The Abyss / Season 1, Episode 9
Children of the Deep
THE ABYSS Season 1, Episode 9: "Children of the Deep" --- [CHAPTER 1: THE NEXT GENERATION] Elena Chen was born three years after the entity's withdrawal. She'd never known a world without it—without the knowledge that something ancient and vast lived at the bottom of the ocean, watching humanity with patient curiosity. For her, the entity wasn't a traumatic first contact. It was just part of reality, like gravity or sunlight or the internet. Something you learned about in school, heard about on the news, occasionally thought about late at night when the world felt too small for all the questions it contained. Her mother had been famous, once. The woman who said no. The ambassador who negotiated partnership. Now Mira Chen was sixty-three years old, retired from diplomatic service, living in a small house on a hillside in Northern California, as far from the ocean as she could get without leaving the state. "You can't go," Mira said, when Elena told her about the proposal. "It's too dangerous." "You went. Multiple times." "That was different. I was negotiating. You want to—what? Visit? Like it's a tourist destination?" "I want to understand," Elena said. "All my life, I've heard about the entity. Read your reports. Studied the research. But I've never experienced it. I don't know what it feels like...