.
The harsh light from the floods paints the seabed in stark shadows. Prometheus glides on, past a yawning sink hole.
Kim reaches for the joystick. In Berlin twin sisters, blonde and twelve years old, go into epileptic fits. Neither will recover. In Vatican City father Alphonse Riticio notices the holy water boiling in the fonts at the Basilica.
