Chapter 62 — Atmospheric Diving Suits
The Curve of Time, Chapter 62 —— Atmospheric Diving Suits, in which Mica learns a little of Saskia’s past.
Followed by some musings on authenticity in writing.
Listen to full episode :
— 62 —
Atmospheric Diving Suits
“Maybe, because we’ve already seen it not work”——Mica framed what she was about to suggest——“you can’t just go back and stop the oil spill. But what about heading down there today or tomorrow? You could dive down to the blowout.”
“That would help, how?” Saskia asked.
“Go with me.”
Saskia shook her head. “The well head is 400m below the surface. That’s 1200 feet. I can’t dive that deep.”
“You said you once saw an angler fish. Don’t they live in the darkest depths of the ocean?”
Saskia smiled at the memory. “That was a bucket list item ticked off, that’s not everyday diving.”
“But you have dived that deep?”
Saskia described her college roommate, Elena, a marine biologist who had gone on to study sea creatures in the darkest depths of the ocean. Back in college, the two of them had taken a spring break trip to dive in Mexico, and then, a few years later, Elena had convinced Saskia to get a bare bones ADS certification with her one summer, precisely so that she could bring her along on a research trip. Elena had convinced Saskia to think of it as a girls reunion trip, but much more fun and meaningful. It had taken Saskia’s entire annual vacation that year, but it had been totally worth it. The two had bonded over the once in a lifetime diving. “Some people go sky-diving, but a lot less people have been to the bottom of the ocean,” she related with a grin.
Mica felt a pang of jealousy at the way Saskia had dissolved into her memory. It felt once again as if Saskia had been holding her hand, and once again, she’d failed to slip back in time with her. But she brushed it aside. She was annoyed at herself. She didn’t want to be the girlfriend finding jealousy at every turn. Saskia was gorgeous, of course she had enviable histories. The important point was that Saskia was familiar with ADS equipment. Mica forced a smile. “I read about ADS equipment while researching off-shore rigs.”
The effort behind Mica’s smile was not lost on Saskia, who recollected a parallel from her college days: Wassily’s reaction when she took her spring break trip with Elena. Recognizing, however, that calling Mica on it now was unlikely to engender a better reaction than calling Wassily on it had back then, Saskia decided it was best to simply push on. Instead, she feigned obliviousness and pursed her lips together as she watched Mica scour the web for information on ADS specs.
Mica’s and Wassily’s envy might even be an opportunity for the pair to bond later. Saskia smirked to herself.
“Hey,” Mica said, looking up from her computer, “this says, with an ADS, you can dive down to two thousand feet. That’s deeper than four hundred meters.” She paused to read on. “There’s a sacrifice in dexterity, though. Every joint has to withstand the pressure down there.”
Suddenly, Saskia blinked and her head jerked up. Decompression was unnecessary for the occupant of an ADS. She felt a warm surge of relief over a concern she hadn’t yet conceived. If slowing time down made her super strong, who knew how it would affect the need to make off-gassing safety stops on a return to the surface during a dive. ADS gear simply kept you at a constant pressure and normal gas mix. It made decompression sickness and nitrogen narcosis moot.
“What is it?” Mica asked.
Saskia explained her revelation.
“That’s all good, as long as you can take the suit with you.” Mica bit her cuticle.
“At least it’s not a car,” Saskia joked. On the downside, Mica was right, ADS suits did give up dexterity, but that wasn’t insurmountable; it was just like wearing really, really thick and wet clothes. Many layers of them. “In any case, you said I wouldn’t need to turn time around.” Within Saskia’s statement lay the implicit question of why not.
Mica rubbed her forehead. “No, you won’t.”
“So, what is your plan?”
That was chapter 62, Friends. Short, but I hope you enjoyed it!
Not to shortchange you this week, I thought I’d leave you with slightly meatier musings instead. Specifically, I’d like to talk about authenticity in writing.
Some of the recent chapters have talked a bit about local vs global characteristics in geometry, and reflecting on that I noticed that there is an analogy with writing. Stories can be told with the simplest of words and sentence structures, and, yet, still delve into deep and complex themes and narratives. That is, words and sentences are very local in what they tell us about the writing, while themes and plots are more global.
One aspect of this that I find particularly interesting, is that a review might speak about the complexity of a novel, without ever noting that the individual words and sentences are easy to parse, or vice versa. To me, this begs the question of how important the individual strokes of the pencil are to macroscopic picture. Is one, for instance, being dishonest when dressing up or down the complexity of the whole with the choice of language used? And what does it mean for writing to be authentic?
That last question might also be asked in connection with the cast of characters in a story. In that context, global traits might refer to attributes that are at the center of a character’s definition——their sex, their age, their nationality——and authenticity in this context sometimes refers to whether the author is a member of the group they are representing.
Well, pretty obviously, I’m not a lesbian. Still, I’d like to push back against any question of being inauthentic. Short of writing autobiography, I’ll never be the character I’m writing. And besides, it is the job of the fiction author to “make things up”, even if we do try to hew to the heart of the truth. Of course, it is also a cliche to say that we, authors, are all of our characters too; though I’m not sure what that says about authors, when we consider how many murderers populate the pages of books. In any event, I think what makes a character is the details; and one thing that can make them particularly interesting is when details play against stereotypes. I certainly see many elements of myself in Saskia.
Beyond everything else, as I mentioned about a month ago, I am firmly of the opinion that seeing role models is important, and I haven’t read many stories that feature lesbian machine learning specialists; certainly there are less out there as a percentage than ought to exist in the real world. Encouraging that to change is another little part of my effort with The Curve of Time. It’s sort of my version of a Toni Morrison quote I heard the other day that had words to the effect: If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have power, your job is to empower somebody else.
I like that sentiment.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
