Scuba Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Derek gave underwater tours of lost cities. His favorite one was
the former subway tunnels tour. There was something fascinating about swimming through
the tunnels of what had once been one of the greatest mass transit systems the
world had ever known. He liked the grid system. It was orderly. It made sense.
He liked to highlight the history and really tried to explain just what an
amazing thing it really had been. It was important. He wanted people to
understand that it had been important. There had been underground travel of
some sort for nearly one hundred fifty years. There had been experimentations
in technologies and magnets and even anti-gravity propulsion. The tunnels had
seen horses and coal and electricity and pneumatic propulsion. Billions of
people had traveled the tunnels over the years. It had been the most important
travel link in one of the most important cities in history.
And now it was all underwater.
Derek marveled at its greatness. He marveled at its loss.
Something so important, and now it was gone. People didn’t understand that. He
wanted them to understand. When he was a young boy he had ridden the trains
before they had been lost to the water. He still remembered that ride. Not a
lot of the people he gave tours were even alive before the floods. None of them
knew what he knew. He had ridden the subway and had fallen in love with the
system. It went under the city, under the ocean. It was a symbol of all human
achievement. It was what was great about man. Man dug holes under their cities
and turned the dirt into something marvelous. Derek knew he could never do
something so marvelous, but he knew he could honor it. It might be dead and
gone, but its memory could be honored. That’s what he tried to do anyway. He
gave tours and tried to show people what man could do.
The hurricanes came and the water had risen and the city had
flooded. The tunnels were below sea level. They never stood a chance. Even if
the pumps had kept working, there was no way to save them. Even if the city was
recovered, the cost of recovery and time it would take was extremely
prohibitive. Still, people found a way to make money, even off a bad situation.
Derek loved the water. He loved the tunnels. Giving scuba tours seemed like a
natural and obvious choice. Plenty of tourists wanted a chance to see a city
under the ocean. There was something horrific and romantic about it. It was
loss and it was frozen in one spectacular moment. It was a perfect tourist
location.
Derek was saving up his money to buy a submarine. He was not a
rich man, but he wanted to own a submarine. He thought it would help with the
travel and the tours and would give him another moneymaking option. He also had
friends who had friends that had heard rumors that certain investment groups
were interested in building new underground cities for people to live in. They
might be pods or biospheres and there was even a plan for an inverted skyscraper.
That was Derek’s favorite idea – a reverse skyscraper in a city where the old
ones still stuck defiantly out of the water. Derek had a hope that someone soon
might see fit to recover some of the tunnels. If there were going to be new
underwater buildings, there might be the need for new underwater travel. If so,
then Derek wanted to be ready. He wanted to be first in line with his
submarines. Perhaps the submarine would be the new taxi. If so, then he was
ready to be rich. Derek knew it was a pipe dream. He knew it was a long shot.
But he had his dream. For now, he gave scuba tours. But tomorrow? Tomorrow the
whole world could be open again and he would have so much more.
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