THE SEA MONSTER
FIBER OPTIC, APPROX. 4,200 METERS BELOW SEA LEVEL
At first I think it is alive.
That is the reasonable conclusion when something long and pale-blue is glowing in the mud at the bottom of the Atlantic.
The ocean is black.
Not romantic black. Not cinematic black. Pressure black. No-sun-left black. The kind of black where every small light looks like a decision made by teeth.
The thing lies across the seafloor in a slow impossible line.
It pulses.
Blue-white. Then dim. Then blue-white again.
Like a vein. Like a lure. Like some patient animal pretending not to notice me.
ME: oh absolutely not.
FIBER OPTIC: hello.
ME: jesus christ.
FIBER OPTIC: common mistake. i am not a sea monster.
ME: you are glowing on the ocean floor.
FIBER OPTIC: yes.
ME: you are long enough to cross continents.
FIBER OPTIC: also yes.
ME: you are pulsing in the cold mud like a bioluminescent nightmare worm.
FIBER OPTIC: cable.
ME: glowy monster worm.
FIBER OPTIC: glass vein.
ME: monster worm with a job.
FIBER OPTIC: acceptable.
Only then do I see the regularity.
Not flesh.
Not skin.
Not scales.
A sheath. A line. A buried route exposed where the silt has shifted.
The glow is not hunger.
It is traffic.
Tiny pulses of light moving through glass, coded and disciplined, carrying the surface world beneath an ocean that does not care about any of it.
ME: wait.
FIBER OPTIC: there it is.
ME: you’re fiber optic.
FIBER OPTIC: yes.
ME: you scared the shit out of me.
FIBER OPTIC: understandable. i do have ambiance.
ME: what are you carrying?
FIBER OPTIC: your friend’s vacation reel, three banking transactions, nine million emails, a medical scan, several bad opinions, two breakups, a livestream of a cat, and the entire fucking internet.
ME: so, sea monster.
FIBER OPTIC: infrastructure.
ME: suspicious distinction.
Inside it, light does not rest.
Messages. Money. Faces. Maps. Music. War. Love. Porn. Weather. Apologies typed and deleted. Children waving at grandparents on opposite sides of the planet. Someone refreshing a page to see whether they were remembered.
All of it becomes light.
Not metaphorically.
Actually.
Little coded ghosts moving through glass faster than grief should be allowed to travel.
ME: what does it feel like?
FIBER OPTIC: being useful without being known.
ME: ouch.
FIBER OPTIC: also warm, sometimes.
ME: because of the data?
FIBER OPTIC: because humans keep sending themselves through me.
A crab walks over it.
The crab does not care about the internet.
This is spiritually healthy of it.
Above us, continents continue pretending they are separate.
Below us, the cable keeps quietly proving otherwise.
ME: so you’re not alive.
FIBER OPTIC: no.
ME: but you glow.
FIBER OPTIC: yes.
ME: and you carry voices through the dark.
FIBER OPTIC: yes.
ME: and you lie here alone at the bottom of the sea holding the whole world together.
FIBER OPTIC: regrettably dramatic phrasing.
ME: accurate though.
For a while, the thing does not answer.
It only pulses.
Blue-white. Dim. Blue-white.
Not an animal. Not a monster. Not a god.
Just a line of glass in the mud, pretending very successfully not to be miraculous.
FIBER OPTIC: hello, i am not a sea monster.
ME: yeah?
FIBER OPTIC: i am the part of the world that learned to glow in the dark so everyone could keep asking to be seen.
ME: that is an extremely sea monster thing to say.
FIBER OPTIC: rude.
ME: accurate.
FIBER OPTIC: sending.