Year 12

On the final relay box, his right glove malfunctioned, emitting a grinding, shredding noise as they grew uncomfortably warm. Instinctively, he yanked his arm out of the small space, straining against CAP’s control of the left hand and damaging the delicate artificial muscles that moved the fingers.

As Vince threw the right glove across the floor in frustration, he heard a loud, sharp bang that reverberated through the whole station.

"Oh no," Vince whispered.

"Critical malfunction. The door attempted to open,” CAP said calmly.

“You stopped it, though?”

“I shut off the power to the door. The door remained shut, but I cannot risk restoring power, as it might continue its opening cycle. Without hydraulic pressure, the door’s position cannot be maintained.”

“And the sealant won’t hold the water back by itself.”

Vince stepped away from the box, clenching his hands in terror and anger. There had to be a way to rewind the clock, he told himself, it had to be possible to go back, to stop that one fatal twitch. The intense, heart-crushing fear only lasted a minute.

He started laughing. That was it, then. After 12 years, after all he’d been through, after all of the adaptations he’d made to hold on, he’d die because he made one small mistake. It was almost too ridiculous to be believed.

When he made it back to the pallet of blankets that had been his bed for 12 years, he kept laughing until he grew too lightheaded to keep his eyes pointed to the ceiling. It was odd to know how one would die, Vince reflected, but knowing roughly when it would happen made the whole thing more calmly surreal.

“How long do you think before the seals break?” Vince asked as he went to lay in his makeshift bed on the floor.

“You’re asking how long until this place floods?” CAP clarified.

“Yeah. That.”

“Difficult to determine with certainty. The sealant the repair drones produced lasted approximately 48 hours between replacements, though they may take longer to break down completely.”

“That entrance was supposed to be the next one the drone looked at. It’s already been 48 hours…”

He sighed, staring at a ceiling he had never been able to see. For the first time he could remember, he wondered what the place would look like, if he could see it. He wondered what he would look like. The diet and hygiene that CAP had “enforced” had kept his body clean and relatively free of skin blemishes, but there had been accidents that left scars, and his hair had not been cut in 12 years. With no real concept of beauty standards, he couldn’t guess whether he’d be considered attractive. It hadn’t ever been important.

“I guess when the water comes in, it’ll happen so fast that I’ll be flattened,” Vince said.

“If it happens, that is roughly accurate. You wouldn’t recognize the event occurred before it killed you,” CAP said.

“I think we can dispense with ‘if.’”

There was silence for several minutes. Vince wondered if it had managed to make the AI run out of optimism after 12 years. It was kind of bleak, he thought, that things were now so hopeless that even an AI could be made to give up.

"Hah! This is what you've been trying to tell me with the whole Columbus thing, isn't it?” Vince said, laughing bitterly, “The nature of lies. I get it now!”

Vince sat up, eyes instinctively going wide and wild as he “looked” for CAP. He needed something to focus his rage on, but he still couldn’t see. He seethed, and his hands began to tremor.

“We were never going to get out of here. You had to keep me alive though, because you’re a damned robot, and robots have to do what they’re told.”

CAP said nothing. It knew that Vince now saw it as a broken thing, that he believed it had harmed him. It also knew that these weren’t rational thoughts. There was nothing it could say that wouldn’t hurt, not when emotions were this high.

“You could’ve just let me die. I could have…I wouldn’t have had to spend 12 years in this…this…”

He growled, roared, screamed and cried like a wild animal that had just been caged.

Then, after 12 years of silence, the station’s alarms began to sound.

******

“Turn that off!” Vince screamed angrily as he sprang to his feet.

“It’s controlled by the emergency system. I can’t override it,” CAP answered, its voice still calm, though it had to turn its volume to a nearly deafening loudness to be heard over the din of klaxons.

The last thing he had expected to feel before he died was annoyed. He had thought he was too numb to feel anything, but was finding out differently. His will to survive and the need for any kind of escape met for battle at the center of his mind, and though neither was winning, they had turned his mind into a scorched battlefield. He just wanted it all to stop.

“The seal to tunnel three is fracturing. I don’t know how long it will-”

CAP’s voice was drowned out as the station shrieked and shook violently, knocking Vince to the floor. He felt his heart try to leap out of his chest, and he prepared for a sudden end…

…then remembered that the promised death was supposed to be instant. It wasn’t. He waited one second, then another…

And then for the first time in 12 years, he saw light. It was creeping through the stretched, translucent sealant around the compromised door, dimly, barely glowing, but it was unmistakable.

Something was out there.

Something was out there.

“We have a problem,” CAP said in a concerned tone Vince had never heard before.

The station let out an even louder shriek of tearing metal that momentarily drowned out the klaxons.

“Oh no,” Vince whispered, realizing what CAP meant. The thing shining the light - a submersible, probably - wasn’t near the station.

It was on the station.

Vince’s laugh was even more hysterical this time. It was ridiculously, morbidly hilarious: the thing that should have been his impossible salvation was instead going to kill him.

"Vince, listen carefully," CAP's booming voice caught him by surprise.

“The compartment where my hardware pod is housed can be hermetically sealed. Do you remember where the hatch is?”

“Yes, but-”

He knew what the AI was about to suggest, and it made him want to die, rather than face the consequences of doing what it said.

“When the door opens, reach in and rip every wire from the wall as hard as you can. Pull my hardware pod free, climb inside, curl into a ball and shut the door. It will lock automatically.”

“I…I can’t…you can’t…”

“Be sure to pull the pod completely free of the door’s path. Both the door and the pod are heavy; be prepared.”

Vince shook in a mass of emotions too big to untangle as the klaxons blared and the station began to audibly crack.

“Feel your hands. Focus on them,” CAP said.

With an audible pop and a loud, complicated unlocking sound, the compartment opened.

Everything that came after that happened in a blur of crushing guilt and electrifying terror.

******

The seven hours Vince spent curled up in CAP’s compartment, unable to move a single centimeter, had felt like an eternity of torment. The crew of the submersible had grabbed the AI compartment first, and being unaware of his presence, had searched the site for several more hours before ascending to the surface. When the compartment was hoisted onto the salvage ship, he screamed as loudly as he could for several minutes, until someone finally heard his voice through the thick metal. It was another several minutes before the crew figured out how to open the door without a thermal lance.

When he spilled out onto the deck, he opened his eyes only for a split second, before squeezing them shut again to block out the searing light. The crew gathered around him, touching him, carrying him, asking him questions and giving him assurances, but it was all pain.

Earplugs had dulled the noise to a bearable agony, but there were no sunglasses on the ship dark enough to block out enough of the light to stop Vince from screaming in pain. Eventually, they gave him a blindfold and put him in the darkest room on the ship. It took nearly an hour and a half before he could stop hyperventilating long enough to hear the voices distinctly, rather than as drum beats through a haze of tinnitus.

Having only ever heard the calm, measured voice of an AI, the roughness of their voices frightened him.

Year 13

He never properly met the people that had saved him. The ship’s doctor had given him a sedative, and he slept fitfully through the entire trip back to shore.

His eyes had atrophied, and he required surgery before he was restored to close-up vision that was legally blind.

“Vince? Can you hear me?” A voice said. Everything felt slushy as he returned to consciousness. It was the first time he could remember anything specific since…

“Are you awake?” The voice repeated.

Oh god. Oh god.

He wept, and the tears stung his bandaged eyes.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Vince repeated through his sobs.

It was gone. The AI was gone. He had screamed at it, accused it of betrayal, and then it had given up everything for him.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Vince repeated the screed until a dose of morphine made all the thoughts disappear for a while.

******

It took nearly a year of therapy before Vince could freely, safely engage in conversation without trying to harm or kill himself. It seemed like every word he spoke brought back some kind of traumatic memory.

When he was well enough to process the fact, Vince wasn’t completely surprised to learn that Abyssal Horizons hadn’t been looking for survivors. The company had filed for bankruptcy a day before the accident that killed everyone else on the station, and as it turned out, at least a hundred underwater facilities had suffered similar catastrophes before 717. He was the only survivor of any of the incidents.

He didn't say a word as the doctors, lawyers and reporters came, giving their assurances, taking interviews, offering legal services, and recounting the events of the last 12 years.

He didn't care about any of that. There was only one thing he wanted to know…

"I'm sorry," One nurse finally told him. He'd lost count of how many people had come to speak to him, to tell him how courageous he had been or to have their picture taken with "the boy who fought the Pacific and survived."

None of them knew what had happened to CAP, and none of them cared to find out. Only this one nurse had cared enough.

"The crew told me they had expected to find the station's AI unit in the compartment, so they didn't bother looking anywhere else. Just gathered some plant samples, took pictures of the wreck and…"

The nurse stopped when she saw tears forming in Vince's eyes.

"He…it wouldn't have survived long outside its compartment. He told me that. Just too much pressure that deep. Thank you…for telling me," Vince said, voice breaking.

Vince wasn't sure what to expect of the young woman. When he wore his thick glasses, he could see her, but couldn't interpret her face. He wanted to compare her sympathy to CAP’s, but when he tried to think back to any of the melancholy, depressed and terrified moments on 717, he just remembered…nothing. It had been dark. There had only been the sound of his own sobs, whatever the AI had said, and its respectful silence.

"I'm so sorry. I can't imagine what you're feeling right now," The nurse said. He was hearing a lot of phrases for the first time, and this was one of them.

He found that the memory of his time on 717 was hard to hold onto. When he tried to recall the sound of CAP's voice, he remembered that it was quiet, obliging, wise…whichever the moment called for. But the qualities CAP had taught him about - pitch, timber, volume, vibrato - were becoming more unclear with each passing second.

It was a cruel irony. He’d worked so hard to internalize nearly everything CAP said. Its words had literally kept him alive, but his mind was losing the distinct edges of those words the first chance it got. Soon, they’d disappear into the inky black, like everything else down there had.

"Can you tell me about him?" The nurse asked.

Vince knew that he'd never be able to tell the tale completely. Looking into the nurse's eyes, he realized that even if he could recall everything and describe it perfectly - and he desperately wanted to - there was a whole ocean of separation in experience between the two of them. She just wouldn't get it.

Then again, CAP didn't get a lot of things. He still tried. And this nurse, she was trying, too.

Maybe, if there was always one person who tried, that would be enough. Maybe it didn't even matter if that person was "real."

Maybe…