The Deep

The Universe is a big place. A little flash-fiction to get your thoughts churning.

The Deep

As the Voyager 1 satellite left our solar system it had sent images to NASA of our Pale Blue Dot.  The place we humans call home.  Then, in 1990, imaging devices were shut down to limit power consumption.  Since it was known that Voyager 1 would no longer be operational passed the year 2031, there would be no way to tell what it was like within the Oort Cloud or beyond it.  But, one day, on a Wednesday, an unidentified object broke through Earth’s atmosphere and plummeted into the West Pacific Ocean.

 

NASA had known about the incoming object, but they knew it wouldn’t cause damage judging by its trajectory and time of impact.  Unfortunately, for them, the object fell into the ocean at break-neck speed in a vast expanse of water that sat atop Mariana Trench.

It took many hours for the object to sink toward the depths of 30,000ft, but there were fancy new autonomous submarines that could get close to those depths, however, not near it as reported by the NOAA.  Several NOAA vessels were already en route as I sat watching the report being broadcast from off the shores of California.

Off-Shore.

The submersible spiraled down for hours upon hours until it reached a visible area of debris that led even more downward.  Most of it consisted of merely fragments of metal.  Metal blasted with a dark, charred color over white-gray paint.  After a couple more hours our new unmanned sub was reaching its threshold.  It could not go passed a certain depth without total mechanical failure.  But, as we feared the worst, our sonar had shown the object had landed on a plateau a few hundred more feet down.

As the sub reached more crushing depths the object came into focus under the sub’s spotlight with a haunting presence.  A supremely mechanical object amongst a ghostly abyss.  The object appeared to be a satellite.  Only partially intact.   On the side it read: Voyager 5.  I looked at the two NASA personnel aboard our ship.  They stared at the monitor in which the image from the sub was fed back to.  One of them promptly stated, “There is no Voyager 5.”