Subprogramme DEEPMARK
A deep vessel, built where it will sail, in the endless ocean behind GG-D8. The strangest construction site on or off the Earth, and the only one the programme keeps for the joy of it.
1.0 The Node
GG-D8, the Sounding, does not open onto a world so much as into an ocean. Water lies in every direction, warm and clean to instruments, with no floor, no shore, and no surface that any sounding has found. It is not empty. It teems: vast slow shoals of luminous fish, things with too many fins and patient eyes, drifting forests of something between weed and animal, and, at the edge of the lamps, larger movements that have not yet chosen to be seen. None of it has been hostile; most of it is indifferent, and some of it is, the divers insist, curious. We have lost no one to GG-D8 — only humbled everyone who has put a sensor into it.
2.0 The Build — Shipyard in the Open Blue
DEEPMARK has moved from drawings to steel. A deep vessel cannot be carried through GG-1 whole, so it is being built where it will sail: passed through the ring in sections and assembled on the far side. The programme therefore now runs an underwater shipyard — a lit frame of scaffolding and mooring lines hung in the open blue, no seabed beneath it and no surface above, where divers and remote arms fit a pressure hull together a plate at a time.
- Vessel. DSV CETUS — a crewed deep-survey vessel rated for open-water station-keeping with no bottom to sit on and no surface to blow to. Built in sections sized to the 2.5m ring.
- Assembly. On the far side, at a moored frame, by divers and remote arms. The yard is supplied entirely through GG-1; nothing about it exists on Earth except the parts queued at the chamber.
- Mission. Sustained descent — to put a crewed hull deeper into GG-D8 than any tether or drone has reached, and find out whether the ocean has a bottom, an edge, or a builder.