Silence.
Not the profound, crushing silence of the abyss, but a dense, almost viscous quiet that pressed in from all sides. The roar of imploding metal, the scream of rending pressure hulls, the chaotic rush of icy seawater—all vanished as if severed by a knife.
Chen Shen's consciousness, teetering on the precipice of oblivion, slammed back into his body with the force of a physical jolt. He gasped, lungs burning, expecting the brutal kiss of frigid, salt-heavy water. It didn't come.
He lay prone, cheek pressed against something unnervingly cool and smooth. Not metal. Not silt. It felt… alien. The bone-numbing cold of the deep was gone, replaced by a faint, ambient warmth that seemed to emanate from the structure beneath him. There was no water. Only this impossible, oppressive stillness.
He forced his eyes open. Darkness. But not the absolute blackness of the abyss. This was… different. A low, pervasive, sourceless luminescence seemed to seep from the very material around him. It was faint, barely enough to outline shapes, casting long, distorted shadows that danced at the edge of vision. The air—if it was air—was thick, heavy, and tasted faintly metallic, laced with an odor like ozone after a storm and something else… ancient, organic, decaying. It filled his nostrils, triggering primal unease.
Where? How?
Panic threatened to surge. He remembered the crushing impact, the alarms shrieking their death knell, the cold dark embrace of the sea. He remembered the Voice .
"Listen…"
"Return…"
The echoes of those impossible words reverberated in his fractured mind, chilling him more effectively than the deep-sea chill ever could. Had it pulled him here? Was this… death?
A flicker of dull green light pulsed near his temple. A familiar, albeit strained, synthetic voice resonated directly into his auditory cortex, bypassing his ears. It was stripped of its usual calm efficiency, laced with static and a subtle, underlying tension that Chen Shen had never heard before.
"Primary consciousness detected. Neural pathways stabilizing. Severe physiological shock mitigated. Administering neuro-stabilizers and metabolic enhancers. Stand by, Captain."
WALI. The Abyssal 's Warp-AI Linked Intelligence system. It wasn't just a computer; it was a semi-sentient neural net woven into the ship's systems and interfaced directly with his brain via cranial implants. Its survival meant… something. A lifeline in the impossible.
Chen Shen tried to move. Pain lanced through his ribs and left shoulder – bruised, possibly cracked, but miraculously not shattered. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, wincing. The faint light revealed he was in a corridor. Or what passed for one. The walls, floor, and ceiling were composed of the same smooth, almost obsidian-like material that glowed faintly. It curved in unnatural, non-Euclidean ways, corners seeming to dissolve or recede into impossible perspectives. The etched, asymmetrical patterns he'd glimpsed on the ruins outside were everywhere here, covering every surface, deeper and more intricate. They weren't inert carvings; they seemed to subtly pulse with the same faint greenish light that emanated from the substance itself. Where the patterns converged or deepened, he could see the same dark green, viscous residue clinging within the grooves, seeming to writhe with sluggish, independent movement.
"Location unknown," WALI reported, its voice still carrying an unusual strain. "External sensors offline. Pressure differential indicates internal environment stabilized at approximately 1.0 atmospheres. Atmosphere composition is anomalous: elevated inert gases, trace unknown organics, minimal oxygen. Life support protocols initiated. Pressure gel membrane deployed."
Chen Shen looked down. His deep-sea suit was torn and gouged in places, but a shimmering, translucent layer of bluish gel now coated his exposed skin and suit breaches. It clung like a second skin, providing warmth, pressure equalization, and, according to WALI, filtering the air he breathed. A patented emergency tech he'd never thought he'd need inside a structure at the bottom of the ocean.
"Severe structural compromise detected on Abyssal ," WALI continued, overlaying a fragmented, wireframe schematic onto Chen Shen's visual field via the neural link. Large sections were colored critical red. "Damage pattern consistent with catastrophic implosion triggered by localized pressure surge. Origin point: Starboard D-Section, coinciding with biological signature spike."
"Survivors?" Chen Shen croaked, his throat raw. The silence of the corridor pressed in, amplifying the dread in his question.
"Active neural signatures detected: One. Yours." WALI's pause was infinitesimal, but loaded. "Vital signs for Co-pilot Zhao Lei, Dr. Lin Wei, and Engineering Specialist Mikkelson… terminated. Bio-signal cessation concurrent with structural failure. No detectable distress beacons."
The confirmation hit Chen Shen like a physical blow. Zhao Lei's strained voice reporting the anomaly… Dr. Lin Wei's shocked exclamation… all silenced. Gone. Crushed or consumed in the blink of an eye. He was alone. Adrift in this impossible tomb.
Grief warred with a rising tide of terror. He pushed himself fully to his feet, leaning against the unnervingly warm, pulsing wall. The corridor stretched ahead into the dimness, curving away into darkness. Behind him, where he'd been lying, the wall was buckled inward, fused with twisted, half-melted fragments of the Abyssal 's starboard hull plating. It was the breach point, sealed by this strange material itself, as if the structure had… healed around the intrusion. The sight was profoundly wrong.
"Recommend immediate reconnaissance," WALI stated, its tone regaining some semblance of its usual logical detachment, though the subtle tension remained. "Objective: Locate power source, communication potential, or viable egress. Analysis of this structure is paramount. Warning: Unknown energy signatures detected permeating the structure. Origin and purpose undetermined. Proximity to wall etchings correlates with heightened neural activity fluctuations in your cortex. Exercise caution."
"Noted," Chen Shen breathed, forcing his training to clamp down on the panic. Exploration. Understanding. That was his only path now. He took a tentative step forward, the pressure-gel soles of his boots making no sound on the smooth floor. The silence was absolute, broken only by his own ragged breathing and the subtle hum of WALI's processes in his skull.
The corridor wound deeper into the structure. The pulsating patterns on the walls grew more complex, the greenish luminescence more pronounced. He passed openings that led to larger chambers – glimpses of immense, tilted platforms, shattered crystalline formations that glowed with internal light, and more of the cyclopean, strangely angled pillars, all covered in the same maddening script. The sheer scale was disorienting, dwarfing human concepts of architecture. The air grew thicker, the metallic-organic-decay smell stronger. He felt watched.
He rounded a particularly sharp, non-right-angled corner and froze.
The corridor opened into a vast chamber, dwarfing anything he'd seen before. Its ceiling was lost in the glowing gloom far above. Dominating the center was an immense structure. It wasn't a pillar or a platform. It resembled a colossal, partially buried seed pod or a petrified heart, easily the size of a small building. Its surface was covered in the deepest, most intricate network of the pulsing green patterns yet. They throbbed with a slow, rhythmic light, converging towards its base where the dark green, viscous substance pooled thickly, seeming to circulate like sluggish blood. Tendrils of the substance extended across the floor, connecting to the walls and other, smaller nodes placed around the chamber, forming a complex, living circuit.
"Energy concentration centralizing on the primary structure," WALI reported, overlaying energy readings onto Chen Shen's vision. The readings spiked wildly near the giant pod. "Biosignatures… indeterminate. Complex, multi-spectral, non-carbon-based analogues detected throughout the chamber, strongest within the central mass. Pattern suggests… networked consciousness? Or distributed biological system?"
Chen Shen's gaze was locked on the central pod. The pulsing light seemed to synchronize with a deep, subsonic vibration he could feel in his bones, a frequency that resonated unsettlingly with the phantom echo of the Voice in his mind. It was hypnotic, terrifying, and possessed a dreadful sense of… presence .
Then, it happened. Not a sound, but a pressure. An immense, incomprehensible attention focused on him. It felt like the crushing weight of the ocean depths concentrated into a single point of awareness. It emanated from the central pod.
And within the core of his consciousness, bypassing sound, bypassing language, the Voice returned. Impossibly vast, ancient beyond measure, resonating with the deep groan of the Earth itself. But this time, it carried something else. Not just a command, but a concept. An identity.
"Returned…" the Voice breathed, a sigh that vibrated through the marrow of his being. "…Child…"
The psychic pressure intensified, filled with a terrible, alien yearning, a cosmic loneliness that threatened to shatter his sanity. It wasn't hostile… not exactly. It was possessive. Overwhelming.
"WELCOME…"
The final syllable resonated with the force of a tectonic shift.
Simultaneously, a new sound sliced through the oppressive silence – sharp, rhythmic, utterly out of place.
PING!... PING!... PING!...
It was sonar. Active sonar pings. Human sonar.
The sound echoed from somewhere above, muffled by the tons of stone and alien material, but unmistakable. Rescue? Another expedition already? Impossibly fast, but a desperate spark of hope flared in Chen Shen's chest. He instinctively looked up towards the unseen source of the sound.
"External acoustic signature detected," WALI confirmed rapidly. "Pattern consistent with standard deep-sea rescue active sonar. Source bearing approximately overhead, range indeterminate through structure. Attempting to amplify…"
The Mother's attention flickered. The immense psychic pressure wavered, replaced for a microsecond by something else – a ripple of… recognition ? But darker. A sense of deep, ancient intrusion violated. The green light pulsing through the central pod flared violently, casting monstrous, writhing shadows across the chamber. The dark green substance in the channels seemed to churn more rapidly.
"CAUTION!" WALI's voice snapped in his mind, sharper than ever before. "Central biosignature spiking! Energy discharge building! Source unknown! Neural interference spiking – your cortical patterns are destabilizing! Recommend immediate withdrawal from this chamber!"
Before Chen Shen could react, the Voice returned, no longer a sigh, but a roar that shook the foundations of his soul. It wasn't directed at him this time. It was fury. Pure, alien, and terrifyingly focused upwards.
"INTRUDERS!"
The sonar pings continued, oblivious: PING!... PING!... PING!...
The gigantic pod began to thrum with palpable power. Sections of its surface seemed to ripple. The viscous channels glowed fiercely. Chen Shen, caught between the horrifying presence of the Mother and the desperate lure of the sonar above, felt his body betray him. A wave of dizziness washed over him, unrelated to injury. His limbs felt heavy, strange. A disturbing warmth spread from his chest where the pressure gel met his skin, accompanied by a faint internal itching sensation, as if something beneath his flesh was… stirring.
"Alert: Abnormal bio-electrical activity detected within your own physiology, Captain," WALI reported, its synthetic voice laced with a new urgency. "Pattern deviates significantly from baseline. Origin unknown. Correlating… time of onset coincides with initial exposure to the Voice and structural breach."
The sonar pinged. The Mother raged. And deep within Chen Shen, something alien awoke.
He wasn't just trapped. He was changing.
The rescue above might already be too late. Or worse, it might be walking into a nightmare he had unwillingly awakened.