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Kapukahehu Beach, Molokai, Hawaii, Earth
August 10th, 2035
Doc set the autopilot on his boat, the Krispin, and swung down from the flying bridge to greet the kids. He tussled Yui’s hair, and put Terry in a headlock. The young boy escaped with the nimbleness of a martial artist in a move Doc had taught him the previous month.
“Where we going?” Yui asked, looking over the diving gear arrayed on the rear deck.
“Kapukahehu Beach,” Doc said.
“The Dixie Maru?” Terry asked, excited.
“Yup,” Doc confirmed.
“You said we can’t go down below 40 meters,” Yui said.
“You can for a few minutes without decompression,” he explained. “However, we have a game changer.” He picked up a strange clamshell-style case.
Terry immediately became more interested. The aliens who’d been visiting the institute over the last few months often carried cases just like it. They called them, “Union Standard” equipment cases, though they came in a dizzying variety of designs. He tried to imagine some factory floating in space, cranking out these cases for whatever you wanted to store. Everything from crazy alien toothbrushes to laser blasters!
“You got some alien stuff,” Terry said.
Doc looked at him with the appraising look he gave them sometimes when they surprised him. “Yeah,” he said. “How do you know that?” Terry explained. “I had heard there were a lot of aliens coming and going at Kaunakakai lately. You guys and your fish research?”
“Cetaceans, yup,” Terry replied.
“Fish,” Yui said, poking Terry in the ribs with a particularly sharp elbow.
“They’re not fish,” Terry said, and gave her a push. Anyone else might have gone right over the transom. Yui just caught herself and stuck her tongue out at him. “They’re mammals, like us.”
“I wish I had fins,” Yui said. “That would make diving even cooler!”
“Or be able to hold your breath for 10 minutes, like dolphins,” Doc said.
“Fifteen minutes for orcas,” Terry said. He got the appraising look from Doc while Yui’s mouth became an O. Terry enjoyed knowing something Doc didn’t. “So what’s that?”
“This,” Doc said and popped the case, “is badass.” Inside were four metallic cylinders and several sets of plastic grids.
“Looks like waffles,” Yui said.
Doc winked and took one of the cylinders out. Terry reached for another, and the man gently stopped him. “Hold up until I show you,” he said. “Remember what I taught you?”
“Learn, then do,” Terry and Yui chorused.
“Bingo,” he said. Doc took the cylinder and closed the case, much to Terry’s disappointment. Holding the cylinder in his lap, he opened a regular dive case and began removing equipment. Over the next few minutes, as Krispin motored along the Molokai coast, he used tools to attach other items. A rubber head strap, a wireless monitor, and a mouthpiece.
“It’s some kind of rebreather?” Yui guessed, about a second before Terry was about to say the same thing.
“Yes, it is,” Doc said and gave her a thumbs-up. Terry scowled. Doc attached a standard dive mask and slipped the unit over his head. The silver cylinder was maybe five centimeters long, and one centimeter thick. It wasn’t much wider than the mouthpiece when Doc slipped it between his teeth. It looked kind of comical compared to the long rubber tubes linking a standard regulator to dive tanks.
“That’s it?” Terry asked.
Doc removed the mouthpiece so he could talk. “For a low dive, yes,” he said. “It’s self-contained and has one of those crazy alien batteries, so you’re good for two hours.”
“How big is the battery?” Terry asked.
Doc took the equipment off his head and popped a compartment open with a twist. The battery was a centimeter long and half the diameter of the cylinder. He showed them the intakes, which brought in seawater and extracted oxygen to breathe.
“Wow,” Terry and Yui said.
“It’s like something from ‘60s James Bond,” Doc said. Yui and Terry gave him an uncomprehending look, and Doc shook his head.
“What about the plastic waffles?” Yui asked.
“Ah, yes,” Doc said and grinned as he opened the case again. “Remember that 40-meter limit?” They both nodded as he took out the plastic pieces. “These attach with a couple little hoses, and they’re extended gas extractors. They can pull anything from the water you want them to.”
“I don’t understand,” Terry said.
“They can suck nitrogen or helium from the water,” Doc said.
“Oh,” Terry said. “So you can go deeper because you can add helium?”
“Bingo,” Doc said.
“How deep?” Yui asked.
“As deep as you want,” Doc said, and winked. “At least as long as the battery lasts, and you can hot-swap batteries.”
Terry looked at the units, and then at Doc, thinking about the dive breathers. “Where did you get them?”
“Friends in the service,” he said.
Terry knew Doc had been in the military, and that was where he’d learned to dive. It was also where he’d been hurt, though what the injury was, he’d never explained. “Are we going to use them?”
Doc checked his phone and glanced around the cabin to verify the boat’s progress. “That’s the plan,” he said. “We’re going to use them to dive down to the Dixie Maru.”
“We get to use them the first time?” Yui said in disbelief.
“No,” Doc replied and laughed. “I’ve been using them for a month now. I love you guys, but do you really think I’d test alien stuff on a couple of ten-year-old kids?”
Terry didn’t answer, because that would have been just fine with him. Doc briefed them on the basic operation of the apparatus.
“I’ve already programmed them,” he explained. “There are only a couple controls you need to worry about.”
As the boat neared their destination, Doc shepherded Yui into the cabin so she could change into her diving gear, and Terry changed out on deck. Doc was already wearing shorts and a vest. Yui came back out just as the boat throttled back, and Doc’s phone beeped. They’d arrived over the wreck of the Dixie Maru.
Doc set a sea anchor and programmed the boat to hold position. Terry ran up the red flag with its white slash, a universal dive flag to warn passing boats that people were in the water. Doc set dive lines over the side, then helped the kids get their weight belts in place.
“Now, since we have the alien breathers, rate of rise isn’t an issue. If something goes wrong, pull the release on your weight belts and come straight up. Always keep me in sight down there, and let’s go slow on the descent. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Yui said.
“Yes, sir,” Terry echoed. That was part of the deal; they were no-nonsense while diving, and had been from the first time Doc took them snorkeling.
Doc helped attach the plastic filters, which would allow them to go deeper. They were lightweight and attached to the back of their vests, where tanks would have been before. Once in place, Terry couldn’t even feel it. Then it was time to get in the water, and both kids hesitated.
“What’s wrong?” Doc asked.
“It feels weird,” Terry said. They were both standing on the diving platform, Krispin bobbing gently in the offshore swells, dunking their feet in and out of the water.
“Yeah, wrong without the tanks,” Yui agreed.
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” Doc said, rubbing his stubble-covered chin.
“No, I’m good,” Terry said and jumped in the water feet first. He quickly surfaced, put the breather in, and stuck his head back underwater. He breathed in and felt cool, delicious air. Other than a tiny lag between drawing in the breath and the pressure catching up, it was no different than a scuba regulator.
“Okay?” Doc asked.
Terry gave him a thumbs-up. Not to be outdone, Yui jumped in, too. A few seconds later, she was using the breather as well. Doc nodded and slipped over the side, entering the water as smoothly as any dolphin Terry had ever seen.
Doc gestured to the kids to take hold of the dive rope. Once he was sure they had a good grip, he pulled the release and grabbed it himself. The weight fell, and they went with it into the dark.
As they descended slowly into the deep, Terry experienced a feeling of excitement mixed with fear, and he tried hard to control his breathing. Then he checked the monitor strapped to his wrist and saw the battery level at 99% and not changing. He’d become used to a tank with a fixed amount of oxygen. Doc preached constantly to carefully control your breathing to maximize dive time, and to give you a safety margin in order to escape problems. He relaxed and breathed normally.
Every few meters he forced himself to swallow, equalizing pressure in his inner ear. The earplugs he wore kept any pressure damage from getting through to his eardrums. His mask pressed ever harder against his face. He drew some of the pressure away by letting it out through his nose and exhaling.
The surface light fell off to only a dim hint of illumination. It reminded Terry of being under a sheet with only his room’s light on. Merely a hint of light, without being able to see its point of origin. He’d never been down a fraction of the distance. It was amazing, and spooky.
The descent stopped suddenly, and Terry realized they were on the ocean floor. Bright light stabbed out, and he could see Yui in stark relief. Doc had turned his mask light on. Terry did the same, and Yui did so a second later. Their beams played around as they looked at the dark volcanic sand below them. Occasional plant life sprouted where there were rocky outcroppings, and a couple of light-dazzled fish swam past. Compared to the sea life he’d seen closer to the shore at shallower depths, it was almost dead where they were.
As he played his light around, a shape came out of the darkness. It had to be the ship, but it only looked like a jumble of broken wood. He got Doc’s attention by flashing his light at him, then pointed at the boards. Doc nodded; that was it.
He’d told them about the Dixie Maru more than a year ago, shortly after they’d begun diving with him. He’d been down to it a few times before. He had the equipment to do it, but had absolutely refused to take the kids down.
The boat, a fishing junk which had sunk in 1916, still had some stuff Doc called “wreck trash.” They poked around for a while, digging in the sand. Terry found an old spoon, which still showed a little engraving. Yui found an amber bottle with the decayed remnants of a cork in it.
The water temperature was in the high 70s, and they were getting cold. Terry spotted Yui shivering. Doc must have seen it, too, as he pointed toward the surface and made a thumbs-up motion. As per the rules, neither of them disagreed, and they repeated the gesture. He led them back to the dive rope, and they ascended into the light.
It was only as they were ascending that Terry noticed he’d felt different at the bottom. He guessed it was the mixture of gasses extracted by the breather now in his blood. Doc had taught him about nitrogen narcosis and the dangers of it. Breathing helium kept the nitrogen from building up and forming bubbles in their blood. Also known as the bends, it could be horrible. Doc had shown them pictures, and he kept seeing them in his mind all the way up.
The display on his wrist said the breather was down to 77%. All the time they’d spent on the ocean floor, and the alien battery had gone down less than a quarter. Terry was amazed. They broke the surface, and sunlight hit their faces. He felt like he’d come up from a dream.
“That was amazing!” Yui crowed after removing the breather.
“It sure was!” Terry agreed.
“You kids feel okay?” Doc asked, checking his own display.
“Yeah, great,” Terry said. Yui nodded. Terry looked up and saw the sun was approaching the horizon. He needed to get home before too long. Besides, he was shivering now, too, despite the surface water being much warmer. He pulled himself up onto the diving platform and was soon followed by the others.
Doc went into the trawler’s cabin and came back with a couple of huge, fluffy towels. Getting all the water dried off quickly warmed them up. While they did that, Doc got the boat back underway.
As they motored toward their starting point, Doc brought them hot chocolate, while Yui and Terry talked excitedly about the experience. Doc listened to them, smiling a little smile and enjoying their enthusiasm.
“Doc,” Terry asked eventually, “how do you dive deep? I mean, really deep?”
“Well,” Doc said, checking his phone for progress, “when you go below about 300 meters, you use hard suits.”
“You mean like the combat armor the mercs are making to fight aliens?”
“Kinda like that, yeah,” Doc said. He tapped at his phone and held up an image for Terry to see. The suit looked more like the cartoon monster at the end of Ghostbusters than a diving suit. The diver only had a tiny window to look out of.
“How deep can it go?” Yui asked as she looked at the picture.
“Record is 410 meters,” Doc said. “Now if you wanted to go really deep, you could go down further if you just stayed.”
“You mean forever?” Terry asked.
“You could come back up,” Doc said, “but it would take you weeks to decompress.”
“Even with helium?”
“Yup.” Doc finished cleaning the breathers and put them back in the case. He glanced at them for a moment and nodded. “The guys are going to like my report,” he said as he locked it closed.
The boat motored onward as Terry thought. He tried to imagine what it would be like to live deep down, deeper than even the cetaceans dived. No light at all reached past 200 meters. Perpetual night. What would it be like to spend your life down there? The sun fell behind Molokai as they continued on. The excitement remained, even when his bike’s battery died halfway home.
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