Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

On the Throne

Adam had once heard that it was impossible to swim in bubbling water. He didn't know where he had heard that rumor, but always assumed it had something to do with the air disrupting the water equivalent of air resistance. Birds fly by pushing down on the air which lifts them up, and dolphins swim in much the same way, but dolphins aren't birds so can't push against air thus making it impossible to swim in bubbling water.

It turns out that wasn't true, all the water was still present, for the most part, aside from the stuff that was being emitted as steam, so there was plenty of water to push off of, not that it mattered as his suit was so heavy he sank to the bottom anyway.

Adam was no scientist, a fact that he would always regret if he was being honest.

He had always loved science. When he was a kid he had subscribed to all of those space magazines, bought books on astronomy and anything else that caught his interest. When he was a kid he had wanted to become an astronomer or maybe an astrophysicist, but at the end of the day that's just not what he had been cut out for. He remembered crying once as a child when he struggled in math class knowing that physics was probably not in his future.

It wasn't that he couldn't do science. He did have what equated to a masters degree in orbital physics, but that had taken way more work than it probably should have.

At the end of the day he was no scientist. He was a grunt, a trigger puller, but he consoled himself by noting that scientists never got to do anything half as cool as he did. And that included hiding at the bottom of a boiling hot springs to avoid detection by a conclave of alien zealots as he tried to infiltrate their base to threaten their "prophet".

He pushed one step through the water, and then another.

The water around him wasn't exactly boiling, more like simmering, and enough light made it through the surface for his infrared vision to still be working.

He found himself in a strange underwater world.

It wasn't bare rock down here or mineral deposits but a lively ecosystem teaming with strange fish, a couple of those large crabs, and thousands of different kinds of plants. Of course, he wanted to be careful, somewhere around here was the source of the pool's heat, probably a natural vent into the planet's magma interior, and that was not something he was sure his suit could withstand. In fact it seemed unlikely.

Best to stay where he knew it was safe.

Boiling water probably didn't sound all that safe, but as far as Adam understood boiling water was always at the same temperature, assuming gravity and some other stuff was the same. Water has a boiling point at 100 C and 212 F, the boiling point of anything is the point at which a liquid transforms from its solid state into its gaseous state, and thus it cannot get hotter because if it did it would simply turn into vapor. Now if you put water into a pressurized container that changes things, or at least he sort of remembered hearing that, but he wasn't thinking about special cases.

All he knew is that he was safe3 as long as he stayed in the boiling water because the water was unlikely to get any hotter.

One of the large crabs walked past his feet and he watched it go with some interest. To say it was a crab would be a bit generous as it really didn't look anything like your average earth crab. It had several legs and a hard chitinous shell, but the general shape is where all the similarity seemed to end.

Another school of fish swam by to his left

Adam could feel their consciousness, it was sort of a strange experience, kind of just a general humming in telepathic space that conveyed basic wants and desires like hunger. Some species were smarter than others. For instance the crabs had a sort of general understanding of tool usage, but nothing that would be considered sentient. The fish had thoughts that were sort of hive mind-like, and the coral stuff, or whatever it was, at the bottom of the lake was so devoid of brain power that he couldn't even really make out the intention.