The ocean beyond him churned
The ocean beyond him churned in impossible, electric blues, shimmering as though the waters were alive. Elijah Vance adjusted the brass buttons on his sand-colored vest, brushing away the frothy salt spray clinging to its lapels. The wind tugged at his cuffs, which, rolled meticulously past his elbows, gave him the look of an 1890s inventor who had just stepped out of a Jules Verne novel. Only—this wasn’t the 1890s. And Elijah wasn't standing on a wooden pier admiring a steam-powered craft. He was here, in 2147, standing atop a floating city that hadn’t been on any maps just a month before.
Fathoms Deep, as it was called in the conspiratorial undercurrents of the net, was neither listed in international treaties nor acknowledged by corporate power blocs, yet it had emerged as a nexus of whispered rumors. A place built not for war or commerce, but for solving what global leaders had, for centuries, declared unsolvable: nuclear fusion.
Elijah squinted into the horizon. The water beneath the artificial island was electric with bioluminescent spirals, descending into a base nobody could see without plunging into the depths. The sunlight danced on the crystalline edges of shielded observatories—the towers protruding like fangs into the skyline.
But Elijah didn’t have the luxury of sightseeing, not when he had already gone too far. He reached into the pocket of his grey trousers, pulling out a disk no larger than a coaster. Embedded within its surface, the etching of a sun seemed to shimmer faintly as though alive with contained energy. He stared at it for just a moment too long before the distant sound of boots on titanium startled him.
“Elijah Vance!” barked a male voice behind him. Sharp. No chance of mistaking it for a passerby. “Step away from the edge and drop what you’re holding.”
“Funny, that’s exactly what I said to every person who told me this place didn’t exist,” Elijah shouted back, turning just enough to glance at his pursuer. He recognized the sleek, black body armor instantly: corporate-grade, every inch of it polished senselessly to reflect the sun. These weren’t just mere guards. Intercept FarmaCorp operatives. Apex predators in a kidnap-and-silence world.
“You should’ve kept to debugging AI models, Dr. Vance. Maybe then they wouldn’t have sent us.”
They advanced.
He smiled grimly and shoved the disk back into his pocket. “I didn’t debug them. I taught them fusion patterns.”
Before the operative could reach within grabbing distance, Elijah, normally cautious to a fault, made the riskiest leap of his life. He hurled himself over the edge of the floating city, into the abyss below.
Into the abyss
Cold. Crushing. The bioluminescent water closed over him like silk, seconds before gravity kissed him with terminal velocity. But Elijah’s path downward wasn’t random. Concealed in the trench veiling this artificial paradise was the true Fathoms Deep.
Even now, as currents swept at him like ghostly arms, the faint glow of man-made pylons illuminated the descent. Artificial intelligence didn’t just help run the experimental reactor below—it had dreamed the physics into coherence. Hundreds of incomprehensible calculations folded into insightful designs, creating solutions humanity had failed to produce for centuries.
The hidden AI core was housed deeper—beneath a plexus of experimental fusion chambers. But for Elijah, there was no time to cherish scientific beauty. He had seen what little patience FarmaCorp mercenaries had, and their mission was environment be damned: retrieve the key—or eliminate the runaway—and obliterate things they didn’t understand.
He adjusted the small rebreather clipped to his vest and powered forward, toggling a circular glass device nestled against his forearm cuff.
“Daedalus,” he whispered softly.
A voice—wry, distinctly female with the enunciation of 20th-century radio patrons—buzzed into his ears. “You got your hands on the disk, but really, jumping into water? We could’ve gotten creative.”
The AI was alive inside his communicator, as alive as the marine glow pulsing through the waters. Daedalus was his creation—or at least the sentient contribution to advancing humanity back toward technological sincerity. In this moment, Elijah had no illusions that either would survive the evening.
“Where’s the core locking mechanism?” he muttered.
“The disk’s sun signature needs to override the generator’s gold perimeter seal. Plug it at the bottom, just where the platform meets rotator plates.”
“And then?”
Daedalus paused as though weighing probabilities. “Theoretically, it triggers the primary containment on the demo system. Instantaneous build toward nuclear fusion output.”
“‘Theoretically’ doesn’t really inspire confidence, Dae.”
“That’s what you get for designing me with sarcasm protocols. But hey, you’re planning to escape an army underwater, so gold star for insane consistency.”
Something moved in the dark above him—propellers, maybe, but larger, more searching. FarmaCorp wouldn’t risk deploying manned submarines yet; instead, drones with heat-trigger payloads descended. Elijah, clutching the disk tightly, swam deeper, fighting fatigue which now clawed with every pulsing muscle.
A submerged core
Once his boot settled onto the submerged core’s entry dock—blue polished surfaces streaked with web-like patina—there was no time for relishing success. “Here goes,” he muttered, snapping the sun-shaped construct into the glowing mouth of gold-traced panels.
The reactor below—a structure half-mind, half-machine—shuddered as veins of plasma-colored light coursed earthward, into abyssal cradles whose depths no diver yet cataloged. What the human mind instinctively recoiled from exploring, Elijah’s partner—the AI itself anchored here—navigated without hesitation.
“Elijah...” Daedalus’ voice tarried ominous yet oddly personal. “You realize this’ll be bad news if extracted—power grids jacked skyward tomorrow under post-moral buyers mining for anything. Let’s lock certainty now...Pull back into the failsafe node.”
He hesitated. “If you lock containment breaches too fully, who’ll ever end misuse?”
The distant hum expanded—electric chorals harmonizing toward feedback loops where artificial nature exceeded creator predictions.
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: AI and Fusion Power: How Artificial Intelligence is Unlocking the Secrets of Infinite Clean Energy
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