EAST CHINA SEA, NINETY MILES FROM SHANGHAI
TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE PRESENT DAY
THE GRAY SUBMERSIBLE traveled slowly across an aquatic paradise. Sunlight filtered down from above. Kelp beds waved in the current. Fish of every conceivable size and shape darted about. Off in the distance, an ominous shadow loomed in the blue infinity; a huge but harmless whale shark, its mouth gaping wide as it strained the water for tiny clouds of plankton.
From the command chair in the nose of the submersible, Dr. Chen marveled at the stunning array of life around him.
“We’re approaching the Serpent’s Jaw,” a female voice said beside him.
Chen nodded at the information and kept his eyes on the world outside. This would be his last view of natural sunlight for a month and he wanted to savor it.
The submarine continued across the kelp bed until it gave way to a band of coral and then a V-shaped canyon. At first, the canyon was no more than a fissure, but it widened as it ran off into the distance, and from above resembled an open mouth.
The Serpent’s Jaw.
As they traveled out over the canyon, the seafloor dropped precipitously.
“Take us down,” Chen ordered.
The submersible’s pilot manipulated the controls with utter precision and the submarine, filled mostly with supplies, nosed down and descended into the steep-walled canyon.
Five hundred feet down, they lost the light. Nine hundred feet later, they found it again. Only, this time, it was artificial in nature and coming from a habitat anchored to a sidewall of the canyon.
Chen could make out the small living space and the stack of additional modules lined up beneath it. They went all the way to the canyon floor, where a tangle of pipes and tubes could be seen snaking into the ground.
“I trust you can handle the docking,” Chen said.
“Of course. Stand by.”
For the first time, Chen turned to study the pilot. She had wide, expressive eyes, smooth skin and plum-colored lips. It was a pretty face, but her designers hadn’t given her any hair and in places the mechanics of her operating machinery were on full display.
He could make out bones of titanium and polished gearing where the joints of each arm connected to her torso; tiny hydraulic pumps and servos along with bundles of wires that ran like arteries until they vanished beneath white plastic panels sculpted to look like human curves.
The body panels covered her chest, midsection and thighs. Similar panels covered her arms but gave way once again at her wrists. Her fingers were pure machinery; powerful and precise, made of stainless steel, with rubber tips to facilitate grasping.
As an engineer, Chen admired the mechanics of her form. And as a man he appreciated the attempt at human beauty. That said, he wondered why they’d given her such a pretty face, soft voice and attractive outer form without finishing the job. They’d left her stuck halfway between human and machine.
A pity, he thought.
He turned back to the view port as the submersible eased up against the docking collar, bumped it softly and locked on. With the docking confirmed and the seal in place, Chen wasted no time. He stood, grabbed his pack and unlocked the submersible’s inner door. The pilot neither looked at him nor reacted. She just sat, not moving and staring straight ahead.
No, he thought, not half human. Not quite.
Entering the habitat, Chen passed other slow-moving machines traveling on caterpillar tracks. Distant cousins of the submersible’s pilot, he thought. Very distant.
These machines were more like self-driving pallets crossbred with a small forklift. They would unload the supplies and equipment from the submersible and take them to the appropriate storerooms, all without a command from anyone at the station.
At the same time, other automatons would load the sub with the ore extracted from a deep fissure beneath the seabed.
Such a plain word for it. Ore. In truth, the material was unlike anything that had ever been mined before, an alloy trickling up from deep within the Earth, stronger than titanium, a third of its weight and imbued with other unique properties not found in any existing alloy or polymer.
He and the others—and there were very few others who knew of it—called the alloy Golden Adamant, or GA for short. The submerged mining facility had been constructed in secret to excavate it.
To keep that secret, and to maximize the station’s efficiency, it had been built to be almost fully automated. Only one human was stationed there at a time, directing the efforts of two hundred automated workers.
The machines came in all shapes and sizes. A few had humanoid form, like the submarine pilot; others were referred to as mermaids, since they combined human-like grasping arms and a spherical camera-filled “head” with a propulsion pack where a human swimmer’s legs would be.
Others looked like the classic ROVs of aquatic exploration, and still others resembled heavy machinery at a construction site. Most of the later models worked on the seafloor or within the deep borehole itself. All of them operating on batteries recharged by a compact nuclear reactor that had been repurposed from a Chinese attack submarine and secured in the lowest module.