🦺 Submarine Cable Networks

Welcome to the 27th edition of Safe For Work. Today we expand the theme of safety underwater and in outer space.

Submarine cable networks power transmission to oil rigs and carry power from offshore windfarms into power stations. They carry 90% of intercontinental data communication. These cable networks are unseen to most of us, but play an important role in our lives. What happens when communications break down? The unseen becomes known. This is true on a micro level too. Our unspoken habits and ways of thought often surface when communication is not flowing smoothly and gently.

SCORTCHED EARTH

“I’m sorry.”

In the morning, my elbow knocks the orange juice off the edge of the table as I’m heading for the door.

The place that was called “Los Angeles” before the road signs all melted was the first to be hit. It happened in the dead of night-- 1:12 AM. A hundred miles to the East, a woman on the phone with her father in New Haven, who isn’t going to make it long enough for her to book and catch a flight, wonders from her balcony why the sun is suddenly setting again out of nowhere-- or is it just rising at the wrong time, in the wrong direction?

It’s your fault for leaving the glass so close to the edge. It’s my fault for not looking where I was going. It’s your fault for not warning me. It’s my fault, anyways, because I never listen-- even if you’d warned me, it wouldn’t have changed anything. It’s your fault for always deciding that you think you know me so well. It’s my fault for being so knowable. The orange-juice spreads across the floor, seeping into the cracks between the boards.

Moscow. Beijing. Boston. Chicago. Berlin. New Delhi. Cairo. Paris. Lima. Toronto.

“I didn’t mean it.”

Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- one right after the other. Someone with a sense of humor. Someone with something that they like to tell other people is a sense of humor.

I slam the door behind me with enough force to shake thousands of miles of undersea telecommunications cables. You push open the little mailbox flap and shout after that isn’t that just like me?-- but isn’t it just like you?

You can never leave well enough alone.

After about three hours, so many bombs have been dropped back and forth that all life on the surface is scientifically over and done with across the next few years; whoever is sitting at the buttons, wherever they are, decides, just the same way that you or I or anyone would, to systematically glass every other square inch of the planet, also. It’s all done for, anyways. Might as well fill out the coloring book in the last few minutes. There’s a thorough satisfaction to it.

Isn’t that so much like us? Never leaving well enough alone.

I come back and argue for another hour-- nevermind being late for work.

I pace left and right. You throw a potted plant at the wall.

You start to cry. I stomp out of the room because I’m done talking to you, maybe forever, and then I come stomping straight back in again because I’ve thought of something else to say, I don’t want to live with the idea that I haven’t said it.

The craters are still glowing even now at temperatures that only the satellites can still see. They’re still singing in tones that only sound like frantic clicks when you try to translate them-- the chittering of the insects that scientists and also everyone were always chatting in trivia about, how they would survive something like this. The cockroaches would inherit the Earth. And eat what?

Dust and glass. Things that used to be trees-- or look like they used to be trees-- or at least, look more that way than any of the other things you can pretend to call “left over” if you want to.

The next-doors hardly react. They’ve become used to this. They close the blinds. They put on some music.

The deserts never noticed anything at all. Neither did the thousands of miles of undersea telecommunications cables-- what do they ever notice? Fathoms of water shielding them from burst after burst after burst of poisonous fake daylight. They’re beautiful on a map, even now. Loose strands. Untethered neurons, weakly drifting in the deep. Disconnected old connections-- the lines don’t come from anywhere, anymore, and they don’t reach anywhere, anymore.

Isn’t that funny?-- nothing left between us-- and that’s the only thing left of us at all.

The scaffolding of the idea of just maybe trying to talk to each other.

What were we saying back and forth in those last few hours?

“Please don’t do this.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I’m begging you.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“Please stop.”

They still work. There’s no reason, really, that they wouldn’t. If there was someone to talk-- and someone to talk to. The satellites haven’t been as lucky; radiation from the sun and even the Earth has gone burrowing through all their fine circuitry, sending volts and amps and startles into all the places they were never supposed to go. Sparks of a star and a smoldering world, continuing to just kill and kill and kill.

The orange juice was my fault. I know that. I say it was yours-- I’ll never say different.

A spark-- it leaps off from the geiger-crackling pyre of Sao Paolo in particular, and tunnels its way like particles do through the dirt and through the air and through the fact that you can just never be wrong, can you, Valerie, and through the briny sea-water down to the double-insulated midpoint of what used to be a conversation.

We argue about whose foot it was which came clattering down halfway along the row of dominoes-- a pulse, a wave of problems in each direction. I forgot to grab the milk on the way home-- cause and effect?-- I forgot to grab the milk because my thoughts were distracted by what you’d said to me-- about me-- on our usual phone-call during my lunch break. Without the milk, you can’t start on the batter for the brownies for tomorrow’s PTA meeting-- you can never rely on me, that’s what you said at lunch, or did that actually come afterwards? Does it matter?

“I wish I could take it back.”

The pulse travels and travels until it reaches the frayed ends of our patience and then it sputters away into the murky seawater. What used to be London. What used to be New York. A message for both, from the decay of a cesium-137 nucleus-- nobody is listening anymore, and isn’t that just the thing?

A ghost-signal down a dead nerve.

“Let’s start over.”

A spark from nowhere, really. Nothing to say; nothing is said.

And then nothing.

Maybe someday, another spark, again.

“I don’t want things to end this way.”

And then nothing, again.

See you next week as we continue to explore underwater and outerspace, specifically robotics. Stay safe.