In a padded white room, Senator Malthus sits at the bedside of Bill Adorno.

Bill whispers, but his voice is stronger, still not back to normal, but bettering. “We really stepped in it this time. We’re all fucked...fucked.”

“What happened, Bill?” Malthus asks. “What happened down there?”

“Julia,” Bill says, his eyes shifting around the room, looking for something that isn’t there. “Not what we thought. Not what we…”

“Focus up, Bill. Talk to me.”

His eyes flash back into focus as he looks at the suited man who had given him the Narwhal. “Sorry.” He shakes his head. “Mind’s a bit addled. She worms her way in like that, would be fascinating if it wasn’t so...abominable. I know the doctors say it’s psychosis, triggered by the stress and fear, whatever. I’ve read my chart. Bullshit, all of it. Well, the symptoms are real, but, the cause. Well, it’s less normal than that.”

“Tell me.”

“Julia did this, of course. We played the role she needed us to play and then, I don’t know, she toyed with us the way a child plays with their leftover food once they’re full.”

“What role did you play?”

“Oh, we freed her from her prison. They knew. The whales knew that she didn’t belong, so they kept her trapped there.” He laughs. “But then we showed up, played right into her hands. She killed the whales, and then all she had to do was wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“Freedom. You!” Bill shouts, but takes a deep breath and calms himself down. “Sorry, not you. The rescue team. But it’s not their fault. Inevitable that they’d come for us. They had no way of knowing what they’d unleash. We should’ve listened to Jess when we had the chance.”

“The girl...I’m sorry it came to that.”

Bill looks down, stares at his bedsheets.

Malthus clears his throat. “You said it unleashed something. Julia, right? There were no images recovered from the ship. No data, nothing.”

Bill bites on a clenched fist. “We never saw her. But...you know that she’s there. You know! And she eats away at you. When we first crashed, we thought if we stayed quiet--” He chuckles. “It was already too late.”

“Bill…”

“I know!” Bill shouts again. “I know, it’s madness! But this...thing, she tore us apart inside. And she’ll do it again, wherever she is, wherever she goes.” He punches his pillow. “Can’t do a damned thing about it. None of us can. What have we done...what have we…”

Malthus stands and exits the room as Bill’s speech turns to a muttering under his breath. A man in a white coat, the doctor on duty, stands on the other side of the doorway, waiting. He closes the door as the senator exits.

“What the hell happened down there?” Malthus asks.

The doctor shakes his head. “They’ve all suffered some degree of psychosis, some worse than others, but all pretty severe. All that time down there, under the ice. No lights and no hope for rescue. The radiation sickness only amplified their suffering, gave physical form to their mental torment. One by one, it broke them.”

“The man’s talking about a monster.”

The doctor nods. “Not altogether unusual in this situation. Hallucinations caused by built-up stress and prolonged exposure to the dark, coupled with strong denial of their own actions, a desire to pin it all on something else. People died down there, some from sickness, but others not. Killing another person, cannibalism. Extreme circumstances that--whether or not they were all in on it--can cause some pretty extreme mental conditions. The brain is quite skilled at coping with that level of trauma. To them, what they talk about is reality, it’s actually what they remember happening.”

“Christ,” Malthus says.

“Strange to think about, isn’t it? The brain creates monsters to avoid confronting a reality that’s somehow worse than that.”

“That’s a bit harsh.”

“Sorry, you’re right. What happened was a tragedy. That’s my evaluation though. Julia is nothing more than a fantasy, a monster created by their own inner demons.”

“Thanks for your help, Doc.”

Senator Malthus walks to his car, returning to work so he can deal with the PR shitshow that is the crash of the NOAAS Narwhal. As he does so, a deep-sea hydrophone array in the Pacific picks up a deep groaning sound that lasts for approximately fifteen seconds. The sound is filed away as an iceberg running aground somewhere on the Antarctic coast, nothing more.