But I am also the dinghy. I am aware of the water all around, pressing down on me. I feel the darkness and the cold. I am weak from my ebbing power supply.

This is not the kind of back-and-forth telepathic contact I have with Gisco. It’s less about communication and more about a deep symbiotic sharing of knowledge and abilities for practical purposes.

The Yellow Submarine is not alive. It has no ability to feel joy or sadness, no soul. I can’t tease it the way I tease Gisco and expect it to crack jokes back at me.

At the same time, it’s also not just a machine. It has a narrow but definite sense of self-awareness that seems close to human consciousness. It doesn’t fear death as a great unknown, but if the water pressure crushed it, it understands that it would not be able to function or serve anymore. It knows it would become a useless piece of river-bottom debris. That prospect disturbs it in a way that feels oddly similar to my own greatest fears.

No, it desperately wants to function and to serve. So it allows me to merge with it. Welcomes me.

I complained that the people who built it didn’t include an operating manual, but now I see that’s not true. This dinghy is its own operating manual. It has a comprehensive knowledge of its own abilities, which it’s eager to share with me, now that we’re pals.

Jack Danielson cannot see in darkness, so lights blink on, not because I flipped a switch but because the craft understood that there was a need for more illumination. We understood that need together. Just as we need to get moving, and so the sub rocks once or twice and then we power forward, out of the muck, and begin a journey northward.

Now we’re moving in the right direction. Sharing a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Solving problems together. Sub and boy. Boy in sub. Boy running sub. Sub showing boy what to do each step of the way.

Want to go faster? Shall we turn? Need it to be a bit warmer inside? No problemo. Done.

Who’s in charge? Who’s more dependent? Who’s smarter? Where does the power lie in this complex mingling of mind and machine? I can’t say.

But I do know the answers are not simple. Things have changed a lot from the day a caveman picked up a piece of flint and chipped it to make a tool. Now the tool invites the man inside for a shared experience in problem solving.

We’re fifty feet beneath the surface of the Hudson. Moving northward at ten knots. Lights kept low to avoid surface detection.