by Jabez AB Richard
Celibacy afflicted Pearl like prison bars. She even marked in tallies the days since her last lay. Though other factors contributed, she chalked up her involuntary sexual abstinence as an occupational hazard. Piloting submersibles, a mostly solo job, demanded long hours that cut deeply into her social life. No longer did friends introduce their handsome coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances. Having friends stopped years ago. Now she usually avoided people altogether. Also, something about land—dirt, earth, ground—made Pearl uneasy; it discombobulated her mojo. So, when off ship, she spent her time bingeing 80s action movies, thumbing through the latest issue of Forbes, and passing out while watching the Nature Channel. Not chasing tail.
The last time she’d gotten any, a mechanic had come aboard to service the hydraulic system. He looked older, but carved from a marble slab, not an ounce of fat on his body—like a slightly grizzled Richard Dean Anderson affixing rubber tubing to the hydraulic accumulator with a roll of duct tape and the lid from his Kodiak chewing tobacco. Pearl caught him sneaking glances at her ass and saw an opportunity. According to the tallies, her coital dry spell had lasted close to thirteen months. If a stranger’s appreciative eyes sprouted interest, she could water those seeds. She could tend that garden. And, best believe, she would harvest that crop like a pro.
Sex with the mechanic lasted all of ten minutes, from Pearl’s “very direct seduction” to “enough oral for lubrication,” progressing to a “mostly clothed doggystyle,” and culminating without her reaching “anything close to climax.” Afterward, they both pulled up trousers and returned to business as usual without speaking. Its disagreeable aspects aside, the encounter was pure bliss.
“Some experts insist that the earth’s oceans hold more mysteries than the cosmos. Beside the cavalcade of their marine organisms—already a vast menagerie of awesome beauty—the internal structure of the oceans contains their most sophisticated features. Differences in temperature and salinity create underwater lakes. Currents act like rivers, bringing warm waters to far-flung locations. What’s more, the deepest regions of the oceans are even less studied, places like the Mariana Trench, where water pressure poses a deadly obstacle even for the most advanced manned submarines.
“At the bottom of one such trench, in the remote Nemo Zone, an EauTec aqua-research drone discovered the world’s biggest underwater aquifer. The Bygones Aquifer, as it is called, contains potentially hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water. Though an exciting new feature of our oceans, its existence continues to baffle the greatest minds of the scientific community.”
–Excerpt from “Exploring the Oceans’ Trenches” by Dr. Bjorn X. Hallberdson, Senior Researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography
An unexpected outcropping of what looked like dead coral jutted directly into the submersible’s path. For yet another dumb reason (maybe the coral’s high calcium concentration?), the AI piloting program failed to recognize the obstacle and continued straight on to certain collision. Pearl flipped the switch for manual piloting and managed to steer her sub, the Cactus Nebula, away from the dead coral. Immediately, the switch flipped itself back; the AI resumed control and the Cactus Nebula reoriented to its original course–the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Repeatedly on her descent, a painless trajectory she had piloted hundreds of times in other subs, the AI program had become confused. A school of sardines would swim across their path and the sub would halt. Pearl had to navigate fast enough to resolve the AI’s perplexity before the switch flipped back. A couple of times she was too slow and had to repeat the process. Were all computers this quirky?
In ominous fact, a computer had just glitched in another sub, resulting in critical malfunctions. All life support systems had reportedly failed, and the pilot was assumed deceased. The dead sub’s task, to establish a fresh-water derrick and syphoning station on the Pacific Ocean floor, had to be abandoned in its early stages. Securing the fresh water was absolutely imperative to the company orchestrating the project, so they sent Pearl to retrieve the marooned vessel. Normally, Pearl could bang this kind of mission out in her sleep, but the Cactus Nebula was manufactured by the same company, and its high reliance on unpredictable algorithmic intelligence inspired a healthy paranoia in her. For the sake of her mental health, she desperately needed some distraction.
The computer monitor contained a three-dimensional avatar, a convention intended to bolster camaraderie between human submersible pilots and their computer counterparts. The AI program had required Pearl to customize the avatar to approximate her appearance, before the sub’s engines would even fire up. Periodically, the program offered her costume upgrades for a nominal fee. Pearl always declined. Rather than engaging with the stupid algorithm, she let her mind wander, daydreaming instead about the submarine captains who reminded her of hot celebrities.
“Before PROMEO dominated the economic universe, they were just Phil and Sandy Chu, a mom-and-pop developer duo with a Christian dating app called StarCrossd. Capitalizing on the demand for people’s personal information, they bought up other dating apps and sold the data. This led to a few lawsuits, but ultimately created a surge of wealth for the company. Phil and Sandy became billionaires practically overnight.
“With Algorithmic Intelligence growing in popularity, PROMEO decided to push the envelope by building the world’s largest data center. Their first step was to acquire the software company, LyfeBytr. For efficiency, they gutted its most expensive, tenured employees, replacing them with imported specialists who would work on the cheap.
“Next, PROMEO purchased foreclosed tenements near major waterways, and engaged in some high-pressure buyouts in residential areas where renters were unwilling to relocate. Whole neighborhoods were repurposed to make room for the center. While the state government fought to limit access to public water, their interference was effectively a moot point. Even with rivers and lakes at their disposal, PROMEO lacked the necessary water to meet the center’s gargantuan cooling needs.
“But then EauTec discovered the Bygones Aquifer.
“To gain unlimited access to the water, PROMEO spent a few billion dollars to acquire EauTec. For even greater efficiency, they gutted its highest-paid, imported employees, replacing them with AI. The new submarines integrated the latest LyfeBytr interfaces but were built hastily. The engineers who designed them warned that the subs could not withstand the pressure of the deep ocean.
“PROMEO sent one to the Bygones Aquifer anyway–the Frost Galaxy.”
–Excerpt from “Where For Art Thou, PROMEO?” by Konstantin Oczysk, Forbes Staff Writer
The Frost Galaxy closely resembled a cheap vibrator. A cheap vibrator with navigational fins and hydro-propulsion units. There was even a tickler jutting out from its belly, housing the robotic drill arm and its matching reservoir-hose anchor. Below the sub’s bottom, a shimmering stream of icy, fresh water spewed forth from a small slit in the ocean floor—the Bygones Aquifer. Though dim lights still flickered inside the Frost Galaxy, everything else outside of Pearl’s flood beam was in absolute darkness.
The Cactus Nebula (shaped more like a souped-up butt plug) had a tickler of its own, an AI-controlled mechanism that would secure steel wires to either end of the Frost Galaxy, allowing PROMEO to pull it up from the surface. Already the limb housing the coupling device reached toward the dead sub, eager to complete its task and head back to shallower waters. Fifty feet away from attaching the first cable, Pearl’s pressure light began to blink.
Every submersible is susceptible to compression. The best analogy Pearl could come up with was to imagine being squished by a bathtub of water, then exchanging the contents of the bathtub with an entire ocean. That was piloting a submersible through a trench. The blinking pressure light meant that the Pacific had Pearl under its heel. As badly as she wanted to complete her reconnaissance mission, there was no point if she didn’t survive long enough to get paid. Termination felt imminent.
She stared at the Frost Galaxy, now thirty feet away, its silver hull glowing like the phosphorescent bulb of an anglerfish. In the sub’s dim, flickering interior light, she caught sight of movement. Her mission briefing alleged that Captain Les Tuddle had not survived, so her only task was to secure the ship. But something moved again, directly into the light, and Pearl saw Captain Tuddle’s shaggy, bearded face (like Kurt Russell in The Thing), sunken and pale, but still displaying signs of life. Unquestionably, Pearl’s new objective was to rescue her fellow submarine pilot.
Salvage job be damned! Flashing pressure lights be damned! AI tickler be damned!
Pearl knew she was putting the water skis before the seahorse, but she couldn’t resist indulging in a quick fantasy. In this fantasy, she saves hot-ass, Kurt-Russell-esque Captain Les Tuddle, and he is overcome with gratitude. Gratitude and infatuation. His desire is so inflamed that he rewards Pearl by satisfying her deepest, sultriest longings. For the entire return journey to the surface, they engage in copious celebratory nookie-noo, and it’s everything she ever dreamed of.
A second glance at the haggard-looking captain sufficed to clear Pearl’s head. Rescue mission first; hanky panky later.
Another warning light began to flash, and the hull of the Cactus Nebula started creaking and groaning like an animal in pain. Despite the clear danger to the ship’s structural integrity, the AI tickler arm persevered attaching its cables. While watching the arm wiggle in excitement at its approaching enterprise, she witnessed Captain Tuddle’s eyes flutter. His face slipped from view. Pearl deduced that this rescue maneuver might require an annoying amount of resilience on her part.
First, she flipped the switch empowering manual control. She tried to ignore the squealing sound coming from the ship’s hull and piloted a course that would place the two subs perpendicular to each other. How, exactly, was she going to extract Captain Tuddle without getting crushed by the Pacific? Pearl had no answer.
The manual control flipped to AI. Pearl switched it back. Every second wasted was another nail in Les’s watery coffin. Again, the switch flipped, refusing to budge when Pearl attempted to force it. Ecstatically the AI tickler resumed its coupling task. From the computer screen, Pearl’s avatar shook its head and frowned at her. A new light began to blink. This one was labeled Oxygen. For punishment, the AI had cut off her air supply, content to sacrifice a human life in order to preserve the corporate agenda—the nerve of some algorithms. Fortunately, Pearl had one final card to play.
She opened up the computer console’s panel and ran her hand along the inside until she found a hose connecting to a valve—the coolant system. She twisted the valve shut and returned the panel. Instantly, the temperature inside the sub escalated, but it was a strange heat. Every drop of moisture, every bead of sweat seemed to evaporate the instant it touched the air, sucked into the insatiably thirsty machine.
Pearl had hoped that after cutting the AI’s coolant, the oxygen would return, but instead the air remained stagnant, and she found herself beset by severe wooziness.
The long drift downward always made Pearl horny. She split the time between imagining elaborate scenarios in which she was a sapphic pirate captain and staring mindlessly out the sub window. Normally, she observed nothing beyond the endless void of dark water and, occasionally, a fish. But today, she saw something provocatively different.
A man. A completely nude man, totally devoid of any blubber and chiseled from some rare mineral. He swam past the submarine without any SCUBA gear. Pearl noticed a small whip-like nubbin projecting from the base of his spine. It reminded her of a tadpole. Impulsively, she flipped the switch to manual control and hit the brakes on the sub. The naked, swimming man approached the glass and regarded Pearl. God, he was breathtakingly yummy, like an aquatic Rowdy Roddy Piper. Pearl felt herself steeping inside her wetsuit.
Something about the man’s expression indicated his desire for Pearl to exit the sub, which seemed feasible. The water pressure at this depth, while substantial, wouldn’t crush her; once she reached the ocean floor, it would be a different story. Pearl tried to sign—was he a merman?—but she only knew a couple words in ASL, and realistically her new friend lacked exposure to any Terran language. Did he want her to go to him? Yes? Okay, but she needed to put on a helmet and grab an oxygen tank first.
The sheer recklessness of the tryst spiked Pearl’s blood pressure like a shot of amphetamines. She didn’t know the first thing about this creature besides its gorgeous humanoid appearance. But his attractiveness meant something. Nature wouldn’t create a man of such flawless beauty and pair it with some equally incongruous feature, like an imbecilic brain, or a penchant for cruelty. Right?
On a subconscious level, Pearl knew she was justifying decisions that were irrational, unsafe, and ultimately bound for calamity. So, before her logical side could regain control, she geared up and entered the water. The merman was waiting, a sly grin decorating his face.
His deep, soulful, blue eyes hypnotized Pearl, and she let herself be pulled into his embrace. Soft, succulent lips planted kisses all over her shoulders and neck. One of his hands massaged her buttocks, kneading with a powerful grip. He tugged at her wetsuit, searching for a way to take it off. Why hadn’t she undressed in the sub?
As the merman continued to paw, grope, and kiss, Pearl unzipped her suit and tried to wriggle free. Wetsuits are designed to cling, so the leggings required both of her hands and most of her attention. Eventually, Pearl managed to expose her lower torso, though layers of her horniness were also shed in the process. The bizarre, gross nature of the arrangement rose unavoidably to the surface. This wasn’t just a random hook-up with an anonymous submarine mechanic; it was interspecies erotica at a level cresting Pearl’s comfort zone.
But she’d already put on the diving helmet and donned the oxygen tank. And she’d just wrestled with her wetsuit, probably damaging it in some irreparable way. And it had been so long since she’d gotten her rocks off, it felt like there were cobwebs down there. Nope, like it or not, she was in it for the long haul.
Taking some initiative of her own, Pearl reached between the merman’s legs, only to come up with a handful of smooth pubis. It felt alien and scaly, nothing like the rest of his body. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of an unusual, iridescent, purple finger wagging at the end of one of the merman’s arms—the one not pinching her butt flab or rubbing her nipples. She looked closer and her confusion surrounding the missing genitalia dissolved into the briny sea water. The merman certainly had a reproductive organ; it was the weird, purple finger on the end of his left arm.
For Pearl, nothing about getting penetrated by the merman’s mating-arm appealed to her, but she looked into his devastating eyes and became entranced, yet again. Her mouth felt abnormally hot and dry, her whole body, like tissue paper under a magnifying glass. She watched helplessly as the bizarre reproductive organ moved slowly toward her opening. Sex with a hunky sea creature might be nice, and rejecting his advances, after everything she had endured to participate in this seduction, would take more effort than it was worth. Just the same…
The merman noticed Pearl’s arousal had flagged. He halted his progress. A look of bewilderment rippled across his face, as though he’d never encountered anyone adverse to a good tentacling before. Disgusted by Pearl’s vanilla sexual preferences, the merman blew jets of air out of his nose and swam away indignantly, his tiny tadpole tail writhing manically into the boundless murk. Though Pearl may have behaved as immodestly as a horny teenager, the merman’s flippant dismissal marked him as a genuine, chauvinist asshole.
Pearl opened her eyes to a blinding light. Was she dead? Was this the Afterlife?
The air felt like the inside of an oven, a radiant dry heat that made her temples throb. She had to be dead and sent to Hell to receive punishment for a life of lust and depravity. Except, it looked like the inside of her submersible.
With a brain muddled by dehydration, Pearl attempted to rationalize her continued existence. Because the AI piloting program couldn’t discern between an expired human and one who was merely unconscious, it must have returned the oxygen shortly after Pearl had passed out. Was that smoke she saw wafting from the top of the computer console?
The unrelenting heat made Pearl want to smash the Cactus Nebula’s windows, permitting entry to the cold waters of the mysterious, deep-ocean Bygones Aquifer. Additionally, the invasive light beam brought a relentless itchiness to her eyeballs. Who in the Kevin Sorbo was shining that light in her face?
She noticed the AI coupling arm had broken free, though it remained intimately clamped to the Frost Galaxy’s aft mooring ring. The Cactus Nebula’s AI piloting program seemed hellbent on reattaching the arm through a sequence of polite nudges. Even though a part of its motherboard was about to burst into flame and the creaking, groaning sound from the sub being squished by a trillion liters of water pressure had grown exponentially louder, the interface refused to abandon its prompt. The good programmers at LyfeBytr had instructed the AI to attach cables to a derelict submarine, and, come Hell or high water, that’s what it was going to do. Coupling arm or no coupling arm!
Beneath the aft mooring ring, what remained of the Frost Galaxy resembled a flattened beer can. A flattened beer can with navigational fins and hydro-propulsion units. Poor Captain Les. Pearl felt she could consider the salvage mission officially canceled.
At least three more warning lights were flashing. Simultaneously, on the computer monitor, Pearl’s digital avatar twerked its cyber booty. A message below offered a limited-edition outfit change, allowing her avatar to use any celebrity’s naked body. She barely had the energy left to click decline.
Now that her eyes had readjusted, Pearl could see that the bright light emanated from a familiar submarine–the Peach Quasar. Behind the tiller, she saw the square-cut jaw of Captain Brad Nassim, still number one in her fleet of hunky crushes. Hot damn, was he steamy! Like a young Brian Bozworth, curly blond mullet and everything. What she wouldn’t give for seven minutes in the storage locker with Captain Brad.
Recognizing that her death was imminent, Pearl decided that adhering to society’s scruples was a wasted investment–a Sunk Cost Fallacy. So, while keeping her eyes fixed on the other captain’s face, despite it being slightly disfigured by the submersible’s glass, she unzipped her wetsuit and slipped a hand inside to cup one of her breasts. Her body, or maybe her fingers, felt powdery. Was she turning to dust?
The smoke from its burning computer filled the Cactus Nebula, making it impossible to breathe without coughing and choking. Her hand traced the contour of her body anyway, until it reached its destination between her legs. Pearl prayed to Sly Stallone that the requisite moments remained for her to service herself one last time before suffocating.
From inside the smoky cabin, she watched the Peach Quasar (shaped, more or less, like a classic dildo) extend its coupling arm, that also looked like a tickler, toward the considerable aft section of her submarine. The tickler jerked and twitched in anticipation of its task.
As the last murmurings of her awareness fluttered away, Pearl imagined removing the panel to the world’s largest data center; running her hand along the inside until she found the valve controlling its coolant system; and twisting it until it overloaded, permanently.
Jabez AB Richard (all pronouns) lives in Bellingham, Washington with his partner and two kiddos. His fiction and poetry, inspired by the cold, dark beauty that permeates the Pacific Northwest, have appeared in Jeopardy Magazine, Writers Corner Anthology, and Whatcom Writes. On those days when his literary muse is resting, he takes solace in spinning deep-cut funk records and cuddling puppies.
Jabez’s short story “Sugar” was featured in Special Issue ’25 After Dark.