Just one pair of shoes made a hollow drumming on the steel floor as a short, red-haired man and a tall, blonde woman walked side-by-side through tunnel 14-B of Aphrodite's Pearl. He wore cloddy black boots reminiscent of soggy streets even this far removed from such things, and she wore tight-fitting, rubber-soled slip ons that made no noise at all.
The man was a marine zoologist, a specialist in invertebrates, and a new arrival: far from satisfied to be pulled from his research at the behest of a single, VERY adamant, VERY cryptic email about 'emergencies' and 'further disclosure upon arrival' that bore several VERY sobering signatures. He had fought long and hard for the funding those cc's provided, and had thus boarded the little submarine that took him through what felt like hell, for what felt like weeks, with a wall between him and the pilot and no change of clothes. Till at last with a great deal of racket and rumbling, he arrived at the bottom. He thought of Dante. The woman had been there to meet him, and as they took the first three or four seemingly arbitrary turns, he could not help but shudder. He'd always been claustrophobic, and Aphrodite's Pearl was the prettier and more official name for what was not-so-fondly referred to as The Abyss. The 2027 earthquakes ripped the ocean a new one, so to speak, and the resulting feature was named Jupiter's Deep, an anomaly that put Challenger's Deep to shame. To get here at all had been a harrowing trip, dark and eerie enough to evoke the aforementioned religious thoughts. At some point all currents, light, and noise outside the vessel ceased, and the tick and whistle of the machinery became grossly loud in contrast as they fought the pressure mile by agonized mile. And then just that.... for hours.
Eleven and a half miles from sunlight, more a hole in the earth's mantle than a proper trench, it was jumped on almost as a trend in the beginning. Resources, fame, real estate: bunk, of course— and the trend quickly passed— but not before the world's richest had blown near a billion dollars in materials, vehicles and equipment and near two dozen lives in constructing this place.
The Abyss. A man-made complex of rigid steel tunnels partially embedded into the floor and side of the lowermost point of the Deep, abandoned and resumed no less than six times during its construction. A decade and a half the Abyss had existed, half laboratory and half hubris, initially supporting a crew of twoscore enthused researchers... which had dwindled to perhaps eight or ten stubborn souls by now, plus a pair of very necessary psychologists.
Because there was no oil. No magma, no new mineral worthy of mining. No new strain of jellyfish or squid to be named for someone with more stock shares than cells in his body. Nothing living could survive down here: so frigid, so lightless, so completely and constantly crushed by countless billions of tons of salt water... a geologist, maybe, could consider the huge hole a lifetime's joy for how it rotted inwards and downwards like a cavity in a tooth, like a tomb broken into from the top: but hardly a zoologist, and even less a tycoon. How many embittered jokes in his circle had compared it to Mars, for how barren it was, how costly it was to traverse, and how spitefully it seemed to delight in yielding up nothing at all? An unnerving lifelessness, compared to the world it just barely seemed part of. Bacteria, he'd heard. There were two or three stubborn strains of bacteria here, just in traces, and just as likely to have survived in lava, acid, or bleach. Some posited they had been brought here by the builders of the Abyss itself. Blind, invisible and silent, they alone were born and somehow found sustenance here.
Until now, it would seem.
He could hardly keep up, she was walking so fast. And it did not help that she was trying to lighten up the mood with altogether the wrong kind of humor. He gave a weak laugh at her deadpan sarcasm and wished he had been allowed the chance to drink before the trip down.
It was not enough to appease her: she was dedicated to the bit. The line between her eyebrows did not smooth even a fraction, and in fact she looked put out. She hugged her clipboard to her chest as she walked, glaring him down as if she expected an earnest response. Could she... no. Not funny. Not even a little. He stopped walking in nervous confusion, frowning at her.
