The Cure

Corporate Confirmation and the Last Transmission

The calm we’d fought so hard to preserve shattered in an instant. The horizon over the trench darkened with the ominous shapes of armed submersibles — Erebos Biotech had come back, and they weren’t here to negotiate.

Luis had warned us about the lengths they might go to, but nothing prepared me for this. The corporate vultures, armed and aggressive, were moving to seize the coral forest we’d barely begun to understand.

We watched from the vessel as their machines descended, mechanical claws ripping into the fragile coral structures. Then the trench erupted — methane bubbles violently escaping from the seafloor, triggering an underwater tempest of destruction.

The glowing coral, once vibrant and seemingly alive, fractured and died, pieces floating away like lost memories.

The sub trembled as the trench groaned around us—an ancient, wounded body shifting in protest. Just above, the remains of the coral biome crackled through the sonar like falling stars, shattered by tectonic upheaval and Erebos’s armed advance. Methane chimneys ignited in flashes of eerie blue as sediment boiled upward, wiping out centuries of life in seconds.

We were out of time.

Noah hunched over the coral genome terminal, eyes burning with focus. His fingers flew across the keys, initiating the upload protocol. We’d rigged a secure uplink hours ago—our contingency plan. Now, it was our only hope.

“Uploading now,” he murmured. “Genome strand complete. If this gets through…”

The sub jolted sideways—metal groaning, alarms flashing.

Something massive brushed the hull.

I spun to the viewport and froze. An eye, the size of a dinner plate, stared back. Tentacles curled past our field of vision, each lined with dinner-plate suckers ringed in teeth. The giant squid was real—and furious. Its body shimmered with agitation, pale against the black backdrop. It wasn’t just the coral forest that was under siege. We were too.

“We have to shake it,” I said, gripping the controls, though our propulsion was all but dead.

A tentacle slammed against the sub again. Structural integrity fell to 47%. I looked at Noah. “If that upload isn’t done in sixty seconds—”

“I know,” he snapped. “I’m going as fast as I can.”

That’s when the idea hit me—mad, desperate, but maybe our only chance.

“Sperm whales feed on these things,” I blurted. “They’re the only predators strong enough to challenge them. Sperm whale stomachs often contain squid beaks—it's how we even confirmed giant squid existed” (Australian Museum, n.d.).

Noah’s eyes widened. “You’re saying call a sperm whale? Now?”

“They can detect prey using echolocation from kilometers away,” I said, recalling a report I’d buried myself in before the mission. “Sperm whales can detect their prey at distances of several kilometers using echolocation clicks and passive hearing” (Baleines En Direct, n.d.). “If we emit the right frequency… maybe it’ll come.”

He stared at me. “That’s insane.”

“Everything about this has been insane,” I said, already rerouting power to the bioacoustic modulator.

We fed in the sound of distressed cephalopod frequencies, layered it with echolocation feedback, and cranked the gain to max. The pulse cut through the trench like a flare—loud, sharp, unnatural.

The squid paused.

Something answered.

A deep pressure wave washed over the sub, a resonance like thunder rolled underwater. The squid whipped around, suddenly uncertain. Then, from the abyssal dark, a form emerged—massive, slow, and inexorable. The whale.

It moved like a shadow within shadows—graceful and absolute. The squid recoiled, and the whale advanced with a barrage of high-frequency clicks that echoed across our failing hull.

The battle was brief. The whale chased the squid into the black, their duel becoming a blur of tentacles and tail flukes vanishing into the depths.

But our reprieve was short-lived.

From above, Erebos’s subs dropped into the kill zone—sleek and angular, armed with industrial manipulators and torpedo pods. They scanned the trench like scavengers looking for scraps.

“They’re searching for us,” Noah muttered.

“They won’t stop until they have the coral or we’re dead,” I said.

“Then we make it hard for them.”

The whale’s interference had stirred up thick clouds of sediment. Our sonar was useless—but so was theirs. I took manual control, steering us into the drifting chaos. We skirted methane plumes and broken fissures, ducking between collapsed coral towers. One of the drones miscalculated, slammed into a gas vent, and exploded in a geyser of light and debris.

Noah whooped. “That’ll confuse them.”

“Let’s hope it buys us time.”

Behind us, the trench continued to collapse—tectonic fury and corporate greed consuming everything we had discovered.

Our systems were failing. The data had been uploaded, but propulsion was down to 30%, oxygen to 40%, and comms were unreliable.

“Time to surface,” I whispered. “We can’t stay.”

Noah didn’t argue. He slumped back in his seat as I rerouted the last of our energy reserves to ascent thrusters.

We rose through darkness. Slowly. Silently. My mind swirled with loss—Luis’s sacrifice, Anika’s betrayal, the coral’s brilliance crushed beneath Erebos’s ambition. And Danny—always Danny. I could see his face when I closed my eyes, could hear him calling for me across miles of ocean.

The surface was still hours away when the sub’s lights flickered, one by one, until only the soft red of emergency power remained. I held the controls with trembling fingers and whispered a silent promise.

I brought the cure home.