A two-man team must risk a spacewalk when meteoroids threaten crucial portal-spanning telecommunications cables that hang a hundred meters beneath the ocean…and forty-five billion light years away.
Short story | 6,890 words
The first thing that happens is Joyce breaks up with him. The second thing that happens is Crane arrives on the Anhinga. The third thing that happens is the meteoroid falls upward.
But let’s start with the meteoroids:
Approximately forty-five billion light years away, the collision of one interplanetary body into another causes a scattershot stream of meteoroids to go hurtling through space. There will be meaningful effects from this meaningless interaction.
At night, when Glasser leans against the Anhinga’s stern, when the subship sails the waveless stretches of the contiguous ocean, when the void gleams through the thin skin of water preventing the Anhinga from falling through space, this is when Glasser feels the closest thing to alone. Like he’s the only person in the universe.
This is a lie, of course. Beneath Glasser, beneath his ship Anhinga, beneath the film of water comprising the contiguous ocean, there are seven hundred and fifty thousand lines of telecommunications cables hanging weightlessly in the clear cold void of space underneath the world.
And also, there’s Crane.
Crane is Joyce’s replacement on the Anhinga. Crane pilots the deep space drones, which had originally been Joyce’s job. Glasser misses Joyce a normal amount. Joyce had nimble hands and a good laugh and also Glasser had been in love with her for eight years, most of which had been reciprocated.
Glasser is still in love with Joyce, but Joyce is gone. Not dead. Just—one day Joyce sat up next to Glasser and told him she was tired of living on the Anhinga, and she missed her family, and she wanted to go home.
That was a lie earlier, by the way. Glasser misses Joyce like he misses french fries, like he misses live music, like he misses his childhood bedroom and the way Christmas felt when he was eight years old, which is to say that Glasser misses Joyce like something he was always supposed to lose. He kind of feels like an asshole about it.
Glasser thinks maybe when Joyce said that she wanted to go home, he was supposed to say “Okay, so we’ll sell the boat.”
But he didn’t say that. He just said, “Okay.”
All land on Earth extends to the depth of the planet’s core, but if there is any true depth to the water, nobody has been able to confirm it. The contiguous ocean—all saltwater, the Pacific and the Atlantic and all the rest—ends at a depth of one hundred meters, at which point you meet the meniscus. Think of all oceans as fundamentally analogous to a layered Jell-O mold. The top layer: saltwater, and everything suspended within it. The middle layer: the meniscus, a clear, planet-spanning portal that has existed for the entirety of recorded human history. The bottom layer: a patch of space forty-five billion light years away.
They hang telecommunication cables in that patch of space. The cables hang weightlessly, safe from weather and sea life and everything except the void of space. The Anhinga and its two-man crew are responsible for the maintenance and repair of the cables that connect Asia and North America. Without them, eventually the cables hanging underneath the ocean will be severed—the occasional piece of space debris, a tangle, deliberate sabotage, or some other unforeseen event can all potentially lead to a snapped wire, and subsequently, a break in communication.
When this occurs, the Anhinga will be dispatched to the repair zone and Crane will shoot their drones a hundred meters down and forty-five billion light years away. After the drones return and their footage is inspected, Crane keeps the boat steady while Glasser goes belowdecks to their gimbal-mounted workshop and puts together the slivers of cabling that will be spliced into the broken wires. For particularly complicated jobs, Glasser calls in over the radio and the Anhinga waits on location for delivery of materials by aerodrone.
While they wait, Glasser handles whatever repairs he’s been putting off, like fixing the Anhinga’s electronics and warding off the many corrosive effects of seawater, taping cables to the ceilings and floors, sewing patches in his old jackets. He used to repair Joyce’s clothes, but he’s not sure whether he should be repairing Crane’s. He would be amenable—but Crane hasn’t asked, and Glasser doesn’t know whether it would be odd to offer.
The meteoroids are traveling in directions determined by the angle of the original collision and the transference of force from one body to another. Most of the momentum is conserved in the silent vacuum of space. The meteoroids are traveling at terrific speeds.
Crane spends his time fixing the drones, writing letters, and swimming. This is the oddest thing about Crane: the moment the Anhinga is anchored at a suitable location, Crane swaps his dayclothes for a skintight wetsuit and plunges into the water. Glasser watches him from the deck and worries when he takes too long to come up. He doesn’t want a dead body on his hands. But Crane has always come back, dripping water all over the deck, sometimes shivering, usually smiling.
“I used to dive competitively,” Crane had explained once. “I find the whole thing perversely relaxing. Well, I suppose it stimulates the vagus nerve.”
This is the way Crane talks. Using phrases like perversely relaxing and vagus nerve. Glasser wonders, sometimes, what academic hole Crane crawled out of.
The meteoroids are not a metaphor, by the way. They are very real. They will be reaching their point of intersection shortly.
The Anhinga is a two-person subship capable of brief dives without sustaining hull damage. It holds three drones, which hang off the two sides of the Anhinga and deploy directly into the water. As a backup, the Anhinga retains the old space divesuits per protocol, which allow a person a few hours of oxygen and the thinnest protection against the water and the void. They have never been used, because the last freedive was in 2003. Prior to that, freedivers had a similar life expectancy to telephone pole repairmen. That is to say: short.
One of the divesuits is missing. This is because Joyce took it with her as a souvenir in the breakup, along with: the rest of her clothing, the clock shaped like a cat, and their shared future that Glasser assumed would come to pass. Glasser sometimes jokes to himself that he got to keep the house. By this he means the Anhinga.
Joyce lives in America now, somewhere landlocked. Colorado, Glasser vaguely remembers. He hasn’t visited. He doesn’t know whether Joyce wants him to.
The meteoroids slice through the cables underneath the world not like a knife but like a ragged series of bullets. They sever the communicative tendrils that connect Asia and North America. This effect is not visible from space, but the global effect on computing devices is immediate.
They get the call early in the morning, Glasser blearily flicking the receiver on and getting a faceful of static and noise for his trouble.
“—peat, this is Dispatch, repeat, this is Dispatch, Alpha November Hotel Niner respond, repeat—”
Glasser wrinkles his nose and presses the outbound. “Copy, this is the vessel Anhinga, code Alpha November Hotel Niner, this is Alpha November Hotel Niner, Dispatch, what’s the issue?”
“Copy, seven transpacific cables have broken, we’ve identified the most likely location near coordinates 44.1668790 and 164.1362843. Our readings show that you’re the closest ship, estimated ETA to site six hours at ten knots. Can you confirm acceptance?”
Glasser rubs his eyes, sits up straighter. Seven cables probably means that they’ve lost the redundancies, too. Seven cables are a lot for a single incident.
“Copy, confirmed. Will route and report back after drone deployment. Over and out.”
He flicks the outbound off. He turns to Crane, who is already unfolding out of his bunk.
“I’ll start running the checks on the drones,” he says, before Glasser can speak.
“Copy,” Glasser says, and then tumbles out of bed and toward the helm, without bothering to change out of his sweatpants and sleep shirt.
Glasser would have preferred to be alone on the Anhinga, rather than having Crane aboard. He doesn’t dislike Crane, it’s just that Crane’s presence introduces a piece of friction into the closed system of the ship, a second body that Glasser hasn’t known for eight years. Crane is a person with wants and needs that cannot be accurately predicted, because Crane is effectively a stranger. Glasser’s no good with strangers. Glasser is the sort of man who would have preferred to die alone at sea, but the Anhinga needs two for the cabling jobs. And Glasser believes in the job. If he hadn’t believed in the job, he would probably have left with Joyce.
The nice thing about Joyce was that her presence had felt like clear water, or smooth glass. It had been so easy, until it wasn’t.
There is another meteoroid, by the way. It is traveling at terrific speeds, though not so terrific as its siblings. It is traveling in a highly charged cloud of electromagnetic particles. It has not yet reached its destination.
The sun is high in the sky by the time the Anhinga arrives at the incident site. The trip was smooth and painless. On deck, Crane whistles while he programs the first drone sequence into the terminal. Once the drones break the meniscus between sea and space, they will immediately lose all contact with the ship and will rely on the prewritten instructions to return.
Glasser has spent a decent amount of time on air with Dispatch, trying to get a sense of how extensive the patch job will be, which cables specifically have been cut. Dispatch didn’t have much more information, but from what Glasser can tell, the internet is down in a large bicontinental slice.
A tremendous amount of information passes between Asia and North America every day. Financial numbers, diplomatic exchanges, medical data, love letters, memes, emails circling back, stories, selfies, and all the other detritus that forms the backbone of the internet, day after day, night in and night out.
Dispatch won’t tell Glasser that “If this isn’t resolved in twenty-four hours, your contract will not be renewed,” or “Without the Anhinga’s prompt attention, millions of people will go without service, causing great damage to the global economy.”
They don’t need to do that. Dispatch can’t fire Glasser, because there are not so many cablers that they can afford to lose one. This is not a popular profession: it’s long hours, loneliness, and the occasional piece of physical discomfort. And Glasser would never laze on the job; he knows that every second they delay has tangible, grossly negative effects on the world. This is the sort of thing that haunts him, that keeps him up at night. He doesn’t expect anyone to feel the way he does—Joyce didn’t. Joyce was efficient, but had always held the frustrating attitude that a few minutes’ delay was meaningless. Glasser had never understood that.
So. They’re not on a time limit, except for the one that exists in Glasser’s mind.
“How quickly can you get the drones down,” Glasser says to Crane, anchoring the boat with the float-anchor.
“Deploying in two minutes,” Crane says.
“Finalized the flight plan already?”
“I have a system. Yes,” Crane says, sounding more amused than crotchety about the interrogation.
“I don’t mean to backseat drive,” Glasser says, apologetically. He does want to get along with Crane. Glasser’s mild neuroses aren’t Crane’s fault.
“No, you’re fine. I’m not offended. But please be quiet. I’m trying to focus.”
Glasser watches Crane press buttons and rotate dials. He calibrates differently than Joyce did. Crane flicks the deployment switch, and the drones fall into the water.
The drones push through the meniscus into the void of space, undergoing an insane pressure differential that automatically kicks the drones into their preprogrammed routes. The drones run their circuit, taking video of—
The meteoroid breaches the meniscus between space and the sea with the force of a missile. The meteoroid instantly superheats the liquid around it. It barrels through the water at astounding speeds, breaking into the atmosphere two meters from the Anhinga, the transfer of force sending the boat swaying, a column of water shooting upward in a huge spout that blooms into a heavy spray, soaking the vessel underneath.
A sound like a jet engine before the sky darkens and Glasser has the realization that the shadow is being cast by a column of water, quickly overshadowed by the second realization that the boat is shaking underneath him. These aren’t conscious realizations—Glasser falls over, and for a long moment his entire world is just the bodily experience of crashing against the deck, the vertigo as the sky tilts, the water falling on him with a force like he’s belly flopping into a pool.
“Look,” Crane shouts, and Glasser turns his head blindly to follow the arc of Crane’s arm across and up the sky at the meteor shooting into the atmosphere, disappearing in a streak of white debris, wobbling in Glasser’s vision as the boat rocks.
More water falls, hitting Glasser’s face like a slap from the universe. There is no great realization in his mind, just the awe, the shock of how close they had come to death, how rare and incredible this sight is, like being next to a volcano erupting, like seeing the northern lights, all chased down by the next thought: Joyce, you should have seen this.
The meteoroid, prior to puncturing the meniscus, traveled in a cloud of electromagnetic particles which instantly blasted the two nearest drones with a wave of electromagnetic force, wiping the data from their hard drives. They lose their programmed patterns. They drift away.
The third drone, far enough from the ersatz EMP to avoid the blast, completes its circuit, taking video footage in both infrared and normal vision before passing back through the meniscus and laboriously returning to the surface.
“We lost two drones,” Crane says flatly, his hands on the dials. He’s covered in saltwater. He hadn’t wasted any time changing or drying off, working with his shirt off and a towel around his neck. “Only getting feedback from one, not the whole pod. The meteoroid must have been part of a cosmic event on the other side.”
“How’s the remaining one looking?”
“So far fine, I’ll have to manually review the footage,” he says. He glances up from the dials. “Hopefully there’s not too much damage. One drone will be…”
Glasser nods, grimacing. Drops of water roll down his forehead. Getting the job done with one drone will be difficult. There are at least seven broken cables—three drones would have been slow already. And with every second they delay, great swathes of the world continue in silence. It gnaws at Glasser.
He’s also worried about damage to the Anhinga, from the roll. He’ll have to inspect it at the nearest port.
“I’ll relay to Dispatch,” Glasser says.
“I’ll load up the footage and start scrubbing,” Crane says. They break.
Crane has been on board the Anhinga for three months. In that three-month period, the Anhinga has responded to three minor repairs, and handled routine maintenance on ten more cables. There haven’t been any major storms, or emergencies. Crane performed exemplarily, professionally, with only a few hiccups due to the unfamiliar layout of the vessel.
In their downtime, Glasser and Crane had played cards. They had traded books. Crane had shown Glasser how to make tofu from dried beans—the sort of thing that is only exciting if you have run out of shelf-stable tofu on your subship. They hadn’t talked about their pasts. But the subship and all the objects in it were the bare bones of Glasser’s psyche, pinned and splayed for easy viewing.
In contrast, Crane had come aboard the Anhinga, a narrowbody frame carrying a single large duffle bag and backpack.
The video footage plays silently on the small computer screen hooked up to the drone. The first view is of a massacre of wires, punctuated by the bright flare of the meteoroid, and then the clean tight loop of the drone finishing its circuit, highlighting the absolute wreckage across the cables.
“A swarm of meteoroids,” Crane says. He plays the video back again, zooming in on the cables. On the screen, cables hang weightlessly, aimlessly. Two of them are tangled. The breaks look clean, at least.
“Dispatch can’t get anyone out here for another week,” Glasser says. There’s a pit in his stomach. Two of their three drones are down. In an ideal world, this would be a job for one of the big cabling subships, the ones that are spaceworthy and carry a ten-fleet of drones. Maybe even two or three of them.
He runs a hand through his hair. “Christ.”
Crane drums his finger on the drone shell. “How quickly can you get the splices done?”
Glasser thinks for a moment.
“Maybe fourteen hours,” he says, tilting his voice with a question. All the fiber-optic cable in the world doesn’t matter if they don’t have drones, if they can’t program the repair path.
Crane smiles. He looks eager. He looks like he does when he comes up from a dive.
“I have a proposal for you, then. You finish the splices and submerge the subship. I go through the meniscus in a tethered divesuit, to repair the cables manually. Since the Anhinga’s got a forty-five-minute dive window, during each dive I should be able to get a couple cables up and running pretty easily.”
“No,” Glasser says. He imagines Crane never resurfacing. He imagines sitting on the Anhinga’s deck, tugging Crane’s dead body back with the line, unable to know what went wrong on the other side of the meniscus.
“Why not? It shaves a week off the downtime.”
“Haven’t you seen the fatality numbers? The risk—”
“Wipes out a hundred and sixty-eight hours of delay, Glasser,” Crane says.
“One in ten—”
“None of them were me,” Crane says.
“What makes you so special,” Glasser says, and it comes out vicious. Not Glasser’s intention but Glasser isn’t practiced at tone modulation, Glasser lives on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and until six months ago the only person he regularly spoke with was the love of his life.
Crane sighs. Looks out at the horizon and back.
“You know what the problem is? The problem is that you don’t trust me, Glasser,” he says, the tone of his voice perfectly even. “You double-check my actions. You micromanage. At first I thought you had a problem with me, and that would have been fine, but I’m beginning to realize that this would have been a problem with anyone you brought on board. I don’t know how your last partner put up with it.”
“That’s not related,” Glasser says, stung. “I trust you plenty.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m sorry I don’t want you to be killed!”
“You don’t care if I die,” Crane says. “All you care is that it isn’t your fault. It’s useless, baseless fear. Get over yourself. I want to get these cables up and running as fast as possible. I thought we were aligned.”
Crane presses a few buttons, turning off the screen display, before walking back out onto the deck. Glasser doesn’t say anything, just watches him leave. Glasser is too busy being struck by a realization: this is what it must be like talking with him.
Crane had been the first person to apply for the position, nearly four months after Joyce had left. He was a stranger.
Dispatch had told Glasser that if he had had any leads on anyone suitable, they were happy to fast-track the application. Glasser didn’t. A decade of deepwater cabling had narrowed his connections back on land to the slimmest thread. Except for Joyce, he didn’t have anyone else he wanted to live with. A stranger was as good as anyone. He’d looked over Crane’s resume. A list of his education and certificates, his work experience, recommendations from his stints on two other cabling vessels. He was qualified, fine, in the abstract. But the application hadn’t prepared Glasser for the reality of him.
Crane is standing at the stern of the boat, staring down into the water. Glasser walks over. Leans against the railing. The water has cleared from the meteor’s traversal, and he can just make out the faintest smudges of the universe and the cables below. Crane glances over, but doesn’t say anything.
“Okay,” Glasser says.
Crane glances back. “Okay? Just like that?”
Glasser wants to ask where Crane’s confidence stems from. How he spoke with so much conviction. Why Crane is here, on the Anhinga. What makes a man want to dive into the deep ocean. What makes a man so eager to plunge into the black morass of space, with only a thin tether holding him to reality. What brought Crane to the middle of the Pacific.
“Just like that,” Glasser says.
After she left, Glasser had played the conversation out with Joyce a thousand times. It drifts to the forefront of his mind more than he wants it to. He thinks about the things he could have said, instead of just “OK.”
“Joyce, what changed? I didn’t know you were unhappy, and it worries me that you were able to hide that unhappiness on our boat.”
“Joyce, this is my life. I don’t know how to live differently.”
“Joyce, our job is important, and I believe in the mission here. There are so few boats, and so few people who want to live on them, and the entirety of the global telecommunications system hinges on the efforts of real human people, flesh and blood, repairing the breaks in the system.”
“Joyce, did you say yes to the Anhinga because you loved me? Did I trap you on the Anhinga for seven years?”
The Joyce in his head gives him different answers every time. Glasser doesn’t like that he can’t emulate her. It means he’s forgetting her. He worries that it means he never really knew her at all.
Things move fast after Glasser agrees to Crane’s proposition. Glasser goes to the workshop and starts making splices. Crane runs around prepping the divesuit, the propulsion, preparing the Anhinga’s systems for the plunge. Glasser pops out of the workshop and double checks the systems, eats a protein bar, makes more coffee, discusses their approach. The Anhinga is an old ship, and it can only submerge for about forty-five minutes at a time. They have to get right up against the meniscus to properly eject Crane. So, they’ll do the repairs in stages. Crane will be ejected at the nadir of the Anhinga’s dive, and pulled back in right before the Anhinga ascends. And then they rinse and repeat, dive again and again, until all the repairs are done. Each dive would be tight, but it would be doable. It would be more freedives than anyone has done in the last thirty years.
They work. They drink coffee. Crane takes a break to make sandwiches, which they eat while discussing the dive pattern.
“What changed your mind?” Crane asks.
“I don’t know how to argue with you,” Glasser says, after thinking for a moment. “I agree with you on principle, so I can’t think of a way to change your mind.”
“Good,” Crane says.
Glasser finishes his sandwich. “Are you sure.”
Like a statement, not a question.
“Of course,” Crane says. He stands up. Glasser stands, brushes crumbs from his shirt. Heads for the cockpit, stops in the doorway.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why…all of this?” Glasser says, gesturing vaguely at the schematics, the divesuit, the whole mess of the plan they’ve put together. He means the personal risk. He means the desire to freedive.
Crane frowns. His expression goes clouded.
“I used to dive competitively,” Crane says. “Without the suit. In freshwater, where there’s no chance of breaching the membrane. I’ve always wanted to do a freedive. And I can do it for a good reason. I mean—think of all those people. All those god damn people who can’t talk to each other without us.”
“That’s it?”
The ideological reasoning seems thin, like it comes from someone else. It seems too similar to Glasser’s own reasoning: he doesn’t want to participate, but he likes knowing that his actions have massive effect. The lonely megalomania of it all. It seems too abstract a driving principle for one’s entire life.
Crane shrugs. “Sure. What else is there. Why are you out here?”
Glasser frowns.
“I guess it’s my ship,” he says. He doesn’t want to detail the ways in which they’re similar. It feels cheap, from the other side.
They work through the night. Glasser gets a few hours of sleep; Crane crashes for maybe four hours. The sun is glimmering at the edge of the horizon by the time they’re ready. Crane in the pressurized divesuit, ready to be shot out of the propulsion chamber. Glasser at the helm.
“Ready?”
Glasser looks at the first-person video feed piping from Crane’s suit. Right now, there’s nothing to see, just the interior of the propulsion tube.
“Ready,” Glasser says, and he does a deft series of manipulations ending in a strong push of a handle that plunges the Anhinga’s nose downward as itbegins to accelerate.
The world goes silent and dark, the sky replaced with sea. Glasser chews on the inside of his cheek and checks the instruments. It’s been a long time since he’s taken the Anhinga under. He knows it’s safe, intellectually.
“Ten minutes ’til we hit the edge of the meniscus,” Glasser says.
“Copy,” Crane says.
Glasser keeps his hand on the controls. The water continues to darken. Pure velvet blue turning to black.
“I’m out here because I don’t know how to live on land, with other people,” he says. He sees Crane tilt his head upward by the way the camera angle changes. The human impulse to think that any unseen voice is coming from above, even though Glasser is speaking through the radio in Crane’s suit.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. My last partner was my wife.”
Glasser can’t see Crane’s face, but he sees the way Crane shifts his frame, tilts his head.
“That’s awful. My condolences—”
“No, she didn’t die or anything,” Glasser says hastily. “God, nothing like that. She’s in Colorado. I just meant. I didn’t even know she wanted to leave, until she did, but the point I’m making is—I’m no good at talking. Or knowing the right thing to do. I can do it for myself, and I trusted Joyce to make her own choices, but anyone else? Christ. It’s too complicated.”
“Sure.”
“So, I guess what I’m really saying is, are you sure? I’m going to shoot you out into space, and reel you back through, and—”
“—it really does concern you, why I want to do this,” Crane says.
“Yes,” Glasser says.
“Hm. How much time do we have before you shoot me down?”
“Six more minutes.”
“Hm,” Crane says again.
They’re both silent for a few minutes. The subship continues to descend. Glasser’s depending mostly on his instruments, now—the universe underneath the water is growing clearer, but the stars and planets and space debris are so far away as to be useless as locational markers.
“There’s no real reason, I guess,” Crane says. “Nothing I could make you understand in words. I grew up near the ocean. I dove competitively for years. Why do I want to do it? I don’t know, I just do. Like, why did you end up a cabler to begin with? You probably couldn’t tell me. I know I can make it back. I know that this is going to work.”
One minute on the clock.
“Okay,” Glasser says. He keeps the nose tilted down. He readies his hand on the propulsion switch.
Thirty seconds.
Fifteen seconds.
Zero.
And then they’re skimming the border of the meniscus and Glasser pulls the throttle back and slam the propulsion switch, and Crane is flung through the thin film that borders space and the camera on his suit cuts to stars.
Glasser had gone with Joyce once, to the desert. Arizona. They had rented a camper van. They had met Joyce’s mother. They had gone hiking in the early morning, just as the sun was rising.
“Why’d you end up cabling, after,” Glasser had said, gesturing at the landscape around them. The sheer reddish expanse, the way that the sky was like the sea inverted.
“At night, the sky here—it looks like the sky under the sea,” Joyce had said. “The same, but different.”
“That’s a nothing sentence.”
Joyce had laughed. “Yeah, but you understood.”
The Anhinga has cameras pointed at the portal into space. Through it, Glasser can see Crane’s divesuit darting among the cabling, the wavering line of the cord he’s clipped to the cabling and the second cord that ties him back to the ship, the sparks of the handheld soldering iron as the splices are braided in.
Glasser keeps an eye on the timer. They have fifteen minutes before the Anhinga has to surface. Every second feels like a century.
He wants to pull Crane out early. But he doesn’t. He watches the timer count down, he watches Crane on the screen. When they hit fourteen minutes, he reels Crane back into the tube, closes it behind him. The radio blooms to life.
“Got a couple of them done,” Crane says. “We were right on the timing. This is going to work.”
“Jesus.”
Glasser’s focusing too hard on draining the propulsion chamber, tilting the Anhinga back up, pushing acceleration into her frame, and his response comes out harsh. Crane takes it in stride.
“Not to say I told you, but…”
The Anhinga breaches the surface of the water and light floods the helm. The weightless feeling. Glasser braces himself for the impact of the Anhinga’s bow hitting the water. In the propulsion tube, Crane braces against the wall.
The Anhinga crashes up and onto the surface of the water.
“Okay, yeah, you told me,” Glasser says. He’s feeling more optimistic about this now. Two more dives. Maybe this all works out. “Five minutes until the next dive.”
The collision of one interplanetary body into another sent debris hurtling across space. This debris ranged in size from microscopic to gargantuan. A meteoroid is commonly classified as any space rock between the sizes of a grain of sand and a small asteroid.
I apologize for misleading you earlier: there is still one last meteoroid on its way.
Glasser tilts the nose of the subship back down, aiming to skim the Anhinga across the meniscus. Closer, closer. He cuts the acceleration before slamming the eject, and Crane is thrust into darkness.
Glasser watches Crane’s actions through the helmet cam video feed. Just Crane’s hands and the wires in front of him. It’s not particularly interesting work to watch, and Glasser’s eyes dart between the screen and the countdown timer. Back and forth.
This is how he misses Crane’s line being cut by a piece of debris, precisely six minutes and thirty-two seconds into the dive, when the video feed fails.
Crane doesn’t hear the meteoroid sever his cord. The only notice he gets is the faint vibration of the line being torn. When he looks back, there’s nothing connecting him through the meniscus. He feels fear, then. The same fear that he felt when he tried for a world record at holding his breath underwater. The fear that he’s going to die out here, in this inhospitable environment he brought himself into, and that nothing will save him. All his goddamn pride dashed.
He holds his breath on instinct. This is unnecessary—there’s enough air in the divesuit for two and a half more hours. It’s just that the divesuit is no longer tethered to Earth, only clipped to a loop of cabling. The seven-meter distance between the cables and the meniscus feels long enough to be a lightyear.
“Shit,” Glasser says. Swapping to the video feed from the bottom of the boat, he sees the untethered line swaying like a strand of seaweed in the water. Glasser can only make out the faintest outline of the other half of the line swinging free on the other side of the meniscus.
Crane’s divesuit is still in place. The neon cord of the second line is visible. He’s tethered to a loop of cabling. He won’t drift into the black. But he can’t pull himself back through the portal, either. He could unhook himself and push off the cabling, but would he generate enough force? Could he manage to tilt himself in the right direction? One misstep and he’d be flung into deep space. There would be no way to retrieve him. There’s a beacon on the divesuit, but the beacon is only useful on the other side of the portal. To organize a rescue would take days—the divesuit only contains enough air for a couple hours. The dive was supposed to be minutes, not days.
Glasser runs his hand through his hair. He can’t ask what Crane wants him to do. To ask Crane, Glasser would have to send a drone through, record Crane’s diver’s handsigns, and review the footage. That would take half an hour, to program, send, return, and watch.
But—he can send the drone across. Glasser could surface and program the drone to hover in front of Crane for a few minutes, and then deploy it into the water and across the meniscus. Crane could clip himself to the drone and let it tow him back across the meniscus. But after that, Crane would have to swim up to the Anhinga on his own. Glasser can’t deploy the drones when the Anhinga is submerged—the equipment is in a different part of the vessel than the helm— and the drone wouldn’t support Crane’s weight in Earth’s gravitational field. But Crane dives, every time they’ve got a spare moment. Crane swims ferociously.
Glasser agonizes about it for a minute. On the screen, Crane’s form tethered to the cable. On the countdown, ninety more seconds. Glasser can’t talk with Crane. He can’t know what Crane would say. What he would want.
What would Joyce do if it were her, at the helm? He doesn’t know. What would Crane do, if it were Glasser, down there? He doesn’t know. What would Glasser have done for Joyce? If this were Joyce, there would be no question. Glasser would go for her in a heartbeat.
Glasser turns the handle and thrusts the Anhinga toward the surface.
On the other side of the meniscus, Crane watches the shadow of the Anhinga shrink. Fifteen minutes, Crane thinks to himself. He’s on the other side of despair, now—just numb. Like this is all happening to someone else.
He looks away from the portal. The rest of the universe, forty-five billion light years away from where he was born, looks back. It is so beautiful without the filter of the water. The undersea constellations that he memorized when he was young are perfectly visible. Hyperia. The Sea Urchin. The Golden Chain. Fewer than three hundred people have seen these from this side of the void.
He looks back down at the cables in front of him. He could start climbing the cables. Maybe he could find a point where they sit skimming the meniscus, where it would be safer to push through. But there’s no guarantee. The cables stretch for miles, and he only has so much air.
Crane suddenly remembers something his father told him, when he was young and they were walking in a forest: if he ever got lost, he should stay in place to be found. He doesn’t think his father ever anticipated Crane’s situation.
Back before the drones were developed and cablers still freedived, the majority of cabling deaths were situational. A cord that frayed. A knock on the head from a cable moving the wrong way. A missed clip. But the strangest reasons for deaths were described by freedivers returning from near-death incidents, or who had watched their diving partners unclip their divesuits. They described the strange sickness that affected divers after punching through the meniscus. The feeling of vertigo. Of being in a dream. A mental shift led them to unclip themselves and float off into the black. They say that this is a particular type of psychosis that affects spacewalkers, but the sample size is too small to say anything conclusive. It might just be that divers are a specific sort of population; the sort of person who swims willingly into the void.
On board, Glasser punches through the calculations as fast as possible, crunching the numbers while simultaneously activating the drone equipment. He runs back to the helm and grabs a grease pencil and a marker.
He writes on the front of the drone in grease pencil, and then in marker: CLIP YOURSELF ON. There isn’t much space to write. He doesn’t remember if the marker is water soluble. He looks over the side of the subship. The wind is picking up. The troughs of the waves deepen. The universe below is only faintly visible, and Crane is completely obscured.
Glasser turns back to the drone equipment. He hits a button, and the drone drops into the water.
Glasser had been thinking about Joyce, while he ran the calculations. It was inadvertent. Joyce was his pink elephant; Joyce was the Rubik’s cube that soothed the part of his brain that wanted answers to unanswerable questions. It was better to think about Joyce than to think about whether Crane would die. He imagined Joyce’s response to the whole situation. Joyce was always better at cutting her losses—no, that was a cruel thing to say about Joyce. She had been kind, until her decision to leave. And that wasn’t even mean, only terrible to Glasser, to leave him alone.
If Crane lived, Glasser would call Joyce, he decided. He would call Joyce and tell her about the meteor—the first one, the one that was a wonder. He would go visit her in Colorado. It all seems so easy now.
The drone drops into the ocean, making contact with the water. The marker is washed away instantly. The grease pencil is abraded by the waves. But the drone continues to dive. It passes through the meniscus, engaging its automatic second-stage programming in the presence of vacuum.
Crane sees the shadow before he sees the drone. He turns his head. The drone, in all its shiny chrome glory, hovers in front of him. On its surface are the letters YOUR O. He plays a brief game of mental hangman, before discarding the concept of language. His mind is going a million miles a minute. What can he discern from the drone’s presence? The silent metal device hanging weightlessly in front of him. It has no face. Only the shielded camera, the smooth exterior, the jointed limbs. What would he mean by this, if he were Glasser?
Crane closes his eyes. He imagines being Glasser. Glasser, in his taciturn shell, at the helm of the subship that is a reflection of his personality. Glasser who asked him again and again, Are you sure.
Crane unclips himself from the cable. For a brief second, he’s unmoored to anything connected to the Earth.
Then he clips himself to the drone.
Glasser peers down over the edge of the Anhinga. The froth of the water from the drone drop has turned the surface a foamy white. It’s like looking through a clouded window. He wants to run back to the helm, but he has to be in place to receive the drone, to help Crane back on board if Crane arrives.
For a long time—what feels like a long time, anyway—there’s no change. Just the dark water, the foamy caps of waves. And then he sees a round shadow. The drone resurfacing. Nothing is tied to it. He hopes Crane understood what he needed to do.
Glasser holds his breath. He wishes he had some way to explain. He wishes that he had been kinder, that he had asked more questions; he wishes that he was better at explaining himself, someone who was more easily known and more interested in knowing.
No sign of Crane. Glasser almost wants to cry. He wants to call Joyce, after. If Crane lives, he’s going to tell her everything. The bad things, too. He’s going to ask her all his questions and listen to her answers. He’s going to do all the things that are hard, while he still has time to do them.
And then, a blur in the depths coalescing into a form. Glasser feels a great weight drop from his chest.
Crane’s narrowbody frame, swimming upward, stretching toward the light.
“Freediver” copyright © 2025 by Isabel J. Kim
Art copyright © 2025 by Mojo Wang
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Freediver
I really enjoyed this one. Thanks to the author for starting with a creative scenario and extrapolating this tale from it, and thanks to the Reactor team for publishing it.
beautiful and sad. strong notes of homoeroticism and bisexual failure. thank you so much for sharing!
Very nice.
Taut and fascinating. Well done!
Fantastic read. Loved the setting, the buildup, the anxiety – great work.