After a minute he shifted his gaze to the flow of northbound traffic. The taxi fleet was fairly homogenous. In New York City only a handful of makes and models were certified for medallions. They all blended together to the casual eye.
Grigor watched the traffic.
“Almadi shabah, al mustakbal hilmun,” he said under his breath in Gulf Arabic.
The past is a ghost, the future a dream.
He stood there watching. Thoughts raced through his mind like the rafts of yellow cabs barreling along between the trucks, buses and passenger cars on Tenth Avenue.
After a long moment, he nodded imperceptibly to himself and picked up his pace, mingling with the crowd on the street, heading downtown.
The North Pacific
Li Quang had expected to sit on the ocean bottom for six hours, but he was ready to surface in just over four. The operation had gone off without any technical hitches, cutting the length of the dive significantly.
He credited its ease of success to his own preparation and the DSV’s advanced onboard technologies, especially its eight dexterous, tentacle-like gripper arms. Bionically modeled after the limbs of an octopus, their artificial muscles were made of soft, contractile polymers that allowed them to elongate, curl and even change shape, replicating the creature’s agile reach and grasp. Generations removed from traditional robotic claws, they were optimized for precision clasping and manipulation.
Targeted, delicate, precise, it was the definition of a surgical procedure. Under his careful control, the six-foot tentacles stretched out over the trench, threaded down into it and pulled up the cable segment with minimal disturbance of the sand cover. He had practiced his splice, and the damper’s installation, multiple times in an augmented reality training room, using physical versions of the grippers in a virtual undersea environment. The simulation had reproduced the conditions under which he would be working in accurate detail, even duplicating the range and brightness of his halon lights.
Everything done now—the cable neatly laid back to the trench, the trench refilled with silt, the submersible’s tentacles coiled in against its metal curvature—he again typed a message to his support team and then launched into his careful preparations for surfacing.
Minutes later, he activated his thrusters. The craft trembled as it left the bottom and then yawed and trembled some more, gradually stabilizing, climbing slowly but steadily against the almost unimaginable pressure bearing down from countless thousands of tons of seawater.
Li settled back in the pilot’s seat, doing his best to get comfortable for the ascent.
It was a long distance up to the ship.