When they were training us, on the first day as they were double-checking that we could read the little meter that measured the amount of air we still had in our tanks, one of the teachers looked us up and down and said, “never underestimate the water. It doesn’t care about how much time you have left.”
I’m not sure that any of us were really paying attention, not to him, when we were so focused on what the other teachers were saying. But, it stuck in my head, swirling around like the memory of an accident that only almost happened, just waiting in your mind to wake you up in a panic sweat some night.
75 Minutes
The pool is 80 feet deep and 200 feet long and 100 feet wide. The water it takes to fill it would run a town dry; so it never gets refilled, just cleaned—an endless cycle of pumps and filters. The first time I saw it, it was darker blue than any swimming pool I’d ever seen. I wanted to ask someone if that was because they used more chlorine or if it was just because of the size—but I never asked. It looked like the swimming pools I used to have in my dreams, as a kid, the color a little off, the depth a little unsure so that the dreams could so easily slip between the fantastic and nightmares.
At the bottom of the pool, all the way under all that water, was a replica of a station and of a pod. They were exact in dimensions and specs. Training in a neutral buoyancy pool would help us to train for EVA’s before we reached space, or that was the idea—but, of course, everything could be controlled in the pool and so, really, it wasn’t like space would be at all.
There were twelve of us training that cycle. A slightly smaller group than usual. By the end of training, there would be nine—the smallest group to ever graduate the course.
I was having not particularly good, but still sort of satisfying, sex with one of the other trainees. Tenley had blond hair that she kept at a length between short and long, which irritated me on some level. She’d wear it pulled back and an hour into the day, bits of her hair would have come loose from their holding and dangle around her face. When I had her against a wall, sometimes my gaze would fall to the freed strand of her hair as it bobbed in front of me, wiggling like a caterpillar caught on the thread of a spider web.
“Roll!” Tenley would shout before she took her dive, every time. She’d suit up, yell it, then place her helmet on.
It was Tenley’s hair I’d think I was seeing when it happened—floating in front of me in the darkening of the pool. As the lights above flickered in and out and the blue got deeper and deeper.
70 Minutes
“Okay, but what about the idea that reality is really just this infinite loop?” Hana asked. She circled her hands around each other in the air as she said it.
“What does that even mean?” Alec had his feet up, leaned back. He made it look as if being in space was the most blasé thing in the world. I’d never seen his body in perfect, sitting up posture.
“Like I had this philosophy professor in college who said that there were a few people who posited the idea that life isn’t necessarily a simulation but that we can never really know if we’re dead, because maybe we’re all just living an imagined life in the moments before our death. Like we can’t actually ever know when our lives stop, only other people can know that about us. So how can we ever know if what we’re experiencing is real or is just a dream?” Hana got worked up about these kind of things. She’d start rambling and most of us stopped listening. Or I did, at least, but her ramblings about death always pissed me off just a little bit more than the others.
“That’s fucking ridiculous, Han. Death is concrete. People know when they’re dying,” I said.
She looked over at me, for a second shocked, and then she let it slip from her face. “Sorry, Riley.”
I shrugged. “No sorries needed.” But, after a few minutes, filled with the kind of awkward silence where everyone’s breathing got accentuated until the air was thick with the hiss-puff of it, I got up and went to my bunk.
In bed was always the time I most realized I was in space. There was something about the way it felt—some deep in the bone tremble that I didn’t notice in any other position. I tried describing it to Gage one time, a couple of years after he’d left the training and never looked up at the sky with the same wonder again, and he’d paused for a few moments. Then he said, “I felt like that at the bottom of the pool sometimes, like all that weightlessness made me feel extra heavy under my skin somehow.” That hadn’t been exactly what I meant, but I hadn’t ever wanted to tell Gage that. I knew that he felt the water pressing in on him, even when he was far inland.
“Don’t pay attention to Hana’s theories. She’s the reason we shouldn’t let philosophy bros into space,” Alec walked in and dropped himself onto his bunk.
Before I could answer, a humming sound filled the air—a slow peal that at first I thought was in my head until I saw the look of confusion on Alec’s face. “Is that the fucking distress beacon?”
We both got up quick and went to the control room. Hana and our captain, Vivian, were already there. Gael, the medic, rushed in a moment behind us. The beacon went silent.
“Was that an error?” Gael asked.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to get confirmation. It was from the station we’re headed to.” Vivian pointed the location out on one of the screens: Lumiere Station. One of the leading research stations and the place we were supposed to be picking up a scientist and her research from. Vivian flipped on the mic in front of her, “Lumiere Station, this is BNNI-111, do you copy?”
Silence.
Vivian reached to touch the mic again, but before she could a voice flickered out of the speakers, “tank. We’re going into the tank. Help. In the tank.”
We waited for more, all of us holding our breath in synchronized stillness, but the speakers said nothing.
60
You learn the water’s surface before you learn its depth. We had to swim the length of the pool, back and forth, back and forth. My arms would ache so much at the end of the day that sometimes I couldn’t lift them high enough to get food into my mouth. Gage was the one who thought of preparing protein smoothies beforehand so that we all could slump into chairs, slurping up the grainy drink through straws, until we had de-nauseated ourselves enough to sleep.
I had dreams those nights about the pool, about the water underneath me darkening until I was swimming above a night sky without stars. It was one of those nights that Tenley slipped into the bed with me, said “you were whimpering. Bad dream?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“About the water?” She asked and I turned to look at her. The room was dark, but a sliver of light came through the window and illuminated part of her face. She studied me with a look of understanding and so I pulled her closer, kissed her, slipped my hand inside her panties. For a little while, I didn’t think about the pool.
It was weeks of training before we got to do a simulated disaster. It was in a simulation when things went wrong.
55
We had to dock manually at Lumiere. A process that took longer than we would have liked, knowing that inside the station people might be hurt. Hana and I were the most trained at EVA, so we were the ones who went out to release the docking bay door. As we were inputting the emergency code that opened it, Hana said, “did you feel anything before it happened?”
“Before what?”
“Before the NBL accident? Did you have an omens? Know it was coming?” She whispered the questions, fast and quiet.
“Not a fucking clue,” I answered, but I pictured a flash of hair, a light, and something swimming beneath the water—a long dark shape where no shape should have been. “Why?”
She was silent, watching as the bay door began to open. “My hands feel weird. The only time I ever remember them feeling like this was right before something really bad happened.”
The door was almost completely open. “What happened?”
“Never mind,” she said.
We watched as the ship entered the docking bay. We headed inside behind it.
“We are getting no responses and we don’t know what kind of situation will greet us. I’ve messaged our station and followed all standard procedures. I want to make sure that all of you understand that if you want, or need to, you may ask to remain with the ship. No one will judge you.” Vivian said. She looked each of us in the eyes, as she did so.
None of us said anything.
Inside the station, the first hallway was empty but unexceptional. Lights were on, nothing was damaged. It could have been a normal day between shifts. The first room we came to was a sleeping area. The beds were made. The room empty and neat. I saw a photo of a smiling little girl pinned to a wall. She looked seven or eight, a lifetime stretching ahead of her. I’d tracked down photos and vids of my training team, afterwards, as children. I’d stared into each face, still or flickering in image, and I’d try to place the childhood face with the adult ones I had grown to know. Tenley as a child smiled at the person taking the video. Gage was on a swing, laughing. Devon and Sidonie had known each other as children, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, as they grinned into a camera lens. The others all began to blend together. Each face promising some idea of what they would do with their lives. A history teacher once asked me if I thought we would still have wars if soldiers were required to look at the childhood photos of everyone they would have to fight against. I hadn’t answered and the teacher had said, of course we would, it’s easy to ignore things when we think we are right. At the time, I’d agreed with him. Later, I wasn’t so sure.
We kept walking. The next room was the same, a little less neat, with an unmade bed. At the end of the hall, it branched in two directions. Hana and I took the left route while Gael, Vivian, and Alec took the right. We moved in silence. The first door we came to was a research station. There were aquariums set up on several tables. Inside, fish swam. I walked up to the closest tank and glanced inside. There were several fish inside and some kind of kelp growing up from the bottom. “What do you think they were studying with fish?”
“It was something to do with the effects of algaes and sea kelps creating oxygen in different water conditions? I can’t quite remember, but I looked up Lumiere’s research when I heard we were headed here,” Hana replied. Of course, she had done her research. I’d just thought, cool, and hopped aboard. Hana walked to one of the far tanks, its water was darker than the others. Almost murky. She leaned forward to look inside. I turned away, but spun back when she let out a yelp.
“Jesus, what?”
She had stepped back from the tank, but stared at it. “There was something in the water.”
“There’s something in all of these tanks, Han.” I gestured around the room.
“No, like. Something that didn’t look right.” She pointed.
I walked up to the tank and looked inside. In the murkiness, I could tell something was swimming. My stomach clenched for a moment—dark body in the water—but I pushed the thought away. I leaned closer and it swam nearer. At first, it looked like just an eel. Nothing strange about it, until it got closer and I saw its eyes. They were large and seemed to be lit up from within, emitting a faint glow. It blinked once. When its eyes reopened, the glow was gone.
“They glowed right? You saw that too?” I asked Hana.
“Yeah, but there’s something else too. They seemed…human?”
I looked back and it was still looking out at me. It tilted its head upwards as if looking for my own eyes. I turned away. “Let’s try looking in another room.”
45
“This will be your longest dive. In it, you will be working to fix a leak somewhere aboard the station. However, you will first need to locate it. We have programmed three areas on the replica to emit a slight pulsing light, which you will need to find. These areas, once located, will need to be repaired. Your whole team will need to work in tandem, as all the areas need to be repaired within the same time span or the pulse will not turn off.” The trainer spoke in a monotone, his voice so clipped and emotionless that I kept having to tap my leg to stay awake.
“This seems like the weirdest fucking sim. When would they ever have 3 malfunctions that had to be solved in tandem?” Gage asked from beside me.
“If there was an electric short, maybe?” Tenley said. It was an answer that didn’t really make sense, but I nodded because an hour before we’d had sex in her bunk and I was hoping to do it again after the sim.
Gage rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay.”
Devon and Sidonie were the first pair in the water. They’d been on a swim team together in high school even and all of their movements in the water had the ease of years behind them. I admired their dive and watched as they slipped into the deeper blue.
Gage and I were the last pair. Tenley, Roll!, had already gone under. I looked up at the ceiling of the lab, forty feet above us, and it looked further away than it ever had. And then I was under.
Going down always seemed so fast, while the ascension would be painstakingly slow. The light at the bottom was minimal, our sightlines were maybe ten feet to twelve feet in any direction. Gage and I were checking the East end of the replica, we slowly moved along it—both looking at it and gently feeling it with our hands as we moved. It helped to keep a sense of orientation in the water. It was easy to become disoriented and lose your sense of where you were located physically in space. We had been down for maybe fifteen minutes tops, when our coms buzzed in our ears.
“Gage and Riley, we need you to move more quickly. We think Sid and Dev may be having some kind of issue. We lost their vid feeds. They should be maybe 5 minutes away from where you are, if you keep going forward.”
Under the water, Gage shrugged his shoulder slightly. Under the water and the weight of his air tank, it was barely a movement at all but I knew his expressions. We both were assuming this, too, was part of the sim. We picked up our pace, to the best of our ability, and moved forward.
I noticed the color change first. The dark bloom against the blue. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I blinked twice, hard. But the bloom remained. I followed it from a trail to a thicker portion and then I saw the body. It was Devon, floating in the thickest part of the bloom. I realized it was his blood. His arms spread, gently billowing near him, made it seem like he could be fine.
The cracked open glass of his mask told me otherwise, though. He’d have drowned so quick down there, no chance of getting to the surface in time. Gage still moved towards him, reached out and grabbed Devon’s arm. Then he let go. I glanced around for Sidonie or some sign of what had happened and from the shadows of darkness around us, I thought I saw a shape in the water—something long and dark, like a shark but not quite a shark’s shape. Sinuous was the word that popped into my head to describe its movement. I moved towards Gage, trying to get his attention, point it out, but he was already moving forward, looking for Sidonie. I turned back and the shape had gone back beyond my sight line.
I knew I was imagining it, that we weren’t really in the ocean or outer space, that it was a pool and there could be no living non-human thing down there. I knew it and still I searched the shadows for signs of it coming back.
35
“I think we found something,” Vivian’s voice echoed out of our radio as we walked.
“Where are you?” Hana asked.
“We’re at the main research bay.”
We were not too far away, so we quickened our pace towards it. Vivian, Gael, and Alec stood at the main door. It was open, but they hadn’t stepped inside. Hana and I both peered inside. I half-expected some scene of carnage, of massacre. Inside, though, was a giant covered pool. “What is it?”
“Why didn’t I think of that,” Hana said. “When they said tank, but I didn’t think of it. I knew they had an isolation tank on the station. They were doing research on isolation as a way to calm people after emergencies or in stress situations.”
We all stepped into the room together. Vivian walked up to the tank and pressed a hand against it, as if she’d feel something that would offer a clue. “Do you think everyone’s inside there?”
Alec let out a snort of laughter and then caught himself, shook his head. “This station had to have had at least twenty people on it, you think they’re all in there?”
“Why would they be in there?” Gael asked.
None of us had an answer.
30
It was because of Sidonie that we let go of the replica. We saw her floating maybe eight feet away. Gage lifted his hand off and then I followed suit. Both of us moved towards her, towards the shadowing darkness of the pool. As we got closer, she began to turn towards us, a slow spin that seemed graceful, like one of those dancers on a music box who turns with the song. Behind her in the darkness, a shape began coming closer. I saw the way the water moved around it. In front of my vision, a strand of blond hair floated. Where the fuck is Tenley, I thought.
The shape began to speed up, as Sidonie turned so slowly, the darkness got closer and closer. I saw the glint of eyes, a mouth preparing to open. Sidonie’s eyes met mine as she completed her turn.
25
There were an entrance and an exit hatch on the top of the tank’s cover. Both could be reached by ladders up the side of the tank. Vivian had climbed up and lifted the hatch. She called into the tank, “hello?”
There was no answer. She turned on her flashbeam and aimed it inside. “I can’t see a fucking thing. Why are there just two hatches? Who designed this?”
“It’s an isolation tank. It’s supposed to be minimally accessible to give the feelin—“ Hannah began but Vivian’s look of quick anger silenced her.
“Should one of us just….go in there?” Gael asked. The question that all of us hadn’t wanted to voice.
Vivian let out a long huff of air. “As the captain, it should be me.”
“No,” I said and startled myself. “I’m the one with the most extensive water training.”
And it was true. Though everyone trained in an NBL, I’d done a longer, more advanced course. I could hold my breath for almost three minutes under water, could swim the length of a giant pool, back and forth, until my arms felt like they’d float away from me if I didn’t pin them down. None of the others could disagree with me, though I could see that all of them were fighting a duelling feeling of wanting to disagree with me and also being glad that they wouldn’t have to go in the tank.
“It still should be me,” Vivian said.
“It’s going to be me,” I said.
There were tank suits along the wall and I suited into one quickly. The rush before the dive came back to me. How I’d used to love the feeling of my suit as it snugged against my skin. I replaced my flashbeam around my wrist.
“Just look around quick. Don’t go diving under the water if you don’t see anything. We’re not a rescue squad. Just do your due diligence.” Alec said.
I climbed up the tank and swung my legs around the hatch. I felt them dangle in the air. There was a short drop, just one or two feet into the water. I whispered, “roll,” and then I let myself go.
22
When they had gotten me out of the pool, I was in such shock that my body couldn’t stop thrashing around. Someone injected a sedative and I’d dropped into the darkness of induced sleep.
Even years later, I remembered the dream I’d had. I was home, at my mother’s house, out in the country. We had this long, winding dirt road, and I used to walk it every day to get the mail, while I was growing up. In the dream, I was doing the walk and my mother walked next to me. She was pointing out different kinds of prairie flowers that grew alongside the road. “That’s Queen Anne’s Lace, you can eat it you know. But you have to be careful, it doesn’t look that far from hemlock.”
She reached down and picked the flower, its large white head a cluster of tiny flowers. She handed it to me and I held it to my face, trying to inhale the smell. I noticed tiny black ants crawling across it, then. They scattered in patterns, moving out concentrically. “Look, they’re making a galaxy,” I said.
But my mother was no longer there.
19
In the isolation tank, I couldn’t see anything at first. The water was slightly warm, pleasant even. But the darkness, even with both hatches open, was heavy around me. I switched on my flash beam and saw a body floating, face down, not far from me. I didn’t let the panic take me. Not this time. I moved toward the body and moved it enough to see that the person was well past saving.
“Hello?” I shouted into the darkness.
Below me, I saw lights. At first, I thought it was the reflection from my flash beam. But it came from under the water, a glowing more than a light shine. My mind flashed back to the eel’s eyes. It was the same kind of flicker and shimmer.
Something brushed past me, another body floating. The lights were rising beneath me. I wouldn’t panic. It wasn’t really there. I had to keep telling myself that.
16
Gage was the first person I saw when I woke up. He was sitting next to me, as I lay in a medroom bed. I turned to him and tried to say something, but my tongue felt thick and useless in my mouth.
He held a glass of water out, straw pointing towards me, and I slurped at it. “It’s those knockout meds, they dry your mouth out.”
“How’d I get out? What was that thing?” I croaked out.
“You panicked. It could’ve happened to any of us. Seeing Dev like that. You panicked. You were rising too fast.”
He filled me in on almost everything, though everything would come later when they thought I could handle it better. When we’d found Sidonie, I’d freaked out, undone weights and begun a panic swim in what I thought was upwards but wasn’t. Several of the others had had to come to my rescue, bring me back up.
Dev had been working on fixing one of the lights when a piece of the replica had sprung up. Under any normal circumstance, the glass on his helmet would have taken the hit fine, but he and Sidonie had been trying to modify his mask, between dives, to see better under the water—a mod that they hadn’t discussed with anyone and which weakened areas of the mask. When the piece sprung up it had smashed the mask with ease. Sidonie had panicked, hyperventilating until she passed out in her suit. It was a miracle she’d survived, though she’d never swim again.
“What did you see under there?” Gage asked.
“A….I don’t know a fish or monster…or…” I let out a laugh. “And I saw that damn strand of Tenley’s hair.”
Gage’s eyes widened just slightly, but enough that I knew he hadn’t told me something.
“What?” I asked, but I knew.
12
The lights got closer. I wasn’t going to give in to them, give in to the fear I felt crawling up under my skin, scrunching its way across my bones.
“Hello?” I shouted into the darkness.
And the darkness answered, “help.” […]
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Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & environment. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Drunken Boat, Glass, Hobart, and more. She is co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph and her chapbook, The Science of Unvanishing Objects, is out from Finishing Line Press.