by Hugo Navikov
“I do, Your Honor.”
“All the evidence, including the key business introduced as a trick by the opposition, is firmly against your client.”
“I can’t say that, Your Honor.”
“I know, I know. That really would be a breach of ethics, and I don’t want it in my quarters or my courtroom. But the fact remains.” He turned to the prosecutor and said, “However, if I know your opponent here—and I do—he’s going to find a way to work this theory into something admissible.”
“Probably, Your Honor,” Mister Käse agreed with a rueful smile.
“Do you two want to work out a plea deal, both of you cut your losses and walk away without a whole goddamn egg on your face?”
They did.
***
Four years later (out of the ten he was sentenced to in his plea deal for voluntary manslaughter) and one day after the Bentneus Transmission (as they were calling it), Sean Muir was led in his familiar chains to the designated visitation room to meet a visitor, most likely his lawyer, the man who had shared with his client all of the confidential conversation with the judge and prosecutor in chambers. It didn’t really matter who it was; Sean would be still glad to see him or her. Solitary made a body downright thrilled to see anyone at all.
The guard looked through the visiting room door’s tiny viewing window, made a guttural noise of acknowledgment to himself, unlocked the door, and yanked it open for Sean, shuffling in his chains, to enter.
He had two visitors, both of whom he knew, or at least recognized, after being cut off so long from familiar faces. The first was his defense attorney, Bill Kreide, who hadn’t kept him from prison but did get the charges reduced and his sentence a third of what it might have been. Because it was Kreide, the guard would stand outside the room to grudgingly satisfy the rules of attorney-client privilege. Sean didn’t mind that at all.
The other man was Mickey Luch. He had a little streak of gray in his well-kept black beard, but his stocky frame and genuine smile were unmistakable. He hadn’t seen Mickey since he was put away, and now he cried out, “My god—Mickey!” He couldn’t hug him with his cuffed wrists on chains attached to more chain wrapped around his waist, but Mickey’s smile was just as warm and maybe as teary as Sean’s. “I can’t believe it’s you! Not in a letter, but really here! How—what are you doing here?”
Mickey kept smiling as he talked, a hopeful note in his voice. “Mister Kreide and I have something we want to discuss with you.”
Sean looked back at his attorney, kept on retainer paid for by the sale of Sea Legs—the equipment belonged to the university, but the boat was his—and most everything he owned that wasn’t imbued with sentimental value. It had paid big dividends in getting Sean access to the library system and that beautiful typewriter, both of which kept him from cutting his wrists with the wrong end of a plastic spoon. Kreide was setting up a laptop with a screen bigger than Sean had ever seen on a portable machine.
Four years was a long time for technology. Or for a man. The loss of that much time—and the greater amount still to go—hit him with a nauseating pang of regret. But he shook himself out of it and said to Kreide, “Movie time? Did you find evidence to exonerate me? The security video?”
“No, unfortunately, no matter how many times I check with the building management, they keep telling me the system keeps only the previous 24 hours’ worth of recording. It hasn’t magically changed, Sean.” His ironic tone leavened when the laptop finally cooperated and the two-way video chat finally registered the cameras and microphones at both the prison and on the other end. He said, “Sorry to snap at you, Sean. Technology makes me crazy, but the limit of visitors accompanying your lawyer at one time is one, and since I needed Mister Luch, I couldn’t bring my usual computer guy.”
They all waited while the attorney fiddled with the hardware, then the software.
“There we go,” Kreide said at last, and turned the laptop around to face Sean. There was another chair bolted to the floor on the side of the table opposite the prisoner, but Mickey stood with his back to the corner—you could tell he was a sailor who felt more comfortable in tight spaces—and the lawyer just stepped back a few feet. Someone wants to speak with you. Make a proposal to you that you might find compelling.”
Sean blinked in surprise. Was this one of the academic presses he had contacted about his book on present-day sea dinosaurs, the ones theorized by him and confirmed by the Piranha II expedition? They must have been very enthusiastic about the draft he sent, since it explained the “impossible” things that the huge simulcast audience saw right along with the explorers and also supported certain ideas Sean had been proposing for years before the tragedy of his failed deep-sea project. He sat up straighter in the chair bolted to the floor, although he doubted it was possible to look dignified while wearing an orange prison jumpsuit.
“Doctor Muir, please meet Jake Bentneus.”
Sean’s eyes goggled. He had actually met Jake Bentneus briefly years before, when the technical advisor on Lusitania! had invited him to a meeting to talk about ROVs and what it would look like on-screen with them exploring the wreck. Sean had been pleased to speak to the filmmaker and his crew working on the movie, who wanted this information for extra verisimilitude during a framing scene of the present-day sunken ship that would run on either end of the main story, which took place on soundstages and used CGI to portray the romantic adventure making up most of the film. They had all shaken hands afterward and Sean was brought by limousine to the airport for the short jaunt back to San Diego, and that was that. Memorable for a paleoichthyologist, not so much, probably, for a super-famous movie director.
However, the man on the laptop screen said, “Actually, Doctor Muir and I have met, haven’t we?” The pumps and other machinery provided a background of white noise through which his words seemed to rise like an air bubble in the ocean.
“Yes, we have,” Sean said, pleasantly surprised. “I didn’t think I made much of an impression on you.”
“Ha! I became obsessed with the whole thing, as you obviously must know. And obsession leads us down a dark path, doesn’t it?” Bentneus indicated his useless body as well as possible through the facial rods and servos, but Sean would have gotten his meaning even if they had been speaking over the radio. He nodded and indicated with his expression that his surroundings were a testament to what the filmmaker was saying. “So, Doctor Muir—Sean, if you don’t mind—you had a chance to see me in my present state last night, I presume?”
Sean had no idea what he was talking about. How could he have seen Jake Bentneus?
“Mister Bentneus,” Sean’s attorney broke in, “Doctor Muir has been under solitary confinement for more than a year. He doesn’t have a television or radio available to him.”
“Hehhhhhhhhh … please excuse me, Sean. I heard there were some people who hadn’t seen my broadcast. Now I know why we fell short: solitary confinement. Hehhhhhhhhh …”
Sean didn’t have anything to say to that hilarious and thoughtful comment, so he didn’t say anything.
“Mister Kreide and our mutual friend Mickey will fill you in on the details, but the only thing alive on my body is my head. One of your prehistoric beasts chewed my bathysphere like it was one of Mama’s meatballs and spit me out. I’m lucky to be alive at all. Lucky, lucky me! Hehhhhhhhh …
“But you could have told me that your surviving dinosaurs wouldn’t be able to digest me, couldn’t you? It was all right there in your academic publications, warning me, if I’d taken the time to read them. Of course, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get digested if they crunch you to death.”
“Yes,” Sean said, not really liking Bentneus calling them his dinosaurs. Galileo discovered the four moons of Jupiter, but they aren’t known as his moons.
Wait, damn, yes they are. That’s why they were called the “Galilean moons.” Another beautiful conjecture ruined by inconvenient facts, Sean thought, and he could feel the trace of a sm
ile on his face. It had been a long time since he’d smiled.
Coming back to his surroundings, Sean said, “I, um, proposed that in order to live under the incredible pressures near ocean-floor hydrothermal vents, their bodily structure would have had to adapt in such a way that ingesting nonorganic matter—like the plastics and metal in your submersible—would be impossible. Even a man in a thick wetsuit wouldn’t agree with a present-day dinosaur’s stomach. But I also conjectured, and I’m sorry that I was correct, that they would still have the instinct for biting. That’s because I believe there would be no evolutionary pressure, no advantage to reproductive efficiency, to lose their teeth over generations. Or to stop biting with them, since any time they did bite down on or swallow organic matter soft enough to be absorbed by their adapted digestion system, they still got fed. It’s like kittens playing—they are fed in bowls, but they still have that hunting behavior because they can hunt without eating, but they can’t eat without hunting. Of course, it’s only been a hundred years or so since the concept of an exclusive ‘indoor cat’ arose.” He finished and looked at the blank expressions of the two men in the room and the one on the laptop screen. “Sorry, excuse me—I haven’t talked to anyone in quite a while.”
Bentneus “smiled” and said, “Of course, it’s no problem. In the time since my disaster, I’ve realized that I didn’t have the single element, the one thing that would have greatly helped myself and my whole team not only to find your dinosaurs, but to gain knowledge about them without being eaten. Or without getting chewed like a stick of Juicy Fruit.”
“One thing?” Sean couldn’t think of any one thing that would have kept the Gigadon (he liked that name) from attacking Bentneus inside his vertical sub.
“You, Doctor Muir. I should have had you on my boat when we went out there to Challenger Deep. Once we saw that there really were dinosaurs down there—actually, once we discovered a newly formed hydrothermal vent—we could have consulted with you right there and then, or not gone any farther without at least contacting you on the satphone. If we had known more about what was down there, countermeasures could have been considered and built into Ocean Victory.”
“Countermeasures?”
“Weapons, Doctor Muir. We had a golden opportunity to bag a specimen that would greatly advance science, but it all went to hell, as you well know. I had read some of your work, but read it like Buzz Aldrin might have read Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon the night before liftoff; it was an amusing sideline among much more mainstream research I did about the Marianas Trench in general and Challenger Deep in particular. If I had been paying real attention, we could have brought weapons and made everything go … more swimmingly. Hehhhhhhhhh hehhhhhhhhh …”
God, that “laugh analogue,” as Popcorn would have called it, was creepy as hell. Sean ejected that extremely awful “ableist” thought from his brain (he had been a prof at a California university, after all, and knew better) and said, “I never imagined my theories would be quite as ‘on the nose’ as they were. The expedition that landed me here was to test conditions in the environment, see if what assumptions I had made about the vents and life around them were correct—not necessarily assumptions about dinosaurs, but about the ecosystem existing without sunlight. In essence, I was looking to support my less, um, mainstream ideas with new information I collected myself. My wife and myself, I mean.”
“Of course,” Bentneus said. “But, tragically, your mission objectives never came close to being realized because of the loss of your submersible.”
“Yes,” Sean paused, “but especially because of what happened to the person inside of it. My wife.”
“I did say tragically, Doctor Muir.” If he still had hands, he would have cavalierly waved away Sean’s correction. “They don’t imprison you for ten years because you just mishandled a piece of machinery.”
“Look, I didn’t—”
“No, don’t worry about defending yourself. You are not being attacked. I, myself, didn’t fulfill my original mission of touching down in Challenger Deep. We were less than one hundred feet away, but you don’t set your sub down on a 750-degree vent you had no idea was there in the first place. Yes, we discovered and got footage of your dinosaurs, so my name will be in the history books … just not the way I would have chosen.”
Sean nodded. The situation was highly ironic, but what had happened to Bentneus was also so appallingly atrocious that he couldn’t really say anything that wouldn’t feel like piling on. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be saying or thinking or how he was supposed to be reacting, anyway; he literally had no idea why Jake Bentneus was talking to him. It didn’t matter—he was enjoying the hell out of a conversation with a person who wasn’t a prison guard or a lawyer. Obviously, it was about the dinosaurs, probably about the ‘Gigadon’ about which Sean had read stacks of journal articles, but beyond that, it was a complete mystery.
“My life is over, Doctor Muir; surely you can see that. Billions of people saw me in this condition for the first time last week, and they understand. I’m assuming you can understand why I haven’t long to live. But showing my desperation and burning desire for my goal to be realized, that was the real point of letting the world into my private hell. I will ask Mister Kreide to supply you with a transcript—it explains everything about what I’m seeking and how it can be delivered to me. But if I may give you the abridged version?”
“Y-Yes, of course.”
“I spoke a moment ago about the wish that I had outfitted Ocean Victory with weaponry,” he said, and waited for a nod of acknowledgment from Sean, which he made as soon as he realized there had been a pause in the filmmaker’s monologue. “Yes, well, I want a second chance, Doctor Muir. It is impossible for me to be moved from this one spot in one hospital room in one hospital in goddamn Guam. But we have full-immersion VR now, and I will still be a part of this dream realized.”
Sean searched his short-term memory—had Bentneus said what that dream was? “You mean the wish that you had brought along, um, countermeasures down into Challenger Deep?”
“Hehhhhhhhhh … no, that’s merely a dead man’s regret. But this dead man wants to see a submersible just like mine outfitted with not only weapons but also heat generators on an epic scale. ‘Epic’ as in unprecedented: why would anyone want to heat localized areas of the frigid, sunless depths of the Pacific Ocean? But also epic in that I have worked with an army of engineers, applied physics professionals, metalworkers, you name it. I’ve worked with them to create portable, one-use batteries of such power that they allow a one-person submersible to be underwater for 12 hours.
Also, we created the technology to allow the bathysphere will be filled with water, body-temperature water, in which the pilot sits. This keeps his temperature normalized, not going through highs and lows, and the water is constantly recirculated through pipe works that have earned over one hundred new patents for their ingenuity … and their value. I just can’t help but make money. Hehhhhhhhhh Hehhhhhhhh …”
“Wow, I’d love to see the specs on that—”
“Mister Kreide, please provide our friend with any documents he needs.” Sean’s attorney made a note on his iPad. “Have you ever seen my movie Abyssal Zone? It’s from a few years back, but it’s proved prescient—admittedly, it was aliens down there instead of dinosaurs, but you get me. It was way ahead of its time, as my films have always been.”
Don’t say anything sarcastic, Sean reminded himself. “Huh, yeah, I see what you mean. And yes, I saw that movie in the theater, if I recall correctly.”
“Hehhhhhhhhh … good man,” Bentneus said.
Sean realized that part of the creepy feeling he couldn’t shake stemmed from the fact that, apparently, the advanced breathing technology couldn’t be modulated and so there was no inflection to Bentneus’s voice. That meant Sean couldn’t get a good read on what was said lightly and what was meant to be taken utterly seriously. “Good movie,” he said, not having any idea
where the filmmaker was going with this.
“Do you remember the part where Harrison Edwards has to breathe the water itself because of the pressures involved?”
“Oh, yeah, that was tough to watch. How Edwards jerked back when he first filled his lungs—he looked like, ‘Oh, hell, I have made a huge mistake.’”
“Yes, but it worked out, didn’t it?”
As Sean remembered, the aliens executed what was essentially a deus ex machina, rescuing the humans from the depths and magically keeping them from decompression sickness. But it did work out with the breathing the water thing. “As I remember, he could breathe like he was a fish himself.”
“Right,” Bentneus said, and Sean bet that he would have shouted that with an upraised finger if he could. “That’s what we’re going to do with this new submersible, inside the bathysphere. The pilot will be able to breathe the water so his environment can be constantly cooled, even as heat is pouring out of the sub.”
Sean smiled. “The idea is to get the dinosaurs—the Gigadon for sure, but every other dinosaur that can be killed, too—to follow the warm water up as close to the surface as possible, where they can be killed from the boats on the surface. Yes?”
“It’s taken directly from your research, Doctor Muir.”
“Oh, I recognize it. Of course, my speculation that the heat-vent-loving dinosaurs would follow the path of a heat source—like the Gigadon did before its, um, attack—didn’t include instructions on how to kill anything. That wasn’t really the focus. I was trying to work out a scenario in which they could be studied nearer the surface.”
“No, I understand,” Bentneus said. “But you could kill it.”
“I suppose. I mean, if it’s alive, then it can be killed. If one had a way to lift its gills out of the water, that would be more efficient—more possible, actually—than trying to destroy it with guns or bombs or whatever might be carried on a modified commercial fishing boat. A person would—”
