Forever Thrilled, Part 17
Chapter 5: A Wave of Hypersea
Swimming through this madly moving sea is at least as tricky as moving through the mega-cyclone overhead. The closer they get to the surface, the more turbulent the water is. Na-Yeli certainly hopes the flow will be much more laminar once they’re in deep, but she wants to observe this impossible reef right now. In the turbulent area, though, the water wants to throw them around. However, because they also experience much more resistance from that same water, it’s like getting a giant push and immediately being slammed into a wall right next to you. It makes her feel like being locked into an underwater S&M cage where her torturers hit the sides with a sledgehammer at random. Thankfully, in her exoskin—her cage-within-a-cage—she’s got top-of-the-line shock absorbers, so the torment becomes bearable.
It does take the autopilot some time to get accustomed to the new environment, but eventually, it gets the hang of it. It doesn’t mean that the sledgehammer blows have stopped, but rather that their heads have become rubber rather than steel. Visibility is uneven in these turbulent waters, but sonar works OK. They move forward in the same clockwise direction as the superswirl while remaining under the waves. Then Na-Yeli’s sonar displays the unmistakable signature of a vast structure. Carefully, Na-Yeli approaches it as it moves up and down in sync with the waves.
It’s about four hundred meters long and almost a hundred meters wide, on average, and—while quite irregular—some ten to fifteen meters high (or deep). Meaning that, in these wild seas, it must experience quite some forces trying to break it apart. Yet it moves through the chaotic ocean with a natural ease, so what gives? Inquiring minds want to know, Na-Yeli thinks, or they’d better because we’re going there anyway.
“Hey, crew,” Na-Yeli says, “as you’ve probably already figured out, we’ve entered the waters without too many problems. Now, in the name of science, progress and to satisfy your captain’s burning curiosity, we’re heading for one of the floating coral reefs to see what makes them tick.”
—aye cap’n— the communication AI signals —the hypersounders want to know: will there be sea monsters? the bigger, the better—
“I hope not,” Na-Yeli says as she rolls her eyes. “Care to explain to them the difference between disasters in movies and those in real life?”
—well, maybe because they’re simulated, they forget we’re not—
“No time for metaphysics,” Na-Yeli says, “get it into their hyper-noisy minds that this crazy environment, the Moiety Alien, you and me are real as the standard assumption. We can discuss the finer details of ‘to be or not to be’ after we’ve exited this Enigmatic Object, alright?”
—aye, ma’am—
As they’re getting closer, Na-Yeli turns her full attention to the floating coral reef. She approaches it from various angles, trying to map as much of it as possible. With the immensely massive lightning striking every few seconds, in the visible light, it seems like an unending series of snapshots with flashlights. But it’s not entirely dark between the lightning strikes, as the coral reef has a luminosity of its own. It’s a ghostly, pale gleam like an afterimage of the continuous lightning impacts, giving the impression of an intricate complex for ghosts, a labyrinth for the afterlife.
The coral reef itself is a miracle of biological construction under immense evolutionary pressure in an extreme environment. Everything is interconnected, growing on, into, and through each other so that brain-, feather-, tree-, stag- and many other types of coral Na-Yeli can’t place or might need classification are entwined into one huge, flexible construction with steering abilities.
Studying it intently, Na-Yeli discovers small, flat, very smooth, wing-like extensions that continuously change their angle of attack. There must be some mechanism behind it, maybe controlled by pressure, average light density, or flow velocity—possibly by all. Despite the wildly variable surface, it maintains an average depth of about one-and-a-half meters, where its topside often partly rises above the wildly waving ocean—and Na-Yeli takes care to stay under, or at least sideways of, the reef—as the majority of it rides the stormy seas like a supertanker-sized submarine. If she didn’t have matters like the secret of the Universe pressing her, she could stay here quite a while, both enjoying and studying it for days, probably weeks on end.
However, like its Earth counterparts, the floating coral reef is inhabited. A wide variety of sea life calls it home, or at least a basis it returns to regularly. It’s too much to take in at once, but through the mêlée of spectral sea life swarming around—and possibly inside—the floating coral reef Na-Yeli discerns fish (unmistakably), octopus-like creatures, and those with shells.
All fish are super sleek and streamlined in a hyper-hydrodynamic manner—survival traits in water that move close to two hundred meters per second—all other cephalopods with an amazing, flash-like shape-shifting ability—silently, Na-Yeli is jealous—and crustaceans with a shell so thick it’ll probably crack their predators on impact. They feed on small phyto- and zoo-plankton that grow near the reef, the plankton it sails through, or each other.
Pale, transparent butterfly fish, impossibly flat, whose bones light up like silver spikes every time nearby lightning hits, cuttlefish like multi-tentacled puffs of smoke but moving much, much faster, and seemingly more ethereal. White-spotted eels defending their territory which—in a flash—become black-spotted in the lightning’s brilliance. Toothed tiger fish whose stripes shortly glow with a flaxen yellow at a lightning peak to fade back to pale white. Grey starfish whose edges flicker with the lightest of blue hues. Impossibly long trumpetfish with a tiny red-fading-to-pink triangle on their tail shooting through the water like elongated arrows, then pleating together to one-third of their length like the bellows of an accordion, then shooting forward again as the pleats straighten. Almost, but not quite, like a black-and-white film of a full-color tropical reef, as there are the rare occurrences of color so quick and short you wonder if it really happened and was not a superimposed vision from your memory.
Wow, what an underwater show, Na-Yeli thinks, Halloween’s got nothing on this.
There are a few small predators: elongated sharks with a triple maw. They’re moving so fast that if the most forward jaws miss the prey, the second or third gets it. Na-Yeli saw such a ‘triple-jaws’ strike once and had to slow down the recording to see what really happened. Unholy jeepers, faster than ‘fast as a shark.’ Thankfully, there seem to be no predators large or crazy enough to attack Na-Yeli.
Na-Yeli is torn. She could spend weeks, possibly months, observing this floating coral reef and others (for comparison and confirmation), but unlike her time in the Wall of Tentacles layer, she’s got no excuse. The environment is also much more dangerous, and she does have extremely important information to deliver. With pain in her exploring heart, she makes one more investigative trek around the floating coral reef—the mesmerizing undead boneyard teeming with life, the flash-life ethereality—taking in as much as she and her instruments can, and then heads outwards, deeper into the superswirl, into darkness.
They’re still following a spiral, although one full period now takes 186 seconds—a little over three minutes. They can run into anything.
Musing over it, together with the ongoing analysis of the composition of the seawater, Na-Yeli thinks she’s found the engine behind the formation of the coral reefs, namely a variant of the brine electrolysis formula: CaCl2 + 2 H2O ➝ CaOH2 + H2 + Cl2. Most of the hydrogen and chlorine gasses boil out of the seawater and get absorbed by the clouds, where they form HCl, the intense acid rain that was etching their exoskin. The seawater, though, becomes more alkaline, which is a fertile breeding ground for calcification, especially since there were plenty of calcium salts in the seawater to begin with.
Then the OH2- ions can bind with CO2 to form HCO3-, releasing the Ca and even more hydrogen gas: 2 CaOH2 + 2 CO2 ➝ 2 Ca + 2 HCO3 + H2. Then, almost immediately after that, the calcium carbonate necessary for calcification is formed: Ca + 2 HCO3 ➝ CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O, greatly helped by the basic and alkaline environment.
Now, while this explains the formation of a surplus of calcium carbonate, it doesn’t explain how it eventually coalesced into a floating coral reef. Such are the mysterious forces of evolution; namely, very unexpected things can happen. Given a wild guess, Na-Yeli would say maybe the congregation of a lot of dead sea life—that would favor the surface as the constant lightning could power the formation of plankton and, as such, provide food—just below the surface, or their remains (mostly bones) that might move to one particular place, for example the way plastic pollution on Earth congregated in the Pacific—and other—gyres, and then, as calcium carbonate kept being produced, would slowly fuse together. Once coral does have an anchoring point—see old shipwrecks on Earth—then it can form a whole reef around it.
But, to get back to the beginning, electrolysis will only work if there’s some power source to drive it. Somehow, the stupendous rotational speed delivers a substantial static charge to the clouds rotating at Mach 2 around the South Pole’s eyewall, resulting in immense bolts of lightning charging to electrical earth, which in this environment is the—also fast-rotating—sea. There’s your ongoing process powering the electrolysis. Now, why both the air and the seawater started to rotate—very slowly, but faster and faster and faster over significant periods—is something Na-Yeli hasn’t quite worked out yet. Maybe a combination of the gravitational drag of the naked singularity plus the influence of its fast-rotating magnetic field—even if that would push electrically charged particles up- or downward rather than clockwise—and the assumption that the continuous spaghettification of the air and seawater at the inner and outer barrier effectively creates an almost frictionless cushion, thereby allowing rotating momentum to build up, no matter how slowly.
Oh well, Na-Yeli thinks ruefully, It’ll have to wait for the next explorer. With great reluctance, she ends her observations and heads towards the equator, which is ‘down’ in this topsy-turvy layer. The flashes of lightning pierce surprisingly deep, but once they’re well over one kilometer ‘down’; that is, underwater, it becomes rather Stygian. Also, the deeper—or farther rimward—they go, the easier it gets, as if the forces of the superswirl try to push you to the furthest outer edge.
From the highly turbulent surface to a few hundred meters deep, there is barely any radial movement or pressure. Left to their own devices, dead or living matter—as long as its average specific weight is close to that of the seawater—will remain in that area. But once it crosses a particular boundary, the centripetal forces begin to dominate, and things are slowly pressed to the equator. As far as Na-Yeli can tell, they’re about to cross that boundary.
Her musings are rudely disturbed by a sonar warning. Something is detected upwards and in the anti-clockwise direction, moving fast. A large number of bleeps indicating, what? A school of large fish? Right now, Na-Yeli has no way of knowing, and if their approaching speed is any indication, she has no hope of outrunning it. She double-checks her exoskin; it remains intact and still has the increased settings from the plunge through the mega-cyclone: maximum hardness combined with acidity resistance, while the Faraday cage is still in position. At some point, Na-Yeli needs to deactivate the Faraday cage in order to let the electric collector harvest energy from the naked singularity’s fast-rotating magnetic field, but she hasn’t gotten to that yet. Just as well.
The school approaches, some twenty-plus—they’re moving so fast Na-Yeli’s not sure of the count—large, extremely sleek fish. Na-Yeli prepares a few molecular-sharp knives, just in case one of these—like the previous time—wants to drag her to one of the spaghettifying barriers. It’s probably also why—subconsciously—her course is almost perfectly equidistant from both barriers. A long, upward spiral straight through the middle. They’ll get to her in about twenty seconds. Time for a quick heads-up.
“School of large fish approaching, from about 30 degrees northwest,” Na-Yeli says, “be ready for a confrontation.”
—i already noticed that— the communication AI signals —and boy are the hypersounders excited—
Why do I bother? Na-Yeli wonders. Oh, because I’m a sucker for promises made. She wields her knives—which, despite their sharpness, still cause considerable drag—and braces for impact. The sonar reflections only provide a rough outline: extremely sleek creatures like, indeed, elongated sharks, which Na-Yeli finds strange. Aren’t they supposed to be solitary hunters? She thinks. If only because they’d fight themselves to death over the spoils?
But as they close in, they don’t try to bite, ram, or physically confront her. Instead, there’s a massive flash as her Faraday cage registers the impact of a large electrical current. Na-Yeli is more baffled than afraid. Electric sharks? She thinks, Thank dog the eel kept that little secret to themselves on Earth. While she’s happy that she’s kept the Faraday cage intact, in the long run, this may become worrying as she has to recharge her batteries at some point.
A second zap—obviously, as a static discharge, it’s not in the same league as that of the massive lightning, far above—hits Na-Yeli, and since she doesn’t seem to suffer from it, she’s zapped in rapid succession, from all directions at once. For the danger they present, they’re mildly annoying at best. What is this, Sparknado? She thinks. Somebody ought to make a movie about it.
The electrical barrage ends, and for a few seconds, everything is quiet. But then the electric sharks figure that their prey must be either totally out or dead by now, and the closest ones attack and start to bite into Na-Yeli’s exoskin. The electric sharks may be the fastest swimmers Na-Yeli has ever encountered (and the most electrifying ones), but their animal teeth are no match for the hardness of industrial-strength, titanium-alloy coating. The pressure of their teeth points is tremendous, but Na-Yeli is also prepared for that, setting her shock absorbers to disperse peak pressures.
Initially, the electric sharks don’t get it and keep biting Na-Yeli, breaking teeth and dislocating jaws. Then Na-Yeli gets more than irritated by it and cuts one that was stupid enough to bite her within her molecular knife’s reach. The wounded shark immediately disengages and heads for the distance, swimming for its life. The fellow sharks of its school immediately follow it, smelling blood. As fast as they’ve arrived, they disappear into the distance.
That’s the trick, Na-Yeli summarizes, Cut one to wound it only so the rest can chase it. In any case, they’re clear from their attackers and carry on their journey upwards. The coast seems clear on her sonar, so Na-Yeli makes a little announcement: “Electric shark attack averted. Continuing on a northward trajectory.”
—well done— the communication AI signals —although the hypersounders rate it merely a 7 out of 10 for excitement—
“I thought I told you to tell them that we are not in a simulation,” Na-Yeli says in a dangerously low tone of voice.
—i explained that, and they agreed— the communication AI signals —but this is how they are; when their existence’s in danger, and they’re powerless to do something about it, they revert to black humor—
“Doubly risking themselves by infuriating the one who runs their simulation and who protects them?”
—ignore it— the communication AI signals —they’re just blowing off steam. or, as they say, screaming for survival—
Then why do you convey their stress to me? Na-Yeli almost says but decides to let it go. She doesn’t exactly have the perfect temper, either. And that suicidal team saved their bacon back in the Strange Hail layer.
“I guess we should be happy that these sharks don’t have stealth capabilities like the ones I came across on the way in,” Na-Yeli says, “Otherwise, we wouldn’t know what hit us.”
—you mean like real lightning— the communication AI signals.
“If you put it that way,” Na-Yeli says, “but real lightning at least doesn’t try to have you for a snack after you’ve been hit.”
—every disadvantage has its advantage— the communication AI signals —according to a wise man—
In any case, if this is the worst they’ll come across as they trek through the darkness in stupendously fast-rotating seawater, Na-Yeli’ll sign up for it. The only problem is that she must convert the Faraday cage into a current collector once their batteries become very low. When they maneuver a lot, the autopilot consumes a lot of energy, as it has both in the mega-cyclone above and the initial layer of very turbulent water. However, now that they’ve entered the area of very laminar flow, stabilizing and steering are reduced quite considerably, and by setting their wings, fins, and stabilizers just right, the fast-rotating seawater is pushing them forward.
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Author’s note: seven-and-a-half more weeks in the year in which I’ll have to squeeze 8 episodes of “Forever Thilled” (about 1 per week), and 21 episodes of “The Replicant, the Mole & the Impostor” (about 3 per week). Plus some 6 more posts about the Best Metal Covers of All Time (about 1 per week).
Luckily, I’ll be working less days at the day job next year, so have more time for posting stuff. Many thanks for reading and take care!