Places where the bedrock never shifted, suitable for anchoring bubble communities (art deco’s resurgence around the time of the launch was not a coincidence). Medicines and minerals and oil deposits and food sources. There were resources, down there in the sea. Bustos stood up and said he had a solution, people listened. Much of it remains unexplored, even today . . . Two-thirds of the planet’s surface is water. Not for the teeming masses of Earth, the people displaced from their communities by the super storms and tornadoes, the people who just needed a place to live and eat and work and flourish. Oh, space exploration continued-mostly in the hands of the wealthy, tech firms that decided a rocket would be a better investment than a Ping-Pong table in the break room, and now had their eyes set on building an office on Jupiter, a summer home on Mars. Within fifty years of the launch of the female submariners, the sea had become the most valuable real estate in the world. Maybe it was one of those men who first started calling the all-female submarine crews the military’s “mermaids.” Maybe it was one of those men-and they were all men, I’ve seen the records man after man, walking into our spaces, our submarines with their safe and narrow halls, and telling the women who had to live there to make themselves over into a new image, a better image, an image that wouldn’t fight, or gossip, or bully. They hired the right sociologists, they taught their people the right way to deal with conflicts and handle stress, they found ways of picking out that early programming and replacing it with fierce loyalty to the Navy, to the program, to the crew. Women-even military women-had been socialized to fight with words and with social snubbing, and the early all-female submarines must have looked like a cross between a psychology textbook and the Hunger Games. We were more equipped to resolve our differences without resorting to violence-and there were differences. Women dealt better with close quarters, tight spaces, and enforced contact with the same groups of people for long periods of time. We knew that women were better suited to be submariners by the beginning of the twenty-first century. I walk a little faster, as fast as I can force myself to go in my standard issue boots, and there is only a thin shell between me and the sea. Maybe that will be an advantage of those flooded boats no more transitions, no more hasty scrambles for breathing apparatus that fits a little less well after every tour, no more forcing of feet into boots that don’t really fit, but are standard issue (and standard issue is still God and King here, on a navy vessel, in the service of the United States government, even when the sailors do not, cannot, will never fit the standard mold). It will vibrate through the underwater spaces twice more, giving everyone the time they need. The walkway vibrates under my feet, broadcasting the all hands signal through the ship. Things that are choices today won’t be choices tomorrow that’s the way it’s always been, when you sign away your voice for a new means of dancing.

What will be done to them, what they’ll have to do in service to their country. Those ships will be lighter than ours could ever dream of being, freed from the need for filters and desalination pumps by leaving themselves open to the sea. Latest scuttlebutt from the harbor holds that a generation of wholly flooded ships is coming, ultra-light fish tanks with shells of air and metal surrounding the water-filled crew chambers, the waterproofed electrical systems. The heartbeat of the ship follows me through the iron halls, comprised of the engine’s whir, the soft, distant buzz of the electrical systems, the even more distant churn of the rudders, the hiss and sigh of the filters that keep the flooded chambers clean and oxygenated. We are constantly envious of those who escape its limitations, and we fear for them at the same time, wishing them safe return to the reef, where they can be kept away from all the darkness and predations of the open sea. The space is tight, confined, unyielding it is like living inside a coral reef, trapped by the limits of our own necessary shells. The smell of damp steel assaults my nose as I walk the hall, uncomfortable boots clumping heavily with every step I force myself to take. Series: The Tales of Gorlen VizenfirtheĬondensation covers the walls, dimpling into tiny individual drops that follow an almost fractal pattern, like someone has been writing out the secrets of the universe in the most transitory medium they can find.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.

People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.

Underwater submarine cartoon