Reborn as a Spaceship

PoV: Bob (real name: unpronounceable) – Aquasapien Engineer

Working with humans has been… educational. Exhausting at times, but enjoyable. Mostly.

Stewie, the loud one with wild ideas and not nearly enough experience to back them up, spent the most time by my side. He was always full of questions and most of them were relevant, some completely ridiculous, Yet I found his energy oddly infectious. His companion, the smaller female human, Mira, often trailed behind him like a shadow with a sweet tooth. She seemed to enjoy teasing him almost as much as she enjoyed watching him trip over his own tongue.

And I mean that literally.

The turning point in our working relationship occurred during a heated discussion about ballast tank placement; I lightly reminded Stewie of his previous question about whether I "would grill up nicely." The color drained from his face. Then came the muttering. Then the slap to the back of the head from Mira, sharp and immediate, like a training correction. Just like the old human male used as well. Fascinating. Social punishment delivered through casual violence. Their culture was chaotic.

Still, I couldn't deny that this job had been more rewarding than most. Any material I requested, any rare alloy, or obscure tool all I had to do was just mention it to Stewie, and a day or two later, it would appear. At first, I thought he was hoarding resources, but no,it was Laia. The artificial intelligence that wasn't quite artificial. She was the one arranging the requests. There was a system at work here, one I couldn't yet comprehend.

Of course, it was Lazarus who eventually reeled me in.

"You're not here to live out your deep-sea fantasies," he told me, appearing in the workshop one evening as I was testing pressure resistance in a hull module. "I need a functioning vessel. Not a mobile palace with all of your dream ideas. Keep it practical."

That had stung a little. But I understood. So I stripped out a few of the more "ambitious" features and focused on performance. The final product was something I could be proud of. It was a streamlined submersible shaped loosely after my own body, but compact enough to dive deeper than anything I'd ever built before.

And then, the real prize: permission to swim.

Wayfarer, one of the ship's keepers, but was also a child of a sentient planet, which makes no sense provided all the necessary atmospheric data. The water was warm. Strange, but not unpleasant. My race could swim in it with proper filtration. They even built me a tailored exosuit to protect against microbial contamination. I'd have to record a glowing review. Truly five-star client treatment.

The water embraced me the moment I slid from the hatch. Warm, almost unnaturally so for a planet this young. The filtration system in my suit vibrated gently, adjusting for salinity and trace minerals, but there was little biological noise. Just water and depth. It was pure in a way my home oceans hadn't been in millions of years.

I swam alongside the vessel, feeling the subtle shifts in current created by its movement. The hull flexed in that clever adaptive way I had engineered with triangular panels rippling with the pressure, becoming denser the deeper we sank. It was beautiful to see it work in situ, not just in simulation. Laia was piloting from within, her avatar relaying data back to The Arbiter in neat, precise packets. I could hear her voice in the comms, calm and focused, detailing pressure readings and system status with clinical clarity. I offered the occasional comment, but mostly, I watched.

I was the first to swim in these waters. The first to taste them, to drift through their silence. My people would be jealous. I was already planning how I'd phrase it in the next deepwater council meeting. "Yes, of course, I swam on Newwater Prime. What? No, it's not named that yet, but I figured someone had to."

Dimensional shifting was the next test. Laia activated the system while we hovered at a depth of just under three kilometres. One moment the vessel was in front of me, the next it flickered, and the bridge disappeared, and reappeared 30 seconds later, without any warning. I flinched, instinctively curling around myself.

"Apologies," came Laia's voice. "There was a delay. Calibration issue."

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"No," I said, composing myself. "Just… not used to teleporting submarines." I paused. "No one is."

Because no one had this kind of technology. Not the Alliance. Not even my people, and we pioneered every known aquatic system from three spiral arms outward. This wasn't evolution. This was leapfrog innovation built on secrets.

And the trench below us sang to me. I needed to go down there myself.

They had mapped it already but I didn't believe them. It was 47 kilometers deep, too deep for a planet this size. It shouldn't exist. But it did.

I'd even designed a pressurized tank module to ride inside the vessel for a full descent. My suit wouldn't hold at that depth, but inside the tank, I'd be safe. Yet they wouldn't let me go. Laia hesitated. Stewie avoided the topic. Even Wayfarer deflected with philosophical musings.

I didn't understand why that was until Kel visited.

He arrived at my suite, dressed casually, red hair slightly damp as if he'd just finished exercising. "Poker?" he asked without introduction, gesturing to a console already lit with the game interface.

I had no idea what this poker was, but he explained it to me.

Swimming around my room I answered. " So It's a game of deception?"

Kel smiled. "That's one way to put it. But it also tells you how someone thinks."

We played. Or rather, I played and watched him watch me. The game itself was simple with patterns, probabilities and calculated risk. But Kel… he wasn't here for the game. He was studying me. Reading me. Trying to understand what kind of creature I was. Whether I'd talk. Whether I'd sell what I'd seen. They had trusted me up to this point, so I knew there must have been something big I was missing.

"I'm not a threat," I said finally, folding a hand that would've won the pot. "If that's what you're worried about."

He nodded slowly, setting his cards down. "It's not that simple. What's down there its… If you go to the bottom, you'll see something you can't unsee. You'll know something that could get you killed. Not by us. But by the kinds of people who watch for this kind of thing."

I stared at him, letting the silence stretch until the moment cracked. "Then I suppose I'll die knowing."

Kel exhaled through his nose. Not a sigh. More like acceptance. "Laia will take you. I'll clear it with Lazarus."

And just like that, I had what I wanted. Not because I demanded it. But because I'd passed whatever test they'd set for me. Maybe the game. Maybe something self.

The next morning, I was in the tank module as we launched. Laia was at the controls, calm as ever, her expression unreadable. As we descended into the dark once more.

We sank slowly at first. Smooth descent. External pressure climbed, but the adaptive hull responded exactly as it should. The scales along the sub's exterior shifted and folded, hardening like a deep-sea creature's own hide. Below us stretched nothing but darkness. No life. No structures. Only silence and pressure and the quiet song of new water waiting to be claimed.

At 20 kilometres, I began humming. At 30, I sang full-throated to myself. No one else could hear it, not unless they had the instruments to pick up subsonic reverberations but the water listened. I was the first of my kind to swim in this ocean and to go so deep. I would carry that pride.

Then came the shield tests.

At 35 kilometres, Laia activated the pressure bleeds regular internal shielding designed to distribute pressure that would otherwise crush us. I could see the strain it placed on the vessel's frame, but the structure held. At 40 kilometres, the dimensional shield came online. The field flickered across the hull like liquid light, shimmering through my tank's window as we passed into the twilight zone of the trench.

Then we saw it.

Blue crystals.

At first, I thought they were natural formations or some form of mineral extrusion but when the scanner pinged, the resonance was unmistakable.

"Is that… Telk?" I asked, my words translating into soft, harmonic pulses.

Laia's avatar hovered near the viewport. "No. Or rather… not entirely. The samples show 0.5% Telk. The rest is structurally similar, but inert. Non-superconductive. This isn't refined Telk. Not yet."

I didn't respond. I couldn't. A chill passed through me not from the water, but from something older. A feeling I hadn't experienced in decades.

I was going to be disappeared.

I knew the signs. I'd worked with enough governments, enough shadow corporations, enough sovereign planets hiding secrets they didn't want unearthed. This wasn't just a lucky mineral find. It was a secret. A galaxy-scale secret.

And now I'd seen it.

They were being polite. Generous. But I could feel it, I was done for but I wouldn't take it back.

To be the first Aquasapien to dive this deep. To breathe in the warm water of a planet still forming itself.

It was worth it.

"Bob," Laia said softly, turning toward me. "You understand what you've seen?"

"Yes."

"You understand what it means?"

I nodded slowly in the darkened tank. "It means I was right to come. But now I know too much"

She looked at me. "Relax, we aren't like what you're thinking"

I wasn't sure if she could read my body language but I don't think I would relax.

As we rose through the water, I watched the blue crystals fade into the shadows below. I felt something stir inside me it was an old instinct, buried deep in the bones of my kind. A song that hadn't been sung in generations.

Curiosity.

And just a little fear.

But I knew, somehow, that I would be back. The trench had called me once.

It would call again. This was just the beginning of my life on this planet.