text: You may have heard by now that there’s an ocean under the earth’s crust. It’s not just an ocean, but an amount of water comparable to every ocean on Earth combined. Cool, right? Kind of like one thousand leagues under the sea of Journey to the center of the earth, right? It’s so much more than that. The last seven years I’ve been trying to come to terms with my reality. I’ve filled notebooks writing the same thing hundreds of times, trying to get it right, trying to make sure you understand. In 2014, a brown diamond rose to the surface of the earth from what was estimated to be 320 miles deep in the Earth. It contained ringwoodite, which itself had a 1.3 percent water content. It may seem like nothing, but it indicated something amazing - water under the earth’s crust! That same year, a group of hand-picked scientists including myself were tasked to dig as deep as possible into the earth by the government. We began slowly, making sure the latest technology could support a dig that would reach blazing temperatures. With our state of the art drill and a spot on the Earth’s sea floor cool enough to drill into, we hoped to reach into at least ten percent of the Earth’s crust. We were eager to begin what would surely be an incredible discovery! How young and naïve we were. What we found, it is beyond comprehension. They wanted to make sure nothing got out, so that in the event something went wrong they could protect the citizens of the world from mass panic, and protect the valuable resource we found from greedy corporations. I signed endless forms, pacts punishable by prison, swore my mind to secrecy, but this is something the world deserves to know. After all, we live on the same Earth, and what lies beneath me lies beneath you too. You were lied to. I’m so sorry. We found evidence of water, and proudly presented it to our superiors. They paraded it to the highest-ups, shared it with everyone they could, and immediately closed the project down despite our insistence that we should continue and see if there was anything else down there. We told the world that we found water underground, lots of it. We were expecting perhaps microscopic, dead bacteria from eons ago. The superiors ordered us to stop, but greedy as we were we pushed farther in the name of science. I wish every day that we had left it alone. Instead, we pooled our money and appealed to whoever we could, and eventually found an eager sponsor. Have you ever wished you’d never learned the truth about something? That your hunch that your husband having an affair was false? That Santa was actually real? On day forty seven our seismographs went off the wire. The readings were something akin to a deep sea creature’s call from the bottom of the ocean. Except, as we came to find out, it was the movement of the things making our scans go crazy. We assumed it was crust movement from a tectonic plate, like a natural disaster close to us. The readings were erratic and lasted for hours. Our sponsor helped us get our hands on a new model of a machine that could show shapes based on the readings, technology unheard of at the time. We were hoping for tectonic movement, and how I wish that was what it was. We expected a breakthrough, just not the kind we got. We realized one day the erratic readings were actually patterns that lasted for Hours or days at a time. We checked in about any natural disasters close to us, and only heard of a small earthquake in California. We called in two more people, experts in tectonic plate movement and deep sea readings respectively. They were as baffled as we were. It was something solid. And then another solid thing. And then another. Huge, and moving as if they were alive. That night after a few drinks we laughed at the sarcastic suggestion that they were sea monsters. In the following days, we held multiple meetings that lasted anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours with little. breaks, trying to find out what kind of rock or mineral could move like that and after scanning hundreds of research papers and both classified and de-classified documents, nothing came about. There was a promising lead in boiling water and debris creating the movement, but it hit a dead end. Theory by theory, the possibilities slowly fell away until we had to face the idea that what moved in the water was indeed, in some ways alive. Horrifyingly, the size of the underwater ocean stayed the same, but the volume of water was diminished to accommodate what we are still trying to classify. Sharks? Snakes? Eels? Megoladons? Nothing sticks. They have no oxygen, no food source, no reason to even exist. What is their purpose? I am beginning to truly believe they are titans, something more than any tiny stupid human brain can understand. I’ve sat with this secret for so long that some days I wonder if I’m still the same man, still a sane man. I swear I can feel them now, moving, swirling under my feet, and if they moved too much surely the crust would crumble and I would fall into the gaping, slithering darkness. One of the scientists couldn’t handle what we found and hanged herself the year of our discovery. Two died in mysterious freak accidents in as many years after coming close to sharing the truth. Another disappeared from the face of the Earth just weeks ago. Now seven years from our discovery date, I don’t know how many are left - I don’t dare try and find out. I’m afraid that I might be the only one. I went into hiding when I realized what they were doing to us, but running away from reality has only diminished my psyche. I live a hermit’s life - my desk covered with books I don’t read in an attempt to cover the obsessive drawings and possible answers. The titans appear in my nightmare black as night, slippery and beastly. Long and thick like snakes, but beyond anything we have in our oceans. Every time I fall asleep, I wake up floating in the horrible underground ocean. Through the inky blackness I can see them - they surround me; I feel them sliding by my skin as they close around me and smother me with their horrible bodies. I live near a pond to which I’ve rigged a lighting system. Every day I go out and compulsively check to make sure I can see the bottom. I can’t get close to it without my knees giving out and panic taking hold of me, but I still need to check. Life lost meaning with no one to hear or believe me. I am afraid of the dark, but perhaps death is not darkness. I tried to take my life. It didn’t work, and bitter as I was at the time that my attempt to escape my constant and all-encompassing depression failed, I believe it may have been a sign to finally do something. The moment you see this, I’m a dead man, but knowing someone will see this has lifted an immense weight off my chest. I may have lost parts of myself, even parts of my mind, but finally alleviating years of guilt and obsession may make the last of my days more peaceful. When they come for me, I won’t fight, and I won’t die afraid. I have done what I can, and I can rest peacefully knowing I finished what my colleagues set out to do. Unlike my little pond there is no air in that magnificent cave below us, no light, no green. There is only the huge creatures that haunt the dark water. How they have survived for millions of years I am sure we will never know. But still they live, two hundred times larger than a blue whale. I am losing my mind. I hope that if I go to hell it is truly at the center of the Earth so I don’t have to be near what dwells just beneath our feet. Nothing I do can distract me from them. Every time I lay down, every time I wake up, they will always be there. They exist beyond this delicate crust we call home, beyond your science, your cities, your gods.