My old captain once told me a story about why submarines were built without windows.

He would explain that the first underwater vessels were created with little glass

pains, giving an insight into the darkness of the ocean depths. A world rid of light,

never meant to be seen by animals wandering on land. It's not the isolation that drives a man

mad, eat claim, nor is it solitude? No, what drives a man to the brink of insanity

is to stare into the heart of the sea and pray that nothing stares back.

While it wasn't unusual for old men at sea to tell tall tales,

my captain was on the loony end of the spectrum after one too many years spent in a metal box.

That's one of the many reasons that each and every man has to endure a long and rigorous

psych evaluation before setting foot on a submarine. Obviously, that was an aspect of the job

my captain hailed as pointless pseudoscience. I never believed his stories, but they stuck with me.

We had all been well first in the functionality of military submarines. We knew that windows provided

a weakness to the structural integrity and were hence never integrated into military grade vessels.

If I were a better man, I would have said that my captain knew that as well.

As fate would have it, my captain did meet his end at sea. He'd end his own life by tying himself

up in a metal chain before jumping into the ocean in the darkness of night.

But the idea of men going mad at sea stayed with me. A kind of madness only understood by those

living at sea. Men were never meant to venture that deep into the abyss, a fact proven by the

thousands of lives ending at the bottom of the ocean. Whenever I lay awake at night to the

sound of our submarine's hull settling under pressure, I'd hear my old captain's words of warning,

not to stare into the abyss. Because if you do end up staring into the darkness,

only horrors unfold when you pretend to be the one in control.

...