Cataclysm

The sonar again returned nothing. Another routine scan of the depths surrounding us, to only remind us of this static nightmare that continued to string us along. Some expected it, the importance of potential contact entirely absent from their lives. Others felt interrogative, obliged to ask why this had failed, why there wasn’t anything out there, why my leadership had failed to spearhead any successes. Others were kept from even knowing the full extent of our situation, as we aimlessly cruised 10,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, in the most articulated and accepted crusade to deny the mortality of everything.
To those who it at least mattered to, I cared as much as they did. While every waking hour became a performance to maintain the walls of secrecy in my position, I too wanted everyone to know that I shared their exact same creeping anxieties, but needed them to know not in fear of them pushing me to accept something that I did not want to accept. And acceptance was impossible. It was as if there was some parasite, or some inert function I was born with, that did not allow me to see that above us lay only nuclear plains of dust, as a manifestation of the hatred mankind had for itself. A hatred above any entity, concept, phenomenon, system, anything that had once danced those plains when they were un-violated by a pervasive desire for self-destruction. No. Accepting that amidst my steel-sheltered existence, was akin to the sensation of having my nails ripped off, one by one.
“It has been 142 days since we departed,” commented the submarine commander, whom I remained a single rank below, “and we have continued without any issues.”
“This is an issue,” I returned, “no one else is out there.”
“Why do we need anyone else? We have everything we need to live down here. Anytime we need something, we have the capacity to emerge and get it. There should be enough food stored above there to sustain us for the rest of our lives. Why must I baby this to you, Colonel Troy?”
He turned to the others in the room.
“Good morning, and you are all dismissed.”
When only he and I remained, he sighed, before a grin flashed across his face.
“We need to reroute the submarine over the southwest most island to us. The prewar reports estimate that the buried supplies hold enough food for everyone in the submarine for a while.”
He passed me a map of the island, with several points marked on it with red.
“These are the areas where the supplies are available. We need everything excavated in the course of 24 hours, to avoid excessive exposure to the radiation above. Be at the control room by 0900 hours.”
With a pat on the shoulder, his exit left me alone with the sound of silent sonar. The scans passed like waves stretching towards far and distant beachheads, that from what the waves could see, were non-existent. I knew I could not get lost in those sweeping lines, as I convinced myself to be separate from these endless scans. Unlike them, I knew there was at least one other submarine in the water when we got the fatalistic transmission from above. At least one, meaning there could be two, three, perhaps even four. They ran our same fuel, they could still be out there. The atolls and islands were not the only pockets of resources buried over the scorched Earth, so it wasn’t definite that they had starved. They would have faced the same predicament as us, and surely they would have had to follow similar mannerisms and commands. So with 142 days of empty seas, where are they? 
Why are you doing this… Why are you hiding…
My fist clenched, as if the tightness of it could somehow pull the distant vessels any closer.
Please, for the love of God… Do something. Do anything.
If the other submarines had been hijacked, I wouldn’t care. If they had blown up, I wouldn’t care. If they had been against us this whole time, had wanted this for humanity, and housed the architects of destruction in its confines, I wouldn’t care. Even if the submarine is the enemy, I wouldn’t care. As long as some form of signal was given. Something to keep me from clutching at straws and failing to return answers to the constant interrogations of my psyche, from both external and internal forces. It was obviously pointless. I needed to get back to work.
The control room mostly provided no sanctuary to the abrasion of my thoughts. Its confines only guilted me into thinking that I was trying to distract myself with the more pressing matters of my psyche, irrespective of the importance of the work at hand. But today that guilt was looser, those gnawing thoughts a little quieter, redirected to finalizing the chartering of our route to the island. 
“Sir,” someone at one of the panels began, “our reports from last night have returned us no signs of radiation around the southern and western parts of the island.”
“Okay,” I responded, “I maintain my position that we need to keep around the deeper waters to avoid any prolonged exposure to surface elements.”
“We have already reached an area effectively free from radiation, rising to the surface holds no real substantial risks.”
“And of what benefit is it to emerge?”
“It would allow us to replenish our oxygen levels, in the case we remain submerged for longer than anticipated.”
“Right,” I sighed, and took a seat back in the room, “we will continue along our original path towards the surface.”
With the absence of any further statements, the crew pushed forward with the decision. Shouldn’t I have been happy? Being further from the endless depths meant a greater chance of some contact, a potential of reaching an elevation that another submarine was on, or the discovery of some other ship from above. It was what I wanted, right? As the crew moved through their coordinated iterations to adjust the submarine to changing pressures, I felt my mind caught again in pincers. In seeing them always in meter, synchronized with a sense of technical elegance, my familiarized delight felt as if it was curling back, as one keels back in old age following a lifetime of growing upwards. And on this day, it finally twisted back enough to impale my heart, forcing my focus to return inwards.
After the many days I had bare witness to their work, these people seemed to merge with the room around me. Their humanity, their life, became only another part of a cyclical process, its steel wheels growing sharper through their rotations, as opposed to blunting from friction. After 142 days, this wheel had thinned and mangled itself into a buzzsaw, accompanying the puncturing cacophony of every agonizing step of my life. The booming metronome of their footsteps, the slurry of their pre-prepared and practiced phrases, their tensioned content of my command and my desires, as they attempted to assimilate me into the known through a permeation of my thoughts. Their movements and commands across the room stretched to the limits of my peripherals, and in that moment it became so overwhelming that the matter of a handful of people, in a single room 10,000 feet below the ocean, became everything that existence offered. 
A reminder of the disgust of food against the walls of a mouth. A reminder of the agonizing buckling of one’s ribs as they breathe. A reminder of leathery eyelids scraping upon one’s eyeballs. A reminder of the dryness in one’s mouth as they speak, the scraping of bony joints in movements, and the perpetual migraine, blowing up the soft and tender confines of one’s brain like a balloon animal. In that moment, it became impossible to see, remember, or imagine anything beyond images of forks scraping against plates, fingernails on chalkboards, the misplaying of notes on a reed, all these images revolving in circles, ovals, cycles. Like waves towards beachheads, sandpaper waves scratching the air. But the air gave no response. None at all.
I could no longer trust these people. I don’t mean I didn’t believe them, or believed them to be evil. I could no longer trust these people could help me, and I could not envision that they could see life as anything different than these rough images in my brain. I had been lobotomised by aquatic trenches. Despite the millions of years for which life had roamed, and its spectacular uniqueness in a boundless universe, even with a potential for an afterlife or an overwhelming entity, I could not perceive its existence as beyond lukewarm. And with the lukewarm significance of my existence extending to the perceptions of anything around me, the understanding that they could not be without my senses contaminated them with the poisons of my brain. For everything I knew, my withering psyche became the center and heart for life around me.
The walls of the room suddenly jolted, with a force that had not been anticipated for months. The perfection in the movements of my subordinates shuttered, everyone quick to alertness to the sudden impact against the submarine.
“What the hell was that?” one man exclaimed.
“Reports of some sort of collision at the back of the submarine,” another assessed, “I thought we had sensed these waters to be clear of threats.”
“Could it be a torpedo of some sort? What even is worth fighting us over?”
Through the scramble, I shot back to focus.
“How does it look?” I inquired.
“We cannot detect any foreign object or vessel behind the submarine.”
“More comprehensive report coming now,” another man added, “a mine has hit the back of the submarine. It must have slipped past the sonar.”
“I see…” I pondered. “Slow down the engines, I need to inspect the damage. Stay put.”
…
Then Colonel Troy left.
In the control room, confusion soon overtook the initial panic. What did he mean by “stay put?” Now that everyone was out of the eyes and ears of their commanding officers, the tension in their speech loosened as people spoke more freely.
“Will he be back soon?” a man began, “He usually stays within the command room.”
“Look Thomas,” another voice responded, “we should have control over things here for the time being. The Colonel should know what he’s doing.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Thomas mumbled, “but it has been ages since we’ve experienced something like this, Samantha.”
“It’s fine. He knows not to touch the airlocks in such a situation like this, he made that emphatic last time we had a collision like this.”
“I mean… he seems a bit on edge lately. It feels like we haven’t really seen him much outside of the control room. And I think he’s using too much of the vessel’s energy on the long-range sonar.”
“Well it’s not like we have an energy shortage. And if we run out we can go up again.”
“Yeah, but never for too long. The last thing we want is someone dying from radiation here.”
“Given the situation now, that’s probably the least of our worries…”
“As long as the airlocks stay tight, this submarine is the safest place on Earth.”
Samantha scoffed.
“Miss any family, or friends?” Thomas changed the topic.
“I try to keep my mind off that.”
“Maybe… they could have gotten to some bunker.”
“Realistically, I th-“
Then a crash. A flood. Then nothing.
…
I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t mean to cause this. I had run to the damaged area of the submarine for inspection, just to see what had happened. When I got there and saw nothing damaged internally, I figured there would be nothing to stop me from taking a look from the outside, to give everyone a report straight from the eye. The pressure adaptive suit for external inspection of the submarine had been right there, and there were again no roadblocks towards any attempt to use it. Any lock that was or could have held me back, was not beyond my clearance, as I began to march through the airlocks outside of the submarine, to inspect the damage. That’s all I wanted to do. I swear, it’s all I wanted to do, inspect the damage.
It just so happened, that once outside the steel beast, my harness was perhaps a bit loose. And the rope was a bit jaunty. It was to be expected, after many daily check-ups outside the submarine by technicians, and the motion of the ocean not always being predictable, that the rope was, on the 142nd day below the surface, a tad bit weaker. But I figured it couldn’t be an issue for my weight, it was not like I was eating much anyways down there. It was a fine idea. Get a real eyewitness report of the issue at hand, beyond blind scans of echolocation, and the mindless beeps of sonar that still returned… no, REFUSED, to give me anything. And as a part of the suit for repairs, you would have a toolset of course… one of those tools being a knife. And maybe the rope should have held me more, been stronger. Strong enough to resist me as I cut through it, and pushed away from my prison. 
Simultaneously, the submarine imploded.
As I said again, and I will say again, I didn’t mean for it to happen. Maybe something went wrong with the airlocks, or another projectile had hit the submarine to finish the job. I didn’t do it. But when I saw it all crumble, dimly under the headtorch of the suit, I felt something. When I perished, in cutting my rope and letting the deep take me, the submarine was too consumed by the ocean. I felt that an internal assessment had finally been confirmed. That everything I perceived around me was stringed and wired, and dependent upon my continued existence as a person to remain. And upon death, that was it. Nothing remains. No concept of being remembered. When death arrives, everything goes, meaning the world, as you see it, effectively caves in through your demise.
But as I floated in the frigid darkness, my attritional struggle upon that vessel ceased to be. I had everything I wanted. For 142 days, I didn’t want anything. I didn’t want to be anywhere. I didn’t want to be with anyone. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to be. But now, I had everything. I was nowhere. Everyone was gone. There was nothing to be done. I was soon to no longer be. My submerged purgatory felt so soothing in comparison to the constant anxiety of trying to reach outside contact. My feet were finally suspended, away from the cruelties of gravity that locked me towards steel floors or carpet. As the lights from my suit faded away, laughter finally soothed the buckling of my ribs, with the lukewarm waters of existence carried away like mist.
Category:Weird
Category:Places