Heather had thought she... «Into the Drowning Deep»
RamingoWS13 апреля 2018Heather had thought she knew what darkness looked like; had believed the waters of the trench were as dark as it was possible for a place to be. As her submersible slipped below the surface of the Deep, dropping downward at a pace that skirted the line between conservative and ambitious, she realized with slow and dawning wonder that she had never known darkness in her life. Nothing that lived on the surface had. Humanity had feared the dark since time immemorial, and yet humanity had never experienced the dark, because it wasn`t until recently -- the age of cunning hands and clever machines -- that the dark had been anything more than a whispering legend, a rumor of a nightmare. Biologists and the laws of evolution on Earth said humanity had started, like everything else, in the sea. Maybe that explained fearing the dark. An ancestral memory of this sort of all-consuming nothingness would have been enough to terrify anyone. The dark passed around her like it had physical weight, like it accounted for more of the crushing danger of the deeps than the water itself. Her submersible`s lights pierced it like spears, so bright that they seemed unbelievable, yet unable to illuminate more than a few feet on every side. She could have turned on every light she had, lit every emergency signal, and still not done anything to brighten the Challenger Deep. This was where darkness went to live forever, growing deeper and more powerful as the eons passed it by.
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