Deep Sea Betrayal

Zachary's voice cracked through the comm as he spotted my movements on the monitor, finally betraying a hint of panic. "Carter, what are you doing with that cutting torch? Put it down!"

Even though he was an outsider to this line of work, he knew exactly what that cable meant.

I pressed the plasma cutter's nozzle firmly against the main load-bearing cable and spoke slowly and coldly through the comm, my voice cutting through 300 meters of icy seawater.

"Summer, Zachary... Did you forget that the lifeline of this old diving bell is all out here? Since you love the deep sea so much, and since you think livestreaming down here is so entertaining, why don't you stay down here forever and enjoy the scenery with me?"

The comms instantly erupted into chaos.

Summer's shrill scream tore through the speaker, her voice cracking from sheer terror. "Carter! Don't you dare! This is a live broadcast! Millions of people are watching! If you do anything crazy, you'll be a murderer! You'll go to prison!"

I let out a bitter laugh, feeling the increasingly violent spasms in my lungs. "Prison? You're already trying to kill me, and you think I'm afraid of prison time? In my current state, even if I took you both out, it would just be written off as an accident caused by deep-sea psychosis. That's the cause of death you already picked out for me, isn't it?"

I let out a bitter laugh, feeling the increasingly violent spasms in my lungs. "Carter, stop trying to scare us! The diving bell's glass is military-grade bulletproof, and that cheap torch of yours can't cut through it! Get away from there right now, or I'll kill you when I get back up!"

"Who said anything about cutting the glass?" I said as I stared through the porthole like I was looking at a couple of corpses, my eyes ice-cold.

"What I'm cutting is your lifeline: the cable!"

The instant I finished speaking, I slammed the cutting torch to maximum power without hesitation.

They both shouted, "No!"

"Carter! Honey! I was wrong! Please don't cut it! I'll open the door! I'll open it right now!" Summer finally realized things were spiraling out of control as she wailed through the comm, frantically pounding on the inner hatch.

She had forgotten that Zachary had welded the door shut with a blowtorch, and there was no way to pry it open in time.

Zachary broke down, too, screaming, "Stop! I don't want to be a director anymore! Carter, I'll give you all the money back! Just stop!"

Under the searing heat of the plasma flame, the load-bearing cable began to melt and snap rapidly.

A loud crack echoed, and the warm yellow lights inside the diving bell went out instantly as all the communication cables and oxygen lines were severed at once.

Accompanied by Summer's utterly desperate screams and Zachary's hysterical curses, the heavy diving bell, now stripped of both the mother ship's support and its buoyancy, plummeted rapidly into the pitch-black abyss of the trench below.

The static in my earpiece cut off abruptly, and the world fell into deathly silence.