Oceanus towered before us—a relic from another age, washed ashore in another world. The remains of a lone anchor leg, acting like a bicycle kickstand, kept the giant sphere oriented on its vertical axis.

The habitat’s appearance was gruesome. Scientists had chemically rendered and treated the aero gel skin to remain impervious to the prolonged effects of being submerged for extended periods of time, but even the most imaginative among them could not have foreseen this.

Time had been both cruel and innovative. At one point the entire lower bowl had been sealed in a concretelike layer of hard corals. As we walked around the sphere, ABE identified colonies of bottlebrush, bubble, and staghorn coral, each having multiplied in a variety of shapes and sizes. As the previous coral colonies had died, new ones had grown on top of their limestone skeletons, creating a living habitat for hundreds of species of fish, sponges, and bottom-dwelling marine invertebrates.

At least that was how ABE described Oceanus’s existence—up until the moment the coral reef had become so heavy it had collapsed one of the ship’s anchor arms. The impact with the seafloor had cracked the reef; the subsequent destruction of its remaining three arms and the rolls that followed—witnessed by yours truly—having crushed and shed major sections of coral from Oceanus’s skin, so that the lower bowl of the habitat now appeared like the bottom half of a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle with sizeable chunks of its pieces missing.

The upper bowl seemed forged from an entirely different past.

According to ABE, Antarctica’s melting ice sheet would have eventually exposed Oceanus’s upper hemisphere to the sun. As the sea warmed, first algae then sea grass had taken root, no doubt feeding the sea life living in the coral reef below. In a marvelous symbiotic relationship with its environment, Oceanus had in essence become an ecosystem both outside its walls and within.

While anchored underwater that ecosystem had flourished; on land the vegetation had quickly dried out and died. Clusters of dead plant life now hung from the ship’s upper bowl like long tufts of green-brown hair on an aging human skull. Every few minutes another dried-out cluster would drop off the habitat, adding to a ring of algae and seaweed piled five feet high in the sand.

There was only one possible entrance into Oceanus—the egress chamber from which I had made my escape. I circled the titanic sphere twice before Oscar gestured at the sealed hatch—as if the clever creature knew its purpose.

Reading my thoughts, I suppose it did.