As soon as Phoebe was lowered to the water’s surface I kept my eye on the dolphins. The event with Laura had unsettled all of us, and our radio communications were curt, businesslike and sombre. Dolphins aren’t quite the lovable children of the ocean as they are often portrayed in the press: they are still wild animals and are quite capable of savagery and viciousness. Their intelligence can even lend a bit of perversity to their behaviour. I’ve seen them torture their prey playfully like a cat would a trapped mouse. But I’ve never seen or heard of them grouping together to bully an individual like they had done to Laura. We were all concerned that they’d turn on the dive team.
I watched expectantly as two of Meredith’s team released the harness securing us to the A-frame. Since she was wearing a full face mask with comms on this dive I could converse with the team leader. “Everyone OK, Meredith?”
“They’re not paying us any attention, Matt. They’re just off on their own. To be honest I’ll be happy if they stay that way.”
Simon picked up a mic. “Fine by me too. I’d rather see what they get up to when humans aren’t about. There’s nothing out here for them, I can’t imagine what they’ll do here.”
That was true. This far out into the blue the ocean is empty of life. No currents bringing plankton or krill or algae for anything to feed on, and with no bottom of the food chain, there were no higher levels. It was like we were led into the middle of a desert consisting of nothing but sand dunes.
On this occasion I couldn’t experience that moment of calm that I usually feel whenever I start a dive in Phoebe. I usually gaze up at the receding circumference where the water’s surface intersects with the observation bubble, marvelling at the languid lapping and the rivulets that trickle down around the apex after a wave temporarily submerges it. This time I was too reproachful: watch the team, watch the dolphins.
We sank down to fifteen metres and angled the cameras up to watch the silhouettes dance against the shimmering backdrop of the sunlit surface, around the dark broad shape of the hull of the Mimas. As soon as I cut power to the jets the dolphins peeled away from the surface and finned down to us. They gathered around Phoebe like orbiting satellites, each turning its head to peer in at us as it passed in front.
Simon contacted Meredith. “As discussed, please hold station. They’re bound to come back up to you soon.”
“I don’t know, Simon,” I murmured off of the radio. “They’ve been interested in Phoebe ever since they saw it. The dive team, not so much.”
Simon opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. After a moment he said in realisation, “You’re right...down South, when they swam away from us after the first time we saw them? They weren’t coming up to see the dive team, they just wanted us to take the sub here.”
As if to confirm that hypothesis, the dolphins, seemingly coming to a tacit agreement, swam down below Phoebe. I piloted the craft to look down on them. Their forms were disappearing into the depth.
I sighed heavily. “Yes sir, Mr Dolphin, I’m coming, sir.”
Simon smiled and called up to the surface. “Phoebe to surface. Frank, John, they’re going deep. We’ll follow them. Frank, I guess we could have the dive team get back on the platform and be ready to go in again for when they come back up? Over.”
“Sounds good, Phoebe. Over.”
“Sorry Meredith, no playing with dolphins just yet.”
I won’t relate Meredith’s rather profane response.
After a couple of minutes of descent Simon mused,“Maybe they can survive out here because there’s some food source on the bottom.”
I shook my head. “Bottom is too deep. The deepest any dolphin has ever gone is half a click, and that was only for a few minutes.”
“Yes, Matthew, but how deep is it here? Sure, this is the intercontinental, but no one is mapping every square kilometre of the sea bed. There could be an undiscovered mountain range below us.”
“I suppose. In that case I look forward to spending time with our new friends in their magic fairy castle beneath the waves.”
Phoebe’s communications with the surface has the bandwidth to transmit voice and telemetry but not video. Water is a tricky medium to send signals through. So we had to keep Frank informed of what we saw. Frank called down to us. “So Matthew - what’s the official record for the deepest dive by a dolphin?”
“Five three four metres. For eight minutes.”
“And you’re coming up on five hundred. Any sign of them stopping?”
“No, they’re still going strong.”
This depth is colloquially known as the ‘Twilight Zone’, due to to quality of the ambient light. Water acts as a weak red filter, such that the deeper you go, the bluer everything appears. After forty metres nothing shows up as red unless some other light source is trained upon it. Tropical fish and corals that would be dazzling orange or yellow or red at the surface become dowdy greenish or brown. At four hundred metres the only light remaining from the surface is an eerie indigo. I was losing sight of the dolphins, so I turned on the floodlights.
As they moved in and out of the beams, the dolphins’ hides flashed like scimitars in the gloom. “That’s it, Frank. Deepest recorded dive for a dolphin. This species is quite something.”
“How deep do you plan on following them?”
I looked across at Simon but his face was neutral, giving me the indication that this was my call.
“I’ll go as deep as a click.” Phoebe is rated for a max depth of 1.2 clicks, and she and I had been on dives that approached that, but I wasn’t about to risk the sub on an unplanned excursion such as this one. Frank was wise enough not to remind me of either fact. Simon probably knew anyway, but didn’t speak up.
Past 600 metres, and we’d reached the Midnight Zone. No light from the surface remained. Unlike other dives I had taken to this depth, the water was so pure that Phoebe’s spotlights illuminated nothing except the dolphins and the craft itself. No drifting particles, and no other marine life. Without points of reference we had no sensation of movement. Our worldview consisted of the craft, the abject darkness around it, and the quicksilver flickering of the dolphin pod below us. Time seemed to be suspended. Unconsciously, I began to breathe so gingerly that at one point my reflexes kicked in and I inhaled sharply to compensate.
Frank called in every hundred metres to check in.
At 980 metres the dolphins did something which brought us to our feet, gasping in astonishment. They slowed in a peculiar fashion: their swimming motion remained unaltered but appeared to be displayed to us at a lower speed, as if we were watching them in a video that was being gradually slowed, rather than the dolphins themselves taking any action. At the same time, under the floodlights, the dolphins reddened. It was the opposite effect of the filter that the water imposed upon objects, only a far more pronounced effect – their skin turned to cherry red in the space of a couple of metres. And then they vanished.
Not all at once. First the lead dolphin, then others as they reached the same depth. One by one they slowed and turned red and disappeared.
Abruptly I sat down and hauled back on the throttle, bringing Phoebe to a halt before she could reach the point where we lost the dolphins. Simon was bewildered and a little angry. “What the hell happened?” He retrieved his marine torch and switched it on with a quick twist. Then he shone it from side to side, vainly attempting to catch sight of the pod, as if what had happened was some trick and they had in truth simply moved out of our sight. Eventually he started to press the end of the torch on the interior surface of the observation bubble, and that upset me.
“Sit down, Simon, and turn that thing off.”
He looked at me, with something like a snarl forming on his face. Before he could say anything Frank interrupted on the radio. Attenuated by the deep water, the bandwidth was low and the voice burbling and fuzzy. “Surface to Phoebe. Matthew, you’ve stopped your descent. Please report in. Over.”
Simon seemed to remember where he was. He shook himself and sat back down. I retrieved the mic.
“Phoebe to surface. Frank, we’ve lost sight of the pod. Over.”
“Sorry to hear that, Matthew, Simon. What is your condition?”
“We’re fine. We’re...well we’re just in the black is all. No sight of bottom. We don’t know where the dolphins went. Over.”
“Understood. What are your intentions?” Frank was being calm and professional, and it had the desired influence on us.
I didn’t have any plan for this eventuality. “Please stand by.”
I turned to Simon, who was staring dejectedly at the point below us where the dolphins had disappeared. “Well, any ideas?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Well, lets just nudge down a bit further. Go to where they were, but slow and steady, ready to pull out.” Without looking up, Simon nodded.
So I teased the throttle forward a touch and kept a ready hand on it. It was a full, even black outside the ship, but as we closed the distance the darkness seemed to take on a new quality, the light from the floodlights seeming to be sucked away rather than simply illuminating nothing. Then, the tip of the furthest-reaching appendage of the sub seemed to disappear. I pulled Phoebe into reverse, and the appendage came back whole.
“It’s like we dipped into a black substance,” said Simon.
“Yes, but there’s no residue on the sub at all. And the lights never picked up its surface.”
“Go again? We don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effect.”
“Okay.”
We inched closer, as slowly as I was able to apply fine control, until again the appendage dipped into the black.
“Alright Matthew, hold it there as best you can.” Simon carefully shone the torch towards the tip of the appendage, but it did not reappear. “Definitely inserted into a substance then.” He moved the light off, and pointed the beam forward. “But if it’s the surface of a black liquid, it’s showing no movement, no reflections of light. It’s so black it absorbs all the light trained upon it.”
I was deeply uneasy. The absolute blackness had a threatening quality about its extremity. I tried to express it. “I...”
“Let’s try a bit deeper.”
I swallowed hard, tightened my grip on the control stick, and guided the craft forward. The blackness consumed more of the submersible, until I could see no part of the fore of the craft at all. The surface was an inch away from the bubble, and then it wasn’t. It was inside.
It had passed through the clear plastic as if it were not there. The effect was as if the interior of the craft were being flooded with pure black. I let out a cry, released the controls and brought my arms up to reflexively protect my face. Phoebe was still travelling forward, and the surface rushed forward to engulf me.
I watched expectantly as two of Meredith’s team released the harness securing us to the A-frame. Since she was wearing a full face mask with comms on this dive I could converse with the team leader. “Everyone OK, Meredith?”
“They’re not paying us any attention, Matt. They’re just off on their own. To be honest I’ll be happy if they stay that way.”
Simon picked up a mic. “Fine by me too. I’d rather see what they get up to when humans aren’t about. There’s nothing out here for them, I can’t imagine what they’ll do here.”
That was true. This far out into the blue the ocean is empty of life. No currents bringing plankton or krill or algae for anything to feed on, and with no bottom of the food chain, there were no higher levels. It was like we were led into the middle of a desert consisting of nothing but sand dunes.
On this occasion I couldn’t experience that moment of calm that I usually feel whenever I start a dive in Phoebe. I usually gaze up at the receding circumference where the water’s surface intersects with the observation bubble, marvelling at the languid lapping and the rivulets that trickle down around the apex after a wave temporarily submerges it. This time I was too reproachful: watch the team, watch the dolphins.
We sank down to fifteen metres and angled the cameras up to watch the silhouettes dance against the shimmering backdrop of the sunlit surface, around the dark broad shape of the hull of the Mimas. As soon as I cut power to the jets the dolphins peeled away from the surface and finned down to us. They gathered around Phoebe like orbiting satellites, each turning its head to peer in at us as it passed in front.
Simon contacted Meredith. “As discussed, please hold station. They’re bound to come back up to you soon.”
“I don’t know, Simon,” I murmured off of the radio. “They’ve been interested in Phoebe ever since they saw it. The dive team, not so much.”
Simon opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. After a moment he said in realisation, “You’re right...down South, when they swam away from us after the first time we saw them? They weren’t coming up to see the dive team, they just wanted us to take the sub here.”
As if to confirm that hypothesis, the dolphins, seemingly coming to a tacit agreement, swam down below Phoebe. I piloted the craft to look down on them. Their forms were disappearing into the depth.
I sighed heavily. “Yes sir, Mr Dolphin, I’m coming, sir.”
Simon smiled and called up to the surface. “Phoebe to surface. Frank, John, they’re going deep. We’ll follow them. Frank, I guess we could have the dive team get back on the platform and be ready to go in again for when they come back up? Over.”
“Sounds good, Phoebe. Over.”
“Sorry Meredith, no playing with dolphins just yet.”
I won’t relate Meredith’s rather profane response.
After a couple of minutes of descent Simon mused,“Maybe they can survive out here because there’s some food source on the bottom.”
I shook my head. “Bottom is too deep. The deepest any dolphin has ever gone is half a click, and that was only for a few minutes.”
“Yes, Matthew, but how deep is it here? Sure, this is the intercontinental, but no one is mapping every square kilometre of the sea bed. There could be an undiscovered mountain range below us.”
“I suppose. In that case I look forward to spending time with our new friends in their magic fairy castle beneath the waves.”
Phoebe’s communications with the surface has the bandwidth to transmit voice and telemetry but not video. Water is a tricky medium to send signals through. So we had to keep Frank informed of what we saw. Frank called down to us. “So Matthew - what’s the official record for the deepest dive by a dolphin?”
“Five three four metres. For eight minutes.”
“And you’re coming up on five hundred. Any sign of them stopping?”
“No, they’re still going strong.”
This depth is colloquially known as the ‘Twilight Zone’, due to to quality of the ambient light. Water acts as a weak red filter, such that the deeper you go, the bluer everything appears. After forty metres nothing shows up as red unless some other light source is trained upon it. Tropical fish and corals that would be dazzling orange or yellow or red at the surface become dowdy greenish or brown. At four hundred metres the only light remaining from the surface is an eerie indigo. I was losing sight of the dolphins, so I turned on the floodlights.
As they moved in and out of the beams, the dolphins’ hides flashed like scimitars in the gloom. “That’s it, Frank. Deepest recorded dive for a dolphin. This species is quite something.”
“How deep do you plan on following them?”
I looked across at Simon but his face was neutral, giving me the indication that this was my call.
“I’ll go as deep as a click.” Phoebe is rated for a max depth of 1.2 clicks, and she and I had been on dives that approached that, but I wasn’t about to risk the sub on an unplanned excursion such as this one. Frank was wise enough not to remind me of either fact. Simon probably knew anyway, but didn’t speak up.
Past 600 metres, and we’d reached the Midnight Zone. No light from the surface remained. Unlike other dives I had taken to this depth, the water was so pure that Phoebe’s spotlights illuminated nothing except the dolphins and the craft itself. No drifting particles, and no other marine life. Without points of reference we had no sensation of movement. Our worldview consisted of the craft, the abject darkness around it, and the quicksilver flickering of the dolphin pod below us. Time seemed to be suspended. Unconsciously, I began to breathe so gingerly that at one point my reflexes kicked in and I inhaled sharply to compensate.
Frank called in every hundred metres to check in.
At 980 metres the dolphins did something which brought us to our feet, gasping in astonishment. They slowed in a peculiar fashion: their swimming motion remained unaltered but appeared to be displayed to us at a lower speed, as if we were watching them in a video that was being gradually slowed, rather than the dolphins themselves taking any action. At the same time, under the floodlights, the dolphins reddened. It was the opposite effect of the filter that the water imposed upon objects, only a far more pronounced effect – their skin turned to cherry red in the space of a couple of metres. And then they vanished.
Not all at once. First the lead dolphin, then others as they reached the same depth. One by one they slowed and turned red and disappeared.
Abruptly I sat down and hauled back on the throttle, bringing Phoebe to a halt before she could reach the point where we lost the dolphins. Simon was bewildered and a little angry. “What the hell happened?” He retrieved his marine torch and switched it on with a quick twist. Then he shone it from side to side, vainly attempting to catch sight of the pod, as if what had happened was some trick and they had in truth simply moved out of our sight. Eventually he started to press the end of the torch on the interior surface of the observation bubble, and that upset me.
“Sit down, Simon, and turn that thing off.”
He looked at me, with something like a snarl forming on his face. Before he could say anything Frank interrupted on the radio. Attenuated by the deep water, the bandwidth was low and the voice burbling and fuzzy. “Surface to Phoebe. Matthew, you’ve stopped your descent. Please report in. Over.”
Simon seemed to remember where he was. He shook himself and sat back down. I retrieved the mic.
“Phoebe to surface. Frank, we’ve lost sight of the pod. Over.”
“Sorry to hear that, Matthew, Simon. What is your condition?”
“We’re fine. We’re...well we’re just in the black is all. No sight of bottom. We don’t know where the dolphins went. Over.”
“Understood. What are your intentions?” Frank was being calm and professional, and it had the desired influence on us.
I didn’t have any plan for this eventuality. “Please stand by.”
I turned to Simon, who was staring dejectedly at the point below us where the dolphins had disappeared. “Well, any ideas?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Well, lets just nudge down a bit further. Go to where they were, but slow and steady, ready to pull out.” Without looking up, Simon nodded.
So I teased the throttle forward a touch and kept a ready hand on it. It was a full, even black outside the ship, but as we closed the distance the darkness seemed to take on a new quality, the light from the floodlights seeming to be sucked away rather than simply illuminating nothing. Then, the tip of the furthest-reaching appendage of the sub seemed to disappear. I pulled Phoebe into reverse, and the appendage came back whole.
“It’s like we dipped into a black substance,” said Simon.
“Yes, but there’s no residue on the sub at all. And the lights never picked up its surface.”
“Go again? We don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effect.”
“Okay.”
We inched closer, as slowly as I was able to apply fine control, until again the appendage dipped into the black.
“Alright Matthew, hold it there as best you can.” Simon carefully shone the torch towards the tip of the appendage, but it did not reappear. “Definitely inserted into a substance then.” He moved the light off, and pointed the beam forward. “But if it’s the surface of a black liquid, it’s showing no movement, no reflections of light. It’s so black it absorbs all the light trained upon it.”
I was deeply uneasy. The absolute blackness had a threatening quality about its extremity. I tried to express it. “I...”
“Let’s try a bit deeper.”
I swallowed hard, tightened my grip on the control stick, and guided the craft forward. The blackness consumed more of the submersible, until I could see no part of the fore of the craft at all. The surface was an inch away from the bubble, and then it wasn’t. It was inside.
It had passed through the clear plastic as if it were not there. The effect was as if the interior of the craft were being flooded with pure black. I let out a cry, released the controls and brought my arms up to reflexively protect my face. Phoebe was still travelling forward, and the surface rushed forward to engulf me.
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