Knocking From the Deep

“At eleven thousand meters depth, a solitary oceanographer hears rhythmic strikes upon the titanium hull: someone outside is tapping his childhood name in Morse code.”

Anchored to a hydrothermal spire inside the Mariana Trench, the Erebus deep research redoubt watches the planet's lowest tectonic fracture. Oceanographer Mateo Rivas completes a nine-month solitary watch monitoring methane plumes and hadal seismology. When hydro-acoustic hydrophones capture rhythmic metallic strikes against the bathysphere's outer hull eleven thousand meters beneath the Pacific, Mateo realizes they are neither thermal contractions nor abyssal fauna: the percussions trace 1944 merchant marine telegraphic Morse, spelling the coordinates of a collier vessel lost eighty years prior carrying his own grandfather.