Author: Cyrus Borzak
World Wonders and Beyond Conference
Perlan
Reykjavik, Iceland
2036
“Please welcome this year’s keynote speaker, a man who’s inspired us all to stay curious, Doctor Wilbur Harrington.”
“Wow, it is an honor to be here among so many friends, colleagues, and individuals who still believe there are things that can go bump in the night. Your presence here this week gives me great hope for our future. I trust you’ve all come to poke the unknown and have a little fun.
Now, we can’t have too much fun though; there is vital work to be done. In an age where AI has been integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, it is important that we maintain our ability to think critically, because despite what our digital overlords would have us believe, we don’t know everything about our world. It’s no secret that I’ve been a hesitant adopter of AI. Aside from summarizing my emails and making sure I see the most urgent correspondence, I try keeping it out of my life. As a society, we’ve gotten too lenient on the electronic brains, assuming everything we’re presented is a vetted fact. I never developed that trust, and rather than being someone who has to check the work of a machine, I do the research myself. Heck, I’m the one that went to school. I’ve put the effort into developing my knowledge and skills, so I want to be the one to applying it to the work.
That’s the mindset at the crux of what the world is facing today. Those pursuits embracing AI to advance scientific knowledge of building better materials, advancing sustainability, improving quality of life, the folks doing those things only have to read a report at the end of the day. Their know-how, education, and experience is reduced to button-pushing. They’ve lot their purpose, and so they’ve lost the imagination that drove their motivation.
Conversely, those groups using AI to build weapons and instruments of destruction, they’re doing so based on sadistic ideas and dreams. They’re still motivated to build bigger, better, and more destructive bombs or chemicals with consequences we’ve not yet fathomed, but they have. They’re feeding their dreams to the machine, and the machine is working overtime to help achieve them.
I know, I know, we’re not here for an AI conference, and I apologize for my diatribe at the dais. Purposely, however, I want to illustrate with that we here are people of science with purpose and motivation to uncover the things in our world that remain in the dark. Popular thinking is that we have the technology to map every inch of the world, but that’s not true. We haven’t tried to do that because nobody cares that it hasn’t been done, except for us, and we’re doing it, as I guess critics would say, the hard way. We’re rolling up our sleeves and sifting through the evidence of time and experience.
Now, I will admit, I’m a middling researcher at best, but I make up for it by being an incessant asker of questions. In that, I surprisingly found a kindred spirit in the machine. It happened in a moment of boredom. I sat at my desk staring at a blank screen. It was as empty as my mind. I had no direction or inclination of where to go next. What could I write? What should I investigate? Do I need to go back to school? What should I be reading? I was frustrated and lamented such an empty feeling, so I shouted to the heavens, ‘I need an idea!’
And the machine is always listening. In that moment, what turned out to be the greatest question I’ve ever looked to answer came from the machine and not my own gray matter.
Its synthetic voice resonated through my office, ‘It sounds like you need a new mystery to solve. Here are the ten most popular unsolved oceanic mysteries.’
Why did my AI eavesdropper interject without a direct prompt, and why did it jump to recommending mysteries specific to the ocean? I have no idea. It makes me uncomfortable trying to understand where the machine is and where it isn’t, and I’ve long since stopped trying to connect the dots for what information is presented and when. Despite that, it forced me to ask myself why should I only look to the universe above for the unknown? There’s still plenty to uncover beneath the surface of this planet. Despite what you may think or been told, we’ve not come anywhere close to peeling back the veil of what resides in the deepest, darkest recesses of our oceans.
Anyway, after I recovered from the shock of AI positing an insightful question, I decided to let the machine run with it. So I asked it to give me the oceanic locations with the most reported incidents of missing shipping vessels or unexplained phenomena. I made the mistake of not setting appropriate parameters for those results, so I ended up with a list where every fisherman’s tale counted as ‘unexplained phenomena’. You can imagine, it was an unwieldy and worthless collection of misdirection. According to that list, however, congratulations are in order for a fisherman from the Philippines who has reportedly caught no less than fifty sea dragons.
Alas, after several iterations, I finally had a list of five locations around the globe where ship or boat disappearances and, what I’ll call ‘sea monster’ sightings occurred at an abnormal density. Now, this list was constructed by the machine after pulling from all of humanity’s recorded history, so for the earliest reports, we’re getting more sea monsters than vanishing vessels, because who was going to be around to pinpoint where a ship disappeared, right? I came to this realization after spending weeks verifying the individual data points constructed by the machine, because again, I cannot bring myself to fully trust something that is serving up exactly what I want to see.
So, of those five locations, you should be thrilled to know that we’re sitting next to one right now. This beautiful and diverse island is a bastion of mystery and the supernatural, which naturally extends into the dark waters around it. One day, I hope to extensively explore here by land and sea. Then, of course there’s the storied Bermuda Triangle and its many mysteries. There’s the Pacific’s Devil’s Sea that could be the Bermuda’s sister. And, naturally, when we’re talking about oceanic mysteries, I’m sure most of us immediately think of the Mariana Trench. What we have explored of the trench continues birthing new discoveries, so we have to be excited about what it may still yield.
But I don’t want to talk about any of those, at least not today. That’s not where I’ve spent the past almost decade focusing my efforts. The North Atlantic Oceanic Society has a strict mandate for where we can direct our research, which excludes us from diving into the wonders of the Mariana or the Devil’s Sea, and with no intent to besmirch our hosts, the Icelandic government is electing to be protective of their natural splendor and myth. For the record, I fully respect and support that decision. Fortunately, one of the five locations shrouded in the unknown happens to be just off the east coast of the United States. Its presence is the answer to the question I volleyed around with the machine all those years ago.
If you delve into the Native American lore of that area, you will find the stretch of coast along what is the present-day state of Maine is also known as Devourer’s Passage, which is a modernized translation of Waters of the Hungry. Apparently, disappearances have occurred here for centuries and perhaps longer. Actual vessel disappearances are attributed to routes along this stretch of coast going back to the seventeen-hundreds, and descriptions of a massive sea beast patrolling the waters appear from present day accounts back through early native artwork.
Despite the plethora of disappearances and the inherent threat, this coastline remains a vital seaway for transport along the coast and as a gateway into the broader Atlantic. It would seem that no amount of evidence could persuade sailors that the events within Devourer’s Passage are anything more than stories told to young seamen to keep them alert and focused. Yet, my team attributes no fewer than ten vessel disappearances in the last ten years to this stretch of water. I’m not very good at math, but even I can decipher that those numbers equate to at least one disappearance per year. That, friends, is a lot.
You may be saying now, ‘That’s all very informative, doctor, but what have you found with all your research?’ Well, I wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t found anything exciting. We’ve actually discovered two boats. I can see it on your faces and agree, that is not itself very interesting. These boats, however, were not found at the bottom of the ocean but intact and afloat on the water, floating on the same waters that we are scanning every hour of every day. Two years ago, empty waves suddenly were not when the first vessel appeared. A year later, a second boat showed up on what had only moments earlier been vacant waters.
What is even more astounding is that the first boat that appeared is from the eighteen-hundreds, a granite hauler. More unbelievable, when it appeared, it was in perfect condition with its cargo intact. There is a sailing song common among Maine’s ports that goes, and apologies for my mediocre singing, it goes:
Mother’s Venture stout and true,
Vanished on the ocean blue.
No wreckage, mast, or sail be found,
On still nights her bell still sounds.
’Tis hope the lost shall reappear,
Til that day, hold memory dear.
With complete sincerity, I tell you that first ship was Mother’s Venture, which vanished with all crew in 1850.
As I said, a year later another boat appeared. This one was constructed in the later nineteen-hundreds and belonged to a family of lobster fishermen out of Bar Harbor, Maine. While its disappearance did not spur the creation of any songs, it devastated a community and a family still recovering from loss. Once again, this vessel, The Orange Nightingale was in perfect condition relative to its age. Unlike Mother’s Venture, however, what we found onboard The Orange Nightingale changed the course of our work and will soon change how you all view the world.”
Featured Image: Perlan, Reykjavik, Iceland (https://perlan.is/; Image: https://perlan.is/articles/complete-guide-to-the-northern-lights)
