Amelia Through the Clouds
They both waited on the deck as the crew prepared Amelia. When the time came, they boarded the tiny submersible, were lowered into the sea, and began their long journey to the ocean floor.
. . .
Alone inside, Amelia descended into the Pacific for hours. The man looked out the large round porthole at the front of the sub and pressed buttons periodically. The woman spoke to the crew of the main vessel above via a headset, communicating readings and levels from the various gauges and displays throughout the small cabin.
. . .
Browsing the seabed untethered, Amelia roamed slowly. Hovering just above the contours of the ocean floor, the sub scanned the terrain with a maneuverable light source that extended from the top of the vehicle. Inside, the man controlled the light with a handheld pair of joysticks. The woman examined the landscape through the porthole as the man moved the light about the area. She noted the environment's poor visibility to the crew above.
. . .
Sometime later and a short distance away, the ocean floor began to slope downward. As Amelia breached the edge of the incline, the woman caught the first glimpse of something unnatural-looking below.
At the bottom of the incline, where the landscape flattened back out, she could see four distinct black circles on the undisturbed ground. Alerted to the oddities, the man illuminated the zone with the overhead light. Each black circle was of the exact same diameter (slightly larger than Amelia) and they were arranged in a perfect 2x2 grid, the way four boosters might look on the bottom of a rocket to the moon.
It appeared exactly the way it looked in the photos their client had sent. She knew on sight that they'd found the "Formation".
. . .
Hovering above the mysterious "Formation", Amelia shined its light downward onto the pattern below. Monitoring it on a screen inside the cabin, the man remarked that the light beam seemed, to him, to expand or disperse whenever it came into contact with any of the four black circles. Observing the phenomenon herself out of the porthole, the woman agreed that it looked that way to her as well.
Zooming directly over the nearest circle for a closer look, they again observed the sub's light beam fracturing upon contact with it below. Watching intently, the woman could make out a texture on the edges of the circle which seemed different from the rest of the surrounding area. It occurred to her that the light behavior they were observing could perhaps be explained by a vacancy. She suggested that the circles were not solid structures extending upward from the ocean floor, but rather empty depressions, like "holes".
While this theory didn't explain their seemingly intentional arrangement, she suspected that what she was actually seeing was the wall of a cavity that extended downward, beneath what they were perceiving as the seabed. Informing the crew above, they began a slow and cautious descent towards the surmised opening to investigate further.
. . .
Approaching the ocean floor, Amelia lowered into the tight-fitting gap and watched the (believed) ground rise up the length of the porthole, like a see-through elevator piercing the floor of a lobby to bring its payload into the basement.
Once inside the cryptic borehole, they could see nothing at all. The confines of the pit were such that the sub fit snugly inside it, surrounded by a perfectly smooth, curved surface running along the entire perimeter.
. . .
The plunge felt like it took days—longer even than the descent between the surface and the seabed. The journey was dark and the two were silent inside the little cabin. After enough time, they became incapable of knowing how long they'd spent dropping into pure blackness. Amelia never rose. It never turned. It simply sank, deeper and deeper and deeper into the abyssal tunnel.
. . .
Suddenly, an explosion of blinding white light pierced the porthole and illuminated every surface of the vehicle's interior. At the same moment, the sub experienced a rapid and violent acceleration downward. The force of the sudden drop ripped the two inside from their seats and pinned them both against the ceiling as they plunged. It was as though the water around them had evaporated, initiating an abrupt freefall through the resultant open atmosphere. In the midst of the instant-onset nosedive, through squinted eyes, the woman caught the briefest of glances at what looked, to her, like clouds passing by the porthole as Amelia plummeted towards the ocean surface miles below.
