# "I’m a Marine Biologist. Something’s Building Structures on the Ocean Floor" Creepypasta

An episode of [CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1492008134), 8 May 2025, 43 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/65997154/i_m_a_marine_biologist_something_s_building_structures_on_the_ocean_floor_creepypasta.mp3

CREEPYPASTA STORY►frequent-cat Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO- SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd... iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS- ►"Good Places to Start"- • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep ... ►"Personal Favourites"- • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher... ►"Written by me"- • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creep... ►"Long Stories"- • Long Stories FOLLOW ME ON- ►Twitter: / creeps_mcpasta ►Instagram: / creepsmcpasta ►Twitch: / creepsmcpasta ►Facebook: / creepsmcpasta CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪ ►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪ ►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪ ►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪ This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: The rv ARC light was about as glamorous as you
[0:04] Speaker 1: would expect from a deep sea survey vessel, a flat,
[0:08] Speaker 1: gray hole stained from salt spray, a deck cluttered with
[0:12] Speaker 1: rigging and cable drums, and a permanent smell of hydraulic
[0:16] Speaker 1: fluid that seeped into your clothes no matter how many
[0:19] Speaker 1: showers you took. We were out past the continental shelf,
[0:24] Speaker 1: hundreds of miles off shore, crawling a forgotten stretch of
[0:28] Speaker 1: the Abyssal Plain. No shipping lanes or geological features marked
[0:33] Speaker 1: on the map, just endless, featureless sea floor at four
[0:37] Speaker 1: thousand meters down. My job was simple enough. I was
[0:43] Speaker 1: part of a five person science crew operating bathymetric sonar
[0:48] Speaker 1: sweeps logging data to the cloud array below the bridge.
[0:52] Speaker 1: We flew an ROV twice a day, a heavy steel
[0:56] Speaker 1: framed unit about the size of a golf cart, rigged
[0:59] Speaker 1: with high h intensity lights, manipulator arms, and a suite
[1:03] Speaker 1: of still and video cameras. Everything was backed up twice,
[1:09] Speaker 1: raw feeds dunted into redundant cold storage banks, reviewed nightly
[1:13] Speaker 1: over instant coffee and bad jokes. Most days blurred together.
[1:20] Speaker 1: We would lower the ROV follow a tight grid programmed
[1:24] Speaker 1: into the system and then scan every inch of mud
[1:27] Speaker 1: and stone for anomalies like burrows, sediment plumes, or lost
[1:31] Speaker 1: straw nets, anything that broke the monotony of silt and darkness.
[1:39] Speaker 1: There was an unofficial contest among the crew find something
[1:44] Speaker 1: worth naming. It was usually a thermal vent or a shipwreck.
[1:49] Speaker 1: Occasionally someone would discover an unidentified rock formation. If it
[1:55] Speaker 1: wasn't on the database and past the checks, you got
[1:58] Speaker 1: to propose the desert nation. It was a dumb bragging, right,
[2:04] Speaker 1: but when your world shrank to forty meters of ship
[2:06] Speaker 1: steel and the endless screaming of the sonar puls you
[2:10] Speaker 1: took what you could get. I remember the day it
[2:14] Speaker 1: started because it had been a bad morning for the
[2:17] Speaker 1: ROV team. The wind system had glitched during recovery and
[2:22] Speaker 1: nearly dumped two million dollars of hardware into the deep.
[2:27] Speaker 1: We were tense and distracted. Still, protocol said to keep
[2:32] Speaker 1: the scans running. All repairs were underway. The bathymetric sweep
[2:37] Speaker 1: came in, slow, layering soft outlines across the workstation, monitors,
[2:43] Speaker 1: rows and rows of nothing, until sam our sonartec leaned
[2:49] Speaker 1: forward and frowned, Hey, you seeing this, he piped the
[2:56] Speaker 1: signal to the main screen. There, against the background noise
[3:02] Speaker 1: of the plane were clusters of depressions, hexagonal, about three
[3:08] Speaker 1: meters across each, shallow but precise. At first we thought
[3:15] Speaker 1: it was sensor noise, maybe a misfire from the multibeam ray,
[3:20] Speaker 1: but the pattern was too clean. They repeated with eer irregularity,
[3:26] Speaker 1: spaced at near perfect intervals, stretching outward for what looked
[3:31] Speaker 1: like miles. No obvious elevation changes, no ridges or venting nearby,
[3:38] Speaker 1: just those shapes plunged into the seabed with surgical precision.
[3:44] Speaker 1: Sam ran a calibration check while the rest of us
[3:47] Speaker 1: crowded around. The readings came back normal. The array was
[3:54] Speaker 1: working fine. Could be polygonal cracking, Lucas offered. He was
[4:01] Speaker 1: a junior geologist fresh out of postdoc. You know, desiccation
[4:06] Speaker 1: features from sediment drying back in the plister scene. No way,
[4:11] Speaker 1: said Marla, our RV pilot, shaking her head. Not this
[4:16] Speaker 1: uniform and not down here, too deep, too much pressure.
[4:22] Speaker 1: We logged it like any other anomaly, file, stamped coordinates, noted.
[4:29] Speaker 1: Nobody said it out loud, but you could feel it
[4:33] Speaker 1: in the room. The slight thrill, the unspoken possibility. Maybe
[4:40] Speaker 1: this was the thing we could get to name. We
[4:45] Speaker 1: decided we would send the RV back down first thing
[4:48] Speaker 1: after repairs, take a closer look, maybe bring back a
[4:52] Speaker 1: sample if the manipulator arms could manage it. Later that night,
[4:59] Speaker 1: lying in my bunk with a ship's soft creaking all
[5:02] Speaker 1: around me, I kept replaying the sonar image of my mind,
[5:07] Speaker 1: most perfect hexagons stretching into the dark, waiting. By noon
[5:17] Speaker 1: the next day, the r of V was repaired and
[5:20] Speaker 1: pressure tested. No major damage, just the fried relay in
[5:25] Speaker 1: the tether winch that the engineers swapped out with a
[5:28] Speaker 1: spear from the parts locker. Marla ran the pre dive
[5:32] Speaker 1: checklist twice, cross referencing with the top side crew thrust
[5:37] Speaker 1: this green cameras clean, manipulators responsive. The fiber optic tether
[5:42] Speaker 1: hissed through the winch as we lowered the RV down
[5:46] Speaker 1: through the ghostly blue haze of the operation. I sat
[5:51] Speaker 1: behind the monitor array in the control van, sipping bitter coffee.
[5:55] Speaker 1: Or The depth counter ticked upward five hundred meters a thousand,
[6:01] Speaker 1: two thousand by three thousand, eight hundred metres. The sunlight
[6:06] Speaker 1: was gone only the faint scatter of bioluminescent creatures spun
[6:11] Speaker 1: past the camera, looking for all the world like disembodied stars.
[6:16] Speaker 1: At four thousand, one hundred and twenty seven meters, the
[6:20] Speaker 1: ROV's altitude warning chimed. The bottom was close, coming up
[6:27] Speaker 1: on the target grid. Marla announced, hands steady on the joystick.
[6:33] Speaker 1: She feathered the vertical thrusters, easing the RV down with
[6:37] Speaker 1: practiced grace. Twin led rays flared to life, pushing a
[6:42] Speaker 1: stark directional beam across the dark sea floor. The feed
[6:48] Speaker 1: resolved slowly. Fine sediment kicked up in lazy clouds as
[6:53] Speaker 1: the RVs skids brushed the bottom. When it cleared, the
[6:58] Speaker 1: formations came in to view, I leaned forward unconsciously. They
[7:06] Speaker 1: were even more precise than the sonar had suggested. Wide
[7:11] Speaker 1: hexagonal trenches, each one about two meters were carved into
[7:16] Speaker 1: the substrate with impossible symmetry. The edges were sharp and clean,
[7:22] Speaker 1: not slumped or rounded as expected from erosion. They were
[7:26] Speaker 1: arranged in a pattern too regular for any known natural process.
[7:32] Speaker 1: Between some of the hexagons rose thin spires no more
[7:36] Speaker 1: than a meter high. They were narrow, almost needlelike, tapering
[7:42] Speaker 1: to sharp points. The floodlights revealed the surface was not
[7:47] Speaker 1: natural stone at all. It absorbed the lights strangely, reflecting
[7:52] Speaker 1: only a dull sheen material composition, I asked. Lucas checked
[7:59] Speaker 1: the spectrum to read out low reflectivity. Looks basaltic at
[8:04] Speaker 1: first glance, but the density is wrong. No magnetic signature either.
[8:10] Speaker 1: Could be synthetic. Synthetic that made my stomach titan. There
[8:18] Speaker 1: should not be anything synthetic four kilometers below the surface.
[8:24] Speaker 1: Marla maneuvered carefully over the field, the manipulator arms tucked
[8:29] Speaker 1: in close to avoid disturbing the formations. No visible life.
[8:34] Speaker 1: Sam noted from behind me. He was monitoring the low
[8:38] Speaker 1: light auxiliary cameras. Too deep for anything beyond extremophiles, maybe
[8:43] Speaker 1: some amphipods or microbio mats. There was something strange about
[8:49] Speaker 1: the water chemistry too. The conductivity probe picked up faint
[8:54] Speaker 1: electromagnetic readings, tiny surges barely above background noise, but steady.
[9:03] Speaker 1: Could be geothermal, Lucas offered, but he did not sound convinced.
[9:10] Speaker 1: I kept my eyes glued to the forward facing cameras
[9:13] Speaker 1: as we moved deeper into the cluster. Every trench, every
[9:18] Speaker 1: spire was placed with mechanical position, no collapse, no drift.
[9:25] Speaker 1: It was as if the entire field had been set
[9:28] Speaker 1: out according to a blueprint we could not see. At
[9:33] Speaker 1: the edge of one of the frames, something shifted a
[9:38] Speaker 1: blur low to the ground. I jerked upright heart stammering.
[9:44] Speaker 1: Marla pan write. She nudged the stick, swinging the ROV around.
[9:51] Speaker 1: Nothing just sediment curling in the beams. Probably a fish,
[9:58] Speaker 1: Sam said, but he sounded uncertain. There were some species
[10:04] Speaker 1: of snailfish, rat tails, and amphipods that could survive at
[10:08] Speaker 1: this depth, but nothing that would move with that kind
[10:12] Speaker 1: of speed. Another movement, this time at the far periphery
[10:18] Speaker 1: of the overhead camera. A flicker too fast to focus on.
[10:24] Speaker 1: Could be debris stirred up by the thrusters. Marla offered
[10:29] Speaker 1: she was trying to stay calm, professional, but her voice
[10:33] Speaker 1: was tight and her headset. We liked the coordinates of
[10:37] Speaker 1: the anomalies and swept the immediate area for more readings.
[10:42] Speaker 1: Nothing consistent, just those endless trenches, the eerie towers, and
[10:49] Speaker 1: the faint sense of something just beyond the reach of
[10:52] Speaker 1: our lights. By the time we winched the ROV back
[10:56] Speaker 1: to the surface, my nerves were humming under my skin.
[11:04] Speaker 1: I sat in the dry lap the next morning, staring
[11:07] Speaker 1: at the overnight scans until my coffee went cold in
[11:10] Speaker 1: my hand. The multi beam bathymetric data had finished rendering
[11:15] Speaker 1: stacking into shimmering blue topography grids on the analysis monitors.
[11:21] Speaker 1: I pulled three sweeps baseline twelve hours later and twenty
[11:26] Speaker 1: four and laid them together to check for any sea
[11:30] Speaker 1: floor changes. At first, he looked clean, identical patterns, no collapses,
[11:38] Speaker 1: no disturbances. Then Marlas slid into the chair next to
[11:43] Speaker 1: me and pointed with the stylus at a cluster near
[11:47] Speaker 1: the site's northern edge. Doesn't this look weird to you?
[11:53] Speaker 1: I leaned in six depressions, all hexagonal, arranged in a
[11:58] Speaker 1: loose arc. Another seven clustered just below them, five more
[12:03] Speaker 1: to the west. I ran a quick measurement to all
[12:07] Speaker 1: over them. The distances between the pits varied a little,
[12:11] Speaker 1: but not enough to call random. There was a rhythm
[12:15] Speaker 1: to it. Coincidence, I said, mostly to convince myself pariodolia.
[12:23] Speaker 1: Our brains want to find patterns. Marla wasn'tconvinced. She chewed
[12:30] Speaker 1: her pink cap and tapped the open ship's internal manifest,
[12:34] Speaker 1: a digital diagram showing crews, quarters, lounges, labs, and shared spaces.
[12:41] Speaker 1: She tilted her head, humor me look. She overlaid the
[12:49] Speaker 1: manifest atop the bathymetry render. It was not perfect, but
[12:55] Speaker 1: it was close enough to stiffen the hair along my arms.
[12:59] Speaker 1: The largest grouping on the seafloor roughly matched where the
[13:03] Speaker 1: gallery and the wreck rooms sat on the ship. The
[13:06] Speaker 1: five smaller pits aligned roughly with the forward cabins, my
[13:10] Speaker 1: bunk among them. We sat there for a long time
[13:15] Speaker 1: without speaking. By lunch, word had spread. Half the crew
[13:21] Speaker 1: jammed into the lab to look at the Scan's opinion
[13:25] Speaker 1: split fast. Some said it was pure chance, that it
[13:30] Speaker 1: was just rocks, debris filled shape by currents we didn't
[13:33] Speaker 1: yet understand. The others grew silent, thinking about how the
[13:38] Speaker 1: ship creaked at night, how the sonar would sometimes ping
[13:41] Speaker 1: back false returns. The tension was palpable. Meals grew quieter.
[13:49] Speaker 1: You could feel it shift in the air, heavier, harder
[13:53] Speaker 1: to shake. Conversations stayed locked on surface topics, instrument calibrations,
[13:59] Speaker 1: generate cycles, and food rations. Nobody spoke about how the
[14:04] Speaker 1: walls seemed to hum when you were alone. Sleep came hard.
[14:10] Speaker 1: I woke once around three a m heart hammering, cold sweat,
[14:15] Speaker 1: soaking the sheets. In the darkness, I thought I heard
[14:20] Speaker 1: something tapping rhythmically against the hull, distant and slow, like
[14:25] Speaker 1: something running the pads of his fingers down the ship's spine.
[14:29] Speaker 1: No one admitted to hearing it when I asked around
[14:32] Speaker 1: in the morning, but no one denied it either. Then
[14:37] Speaker 1: came the update from the overnight automated RV mapping run.
[14:42] Speaker 1: A new structure had appeared. It had not been on
[14:46] Speaker 1: any previous pass, verified by timestamped footage and sonar sweeps.
[14:53] Speaker 1: It was shaped differently, no perfect geometry this time. Instead,
[14:59] Speaker 1: it was slight, irregular, almost an atomic hare, a stretched
[15:06] Speaker 1: oval embedded into the silt, taxtured and away. The data
[15:11] Speaker 1: could not fully resolve. Marla printed out the overlay and
[15:16] Speaker 1: pinned it up next to the others. She added a
[15:19] Speaker 1: sticky note underneath it, it's watching. Nobody laughed. We launched
[15:31] Speaker 1: the second r V dive just after sunrise under a
[15:34] Speaker 1: sky smeared thin with silver clouds. No one ate much
[15:39] Speaker 1: that morning. Even the engine noise seemed muted. As we
[15:43] Speaker 1: craned the RV back overboard, letting it sink into the
[15:47] Speaker 1: depthless dark. The cable unspooled in measured words from the
[15:51] Speaker 1: A frame, tension sensors ticking numbers into the console by
[15:56] Speaker 1: my knee. We dropped fast, fallowing the same descent vector
[16:01] Speaker 1: as the previous night, straight back to the mapping site.
[16:07] Speaker 1: At about three eight hundred meters. The lights kicked on,
[16:11] Speaker 1: cutting long cones through the water full of swirling silt.
[16:17] Speaker 1: The first glimpses of the seafloor came seconds later. The
[16:21] Speaker 1: original formations were still there, silent black trenches, neat towers
[16:27] Speaker 1: of map material, but now something new sat among them.
[16:33] Speaker 1: It did not look natural. Manning the camera controls beside me,
[16:39] Speaker 1: Marla zoomed in, carefully nudging the pan with a slow,
[16:43] Speaker 1: steady hand. The new structure rose out of the silt,
[16:48] Speaker 1: maybe three meters high, much more complex than the clean
[16:52] Speaker 1: exagonal pits. It looked skeletal, almost bony in its angles,
[16:58] Speaker 1: thin arches into twined at strange geometries that no natural
[17:03] Speaker 1: basalt or limestone formation would have made. At its base,
[17:08] Speaker 1: embedded in the seafloor, something caught the light. I leaned forward,
[17:14] Speaker 1: squinting at the monitor. The spiral deeply etched into the
[17:20] Speaker 1: silty plane. Now more than etched, it had dimensionality and
[17:27] Speaker 1: stood raised, shallow ridges of black material rising into the water,
[17:32] Speaker 1: curling tightly into a pattern. Mala cursed under a breath.
[17:39] Speaker 1: I toggled the data overlay on the screen. The plotted
[17:43] Speaker 1: course of the arc light from the last three days
[17:46] Speaker 1: appeared in green lines. It matched perfectly. The spiral mirrored
[17:55] Speaker 1: the ship's path through the survey area, down to the
[17:58] Speaker 1: minor course corrections by the auto nav. We had not
[18:03] Speaker 1: transmitted those paths outside the vessel. There was no broadcast,
[18:07] Speaker 1: no relay. That pattern should not have been accessible to
[18:11] Speaker 1: anything except our internal systems. The realization hit like a
[18:18] Speaker 1: cold slap. Whatever was down there, he was not just
[18:22] Speaker 1: reacting to our presence. He was tracking us. He was learning.
[18:31] Speaker 1: Marla swung the RV in closer, aiming to capture a
[18:35] Speaker 1: better angle of the spires. The feed stuttered as the
[18:39] Speaker 1: RV shadow passed over the new structure static blade across
[18:44] Speaker 1: the screen. Status lights on the pilot board flickered, a deep,
[18:49] Speaker 1: vibrating harm rattle through the ship's deck plates. Backer off,
[18:54] Speaker 1: I barked. Marla immediately reversed the thrusters, pulling the RV
[19:00] Speaker 1: to a safer standoff distance. The noise eased, but not completely.
[19:06] Speaker 1: Instruments and the read out panels pulsed faint red warnings,
[19:09] Speaker 1: vaultage drops, minor system faults. It was not damaged in
[19:14] Speaker 1: the traditional sense, it felt closer to interference or corrosion
[19:20] Speaker 1: happening in real time. Marla muttered, scanning the status lights,
[19:27] Speaker 1: it's like it's eating the signal. A keyed into the
[19:33] Speaker 1: shipboard internal channel. RV team to bridge, we are getting
[19:37] Speaker 1: electromagnetic disruption at the dive site. Ad just passive scanners
[19:41] Speaker 1: and PRESP for possible early retrieval. Copy that RV team
[19:46] Speaker 1: monitor vitals and advice. We floated the ROV higher, switching
[19:52] Speaker 1: off unnecessary systems to conserve power. The feed cleaned slightly
[19:58] Speaker 1: enough to get one lass pan over the field. The
[20:03] Speaker 1: new skeletal structure was not alone. Further out, just at
[20:08] Speaker 1: the edge of floodlight range, another small formation began taking shape.
[20:14] Speaker 1: It bulged out of the silt dark and ridged the
[20:18] Speaker 1: way barnacles first cling to a ship's hull. I locked
[20:22] Speaker 1: the timestamp, noted its coordinates, requested retrieval. The hour of
[20:29] Speaker 1: e rose steadily whining as it climbed through the cold
[20:33] Speaker 1: weight of the abyss. As the winch hauled it back
[20:37] Speaker 1: onto the deck, I caught Marla watching the monitors a
[20:41] Speaker 1: second longer than necessary. Did you see it? She asked,
[20:46] Speaker 1: voice low. See what She hesitated, then shook her head.
[20:54] Speaker 1: Never mind, but the look in her eyes told me
[21:00] Speaker 1: she had seen something move. The mood and the arc
[21:11] Speaker 1: light soured. By the next day, the meals were even quieter,
[21:16] Speaker 1: Conversations clipped at the edges. No one said it out
[21:21] Speaker 1: loud yet, but the divide was growing. Marla paced the
[21:25] Speaker 1: lounge and short sharp burst, arguing with Ethan, our senior hydrographer,
[21:32] Speaker 1: we should pull the anchor and get the hell out.
[21:35] Speaker 1: She snapped, voice cracking under the strain. This isn't natural,
[21:40] Speaker 1: It is not geology, it's not life as we know
[21:43] Speaker 1: it either, Ethan. Ever, the opportunist folded his arms and
[21:48] Speaker 1: shook his head. You realize what this could mean if we,
[21:52] Speaker 1: the first did document a non biological scent in structure,
[21:56] Speaker 1: do you understand the weight of her careers are made
[21:59] Speaker 1: of less? His voice had a note of desperation. I
[22:06] Speaker 1: remember the early days of the voyage, how we used
[22:08] Speaker 1: to joke about finding the next challenger deep, about naming
[22:12] Speaker 1: some underwater canyon or thermal vents after ourselves. The competitiveness
[22:18] Speaker 1: was baked into the blood of every research ship crew.
[22:22] Speaker 1: Now it sounded pathetic, hollow. I said nothing. Instead, I
[22:31] Speaker 1: chewed my breakfast slowly, watching the tensions strangle the room. Later,
[22:38] Speaker 1: while rerunning bathymetric sweeps, I caught Sam Arsnartk staring too
[22:43] Speaker 1: long at the screen, jaw slacked. He pointed at the
[22:48] Speaker 1: data traces, deep harmonic ripples that had not been there before,
[22:54] Speaker 1: slight deviations, faint signatures repeating deeper and deeper in the
[22:59] Speaker 1: water column. Feels deeper than it should, he mumbled, feels
[23:05] Speaker 1: like falling. No one was sleeping much. Whenever I did
[23:13] Speaker 1: doze off, I dreamt of those spirals, dreamt of standing
[23:17] Speaker 1: barefoot on the seafloor, staring up at towering black spires
[23:22] Speaker 1: that stretched forever into a starless sky. No water, no pressure,
[23:29] Speaker 1: just the endless sensation of sinking. We launched another RV
[23:36] Speaker 1: dive that afternoon. None of us wanted to say it
[23:40] Speaker 1: was stupid, but every glance said it. The ocean was
[23:44] Speaker 1: calm above, with the field looked different again. When the
[23:48] Speaker 1: r V hit the bottom, a new structure stood near
[23:53] Speaker 1: the original cluster. Marla controlled the RV with tight, nervous
[23:58] Speaker 1: flakes of the joystick, angling the floodlights to frame it fully.
[24:04] Speaker 1: The spire was taller than the others, irregular. Where the
[24:08] Speaker 1: other ones had a machine symmetry, this one bent slightly,
[24:13] Speaker 1: top heavy, almost humanoid. There were jutting shapes where arms
[24:18] Speaker 1: should have been, a rounded dome where a head might be.
[24:23] Speaker 1: The radio crackled. Marla's voice came thin and wired from
[24:27] Speaker 1: the control booth. You're seeing this. Ethan hovering behind her, whispered,
[24:37] Speaker 1: it's copying. No one dared breathe too loudly. Marla nudged
[24:44] Speaker 1: the r OFV closer, attempting a slow orbit around the
[24:48] Speaker 1: figure for better imaging. The starboard thrusters engaged, humming softly
[24:53] Speaker 1: through the deck. Halfway through the sweep, the r of
[24:58] Speaker 1: E jerked to a sudden halt. Red arms blinked across
[25:02] Speaker 1: the piloting console. Tether tension spiked, damn it, tether snag.
[25:08] Speaker 1: Mala cursed, hands flying over the controls, trying to reverse
[25:12] Speaker 1: the motors. The RV barely budged I switched to the
[25:18] Speaker 1: rear camera feed, squinting. Something had latched on to the
[25:23] Speaker 1: tail end of the vehicle. Nothing mechanical, nor a net
[25:28] Speaker 1: or debris. It was something organic. It looked vibrous, like
[25:35] Speaker 1: strands of thick kelp, but the way they gripped and
[25:38] Speaker 1: flexed against the pressure was all wrong. They merged seamlessly
[25:43] Speaker 1: into the black material of the surrounding structures. We ran
[25:49] Speaker 1: emergency retrieval protocols, tugging manually through the winch, but it
[25:54] Speaker 1: held fast. We could not rip it free without risking
[25:58] Speaker 1: the whole tether system. There was no real choice left.
[26:04] Speaker 1: The RV was stuck hard teth at tension red lining,
[26:08] Speaker 1: and we could not afford to abandon it. Not just
[26:12] Speaker 1: because of the equipment cost, though that was astronomical, but
[26:17] Speaker 1: because it was our eyes, our only clean set of
[26:20] Speaker 1: them down there when no human belonged. The problem was
[26:27] Speaker 1: we had no back up unit. There was only one
[26:30] Speaker 1: other way. The arc light carried a single two persons
[26:35] Speaker 1: submersible in case of emergency retrievals or close proximity geological surveys.
[26:42] Speaker 1: The seeker, the sphere shaped titanium pod bolted with manipulator
[26:47] Speaker 1: arms and a single narrow viewing slit. It had been
[26:52] Speaker 1: loaded on board almost as in afterthought and nod to
[26:56] Speaker 1: redundancy in the paperwork, but nobody had touched it yond
[27:00] Speaker 1: maintenance checks since the voyage began. Only Ben, our junior
[27:05] Speaker 1: pilot and maintenance tech, was rated to operate it. He
[27:10] Speaker 1: volunteered without question. I can get it loose, he said,
[27:16] Speaker 1: tapping the side of the sub's hull. Get close, use
[27:19] Speaker 1: the starboard arm to pry it free. Marlow was pale,
[27:24] Speaker 1: but nodded. Ethan and I ran rapid systems checks on
[27:28] Speaker 1: the seeker's life support ballace controls and thrust the calibration.
[27:34] Speaker 1: No time for real redundancy checks. If the field was
[27:38] Speaker 1: shifting daily. We had no idea what the r VM
[27:41] Speaker 1: I record or what it might provoke if left attached
[27:46] Speaker 1: too long. We sealed Ben into the sub, gave him
[27:51] Speaker 1: a thumbs up behind the thick view bought glass, the
[27:54] Speaker 1: white lights from the hangar floor flashing across his face.
[27:59] Speaker 1: The winch lowered the Seekers slowly into the churning black
[28:03] Speaker 1: until it disappeared under the surface, leaving only the faint
[28:07] Speaker 1: crackle of the tether COM's line trailing back up to us.
[28:12] Speaker 1: Descent took nearly an hour. From the command deck, we
[28:17] Speaker 1: monitored his telemetry. The seekers on board sonar pulsed dutifully
[28:23] Speaker 1: slow pings, rebounding off the abyssal plane. At four one
[28:28] Speaker 1: hundred meters, he hit the bottom. Marla switched the external
[28:33] Speaker 1: floodlights on the screen, filled with particulate haze, like slow
[28:38] Speaker 1: snow drifting through eternal darkness. Shapes loomed through the gloom.
[28:45] Speaker 1: First the old structures, spires rising like broken teeth, mat
[28:50] Speaker 1: and ancient, and then the new one, the irregular figure spire,
[28:56] Speaker 1: the one that bent to the shoulders arms askew. Ben
[29:01] Speaker 1: approached cautiously, thrusters whispering in minute bursts, keeping him neutrally
[29:07] Speaker 1: buoyant a meter of the sea floor. He swung the
[29:11] Speaker 1: seeker around the tangled RV, the manipulator arms who used
[29:15] Speaker 1: the probe the fibrous strands wrapping the equipment. On the
[29:20] Speaker 1: video feed, it looked almost fungal. A slick membrane had
[29:25] Speaker 1: sprouted over the r of V chassis. Pulsing faintly, Ben
[29:31] Speaker 1: grunted over the combs, feel soft, almost like tissue. None
[29:39] Speaker 1: of us spoke the soa blurched telemetry spiked, depth indicators
[29:45] Speaker 1: ticking down in jerky fits. Something's pulling. Ben's voice broke
[29:51] Speaker 1: through roar and panicked. We saw it on the monitor.
[29:56] Speaker 1: The Seeker was sinking, not falling freely, but being dragged downward.
[30:02] Speaker 1: The ballast control flashed critical thrust, the screaming against an
[30:07] Speaker 1: unseen force blow tanks. Ethan shouted into the combs, but
[30:13] Speaker 1: it was useless. Ben was already trying no response. The
[30:20] Speaker 1: final seconds of the feed were a blur. The Seeker's
[30:23] Speaker 1: exterior lights swept the sea floor, illuminating the figure spire again,
[30:29] Speaker 1: but closer, now distorted twisting inward. The r V appeared
[30:36] Speaker 1: briefly in the frame, still cocooned in that alien growth,
[30:41] Speaker 1: and behind it, with the trench dipped into darker folds,
[30:46] Speaker 1: more shapes waited, larger ones. The feed cut to black.
[30:57] Speaker 1: Chaos rippled across the arc light. Ethan and Marlas scrambled
[31:01] Speaker 1: at their stations, shouting across the deck as the last
[31:04] Speaker 1: telemetry from the seak of flat lined. The small submersible
[31:08] Speaker 1: stepth indicator had frozen at an impossible number beneath a
[31:13] Speaker 1: designated operational range, and then blinked out. No visual feed,
[31:19] Speaker 1: no external sonarping, only the droning emptiness of the abyss
[31:24] Speaker 1: beyond the hull. I stayed glued to the ROV console.
[31:30] Speaker 1: The tether was still functional, but barely. Battery drain warnings
[31:34] Speaker 1: pulsed at the corner of the monitor, the autonomous systems
[31:38] Speaker 1: fighting to stay alive. I twisted the joystick, panning the
[31:43] Speaker 1: external camera one slow, deliberate sweep across the field of formations.
[31:51] Speaker 1: Something caught the edge of the frame. Where before the
[31:56] Speaker 1: spires had stood in jagged randomness, there was now a
[32:00] Speaker 1: new structure, right on the fringe of the disturbed trench
[32:04] Speaker 1: where Ben had been pulled under. It was still forming,
[32:10] Speaker 1: Not rock, not coral. No slow geologic patience here. This
[32:15] Speaker 1: was something birthing itself from the seafloor, extruding and reshaping
[32:20] Speaker 1: in real time, tendrils of black and material writhing inward,
[32:26] Speaker 1: knitting together. We watched in horrified silence as it thickened
[32:31] Speaker 1: and took on contour and form, the beginnings of a
[32:35] Speaker 1: figure coming into shape. Marla cursed, softly, backing away from
[32:41] Speaker 1: the screen. Ethan stood there, arms crossed, white knuckled against
[32:46] Speaker 1: his own ribs. This cannot be natural, he muttered. I
[32:54] Speaker 1: tried to turn the camera again, angling toward the last
[32:57] Speaker 1: no position of the seeker, hoping maybe Ben had escaped,
[33:02] Speaker 1: hoping there would be a light and moving object, anything
[33:06] Speaker 1: to suggest he had somehow gotten free. Nothing, only blackness.
[33:15] Speaker 1: I rotated back to the formation, instinctively scanning for landmarks,
[33:21] Speaker 1: but the figure was gone. The sea floor was bare again.
[33:27] Speaker 1: The rfv's battery warning flashed critical red. I powered down
[33:31] Speaker 1: the external lights to conserve energy for the tether systems.
[33:36] Speaker 1: Across the deck. Ethan was flipping through the passive sonar array,
[33:40] Speaker 1: rerunning diagnostics. We could not use active sonar now, not
[33:45] Speaker 1: with certainty that Ben or whatever remained of him, was
[33:49] Speaker 1: not near the hole. The shockwaves from an active pin
[33:52] Speaker 1: could shatter a man submersible if it was close enough.
[33:57] Speaker 1: Ethan leaned into the console, frowning. I've got something, he said,
[34:04] Speaker 1: A faint contact, A return on passive sonar. It was
[34:09] Speaker 1: moving toward US fast. No surface ships within range, no
[34:15] Speaker 1: known subs, no other research vessels were in this quadrant.
[34:20] Speaker 1: We were supposed to be alone out here for another
[34:22] Speaker 1: two weeks. Marla grabbed the emergency flare protocol and hovered
[34:28] Speaker 1: near the distress beacon switch, but I shook my head,
[34:32] Speaker 1: no sense signaling. Whatever was coming, already knew where we were.
[34:41] Speaker 1: The contact was smooth, steady, gliding without turbulence, closing distance
[34:47] Speaker 1: too cleanly. Ethan adjusted the gain. An outline began to
[34:53] Speaker 1: coalesce on the sonar projection, a shape nearing the arc lights.
[34:58] Speaker 1: Hull small compared to the ship, but just the right
[35:02] Speaker 1: size for something like the Seeker. Marla excelled sharply, almost
[35:09] Speaker 1: a sob. It's ben, she whispered. I kept my hands
[35:18] Speaker 1: clamped tight on the edge of the console to stop
[35:20] Speaker 1: them from shaking. If it was him, if somehow he
[35:25] Speaker 1: had gotten free, he would have radioed by now. The
[35:29] Speaker 1: seekers coms were silent, completely murderously silent. The contact reached
[35:37] Speaker 1: the vessel docked. The ship lurched slightly, a vibration through
[35:43] Speaker 1: the steel underfoot that carried the moonpool all the way
[35:46] Speaker 1: to the bridge. The crew instinctively turned toward the axis
[35:51] Speaker 1: corridor that led down to the moon pool bay, leaving
[35:54] Speaker 1: to see what had docked. I stayed at the console,
[36:00] Speaker 1: the black screens offering no guidance, no comfort. The r
[36:05] Speaker 1: of V was dead, now severed from us, blind and powerless,
[36:10] Speaker 1: only the sonar lingered behind an occasional soft ping from
[36:15] Speaker 1: Ethan's station, trying to resolve an image that would not come.
[36:21] Speaker 1: Marlar's voice cracked through the intercom from below, tight and strained,
[36:26] Speaker 1: contacted the submersible. Doc it's the Seeker. Looks intact, no
[36:31] Speaker 1: visible damage through the deck speakers. Marla's voice again, higher pitched.
[36:40] Speaker 1: He's Bend's here, just stepped out. Looks normal, says He's fine.
[36:49] Speaker 1: I stayed frozen in my chair, staring at the dead
[36:53] Speaker 1: r V feed. A flicker of movement caught in my eye.
[36:59] Speaker 1: The passive onar was still active in the corner, and
[37:02] Speaker 1: there was a side utility window no one had touched.
[37:06] Speaker 1: An object was drifting past the ship's bow, slow and aimless. Curious,
[37:14] Speaker 1: I toggled the camera, hoping for a glimpse before the
[37:17] Speaker 1: power fully died. Static and distortion bloomed, but one shape
[37:23] Speaker 1: pushed through a body, bloated, skin, pale and slowing away
[37:33] Speaker 1: under the crushing pressure of depth. His uniform was torn
[37:37] Speaker 1: and trailing in the water, but there was no mistaking
[37:41] Speaker 1: the orange patch stitched to the chest, the color used
[37:47] Speaker 1: for Junior's. A chill went through my veins so fast
[37:53] Speaker 1: it left me dizzy. I stood hard enough that my
[37:56] Speaker 1: chair clattered to the floor. No Ben was still on
[38:03] Speaker 1: the seafloor, which meant whatever I had just climbed aboard
[38:08] Speaker 1: was not him. I sprinted across the deck, shoving past
[38:14] Speaker 1: the storage cart, nearly losing my footing on the grating floor.
[38:18] Speaker 1: Half Way to the hatch leading down to the docking level,
[38:22] Speaker 1: I grabbed the first heavy object. I saw, a rusted
[38:25] Speaker 1: steel emergency pry bar, long and pitted from years of
[38:29] Speaker 1: salt exposure. He weighed heavy in my hand. I barely
[38:34] Speaker 1: registered it. My boots hammered down the stairwell below. I
[38:40] Speaker 1: could hear laughter shout, the casual tones of a reunion
[38:46] Speaker 1: around the corner into the docking bay, my heart trying
[38:50] Speaker 1: to climb out of my chest. Ben what wore Ben's
[38:54] Speaker 1: face stood surrounded by Marla and Eathan. They were patting
[38:59] Speaker 1: him on the back, half laughing, half crying, disbelief and
[39:03] Speaker 1: joy muddling into one chaotic scene. They turned at the
[39:08] Speaker 1: sound of my footsteps, saw me coming in fast. Pry
[39:12] Speaker 1: bar raised. I screamed, without words, a roar that tore
[39:17] Speaker 1: out my throat. Ben turned confusion flickering across his face.
[39:24] Speaker 1: Marla shouted my name. Ethan moved to intercept. I barreled
[39:30] Speaker 1: through both, shouldering them aside with every ounce of terror
[39:33] Speaker 1: and momentum I could summon. The first blow caught Ben
[39:38] Speaker 1: square in the side of the head. He staggered a
[39:43] Speaker 1: and going up defensively, mouth opening in a protest that
[39:47] Speaker 1: sounded wrong. The cadence too clean, the tone pitched half
[39:51] Speaker 1: step too high, the consonants dragging unnaturally for someone with
[39:56] Speaker 1: blunt head trauma. I did not stop another blow and another.
[40:05] Speaker 1: Ethan tried to pull me back. I wrenched free. Ben
[40:09] Speaker 1: clapped to his knees, hands trembling, mouth working in a silent,
[40:13] Speaker 1: broken mimicry of human distress. I raised the pry bar
[40:19] Speaker 1: one final time and brought it down across the top
[40:23] Speaker 1: of its skull with every fiber of strength I had left.
[40:28] Speaker 1: The head cracked open. The sound of liquid bursting across
[40:33] Speaker 1: the floor silenced the room. Ethan stumbled back, hand clamped
[40:39] Speaker 1: over his mouth. Marla simply froze, eyes wide, making a
[40:44] Speaker 1: keening sound low in her throat. They no longer fought
[40:49] Speaker 1: me on my decision, after seeing what'spilled out from what
[40:55] Speaker 1: looked like Ben. A gush of thick, briny water explodedaded
[41:00] Speaker 1: across the deck, plating puddling across the Decking strands of
[41:05] Speaker 1: green filament, slick and twitching, spooled out of the ruin
[41:09] Speaker 1: of its head, writhing weakly against the metal before falling still.
[41:17] Speaker 1: The air filled with the sharp, stinging reek of deep
[41:20] Speaker 1: salt and rot. The thing twitched once more, then stilled silence.
[41:32] Speaker 1: Only the low, steady drip of salt water from its
[41:36] Speaker 1: body remained. I dropped the pry bar. In the aftermath,
[41:42] Speaker 1: none of us moved for a long long time. In
[41:48] Speaker 1: silent agreement, we pushed whatever looked like Ben off the ship.
[41:53] Speaker 1: Wearing multiple layers of protective gear, we cut the line
[41:57] Speaker 1: to the rov. The considerable loss was much more palatable
[42:02] Speaker 1: after seeing the consequences from below. We called it, ended
[42:08] Speaker 1: the mission and returned home. All reports were wiped and
[42:13] Speaker 1: Ben was documented as missing at sea. We co operated
[42:17] Speaker 1: a story about his reckless behavior and repeated it enough
[42:24] Speaker 1: until it was believed

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