“Deep Sea Slumber” — FWG Flash Fiction for 6/21/2025

The power of the human touch can sometimes be hard to contain.

The prompt is:

https://pixabay.com/photos/diver-anemone-fish-underwater-9328628

DEEP SEA SLUMBER

The cold weather necessitated the ill-fitting dry suit for his dive, but Travis wouldn’t wait for warmer months. He couldn’t risk word of his find getting out, or worse, someone else stumbling upon it, like he did.

Of course, there were probably fewer than a hundred people in the world who would recognize his discovery for what it was. And, as far as he knew, he was the only one of that select group who was an avid scuba diver. Still, Travis was too antsy to wait another season, or even another day before retrieving the artifact.

And that’s what he was sure he had found on the floor of the North Atlantic. An artifact, not of a lost civilization inundated by some Atlantean disaster—although that itself would have been front page news. No, this was an alien artifact that, if he could salvage it, would be worth billions.

The encrusted debris field of the crash site littered the ocean floor, but Travis was instinctively drawn to the largest of the exposed spaceship parts. He felt its warmth as he approached, and when he touched it, it thrummed with pent-up energy. The machine’s dormant buzz quickly grew into a teeth-rattling vibration, then a seismic rumble as his touch awaked the craft’s long-sleeping, self-repaired machinery.

Travis stared in awe as the surrounding seabed began to rise. Too late, he realized he was floating at the center of a disk far larger across than the largest aircraft carrier was long. On top of the impossibly large vehicle, the upwards acceleration through the water pinned Travis like an amoeba on a specimen slide.

As nitrogen bubbles popped in his veins, the vessel burst through the surface. Rising even faster into the bright blue sky, Travis wished his dry suit was a spacesuit.

THE END