No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness which creates it. So, to overcome his anxiety, Asan modifies his mindset. An easy enough thing to do upon earth. Far more challenging once entering, and operating from within, the planet.
Fear sets when the Plinko, so prompted, proceeds through the machinations sealing him within the submersible. After cracking the shell of the Atlantic and beginning their descent? He panics. Monk doesn’t notice. He’s too busy working their way through given waters into an unknown wilderness. This crazed, inverted, cosmos.
We see ourselves being translated into forms of information. How this idea holds no greater truth than when, a few minutes later, and however many meters deeper, Asan realizes that he, as vessel, is no different than a box of rain. A puddle upon the ocean floor. He breathes easy.
A fish, negatively buoyant, floats in front of a portal. Another, part black, part silver, flashes on and off, its bioluminescence fantastic and mysterious. Here, eyes often evolve to become so large as to be the creature’s dominate feature. Organs that grow not as sunlight’s consequence, but from the broader color range that doesn’t exist except as the result of bioluminescence.
They drift through the ocean. Asan is convinced that arriving upon the bottom of everything will yield new life, and that this life will shape our understanding of living. He’s certain. The danger, the investment in going where no human has ever been before? Totally worth it.
Even at less impressive depths there is so much life. Lanternfish. Anglerfish. Strange mollusks. Huge starfish. Large animals, these, that assume in appearance a human skeleton’s ribcage. After his first dive Asan had witnessed more life forms than during twenty-seven years spent walking the earth’s surface.
Atop the Plinko are sets of infrared lasers. These illuminate life. Down here, most of the creatures are whacked. Like underwater bats they flit with precision but no grace, their brains scientific instruments orchestrating wild abilities to echolocate. The creatures use red to survey and communicate. This isn’t the Discovery Channel, though; they aren’t chumming. Strange, how exciting it is to witness nothing. Onboard a dozen monitors, and each detects the same darkness. For now, it’s watch nothing and wait.
They continue their descent. They plunge through the various depths of the ocean’s identified zones towards data which reveals something different. All of it black. The bright white lights atop the rig? The tracers? Monk kicks these on before slowing to make contact. This light is beautiful. It’s like waking from some other life to see light for the first time. To like God make a world that before this moment never had night and never had day.
Monk adjusts the controls. Technology. No longer considered separate from consciousness but, rather, an extension, a part of us. How we view and how we manipulate the world an involuntary action. Upon allied code the world spins. Like God it’s from our minds—made manifest by simple keystrokes—where the world ends. It’s down here where the world begins.
Monk, his studied face tight, eyes passing from monitor to monitor, strikes the keyboard and runs through a series of voice commands—having measured the conditions per a few competing models, temperature and current have been accurately predicted—deploys the landing gear. The Plinko, with a reverse thrust, slows to make contact, evenly settling within a foreign hadopelagic zone.
Monk flips a switch, he adds more tracers. The world around them polished shadow. Shadows pewter against the absolute blackness. The ocean floor barren. Whatever passes for direction a bleak wet desert snuff-colored for miles. This weird world of gloom. This gray wilderness atop the bottom of this nameless rocky trench. Inverted islands are separated from one another by interminable stretches of Abyssal Hills, and these alienated by their endless Plains. Flakes from many meters above fall like snow, the ocean’s dead and dying, eternity’s remains.
It’s enough to be this deep. To spend an hour staring at so much nothing, here, where Asan and Monk are as unknown as anything they might see, that no human being has ever seen, and if for this reason is possessed of a goodness, its distance from Man something warm and bright as if purity arises not from within, but from the absence of judgment.
The creature moves. There’s no foreground and there’s no background so it’s impossible to gain perspective. The object is both itself and its relationship to scale, to distance. A spectacle. The full and total apex of essence. Monk consults his monitors. Asan relies upon experience. Neither knows the difference.
The animal is yellow. As if riding a gentle current, it moves towards them. It isn’t a fish. At least it isn’t a fish within any database. While not quite round, Asan ascribes unto the animal a circumference greater than a golf ball, but not by much.
Closer, the animal lacks definite features. The creature possesses a rubbery exoskeleton. Asan looks at Monk. He isn’t with Asan. One hand here, the other there, he’s busy with the business of recording, of collecting. What would humans, Asan thinks. What part of me would evolve solely as a result of my own thoughts? Of reflections turned inward?
The rubber duckie appears to have swum from China. Beneath a brown sombrero its eyes are huge, pupils expanded, and this so dramatically as to have done away with iris, with sclera. While illusory, there appears just a bit of opaqueness viscous. Otherwise, just wide-eyed blackness. One third of its face consumed, eaten by the outer darkness, the toy wears a brightly colored scarf, a spectral sort of band, red in spectrum argon meeting, bleeding into ultraviolet to define its neck which falls unmistakably into its shoulders and this—more red—unrolling to define its back, which rounds to inform the feathered angle of its rear end.
Holding a blue maraca, it wobbles as it swims by. And Monk kills the camera.
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author bio:
Richard Leise recently accepted The Perry Morgan Fellowship in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. While completing a MFA, he has a novel out on submission, and is completing a collection of short stories; his work may be found in several publications, with more forthcoming this season.