Key: In, out
It’s three-thirty in the morning and we’re far underground in one of the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean. A hole has been drilled down through the ocean floor and a small microphone has been fed through the hole some considerable distance vertically downwards.
We are listening to huge plates shift subtly, but on a colossal scale. Slowly we fade up a hydrophone attached to a weight resting on the sea bed. We hear an echo of a long reverberant but distant boom. Then, nearer the surface, a thud on the bottom of a submarine. An identical boom again back down below. Further up, a string of bubbles.
Behind another vessel, the one that is recording what follows, there is attached a substantial length of cable. Along its line, at long but evenly spaced intervals, there are twelve waterproof speakers. As the vessel rises to the surface, slowly towing the speakers, the ocean-floor hydrophone records the following sounds, one sound per speaker, in slow succession:
A man asleep in Denver.
A girl asleep in Chibok.
A woman asleep in Monklands.
A man asleep in Sydney.
A woman asleep in Guangdong.
A parent asleep in Gaza.
A woman asleep in Uppsala.
A doctor asleep in Quetta.
A man asleep in Al Wakrah.
A person asleep in Kent.
A family asleep, on the move.
Something away from the earth, awake, listening.