Weekly Writing – July 22 2023

Manual control cut out just as I lost the last of the light from the surface. Darkness outside, darkness across the cockpit, in the same catastrophic blink. I thought at first, sitting, gaping out the windows, that I’d gone blind.
Some faulty connection in my nervous system, knocked loose by the pressure or sinking eddies. But there’s still light down here, out there, enough for me to know my eyes aren’t what failed me.
Bioluminescent sparks and squirms in the dark. It’s been ten minutes and the sub is still sinking.
I know the calculations. If I’m sinking straight and unpowered, I know exactly how much farther I have to go. I pace the tiny capsule, the dull, rubbery thud of my steps filling it like a tachycardiac, sinking heart, and I wonder if all the others were this foolish.
Go down and check on the god. Measure its mood and undulations, the number of visible eyes. Make those exact calculations, count how long until another sacrifice needs to be dropped into its abyss. Just a week after I finally lodged that complaint with HR, too.
About the corners they keep cutting in their sacrificial selection processes. Just a week after I threatened to go public. I deserve what’s waiting at the bottom of this straight, unpowered trajectory, just for looking at the open door of the sub, before boarding, and not seeing it as a gaping maw.
Still, I shiver as I pace, and I whisper the prayers I’ve never really believed in. Of devotion, of supplication, of confession. Atonement. I watch for eyes below, through the windows, and I hope there’s even a drop of undocumented mercy in the god I’ve been measuring all these years.