Dear you
My letter about the beached whales raised more questions than answers so I'm writing this to warn you: Stay away!
I get that making contact with the few thousand zombies who made their home in the Mariana Trench would be world changing, but trust me all you still-breathing people, that will not end well for you, or your equipment.
Your drones and diving bells will fail because they don't want contact; and your divers will die because we do.
With "they" I don't mean those old zombies sitting immobile for months in what I call the Main Moan, nor do I refer to us young ones who still go up and about to refresh our cemetery signs and scavenge supplies.
While we zombies are apex predators, we are not the most dangerous entities you have to worry about down here. Luckily, the ones you do have to worry about avoid contact, so I'll get to them next. Before them, let me explain why you have to first worry about us zombies.
We are not that many, only a few thousand, but we are in every meaning of the word, super human. It comes with the pressure. As the saying goes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and since we are already undead, the enormous hydrostatic pressure that causes widespread necrosis and cell lysis in living tissue, just forces our molecules and cells closer together, making us a little stronger every day.
According to one paper on the subject I tried reading while up scavenging, the immense hydrostatic pressures down here "alters tertiary and quaternary protein structures". I didn't understand most that paper but I can tell you what "a forced decrease in molecular and cellular volume" looks like down here.
It looks a lot like a garden gnome.
Go ahead. Laugh.
It is what I did when I met my first really old zombie. Ur is what it calls itself and it barely comes up to my knees. Ur is an "it" because sex is the first thing to go when you die and after a few millenia down here having your body squashed by the full weight of the Pacific Ocean, your average human body ends up in a size best described as "gnome".
Ur just needs a red hat and a little fishing rod to get a role as extra in the next Gnome sequel.
I was only laughing on the inside at this thought but I swallowed even my mental smirk when Ur picked up a fist-sized metallic nodule and proceeded to squash it like a stress ball.
That was how I learned that zombies become stronger as they get smaller. Think hydraulic yellow machine strong. Which is why the really old zombies still call submarinses and deep sea diving bells “lunch”.
I call divers "liquorice"... a bit rubbery on the outside, but with a delicious salty-sweet taste on the inside, once you start chewing.
See, small as human brains are, it is still our best-tasting source of the glucose that keeps as sentient. Whale brains are bigger than human brains, but in taste, whale brains are salted pork while human brains are honey-glazed fat, ready to melt on your tongue.
But I digress. Back to them who don't want to make contact yet.
They are small, biped reptilians who have been quietly evolving in air pockets under the ocean in the 66 million years that passed after most of the other dinosaurs went extinct.
All dinosaur survivors have this in common, their ancestors could hide underwater while things burned on land. The ancestors of these theropods found large air pockets, and when their fellow survivors went back topside after the smoke had cleared, they stayed. They found more air pockets which they turned into nurseries while the adults lived increasingly ambitious amphibious lives as far from the surface as possible. Obviously, only the cleverest survived to breed.
Now fast forward many, many millions years later, to when the first zombies discovered that cold and hydrostatic pressure are best at keeping our bodies from decaying.
Which is how we zombies and the very clever reptiles met up in the Mariana Trench. For the shy reptiles, no place is further from the surface than this deep gash in Earth's crust; and for us undead, no place offers icier cold and a more comfortable condensing pressure.
We meet the clever reptiles only rarely though, when they open their hatches to flit to the top in their flying saucers; or to go on a walkabout to gather more of the ancient polymetallic nodules that litter the ocean bed, the same nodules that Ur likes to use as stress balls.
We never speak. Instead, we relate with them much like you do with other intelligent animals. For the little reptiles certainly are intelligent – perhaps the cleverest species on Earth. But it is a cleverness as alien as that of any octopus, with mimicking minds as quick as any of the corvids and the cherry on top -- they are more telephatic than even elephants.
Yours,
Zohm Bieh
