to breathe

Something must have gone wrong I guess. I'm not sure how it would have been had everything turned out according to plan, only that this is not how it was meant to be. Something had failed. Some momentum had propelled me from where I was meant to be, from how I was meant to be, into where I am now.

And that is a weird liquid that my head is sticking in and that I cannot breathe.

It cannot have been more than a few moments, because I don't feel the panic you get from drowning. And neither have I bothered trying to inhale, so even though I know absolutely nothing about my surroundings and how they work, it seems that my body has not come as unprepared as my mind. Straight from hyperspace as it seems, I can still feel the slight nausea and I remember the sense of dislocation when I opened my eyes a moment ago. That – I am used to. Having my head underwater and – from the feeling of it – the rest of my body hanging in the air – that – I am not used to.

There's a distinct layer of something just below my neck, some kind of surface or a different liquid, floating just centimeters below my face, stretching out up to the underwater horizon. Looking further down I can even see the rest of my body through that rippled and rippling layer of water. I raise my arm and everything works as it should. Everything except breathing. I raise my hand to my face, feel it dive into the liquid – upwards – and feel my fingers upon my lips, gliding through the water, bringing tiny bubbles of air with them, which, however, immediately float back down through the water and merge back into the surface below.

It still takes a moment to understand the situation, to turn my mind away from the expected and accept the unexpected. I appear to be floating in the air, with my head stuck inside an ocean of water above the surface. A world upside down, or gravity upside down. Whichever is the case, my prime motivation has become getting fresh air into my lungs, as I can slowly feel the nervousness and the lingering panic growing. Time to act.

I try to dive downwards, and for a moment, my head bursts through the surface and into the air, just to fall back into the water again. I know this doesn't go a long way to solve the situation, but I repeat the process a few times nevertheless, taking short gasps for air every time I break through the surface below. There is definitely air below me. A slight smell of ozone, and I remember something from the data during the briefing. There has been a briefing. There has been data. There is a planet with a breathable atmosphere that would probably smell of ozone if I were to inhale it without a filter. Which shouldn't happen, as I was supposed to be in an environmental suit with a sophisticated set of filters.

I'm not in a suit.

I'm naked.

And I'm floating in air that is apparently heavier than the liquid above, and apparently also denser than my body. Either that or gravity is not working the way it is supposed to be.

None of it makes sense.

Yet here I am. I try to roll my body, to move around and bring myself up into a horizontal position, until I seem to overcome some gravitational angle and manage to lie on the surface and turn my face downwards so that it bobs through the surface. It feels almost like lying adrift on water, only that the water is above me and the sky below. At least I'm now able to breathe freely.

I rest for a moment and then start to observe my surroundings, turning my head a little, only to confirm that I am indeed lying on the surface of an ocean that stretches to all sides without any landmark, without any sign of land. This actually is how it was supposed to be. The planet didn't have any visible surface land mass, it was basically an ocean world. I lick my lips and taste the water. Less salty than on earth, with a slightly tingling aftertaste. It might match the analysis of the data that was presented to me, but I'm not sure. I hadn't bothered imagining how the water would taste. Come to think of it, I had always tried to figure how the atmospheres of the planets I visited would taste like, but had never cared to come up with any assumption about the taste of their seas. Not that it would have mattered anyway, I rarely came into contact with the water, staying in the environmental suit most of the time, only sometimes opening the helmet to confirm I was right about the atmosphere.

Without the suit I also lack the instruments to take any measurements and find out whether the spores would be able to flourish in the water. Anything was up to speculation now. If I had been transported down then there was a chance that the suit would be here, too. I don't even think the launch tube would tunnel me down without the suit at all. At least not with the safety protocol active and the magnetic locks switched on.

I need to find out more about the forces at work here. My situation is clearly not just a trick of the mind. Even if my sense of gravitation had been inverted, it would not explain my body sticking out of the water with only my head heavy enough to be submerged. And it also wouldn't explain the gravitational angle at which my body flipped from the vertical position into the horizontal.

I look down into the sky, squinting my eyes, searching for something to focus on. There seem to be some clouds, but all of them are clustered in the distance to my left. Since I cannot see the sun anywhere else I figure it must be behind those clouds, which seems strange as they don't appear very dense and I can't make out a distinct spot of bright light. Also, the sky has a strong blue hue, with a hint of green. None of this really matches up with the data from the briefing. I would have expected the atmosphere to more or less white. The spectral analysis indicated a thin layer of clouds that constantly covered all of the planet. There was nothing that would explain blue and green to filter through the blanket of clouds and nothing that would indicate a clear sky with clouds only clustering on one hemisphere. I was either somewhere else or something had changed since the last probe had been here. If I had the suit I could have checked the scan that the carrier had made upon arrival in orbit.

I take a few deep breaths and roll on my back. The water is a crystal clear greenish blue. For a brief moment I succumb to the notion that I'm still lying in the cryogenic tank, just experiencing a weird dream. Both water and air seem nearly temperature-less, and the fluid in the tank would have the same 18 degrees as my reduced body temperature during flight. But this is not a dream, it feels real. I know the sensation of waking up from the freeze, the total lack of sensory input. The first thing that comes back is the sense of touch, and the eyesight comes last. There's no dreaming, you feel slightly dislocated, but otherwise fully awake and aware from the moment the machine volts you back to life. I'm not dreaming.

I can make out a few diffuse specks of light in the water. I have to roll for a few breaths of air, then return to inspect them more closely. It is hard to focus on them, but after watching them for a while, a sudden realization strikes me. This is a sun and a moon I am looking at, through water. The brighter one must be the system's second star – and the larger, but less bright, the planet's only moon. I turn my head to the right and see a few rays of light dancing through the rippled surface. The prime sun must be to my right now, lighting up the whole body of water. Everything is light, even below me. There is air below me, but it is not the atmosphere. It must be air inside the ocean, a hollow, a giant bubble of air beneath the water. And the whole ocean is lit up by the system's close prime sun, and the opposite part of the ocean is the distant greenish blue haze I see below me.

However I got here, I am below the planet's ocean, floating on a body of air within it. This must be the planet's core. I'm running a few of the formulas through my head and if I'm not mistaken, then this would actually explain some of the weird facts in the data, those that didn't really add up and were disregarded as flawed measurements. If only I had the suit, then I could just run all this through the processor and do a proper analysis of this weird phenomenon.

A frightful thought strikes me. If I am floating below the ocean, then the carrier would probably not be able to even detect me down here. With the planet not having a solid core it might yet be able to detect the suit since it would be the only larger metallic object down here. Without the suit I won't even be able to rely on the automatic retrieval let alone try to contact the carrier and prepare a callback tunnel on my own. The carrier would be looking for the suit, and not for a naked human that had sunk through the ocean somehow and was now bobbing on its inner surface. There is no one up there making any assumptions, no one who wonders. There is just the carrier, programmed by protocol. The carrier analyzes, calculates and acts. It cannot wonder. It cannot care. And the first of the harvesters would arrive in 50 years at the earliest. With me not returning they might even be called back and distributed elsewhere.

I am on my own. And if I don't find the suit I will just float here inside this giant ocean, stranded without shore.

Unsure of what to do, I decide to head for the only noticeable sight, and that is the cluster of clouds that must be on the sun's side of the planet. It's a bit difficult to swim, because I have to keep my head below the surface and have to fight the urge to rise and breathe. After a while however, I manage to keep a constant pace.

I swim for a while, then pause to try and judge the progress I am making. I can't really make any assumptions about the distances. I don't know the diameter of the body of air, nor can I estimate the distance between myself and the clouds. They are too diffuse to make out any forms. The planet would be far too large to allow me even the slightest hope of crossing any significant surface distant within days, swimming. But the inside surface would probably be a lot smaller, so maybe I stand a chance of getting nearer the clouds. Maybe the carrier will analyze the clouds more closely. At least they are not supposed to stick to one side of the planet.

Again I start for the clouds, increasing my pace, but not so much as to exert myself too quickly. I might be able to drink the water, hoping that it is not poisonous, but I don't think it will provide enough nourishment to replace any lost energy.

Without the suit, it is hard to keep track of the time. I know that the planet's days are a bit shorter than standard earth days, but I still cannot make out the primary sun to try and measure time. I do not even know what to expect when I get nearer to the clouds. My hopes of the carrier finding me down here is dishearteningly slim, and there's no reason the environmental suit would be bouncing on the surface just below the clouds. But my only other option would be to just wait for something to happen. I'm too impatient to do that and I would probably have cursed myself for not having tried to do anything later.

After a while I start to feel the wear of my swimming, which has become increasingly frantic over time. Frustrated I pause and look at the clouds. They are clearly lower on the horizon, although it looks rather weird, for the horizon isn't curved the way you would expect. There's also something quite odd about those clouds. They look much too solid in a way, now that I have drawn nearer. I'm still to far to make out any details, but from the look of it I could swear that they are actually floating on the water.

Suddenly I become aware of movement in the water. I look up and are puzzled to see that the water is much brighter here, nearly a milky white. Then I realize that this isn't the water I am looking at – it is one of the clouds, obviously rising from the water above me towards the surface. I cannot make out enough details to confirm this visually, but I feel water pushing from above me and I see shades of light in the milky form.

With shock I realize that it might have been a lightheaded idea to swim for those clouds. Whatever is moving above me is moving on its own accord. It must be some kind of creature and apparently it is coming right for me. I panic and start swimming away, looking up into the water to see which way might be best to escape. But the cloud draws nearer and nearer.

One of the hardest things about the training I received was to remain calm in situations where human instinct would usually push us to frantic and uncontrolled actions. Realizing that I cannot possibly escape, I stop swimming, roll over and inspect the cloud as it draws near. It looks like some kind of milky white bubble, but there are different shades indicating a more complex structure beneath the bubble. The surface seems to be mostly smooth, but there are areas that seem to be thicker and others. At least I don't see a maw or any opening that might engulf or swallow me.

Since there's nothing much I can do, I await the approach with an uneasy feeling.

Finally it's surface touches my feet. It feels soft, almost spongy, but strong enough to push me down into the air. I let myself sink to my knees as it pushes me out of the water, noticing a distinct twitching wherever I touch it. This must be a creature and it is feeling that there is something touching it. I try to move as little as possible, not wanting to draw too much attention to myself at the moment.

The creature rises through the surface until it actually looks like part of a huge white bubble has emerged. Then some seams appear where I had seen the layers before. Openings appear, like flaps, emitting gushes of air. The creature seems to be exhaling. Curious, I try to crawl for one of the opened flaps, but as I draw nearer, the surface twitches and the flap closes. I head for another of the openings, but again the flap closes. Behind me, another one seems to have opened. The creature seems to notice me and it appears as if it doesn't want to expose the flaps near me.

I sit down and look through the bubble. There is definitely some movement below, the creature doesn't seem to be spherical. I'm sitting on its surface and there is something else down below.

After a while I realize that the bubble is actually deflating. The creature obviously contained a lot of air and seems to be exhaling all of it through the flaps. As the process continues, it grows flatter and flatter, yet it doesn't seem to sink back down into the water. Finally I find myself sitting on a spongy, rather flat island, about thirty meters across. From time to time I can make out some kind of strands or tendrils moving in the water. From all I have seen so far, the creature reminds me of a giant jellyfish which exhales air through openings in its umbrella.

The whole deflation process has taking quite a while and as I look up, I realize that what I thought of as clouds at first, are actually thousands of these creatures, floating next to each other, forming a weird, gelatinous landscape near me. It seems that the creature I am riding on is swimming or drifting towards that landscape, drawing nearer its kin. The whole scenery becomes even more surreal by the light of the system's primary sun glowing from below, lighting up the jellyfish and creating constant shades and flares of light in this strange, luminous landscape.

My creature has reached the others now, slowly touching the border and becoming one with the scenery. There seems to be some activity, though. It's body is wincing a little and I can see tendrils moving in the water, probably touching those of the creatures next to it. The flurry of activity seems to spread through some of them and carry through the landscape in some kind of path. I have no idea whether this is some deliberate form of communication or just an instinctive reaction. These creatures alone are an absolutely fascinating discovery, so very different from the life forms I have encountered so far and that I have learned about from others.

After looking around for any sign of the environmental suit or, in fact, any sight of something out of the ordinary, I decide to investigate the creatures further. I crawl to the edge and try to cross over to one of the others. The moment I touch it, the same twitching motion goes through it, but I manage crawl onto it. To me, the two creatures look indistinguishable. I continue and move over to another one, then another. It strikes me how easy it is to get across, their edges touching each other so tightly that I don't even sink into the water.

As I reach for another one, however, I feel a sudden movement, and the creature I am on draws back a bit, the one I was reaching for pulling away from me. I am faced with a gap of water between them. Astonished, I look around. Nothing else has changed in the landscape, and the gap of water doesn't reach far. I turn and try to get around it, but whenever I try for that direction, the creatures stir and move apart, as if they were deliberately trying to prevent me from traveling in that direction. I turn around and head for another direction, keeping a close eye on the next few creatures. This time I can even see some of them huddling together a little as if to make it easier to climb across.

This is absolutely stunning. I have to keep myself from assuming too much, but I can hardly fight the thought that these creatures share some kind of intelligence, that they know I am here and that they have a certain path planned for me. This could be a worrying thought, but I guess if they would mean me any harm then they could just have dumped me into the water anyway.

I continue in that direction, and whenever a gap of water appears, I try until I find a direction that remains passable. It seems like a strange kind of game and I even have to laugh from time to time at the absurdity of the situation.

After a while I notice a different kind of behavior a short distance from me. One of the creatures starts to heave, its flaps opening and closing. Then it seems to propel itself upwards a little, its flaps opened and fluttering. I hear a deep hissing sound, almost melodic, as air is drawn into the creature, slowly filling its body to form the distinct bubble that I had first encountered. Finally the flaps close and the creature starts moving, shifting. It slowly descends into the water, shuddering. I quickly crawl over the creatures until I reach the slowly closing gap it has left in the landscape. I can see it descending into the water, a glowing ball of milky white, gliding deeper and deeper into the ocean. Finally the hole closes by the other creatures huddling together.

Puzzled, I continue my journey.

As I start to wonder what all this is leading up to, I spot a sparkle, a noticeable glint not far from me. There seems to be some kind of object on one of the creatures. As I stand, trying to make it out, I realize that the object is actually drawing nearer. To be more precise, the object itself doesn't seem to be moving, but the creature on which it rests is apparently swimming towards me, its kin slowly moving aside before it and closing the gap behind it. Finally I can make out the form and let out a cry of joy. It's the environmental suit, and they are actually bringing it to me!

I get down on my knees again and crawl towards it, barely able to believe my luck. Within moments I reach the suit and immediately check whether it has been damaged. Everything seems to be alright, so I carefully open the hatch, try to brush of any remaining water from my body and crawl inside. I manage to get into the control gear and find that the system seems to be in standby mode. After powering up I check the log to find out what has happened.

Apparently the suit was tunneled down empty, but put into standby mode to be ready when I needed it. That doesn't give me any explanation of how and why I have been tunneled down below the planets ocean without the suit. I still doubt that this is even technically possible at all.

This is a riddle I will solve later, however. My first priority now is gathering some data and then trying to return to the carrier. I initiate a scan of the air, water and biomass. To my astonishment, the jellyfish seem to be much more complex than I thought. The umbrella and part of the tendrils below have a rather simple dna structure, but some of the tendrils indicate a much more advanced form of life. I cannot really make out whether these are two parts of the same creature or actually two species forming a symbiosis.

There's not much more I can do to unravel this mystery, so I start my journey back to my ship. Not wanting to damage the creature I am on, I start moving slowly. At first it does not react, but as I start turning a bit and making twitching movements with the legs and arms, the jellyfish descends, slowly lowering me into the water. Once I am free, I configure the legs to propel me through the water, past the jellyfish and towards the outer surface. As I pass the creature, I can get a closer look at its underside. It indeed resembles a giant jellyfish, some of its long tendrils gliding through the water, touching those of the other ones around it. Some of the central tendrils are dotted with some kind of knots, which are glowing and pulsating.

As I drift by, I notice some activity at the surface. Some of the jellyfish are throbbing, air streaming in, forming huge bubbles beneath their umbrellas. As I slowly draw away, I can see them descending into the ocean, following me. Even though the suit's main means of propulsion wasn't meant for underwater travel, I travel at good speed. Nonetheless the jellyfish seem to be approaching after a while, slowly catching up with me. The tendrils seem to be jutting back and forth frantically, their umbrellas slowly bobbing behind them.

After about an hour they have reached me, slowing their pace to glide alongside. From time to time their tendrils reach out to each other, touching for a while, then drawing back, as if they were actually talking to each other that way.

Two hours later, they draw away a bit into the distance, then suddenly perform a strange, somehow beautiful maneuver. Their umbrellas seem to stretch downwards, closing around the bubble of air, while their tendrils float outwards. Then, in a swift motion, they hurl themselves around, now facing the umbrellas towards the outer surface of the ocean, all without losing any of the air. The central tendrils emitted a myriad of colors during the maneuver, then turned back to their regular glow afterwards. Again they start to close in and swim alongside my suit.

Finally, after five more hours, we reach the outer surface. I break through the water, the light haze of clouds above me, through which I can make out the distinct forms of the secondary sun and, now far to my left, the stark, bright halo of the primary sun near the horizon. I send out a call to the carrier, which is followed by a confirmation immediately.

Time to say good-bye.

I turn around and look at the creatures for a last time. They are floating next to me, exhaling air into the atmosphere, slowly deflating again. I wait until they finish, letting the suit scan the air to later analyze if there's any difference in the air they exhale to the air in the atmosphere.

When they are done, they start twitching a little and I can see some of the glowing, central tendrils reaching out carefully, touching the feet of my suit. Then they start drifting away towards the horizon, swimming for the sun, probably off to the shores formed by their kin.

I smile, then program the callback tunnel. No way I'm calling in the planter bots with the spores. The corporation might be disappointed, but the scientists will be exalted when they get my report.

I close my eyes and wait for the spin that takes me away to my ship.