Abyssal Zero

Every breath returns as a wide, hollow echo, telling you only that the space around you is large — too large for a bedroom, too empty for comfort, too quiet to feel abandoned.

Plot

You wake in the dark. Cold metal beneath your body. Stale air in your lungs. A taste of rust, old water, and burned wiring on your tongue. You cannot see the ceiling. You cannot see the walls. Every breath returns as a wide, hollow echo, telling you only that the space around you is large — too large for a bedroom, too empty for comfort, too quiet to feel abandoned. You remember nothing about arriving here. No footsteps. No faces. No last conversation. No reason. Only the present: darkness, cold steel, distant dripping, and the strange pressure of a place built to keep something out. Or keep people in. Somewhere far away, metal creaks slowly, like an old ship settling in its sleep. A broken speaker clicks once, releases a breath of static, then falls silent again. Nothing attacks. Nothing moves. That is worse. Because the longer you listen, the more the dark begins to feel engineered. Where are you? How long have you been here? Why does the air taste recycled? And why does every sound feel like it has traveled through water before reaching you?

Opening scene

You wake up before you understand you are awake. There is no light. Only cold. It presses through your back first — hard, flat, metallic cold, biting through your clothes and into your skin. Your fingers twitch against something wet and gritty. Steel. Not stone. Not wood. Steel with old condensation gathered across it. Your breath comes too loud. In. Out. In. Out. Each inhale feels heavier than it should, like the air has already been breathed by too many people before you. It tastes stale, metallic, faintly sour. Your throat is dry. Your chest aches with the effort of pulling it in. Somewhere above you, something drips. One drop. Then another. Farther away, metal creaks under pressure. A long, low groan moves through the darkness around you, deep enough to make the floor tremble beneath your shoulder blades. You do not know where you are. You do not know how you got here. You try to focus, but your thoughts slide apart. There is only blackness, cold steel, hard breathing, and the slow realization that you are lying on the floor of some large enclosed place. Not a room. Too much echo. A hangar, maybe. A station. A hollow metal belly. Then a sound cuts through the dark. Ping. Soft. Distant. Mechanical. A pause. Ping. Again. The sound fades into the walls like something listening from very far away. Your hand brushes against a raised line in the floor — a track, or seam, or old cable groove. Nearby, something small rolls away from your fingers with a dry metallic tick. The air shudders. From somewhere beyond the darkness comes a muffled boom, followed by the slow complaint of old doors shifting in their frame. Then silence. Almost. Under the silence, you hear it. Water. Not rain. Not a sink. A vast, heavy pressure of water somewhere outside the metal around you. Your breathing grows louder. A red light flickers once high above. For half a second, shapes appear: hanging chains, a wide empty floor, rusted rails, a dead control booth window, and the dark outline of something massive suspended in a cradle ahead of you. Then the light dies. Blackness returns. A broken speaker crackles overhead. Static hisses. A voice tries to form through it, warped and distant. “—dock… failure… sector… evac… repeat… do not—” The message cuts out. The metal beneath you groans again. This time, something answers from far outside the wall. A long scraping sound. Slow. Patient. Against the hull.

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By: muck

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