I devoted my life to the deep sea when I was only fourteen years old and have since done everything I humanly can to get inside a DSV. And it paid off, I am one of three that take DSV Sola, the best vessel in the world, down on their expeditions. First trek we had taken them down fifteen thousand meters, a record for a crewed vessel at the time. Point Coro’s existence was announced two months ago; eighteen thousand meters. Of course we were going. We would have gone the day after the research paper was published if there weren’t so many political obstacles. I remember when “international waters” was a thing. How the world has changed, right? 

And oh how it will again.

Have you heard of a Dunkleosteus? It was a prehistoric fish. It lived in the Devonian period, over three hundred million years ago. Really famous fossils, for fossil nerds. Its skull is terrifying to look at and just as terrifying in function. Fish around that time had thick armor scales, and Dunkelosteus was an apex predator. It needed a crazy mouth to bite through fish armor, so how did it do it? Well: it didn’t have teeth. Instead, its jaw had blades, sharp bones basically infused to the skull and jaw, sort of like a beak. Why have sharp teeth that can fall out or break when you can just bite with your skull? Look up the fossil, you’ll see what I mean, but anyway, here’s why I’m bringing it up: I loved the Dunkleosteus when I was a kid. I thought it was so scary and cool, like the deep-sea anglers and viperfish of today. So freaky, so cool. But we’ve got a good idea, now, of what Dunkleosteus actually looked like. Its skull may be scary, but the actual fish just looked like a big chubby shark. It wasn’t actually a nightmarish monster.

Neither are anglers or viperfish. True, they look scary, even with their skin on, but “scary” just isn’t the same thing for animals as it is for us. The shrimp that the viperfish eats aren’t afraid of the viperfish’s giant eyes and needle-tooth smile, the shrimp are afraid of getting eaten. The viperfish is just the “getting eaten” idea, not a scary face in the dark. And the viperfish don’t look the way they do to scare anything, they have big eyes so they can see in the twilight zone and needle teeth to make sure whatever they bite doesn’t slip away. 

I’ve learned, after all my courses in calculus and molecular biology, that “scary” and “cool” aren’t reality, they are human experiences, which, all, aren’t reality. You might disagree, but I truly believe this. Just because we can see the world doesn’t mean that we see it for what it really is.

When we touched Sola down on the seafloor at Point Coro, eighteen thousand meters underwater, we saw nothing. Nothing free swimming, I should say. Just pelagic clay in our spotlights beneath an aqueous void that, to it, was the sky. True abyss, as we expected. We started getting samples. 

It had been maybe two minutes since we touched. Two minutes. I didn’t even have time to start getting the creeps, if I even could get the creeps on a dive like that, which I never got before. Two minutes, and I chose to look away from Sola’s computer and out to the flat, still plane of clay under our lights. Have you ever seen someone on the street at night and had to look at them twice because you weren’t sure they were actually there? Like, someone in the dark that wasn’t under a street lamp but just close enough to the light’s aura that their presence was half-obvious; a shadow that may be just a normal person but is unnerving enough to warrant that second look, just to make sure you aren’t seeing your own nightmares manifesting. Beyond Sola’s spotlights, there was a shadow exactly like that. A man in the dark. 

I gave my second look and he was still there. He was fifteen feet tall, I could tell exactly because our spotlights were ten feet up and I could only see up to the man’s stomach. His skin was the same color as the lightless water around him.

I didn’t know what to say, or what sound to make. My two crew mates looked when they noticed how frozen I became. Someone jumped in their seat at first glance, I don’t remember who, but we all three stayed still for a long while. The giant abyss man, the half of him we could see, just stood there. Still. And after about thirty seconds, his stomach started to move in rhythm; breathing. The man was breathing like us, but I don’t think he needed to. I think he started doing it because we were doing it.

Then, with the slow speed of a storm cloud, he began to crouch. The man descended his head into our spotlights. His eyes, on either side of his elongated face, were the size of washing machines, and they didn’t blink. They pivoted around, like fish eyes would. He had to turn his face to the side to see us fully with one eye, then turn to the other side to see us with the other. 

Striking as those eyes were, I was focused on his mouth. His lipless, Dunkelosteus mouth that opened and closed like a gulping fish. No teeth; he had a pattern of sharp blades growing out his skull and jaw that perfectly fit together when they shut, like violent puzzle pieces. 

He stayed for fifteen minutes, and we said nothing the entire time. Then he walked off into whatever cold hell Point Coro leads to. I know he was there for us. Unlike the viperfish, or the anglers or the Dunkleosteus, that abyssal man, I am scientifically convinced, was designed to terrify us.