The Weight of The World

Chapter 1

So, I've been writing this story in my head for the past four years that I've been playing Subnautica, and I finally decided to write it down and give some substance to it. It's mostly going to follow the plot of Subnautica, but with a few additional characters, dialogue, and situations added in to make it flow a bit better.

I do plan to stick as closely to Subnautica lore as I possibly can, but do keep in mind that I don't know everything, and I will gladly take any criticism that you can give me. I generally tend to view the story of Subnautica as a very psychologically stressing one for the main character, so expect bits of that. Without any further interruptions, enjoy!

Even after thirteen months of feeding myself with beef flavored nutrient blocks, it still seemed like the better alternative to eating in the Aurora's cafeteria. It was a criminally small room for a ship with almost a hundred-and-fifty people on it, and honestly I'm suspicious of where the cook even gets his food from, seeing as the nutrient storage locker was almost as full as it had been when we left Earth.

On top of that, I didn't really get along with anyone onboard the Aurora. There were a few scientists, about a dozen people on the bridge flying the ship, and the rest were engineers, both theoretical and applied. I was an engineer, with the same amount of training as most other people here. However, the Alterra board of directors had the fantastic idea that they could save on repair costs and crew members if they simply just got one of the essential crew to just do janitor's work during the trip on top of his or her regular duties. And would you guess which lucky bastard got that luxury?

So yeah, technically my job position is "Non-essential systems maintenance chief" so as to disguise how soul-sucking my work was, but my position is pretty clear despite my qualifications. I love being an engineer, building things is my favorite past-time, but lately my work is more akin to scrubbing toilets and arguing with CTO Yu about how changing my main cleaning drone's name to "Alvin" fucks with my notifications and ultimately just makes my job even more demeaning.

Right about now you're probably wondering, "Man, why is this guy such a grouchy old man?", but I'm really truly not. I was actually happy before this mission started, I was going to the very edge of human colonized space and beyond, I was gonna get to see things that no one's ever seen before, and that was incredible. The money was great and all, but I mainly joined this mission for the discovery.

I was walking down one of the many corridors in the large Alterran vessel, casually texting people on my PDA when the loudspeaker came on with Yu's voice saying, "Riley Robinson to cargo bay 3, I repeat, Riley Robinson to cargo bay 3, someone spilled launch grease all over a couple seamoths."

I audibly sighed, before turning around to head towards the storage locker in this sector with my cleaning supplies. However, as I did the loudspeaker came on again, this time with no message except for a very strange electronic static sound that lowered and raised in odd pitch changes, and then stopped. I stared at the speaker on the wall for a few seconds in confusion, wondering if it had been a glitch, before suddenly I was knocked off my feet as everything around me shook violently, and everything turned red as the alarms blared and warning lights filled the hallway.

I clumsily stood up as people ran past me in both directions. I stared wide eyed all around me as panic set in my mind. Had we been hit by an asteroid? Had a fuel tank exploded? An attack by Mongolian pirates?!

The loudspeaker came on once again, this time with the Aurora's automated emergency warning, "Attention, hull failure imminent: All personnel abandon ship." That finally put me into drive. I pushed and shoved past people on my way to the lifepod launch bay, worrying about no one in this situation but myself as my brain switched to autopilot.

As I entered the lifepod bay, I was instantly assaulted by fire and smoke, which consumed most of the lifepods. Of the 75 lifepods, only 28 remained useable, and 27 of them were launching.

I don't think I've ever moved so fast in my entire life as I sprinted full speed towards the last remaining lifepod. Every lifepod was designed to accommodate two people, and I was going to wait for my partner when I once again heard that same odd static sound over the loudspeaker. Remembering what had happened last time, I slammed the door to the launch tube closed behind me, and slid down the ladder straight into one of the two empty seats. I wasn't even in control of my actions anymore as I slammed my fist down on the launch button, not even waiting to see if anyone would come for the second seat. The safety harness lowered quickly to secure me to the seat, before my PDA linked to the lifepod with my digital assistant counting down, "Launching in 3…2…1…" I was shoved painfully against the harness, the impact forcing the air from my lungs as the lifepod ejected at supersonic speed away from the Aurora.

I looked up through the transparent material that made up the top hatch just in time to see the lifepod launch bay explode in a massive ball of fire. As my life flashed before my eyes, I prayed to a god that I didn't even believe in as the sound of air rushing past the lifepod greeted my ears. Air. That meant there was an atmosphere here. I knew that the Aurora was flying past an uncharted planet as part of a gravity slingshot maneuver , but the scanners had still been gathering their data the last time I checked. I was going in blind.

Suddenly, some especially powerful turbulence rocked the lifepod, dislodging the fire extinguisher from it's place on the wall, and wrenching the primary maintenance panel free, causing red emergency lights to come on and alarms to blare. My eyes went wide as I watched the exposed wiring get completely shredded by the extreme forces, spilling oil and lubricant all over the floor. The now free maintenance panel was flying wildly around the lifepod, ricocheting off the titanium walls. I tried to shelter my body with my hands, but everything seemed to happen so fast as the panel few straight into my head, and then everything went black.

I slowly came to, my head throbbing too much for me to want to open my eyes. What did I drink last night? I haven't had a headache this bad in years…and why did I smell smoke?

My eyes slowly drifted open to investigate, when they were immediately met with the flickering of bright orange flames not even two feet away from me. My eyes shot open and my head almost spun around trying to take in everything at once. Suddenly I remembered what had happened.

I tapped the button on my seat's arm to disengage the harness, but it only responded with a flat and strangled negative beep. The god damn battery must've been fried! I had to beat on the controls several times for them to finally register, and the safety harness slowly lifted up. I wormed underneath the bar before it finished rising, and crawled along the floor trying to grab the fire extinguisher. I fumbled with it trying to stand up, and almost dropped it again, but I steeled myself and pointed the red cylinder's nozzle at the flames that had now spread to more than half the lifepod's interior. I pushed on the lever as hard as I could and watched as the carbon dioxide and ammonium phosphate did a beautiful job of covering the fire and suffocating it. I didn't let up on the trigger until there wasn't a hint of fire left, and then carefully placed the extinguisher back on the wall holder.

I reached a weary and shaking hand up to wipe the sweat off my forehead, but there was so much of it that all it did was smear it over. I groaned in pain as my head just started throbbing even worse. I stumbled over to the medical kit fabricator on the wall, which thankfully seemed to still be functioning.

I had to pry the door open a bit to get at the medkit since the latch was a little bent, but other than that it seemed to be in perfectly functional condition. I sat down on the storage locker and opened the medkit, revealing a canister that honestly looked a lot like the fire extinguisher I had just used, only black in color instead of an angry red. It was designed to quickly seal gaping wounds by injecting hundreds of thousands of stim cells into the patient's body to account for lost cells. Thankfully, the only injury I was suffering from at the moment was a splitting headache, so I moved the biofoam can out of the way and grabbed the bottle of pain relievers.

These things weren't very strong, as they were meant to be used in a survival situation where you couldn't afford to be delirious at all, but they definitely took the edge off and allowed me to stand to full height without almost vomiting.

I pulled my PDA out of my back pocket, only to be greeted with a new boot screen with the words "Booting PDA in emergency mode" and Alterra's annoying jingle in the background. I waited for the bootup to finish, before my assistant's voice came on in it's default non-personalized voice setting, "This PDA has now rebooted in emergency mode with one directive: To keep you alive on an alien world. Please refer to the databank for detailed survival advice. Good luck!" I groaned audibly at that, and not in pain this time.

Suddenly, there was a strange flickering in the edges of my vision as odd shapes began to form in my vision. The shapes manifested themselves as elegant circles with numbers inside of them that represented my various vital signs. My PDA must've integrated itself into my neural microchip as part of a new system patch.

I took the time to familiarize myself with the new interface (which was actually pretty intuitive, so good job on that Alterra), and then read through the survival checklist. I had already administered first aid as needed, so now my next step was to take inventory. Right. As much as I liked the PDA interface, the rations these lifepods come standard with aren't even fit to last me half a week. If I was going to survive here, I would most likely need to do it using materials I scavenged.

I finally opened the storage locker and removed the All Environment Protection suit, one of Alterra's most famous inventions. It only worked at minimum operational efficiently, but it worked in pretty much any situation. It was the ultimate jack of all trades. Technically I should've put it on before launching the lifepod, but I was in so much of a panic that I hardly even remember what happened at all.

After getting out of my regular garb and suiting up, the next thing on my checklist was to repair any damage to the lifepod if necessary, and…yeah it was necessary. Fire damage is no joke, and I don't know how long the exposed wiring behind the panel was subjected to the intense heat before I woke up to contain it, so most likely I had to basically rewire the entire sub-station. The radio appeared to have fried during the unusually long atmospheric entry burn. The power cells seemed to still be functioning, but were incapable of transferring the electricity to most parts of the lifepod which needed it because of the shredded wiring in the electrical junction. All in all not good news, but at least everything seemed doable with a simple multi-purpose repair tool.

I approached the survival fabricator on the far wall and waved my hand over the orange sensor bar, which thankfully caused the rectangular device to unfold itself into it's operational position. I let out a loud groan of relief at the satisfying whir of the miniature particle accelerator inside of the machine. The device itself was rather unimpressive looking, simply a rectangular white box with orange accents, a flat table to place objects onto, a black computer screen behind it and two cylindrical needles above it that moved on an omni-directional axis. But despite it's compact and simple design, Alterra's atomic fabrication technology was truly incredible, and their idea to put a simplified version of it inside of all lifepods was a stroke of genius. With it, I can deposit raw materials onto the table in the middle of the machine, and the needles at the top fire ultra-fine lasers that molecularly deconstruct the object, storing it's elemental particle makeup inside of a built-in particle accelerator, and could then smash those molecules into each other to form just about any useful item I could ever want (within the limitation of Alterra law and equal conversion of material matter).

Having established the condition of my lifepod, my remaining problem was that I had no idea where I was, or what kind of environment waited outside the lifepod. The only two things I could assume was that I was on a planet with an unusually thick atmosphere, and those were just the educated guesses of someone who wasn't even remotely qualified to be an astro-physicist. The electrical damage wouldn't allow the lifepod to give me a detailed reading of the environment, which also meant that the fabricator wasn't calibrated for it either. I would need to manually teach the AI on my PDA everything about this world and directly link it to the fabricator if I wanted to survive, at least until I could repair the lifepod's much more advanced scanners.

So, the only thing left to do was put on my helmet, climb the ladder to disembark, and hope that I wasn't instantly incinerated by toxic chemicals in the air. Slowly, I climbed to the top of the ladder, and shakily placed my hand on the bottom of the hatch.

I nervously counted out loud, "3…2…1…now!" and quickly bolted up out of the hatch and into the potentially deadly environment that awaited me.

I almost fell back down the ladder as I came face to face with two unidentified creatures with wings. Thankfully, my reaction seemed to scare them more than they scared me, and they quickly flew away. I ran a sweaty palm down the visor of my helmet, before fully standing up and looking at what awaited me.

…Woah. I…I had no words to describe what I was looking at. I could see the massive form of the Aurora crashed only maybe two kilometers from where I was standing, but that's not what got my attention. There was water…everywhere. I did a full 360 degree turn in place, and the Aurora was the only landmark in sight.

Suddenly, there was a readout on my HUD that informed me of the nitrogen/oxygen heavy atmosphere around me, and despite the immense horror of the situation I found myself in, I smiled. I could breathe here.

My brain immediately switched into science mode as I contemplated the kinds of life that could live here. I already knew that complex life existed here, I had met some of them before even fully leaving the lifepod, and I was in an ocean! The possibilities were endless! I quickly pulled my PDA out of the strap on my hip and turned the camera on. I did another 360-degree turn, but more slowly this time, making sure to take in all the details so that my AI could compile a basic environment profile. I then slid back down the ladder and walked over to the fabricator.

Pressing a small button on the side of the device, I linked it to my PDA, transferring the environmental data into it so that it could give appropriate construction recommendations. Almost instantly, the black screen in the back flickered on and displayed several categories of items, mainly including swim-gear and aquatic support apparatus. Glad to see that's working okay.

However, to actually make any of this stuff, I would need to go exploring. Which I was actually pretty excited about. Who knows, maybe this planet isn't that bad? At the very least, discovering life on an uncharted planet was extremely exciting. Not new by any means, life had been found in all parts of the galaxy (never sentient though), but the odds of getting the opportunity to see it first-hand were slim to none!

So, I took another deep breath, and twisted the interlock on the bottom hatch, causing the pressurized entrance to slowly lift up, revealing the bright blue waves that the lifepod was currently bobbing on. I sat down on the floor and carefully dangled my feet down, and slowly dipped my toes into the water. So good so far. I decided I would never get anywhere if I kept stalling, so I just got it over with and dropped completely into the depths.

My eyes widened in awe at the world of colors that greeted me. Alien fish of different sizes swam about either in schools or pairs, clouds of bioluminescent micro-organisms floated through the water illuminating everything around them. Nearby I could see a forest of tall kelp-like plants that sprouted from the seabed and rose to the very surface. The diversity of plant-life was staggering. The fungi, coral, flowers, grasses, and completely alien flora somehow living together in perfect harmony in such a small area. I had struggled to find words for this place after looking at it from above, but from below the perfect adjective instantly sprung to my lips, "It's…beautiful…"

My AI thankfully remembered what I seemed to have forgotten: My need for air. It gave a loud beep and said one simple word: "Oxygen!" I planted my feet firmly onto the ground beneath me and forcefully pushed myself up and out of the water, gasping for breath and choking on how quickly my throat had dried up. After waiting for my vitals to read as full on oxygen, I dived back down into the wonderful world that awaited me…

And instantly screamed in agony as a creature the size of a medium shark who's body mass was half teeth bit down hard onto my right leg, digging in deep and growling fiercely as it shook it's head back and forth violently. Tears freely fell from my eyes, making it hard to see as I tried to use my free leg to kick the monster in its long snout. My first kick glanced off of it as the creature did it's best to tear my leg off, but the second connected directly with the tip of its snout. The shark-like beast whined in pain and released my leg, breaking a very big tooth off in the gaping wound as it swam away for a second to recover.

With adrenaline pumping through my veins, I swam as fast as my wounded leg would take me upwards to the bottom of the lifepod. However, just as I made it to the hatch and pushed it open, I was dragged back into the depths by the same creature as it latched back onto the same leg, digging it's teeth back into the same cut it had left before, causing me to scream in such a high pitch that It just sounded like slowly letting air out of a balloon.

I had had enough of this thing, so I gripped the floor of the lifepod and painfully dragged myself forward, crying out in pain the whole time as it only shifted the creature's teeth in my leg, making them cut even deeper. My vision flashed white and subsequently darkened as I felt a tooth scrape against the bone, temporarily causing me to lose my grip and slip a little further back. With the lost progress, the shark was winning this fight. It was much stronger than me and started to slowly pull me back into the water. This was a do or die situation, and I put everything I had into one last pull, which actually managed to bring the head of my attacker partly into the lifepod with me.

I stared at its grey and blue streamlined body as its angry green eyes locked onto mine and the creature roared at me around the leg between its deadly jaws. Taking my opportunity, I lunged forward and grabbed the open hatch, before slamming it down several times onto the creature's head, which ultimately caused the monster to release me and drop back into the water. I instantly closed and locked the hatch, before leaning against the wall and screaming as loud as I could in agony as the effects of the adrenaline wore off.

The broken tooth was still deep in my leg. Normally pulling it out would be the last thing I should do, but my leg was in such a bad shape that the blood loss didn't really matter at this point. I gripped the jagged base of the tooth, and clenched my teeth before quickly yanking it out. My skin was starting to go pale, but I didn't know if it was from fright or blood loss, maybe both.

At least I had a reason to use the bio-foam canister in the first-aid kit though. I shook it up, and then placed the metal nozzle directly into the gaping wound, and hissed as the white foam sprayed into the bite, the stim cells going to work in replicating my DNA to act as replacement blood cells. The substance also contained a strong numbing agent which quickly had me groaning in relief. I finished by winding some gauze around my leg, and then with nothing left to do, I collapsed onto my back and cried.

Not even five minutes of being outside of the lifepod, and I had almost been violently torn apart by an alien monster. I was an engineer for god's sake, I shouldn't even be here! What could I have possibly done in a previous life to deserve this?!

I took several minutes to force myself to slow my breathing. I wouldn't get anything done if I just sat here and bitched. Obviously, no one asks to be in this situation, but would Craig Mcgill have given up this easily? Hell no! And I have something that Craig Mcgill didn't, a fabricator. That thing out there might have big teeth and strong muscles, but humanity didn't colonize half the damn galaxy with those things, we did it with our minds.

I glanced over at the sharp bloody tooth lying next to me, and slowly picked it up. I hit it several times against the titanium wall of the lifepod, but couldn't cause any noticeable damage to it's structure. It was a pretty hard material, and it fit nicely in the palm of my hand…

I slowly dragged myself to one of the seats in the lifepod, being careful not to jar my healing leg, and started to tear chunks out of the foam padding. I then tore off a chunk of metal from the arm with the help of the incredibly durable tooth. I set the tooth down on the ground and did a few rudimentary composition tests on it using my PDA. The scanner on the tablet wasn't nearly powerful enough to give me a detailed readout of its molecular makeup, but I was able to build a basic profile for it that the fabricator could recognize.

I then fed the padding and metal into the fabricator, and watched as the two needles above the table fired bright blue lasers that slowly deconstructed the items into their baser parts. Mainly plasteel, cotton, and rubber. Then, I set the tooth on the fabricator table and got to work. I started by filling in the jagged edges at the base with tiny pieces of plasteel, and even used bits of ultra-hard metal to strengthen to structural integrity of the tooth. I then created a makeshift handle largely made of cotton that was actually pretty pleasant to hold onto.

Having finished my rather durable makeshift knife, I picked it up and gave it a few swings. It was nearly effortless to move around, since the tooth itself was very light. Now if something tries to grab me again, I'll have an option other than running.

I decided to sleep and regain my energy, as well as allow the bio-foam to finish repairing my leg. Apparently, I didn't have much of a choice though, as I was out before my head even hit the ground.

I groggily lifted my hands to my head and slowly opened my eyes. My PDA told me that I had been asleep for three hours. I would've liked to get more, but I needed to get moving. I reached down to toy with my injured leg a bit, only to find that it wasn't injured anymore. There wasn't even any visible scarring, despite the fact that my entire calve had effectively been shredded. Alterra technology was amazing.

It was still a bit stiff as I struggled to stand up, but that would pass quickly. I picked up my new knife, and dropped back into the water through the bottom hatch.

It was dark now, and I mean dark. The only things I could make out was the bioluminescence that all the life here seemed to possess. Glowing shapes moved this way and that in every direction, with large schools of them giving off the effect of belonging to a much larger creature. I entered the lifepod for a split second before returning with one of two distress flares that come standard in every lifepod, and pulled the cap off before striking it against the igniter. A bright red light suddenly revealed my surroundings as the flare caught fire. Due to the electrical nature of Alterra flares, it worked just fine under water.

There was no telling what kind of dangers came out at night, but I couldn't afford to sit in the lifepod anymore, I needed to progress. I held my modified tooth at the ready in one hand, and the flare in the other as I used my legs to slowly swim.

After several hours of exploring and discovering resources, I had found a pretty reliable source of raw materials. There were large outcrops of metal that sprouted from pretty much every cliff face, and the thin layer of limestone that covered the important resources was easy enough to break. By the end of my scavenging session, I had gathered a bounty of copper and titanium, which were exactly the resources I needed to fabricate a handheld scanner tool! With one of those, I could basically learn everything there was to know about my environment.

After storing the materials back in the lifepod and creating the aforementioned scanner, I dove back in. The scanner itself followed Alterra's design formula of being simple and compact, but extremely effective. It looked like nothing more than a rectangular box with a rectangular screen sticking out of the left side that displayed simple information about what I was scanning. The device would then emit an array of quantumly entangled photons which would travel through the object and gather information about it's composition and inner workings, before transmitting the more complex data to my PDA's AI to be deciphered and provide a more detailed explanation in my PDA's databank.

I swam around for awhile scanning just about everything, and being in awe of the incredible world that I found myself stranded on. There was a fish here that my PDA temporarily named a "Bladderfish" that was basically a natural water filter. Its body was composed of a hollow membrane that allowed water to pass through, but not salt. I might even be able to use them as a free source of water! There was a large dark blue creature with what looked like a gas mask for a face and a massive glowing green ball on it's back-end that I was initially afraid of, but it turns out that it's actually a herbivore with a pretty extreme defense mechanism. It creates a very toxic substance in the large bulbous green sac on it's back using a specialized algae, it then releases this poison into the water around it when it feels under threat. There was a species of mushroom that was very common, but so acidic that it's innards can be used to make batteries!

And most strange of all, I encountered a small spiky red fish with one large eye on it's front that lives inside of a plant which hides the fish from view. When I got close to the plant however, it's four large petals opened up to reveal the fish, which then shot out of the plant towards me at very fast speeds, and then it exploded. I was far enough away that I wasn't seriously injured, but I was close enough to feel the heat and shockwave, and I definitely do not want to be directly hit by one of those.

On my way back though, I suddenly hear a fearfully familiar hissing roar from behind me, and turn around just in time to see another one of those shark creatures coming at me again. I barely manage to dodge in time, and as the shark zooms past me I wave my scanner over it. My PDA gives it the designation "Stalker", and I quickly put my scanner away and replace it with the knife I made from one of these very creature's teeth.

The Stalker turns on a dime, and instantly turns to face me again as it realizes that it missed its initial attack. Evidently an ambush predator, the large fish stopped its attack and opted for circling me instead, prying me for weaknesses. I didn't give it a chance, and lunged outwards with an attack of my own, slashing the Stalker down the right side of its face, making it hiss in pain and back away from me a good bit. Green blood leaked out of the cut I had made into the water around it.

The Stalker charged at me again with it's jaws wide open, it's eyes narrowed in anger as it threatened to maul me with those dangerously sharp teeth. But this particular fiend was about to become intimately familiar with how dangerous those teeth really were. I waited until it was almost on top of me, and then quickly swam downward and thrust my blade up into the Stalker as it zoomed overhead. The tip of the tooth stabbed straight up into the Stalker's belly, and painfully slashed all the way down it's body as the Stalker was swimming too fast to stop in time.

The attack didn't kill my assailant, but the wound was brutal enough that the Stalker swam away whining loudly in pain. I let out a shaky breath and then I remembered to breathe, and had to surface for air as I realized I had expended a lot of oxygen in the fight.

Despite the intensity of the situation, I felt good. I had nearly been killed by a Stalker the minute I left the lifepod, but I wouldn't ever allow myself to be that complacent again. This world was beautiful beyond belief, but I was clearly not meant to be here. I was going to die here if I wasn't smart, and I intended to learn everything I could about this place.

I was going to survive.

So, with the ever-consuming darkness below me, and the literal weight of the world above me, I dove deeper in search of answers.