Jack is no longer in pain. His expression is rapt.
Looking down past him to a ghostly landscape. His last flare sputters out, but there is light. Bioluminescent algae carpet the walls of the canyon below him. And he's right... it is beautiful.
The water is so clear we can see down 500 feet past Jack's tiny, silhouetted figure, to a vast landscape faintly revealed in spectral pastels. Barren as the moon but exquisite, serene. Changeless. A place unseen by human eyes.
Like a firefly below, the lights of Big Geek are visible. Jack descends toward the ROV, which has grounded on a narrow shelf. Below the shelf, the wall slopes out, suggesting we are near the bottom of the canyon but can't see it.
One big Geek/MIRV, sitting there like a dumbshit. Jack's feet thump into the sediment next to it, stirring it luminous particles. Touchdown... three and half miles of water over his head. Jack leans over the warhead in a swarm of fireflies.
.
.
.
As Geek prints out. Monk takes the headset gently from Ianto. "Okay, Jack, we'll go step by step. Take the cover plate off the firing box."
A long pause. Then...
PLATE OFF
"All right, Jack, you have to cut the ground wire, not the lead wire..."
.
.
.
Jack is peering into the detonator unit. How bad is he? We can't tell.
"It's the blue wire with the white stripe, not...I repeat... NOT the black wire with the yellow stripe."
Jack is staring. Blinking. The two wire look big as sewer pipes, and they're miles away... way down there where his hands are.
The only light he has left is a CYALUME STICK. He pulls out the little plastic tube. Breaks and shakes. It starts to glow, a tiny wand of green light. He fumbles with his tool pouch, takes out a pair of side-cutters.
CUTING NNOW
He types to them. He reaches into the detonator.
In the green Cyalume glow, the wires look identical. The cutters go over on wire. A long beat. They withdraw, and then go over the other
wire...
He cuts—
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.
.
Everyone is frozen. Waiting. It's very quiet.
"Would we see the flash?" Ianto whispers fatalistically.
"Through three miles of water?" Monk asks "I don't know."
They're holding their breaths. Then...
STILL HERE
A cheer goes up. Rebel yells.
"Quiet, quiet! Save you air, goddamnit." John roars.
"Jack, give me a reading off you liquid oxygen gauge." Monk asks.
TEN MINUTES WORTH ID SAY.
Ianto goes white.
"It took him over an hour to get down there…" Owen says with horror.
It's hopeless. Ianto grabs the headset from Monk. "Drop you weights and start back now! The gauge could be wrong..."
.
.
Jack is one his knees beside the dead warhead. His expression is enigmatic. He looks around slowly at the luminous canyon. Starts to type.
.
.
The message comes in:
NO. THINK ILL STAY A WHILE. BEAUTIFUL HERE. WORTH ADMISSION
"No! You can make it! You hear me? Drop your weights... you... can breathe shallow... you... it could be wrong..." Ianto's voice has twisted into a sob. he begins to weep, quietly. "Oh God, Jax, please..."
DONT CRY TIGR
A pause. Then the words...
WE KNEW THIS WAS A ONE WAY TICKET WHEN I PUT THIS THING ON. BUT YOU KNOW I HAD TO COME.
Ianto sobs at the mike. The others look away. The signal is weakening.
Toshiko boosts it and the screen clears briefly.
LOVE YOU WIFE.
He stares at the printout.
"Love you… and I am NOT the wife! I am your soul mate and you… you are mine. Forever."
There is no reply.
.
.
.
A tiny figure lies slumped beside the inert ROV, an Indian dying with his horse in the desert.
Jack's eyelids close. His chest barely moving.
A strange illumination bathes his face and his eyes open. He blinks. Weakly, he raises his head, facing the source of the radiance.
A glowing figure hovers before him, like a vision. It seems to be an angel. Seen closer, as it drifts toward him, we see that it is an extraterrestrial being, bioluminescent like some deep-sea fish. Its body and limbs are transparent, and it resembles a figure made of blown glass. A delicate mantle or veil billows out around its like a corona, which pulsates gently, propelling the being with the hypnotic grace of a Spanish dancer. The head is refined and strangely anthropomorphic, with large eyes that convey a cold, dispassionate wisdom.
It is stunningly beautiful.
The creature settles toward him. Unafraid, Jack extends his hand.
Its slender, blown-glass digits grasp his bulky glove. It pulls him up from the benthic ooze and they glide together down the slope, deeper into the abyss.
At the limits of visibility we see faint, glowing forms moving below. They resolve into NTI ships. Tiny ovoids, like the little scoutship that Ianto nearly collided with at the Montana wreck. The larger manta-ships. And others, strangely configured, moving in the darkness below like luminous fish.
Suddenly the darkness explodes with light. A vast, reticulated pattern of brightly glowing lines, like some enormous circuit diagram, appears below them, covering the floor of the abyssal trench. It sweeps outward from the center, as if the light were surging through channels. The NTIs are revealing their home to Jack. The ships move among the spires like air traffic over a major city.
Jack and the creature descend until, between the lines of light, we see a dark surface of inhuman design. The shape extends beyond the limits of visibility.
Towers hundreds of feet high stretch upward from the curving surface. It dwarfs their figures as the descend toward it, approaching an opening that soon yawns like a vast mouth.
They are picking up speed, swept along by a powerful current, into the mouth- like opening.
Jack stares around in awe as smooth, pearlescent walls blur past him. It is a curving three-dimensional maze of tunnels, like a vast circulatory system, where controlled currents of water become freeways in three-dimensional space. Tunnels divide, narrow, and reenter main-routes hundreds of feet across, as the pair race through in a dizzying blur.
Entering a smaller chamber they settle to the floor, and the NTI moves back a few feet.
A shimmering plane or surface appears like a vertical curtain bisecting the chamber. The seawater divides, like the Red Sea, into two rippling walls.
They move apart. Leaving Jack standing in a short, shimmering hallway.
Weakly, he uncouples his helmet and pulls it free. Drops to his knees. Doubles over as spasms wrack him. Breathing fluid explodes from his lungs. He lies gasping and coughing on the floor, dragging in deep breaths of what he can only hope is air.
It is.
Jack slowly recovers, sitting up. His head is clearing. This really is happening. Beyond the shimmering, vertical surface of the water he sees the NTI being joined by others, move or less identical, until a group of seven is gathered watching him.
"Howdy, Uuuh... how you guys doin'?"
His voice echoes metallically in the strange chamber. Soft laps of water from the 'walls'.
In the air a pattern of glowing lines appears, a series of what appears to be circuit diagrams. Jack staggers back from this strange 'screen' hanging in mid-air. The image is about twenty feet across.
There is a rolling jumble of static and interference which resolves into...the face of Dan Rather, doing the evening news. STATIC, then another newscast. And another. Fragments of the same story. The world on the brink of war.
"You watch our TV? That what you're trying to say? That you know what's been going on up there?"
The NTIs are impassive. Static... then another newscast.
This time, we're allowed to focus on the story. An on-the-scene interview outside a high-tech seismology lab. There is an air of hysteria about the scene... technicians running across the background of the shot, people shouting, the reporter jamming his mike at the harried-looking scientist.
"... a Caltech scientist who is among those reporting an unprecedented disturbance in the world's oceans. Dr. Breg, can you give us a clearer explanation then we're getting?"
Berg is edgy and distracted. People keeps handing him pieces of paper, computer hardcopy. The biggest thing in his life is happening "They're acoustic shockwaves, like tsunamis, but with no seismological source. The waves are propagating toward the shorelines of every continent…"
An assistant runs up, face shiny with fear, beckoning. We see that Berg is running scared. The impossible bringing the greatest terror to the rational mind.
"Yeah. I'll be right there... I have to go. Look, we don't know what it is! Okay? Not the slightest goddamn idea!"
The image dissolves into static, fades out. Jack turns to the NTIs. "You're doing it! Right? That's what you're telling me. Yeah, you can control water...that's your technology. But why?"
Static again, then a brilliant flash. Grainy stock film of a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific.
The film repeats, and then again, faster, and again until is merges into an unbroken white glare. Jack gets the message.
"Hey, you don't know they're really gonna do it." Jack argues "Where do you get off passing judgment on us, when you can't be sure? How do you know?"
The screen exploded into a staccato series of searing images, stark moments from recent history...
US soldiers fighting in Vietnam, street warfare in Beirut, a car bomb in Belfast, a suspect shot in the head in the streets of Saigon, burned and bleeding children, grainy footage of corpses bulldozed into mass graves at Auschwitz, Wermacht soldiers marching in goose-step review, a 13-year-old contra with an AK-47... Just glimpses, strobing... a few frames of each.
But enough. The images continue.
Jack watches as the lights flicker on his face, the ongoing indictment of humanity.
.
.
.
OCEAN FRONT WALK, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
A video news crew leaps from a Jet Ranger helicopter in a parking area and runs to set up near the railing, facing the ocean. Pandemonium reigns around them, people running, driving, evacuating inland.
On the horizon, out to sea, a dark line has appeared.
It grows in height as it comes closer, a wall of water stretching across the horizon, already hundreds of feet high and growing.
.
.
.
NEW YORK
looking seaward past the Statue of Liberty, out past the Verazzano Narrows. Stacked up by perspective, the distant wave is a wall of water impossibly high, still miles out.
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NAVAL BASE, KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, U.S.S.R.
The scene repeats on the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Penninsula in Russia, where a full moon shimmers along the crest of a vast wave.
Sirens wail as Russian sailors run from the docks of Petropavlovsk Naval Base. Some stand rooted as the black glacier of water, a thousand feet high and growing, thunders toward them in nightmarish slow motion.
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OCEAN FRONT, SANTA MONICA
The minicam crew reporter is speaking rapidly, faltering with emotion, his voice cracking like the famous broadcast from the scene of the Hindenburg disaster.
"The horizon has gone dark... the crowd is starting to run... some are just staring, unable to move... the wave... the wave is... it's... I don't know... maybe a thousand feet high lready... getting bigger as I'm watching... still miles out... oh my God, Jesus... I can hear it..."
A roar fills the air, a thunder which drowns out the people's screams, even the rotors of the news chopper as the camera teams scrambles aboard. They leave the announcer standing transfixed, his face blank, eyes tracking upward and upward as the ground begins to shake.
.
.
NEW YORK
The Statue of Liberty looks like a souvenir figurine at the afternoon sun is blocked out by the cresting tsunami, an escarpment of water 2500 feet tall.
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SAN FRANSISCO
The Golden Gate Bridge and the hills of the city, the buildings downtown. Beyond is the wall of sea green which defies our comprehension. The image shakes with the THUNDER.
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MALIBU
A diehard surfer looks over his shoulder as the mountain of water which transcends his worst nightmare. He lies paralyzed on his board.
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MIAMI
Downtown Miami crouches in terror at the feet of the shimmering monolith.
In a penthouse office suite, an executive watches the wave towering above him, blocking out the sun, a line of raging foam appearing as it arches over, about to break upon the teeming city.
And then...
The wave slows as it crests...
And stops.
IT SIMPLY STOPS.
2600 feet high and motionless except for a shimmering undulation of its surface in the bright sun. There is quiet, a faint wind and calling of confused gulls. Various reactions, as the thunder fades and people recover, only to stand awed before the vast, inexplicable manifestation. A news helicopter passes in front of it like a dragonfly.
.
..
MALIBU
The surfer just blinks, starting.
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NEW YORK
On the East Coast it's the same, as the World Trade Centers are dwarfed by a shimmering blue wall which stands... waiting.
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PETROPAVLOVSK NAVAL BASE, U.S.S.R.
Russian seamen, lining the harbour breakwall at Petropavlovsk Naval Base on the Kamchatka Peninsula, stare upward at the monolith of water, undulating in the moonlight. It seems poised to crash down, inflicting inconceivable devastation... but it doesn't.
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OCEAN FRONT WALK, SANTA MONICA
When all have seen...
The wave soundlessly subsides, slowly slipping back and down until the surface of the sea is normal again.
A crowd of people watching the sea as a handheld camera takes in the scene of shock. Moving from face to face. Various reactions as people respond to what they can only understand as a miracle. The faces... awed, stunned, tear-streaked... laughing. The cameraman is just walking. Some people turn to him and smile, or laugh, or whoop.
A woman is collapsed on a bench, crying.
A man is on his knees, shaking.
Total strangers hug each other.
A black guy, tears pouring down his face, turns to the camera with a beautific grin. "Somebody just laid it down to us, man. Things ain't never gonna be the same!"