The RV arc light was about as glamorous as you would expect from a deep sea survey vessel.

A flat grey hole stained from salt spray, a deck cluttered with rigging and cable drums,

and a permanent smell of hydraulic fluid that seeped into your clothes no matter how many showers you took. We were out past the continental shelf, hundreds of miles offshore, crawling a forgotten stretch of the abyssal plane.

No shipping lanes or geological features marked on the map.

Just endless, featureless sea floor at 4,000 meters down.

My job was simple enough.

I was part of a five-person science crew operating bathymetric sonar sweeps, logging data

to the cloud array below the bridge.

We flew an ROV twice a day, a heavy steel-framed unit about the

size of a golf cart, rigged with high-intensity lights, manipulator arms, and a suite of still

and video cameras. Everything was backed up twice, raw feeds stunt into redundant cold storage banks, reviewed

nightly over instant coffee and bad jokes.

Most days blurred together.

We would lower the ROV, follow a tight grid programmed into the system, and then scan

every inch of mud and stone for anomalies like

boroughs, sediment plumes or lost straw nets, anything that broke the monotony of silt

and darkness. There was an unofficial contest among the crew. Find something worth naming.

It was usually a thermal vent or a shipwreck.

Occasionally someone would discover an unidentified rock formation.

If it wasn't on the database and passed the checks, you got to propose the designation.

It was a dumb bragging right, but when your world shrank to 40 meters of ship steel and the

endless screaming of the sonar pulse, you took what you could get.

...