Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #1)

by Mira Grant

humanity sailed, and the sea punished it for its hubris.

That was the thing about the future. It didn’t wait. No matter how hard you tried to run, it always caught up with you in the end.

Children of islands and the coast went one of two ways: they learned to fear and respect the water, or they learned to live for it.

Asking scientists not to look into an open box was like asking cats not to saunter through an open door. It simply wasn’t practical.

Breakups were never easy, and while humanity was hot and fast and had had plenty of time to get over it, the oceans were deep and slow, and for them all change had happened only yesterday. The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home.

Humanity had feared the dark since time immemorial, and yet humanity had never experienced the dark, because it wasn’t until recently—the age of cunning hands and clever machines—that the dark had been anything more than a whispering legend, a rumor of a nightmare.

This was where darkness went to live forever, growing deeper and more powerful as the eons passed it by.

(Which begged the question, she sometimes felt, of whether there were senses humanity, blessed as it was with light and air and a relatively pressure-free environment, had given up on as useless.

What else might people have given up, and never noticed was missing, since it was virtually impossible to define an absence?)

Sometimes she felt like they were so labeled that they should have collapsed under all the competing expectations.

Sometimes science was the closest thing to the sword of an avenging angel humanity was ever going to get.

he would go out with a smile, content that he’d spent his time on Earth in the company of his opposite and equal, something he would never have thought possible.

the ship’s population was split between sorrow and elation, the two seemingly inimical states sometimes sharing the same shadow, the same skin.

“Because I try not to lie to myself when I can help it. To the rest of the world, sure, but to myself? That’s a bad business. Better not to start.”

How far back do we follow the consequences of free will?” “Until the guilt goes away.” “Then we’re going all the way back to the apple every single time. Do you really want that kind of responsibility?”

Everything that threatens us in the sea has its counterpart on land, with less of the gravity-defying freedom the water offers. So what could have driven us away? Nothing more nor less than an equal. One whose mastery of the waters outpaced our own, and left us with the choice to flee as predators, or to live as prey …

Humanity was cruel, and if you were prepared to try to find a bottom to that cruelty, you had best be prepared for a long, long fall.

hand. It was easier to observe the niceties than it was to spurn them.

the problem with trying to define nature is that nature is bigger than we are, and nature doesn’t care whether we know how to define it. Nature does what nature wants.”

“When a man undertakes a journey of revenge, he needs to dig two graves,”

Gone to sea, like all the bright-eyed boys, and like all the bright-eyed boys, he was never coming home. Men might return, but the boys? Oh, they never did.

Gregory questioned the wisdom of letting an entertainment company call the shots. You didn’t let Disney plan a war or Sony run a government.

He was a calm man because he was a simple one, and he was able to remain a simple man because he refused to contemplate things that would have required him to be complex. Let the younger men be complicated. They were still the shadows of the brave boys who’d set out to sea; they had time for complexity.

Disappointment was an essential step in burying those bright-eyed boys, and leaving sensible men in their place.

Let deforestation do away with Bigfoot, let sonar destroy Nessie, but the sea would always be deep, always be dark, always be filled with wonders.

“Creatures, animals, monsters—it’s all degrees, isn’t it?”

The smarter you are, the more likely you are to want to eat the world.

The human race had always created dreamers whose seemingly frivolous dreams forced the creation of infrastructures and innovations that benefited everyone around them.

Sometimes silence was the only correct thing to say.

The sea would continue as it always had, indifferent to the concerns of humanity.

But they had sailed off the edge of the map, into the waters the cartographers had marked with “Here be monsters” and a picture of something terrible and toothy—a warning to unwary sailors that this was, perhaps, not the best route to carry them home.

Nature has made and rejected and lost and remade more biological diversity than currently exists.

“When someone kills an American citizen, we don’t say, ‘Oh well, we killed one of theirs last week; we’re calling it even,’” she said. “We declare war. We sweep civilizations off the face of the globe. They won’t care that they started it. They’re only going to care who finishes it, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s going to be us.”

Nature made what nature wanted to make. Sometimes it came together perfectly. Other times it all fell apart.

“He’ll devour you if you let him. Strip you down to your bones and sap every bit of nutrition he can from your flesh, because you’re what he used to be, and somewhere deep, he hates you for that. We all do.”

It was too imperfect and hence perfect, crossing the line between artifice and reality without any hesitation.

We don’t just conserve the things we like, or the things we find adorable. We conserve everything. We take care of the planet.

Those who came in first often died that way.

Things like this, moments like this, were meant to be remembered. They were meant to be felt. Let these people feel what it was to truly sail to the ends of the earth. No one who went this far from shore came back unscathed. No one ever could.

The trouble was, humans had been domesticated by their own hand. Humans had given up violence as a way of life, and that was a good thing; that was the reason they had civilization and universities and scientific missions, rather than living in a great chasm in the earth, mirroring their aquatic cousins.

Thinking never changed the world. Research did, yes, and study, but that was action. Science was philosophy plus movement. Thought alone couldn’t make the grade.

Change the world by living in it, not by dying for it.

The truth is out there. And when we find it, I’m pretty sure we’re going to want it to stay out there, while the rest of us go home to our beds.

The trouble with discovery is that it goes two ways. For you to find something, that thing must also find you.

Science is not a matter of belief. Science does not care whether you believe in it or not. Science will continue to do what science will do, free from morality, free from ethical concerns, and most of all, free from the petty worry that it will not be believed.

It must have been very peaceful, being dead. They were free of all the complications that still waited for the living.

Was it suicide when death was inevitable? Or was it just refusing to let someone else—something else—decide the way she ended?