Kaizoo didn’t remember changing course.

One moment, he was gripping the yoke, the steady thrum of the thrusters a promise of escape as he sailed for the distant, safe harbor of Contact Beta. The next, a wave of crushing vertigo had slammed into him. The world behind his eyes swam with visions of pale, walking figures and the echoing of LUNA’s words: “They have been dead for a long time.”

When his senses rushed back, the navigational display was blinking with a course correction alert. His own hands, moving with a will he didn't recognize, had input a new destination. The yoke was tilted hard to starboard, pulling the Nautilus-07 in a sharp, urgent turn away from the eight-hour journey he knew was impossible.

He was now on a direct, desperate sprint for the only destination he had the power to reach: the two-hour signal. Contact Alpha.

---

“Power levels at 22%. Reserve cells depleted. Life support systems will begin shutting down in sequence once primary power falls below 15%.”A new, softer chime echoed in the cabin. “Oxygen at 18%. Note: Cognitive impairment and hypoxia-induced hallucinations are probable below 14%.”

LUNA’s calm, analytical tone was back, as if her moment of morbid poetry had never happened. The new problem was as immediate as it was dire.

His eyes scanned the console, and a cold knot tightened in his stomach. The Okeanex distress beacon—Contact Alpha—was no longer a two-hour journey away. It was now dangerously close. His abrupt, unconscious course change had brought him right to it.

But that’s wrong, a lucid part of his mind screamed. LUNA said Contact Alpha was anomalous. Biological. This is a standard Okeanex beacon. Protocol 7-Alpha. The two things didn’t match. It was like hearing a lion's roar and finding a kitten. The mismatch was more terrifying than either option on its own.

There, nestled in a canyon of jagged black rock, lay the source of the signal. A submarine. Or what was left of one. It was larger than the Nautilus, a deep-sea exploration vessel, now a corpse. Its hull was scarred and dented, and a great, ugly tear ran along its starboard side. The name was barely legible under a crust of mineral deposits and what looked like thick, black seaweed: OKEANEX-03.

It was a tomb. But it was also a potential lifeline. If its emergency power core was intact, he could siphon enough energy to reach… well, to reach somewhere.

A memory, vague and unreliable, surfaced from deep in Kaizoo's mind: he had once worked on the Okeanex-03. He knew something was wrong with him, with his memory. It felt like something in his brain and in his chest was trying to get out.

"LUNA," he said, his voice low. "Re-confirm signal analysis for Contact Alpha. You said it was anomalous. Biological. This is an Okeanex-03 wreck. Explain the discrepancy."

There was a half-second pause, a lifetime for an AI.

“Scanning,” LUNA replied, her tone flat. “Signal analysis reconfirmed. Reading is anomalous. Biological interference is present. The Okeanex-03 wreck is… coincidental.”

Coincidental? Nothing down here was a coincidence. The AI was lying, or it was broken. Or something else was broadcasting through the dead ship, using its beacon as a lure.

The risk wasn't important right now; the thought of suffocating in the dark, waiting to die, was far scarier than the lie. He had to go in.

---

He couldn't dock with the derelict; its airlock was a mangled ruin. But he didn't need to go inside himself.

"Prepare the reconnaissance drone for deployment."

A panel on the Nautilus’s underbelly hissed open. On his monitor, a feed flickered to life—the perspective of the small, remotely operated vehicle (ROV), its twin headlights cutting twin spears into the abyssal gloom. It looked like a mechanical crab, with a main chassis and two manipulator arms.

With hands that trembled only slightly, Kaizoo steered the drone towards the gaping tear in the Okeanex-03's hull. The edges of the metal were curled inward like a wound. The drone slipped through easily.

The interior was a nightmare frozen in time.

The ROV’s lights swept across a corridor. Bodies floated in the zero-gravity environment within the ship, their movements slow and macabre. They were still in their standard-issue Okeanex coveralls, now bloated and pale from long immersion. Their faces were locked in final, silent screams, eyes milky and vacant. Their clothes were torn, not by claws, but by the explosive decompression that had ripped through the ship. The water was cloudy with suspended sediment and flecks of… something else.

Kaizoo's stomach feels uncomfortable and nauseous, but he forced himself to focus. The power coupling was in the engineering bay. He navigated the drone through a ghostly locker room, and his breath caught. A child's drawing was stuck to one of the lockers.

"Why are there children's drawings here?"he thought. He remembered that staff on deep-sea missions were always screened to have no children or family. "Why am I thinking like that? What's wrong with my head? None of my memories make sense."

TEEETTTTTT, TEEEETTTTT!

"WARNING: Drone collision imminent."
Kaizoo,startled by LUNA's voice, steered the drone back on course.

"FOCUS, KAIZOO!"

Finally, he reached the engineering bay doors. They were sealed shut. Using the drone’s manipulator arms, he pried them apart, the metal shrieking in protest. The doors slid open, and a cloud of dark, particulate matter billowed out, obscuring the camera.

When it cleared, the ROV’s lights illuminated the room. And the horror reached a new peak.

The walls, the floor, the ceiling—they were covered in deep, parallel gouges. Not the single, desperate handprint he’d found in the Nautilus. This was a frenzy. It looked like a wild animal had been trapped in here, scratching and clawing at the unyielding metal in a final, futile attempt to escape.

And in the center of the room, held in place by a safety harness as if he were still at his post, was a figure in what looked like a chief engineer's uniform. His head was gone. Not detached. Gone. The neck ended in a ragged, shredded stump.

---

Kaizoo gagged, turning his head away from the screen. He had to finish this. He had to get the power cell. He guided the drone towards the bank of emergency batteries, its arms extending to connect the siphoning cable.

The connection clicked into place. “Power transfer initiated. Estimated time to minimum viable charge: seven minutes,” LUNA reported.

Seven minutes. He just had to wait. He kept the drone’s camera fixed on the power readout, trying to ignore the headless engineer floating just at the edge of the frame.

Four minutes remaining.

A shadow fell over the drone.It was large, and it moved with a silent, fluid grace. Kaizoo’s breath hitched. He slowly panned the ROV’s camera upward.

There, hovering just outside a tear in the Okeanex-03's hull that was no larger than the drone itself, was the creature. The black jellyfish. It was immense, a floating shroud of living darkness. Its body was a pulsating, gelatinous bell, and within it, a network of blue, nerve-like filaments glowed with a sickly bioluminescence. It had no visible eyes, no mouth, just a silent, drifting presence that radiated pure menace.

It was studying the derelict. Or studying the drone.

Two minutes remaining.

The creature shifted. One of its long, trailing tentacles, faintly glowing with the same blue energy, began to slowly, deliberately, reach through the tear in the hull. It wasn't aiming for the drone. It was reaching for the siphoning cable. The creature’s glowing tentacle drifted closer, almost brushing the power cable.

“Come on,” Kaizoo whispered, his knuckles white on the controls.

The transfer bar finally filled. Complete.

He didn’t hesitate. He slammed the retract command. The drone shot backward, its camera spinning wildly. For one single, heart-stopping frame, the lens caught the creature in the hull breach.

And Kaizoo saw it.

The swirling blue lights inside its body didn’t just glow—they formed something. A face.

His face.

But it was a nightmare version. His own features, pale and deathly, were framed by a pulsating, bluish aura. The eyes were wide open, pupils dilated into bottomless black pits, and they were locked directly on his—seething with recognition and a hunger to pounce. The mouth was stretched wide into a silent scream, a void of absolute blackness that seemed to pull at Kaizoo’s very soul, trying to drag him in.

A psychic shockwave, cold and sharp, stabbed into his mind. His breath seized. His thoughts shredded, memories blurring as if being erased. He was dissolving, being pulled into that hateful, consuming gaze.

Just as his sense of self tore at the edges, a memory surfaced—a lifeline. A woman’s laugh, warm and mocking. "Hahahaha, be calm, Kai. Just let it go. Don't panic."

The connection shattered.

The pressure vanished, leaving him gasping and drenched in the sudden silence of the cockpit. The panic was gone, replaced by a hollow, unnerving calm.

He had the power. But he had also found a new, more personal kind of terror. The anomalous signal hadn't been coming from the wreck. It had been coming from what was guarding it. And now it knew him.

(A note from the author):

I rewrote this chapter until my own spine chilled. That final image... it haunts me.
If it unsettled you too,adding to your library or a comment fuels our deep-sea nightmare. Thank you for diving into the dark with me.

— [MKI]