The Flock / Season 1, Episode 2
The Depth
EPISODE 2: THE DEPTH
CHAPTER 1: NIGHTMARES
You wake up screaming for the third time this week.
The sheets are soaked with sweat. Your hands are shaking. In the darkness of your Aberdeen apartment, you can still see them—the shapes in the water, the wrong-angled limbs, the mirror eyes that reflected something older than humanity.
The singing fades slowly, but it never quite stops. It's always there now, a background hum at the edge of your hearing. Sometimes you think you're imagining it. Sometimes you know you're not.
Your phone says 3:47 AM. The same time you've woken every night since Neptune Seven.
Six months. Six months since seventy-one survivors drifted into Aberdeen harbor, silent and hollow-eyed. Six months since the official inquiry concluded "structural failure" and closed the case. Six months since you signed a non-disclosure agreement worth more money than you'd earn in a decade.
Six months of nightmares.
You get up and walk to the window. Aberdeen sleeps below, orange streetlights pooling on wet pavement. Beyond the city, invisible in the darkness, the North Sea stretches toward the horizon.
They're out there. Somewhere. Waiting.
Your laptop sits on the desk, its screen dark. You shouldn't open it. You should go back to bed. You should try to sleep, try to forget, try to pretend you didn't see what you saw.
You open it anyway.
CHAPTER 2: THE RESEARCH
The folder on your desktop is called "Tax Documents 2023."
Inside it are forty-seven files that have nothing to do with taxes. Geological surveys. Seismic readings. Internal corporate communications you shouldn't have access to. The things you copied from Neptune Seven's servers in the hours before everything went wrong.
You've read them all. Dozens of times. Looking for patterns. Looking for explanations. Looking for anything that might make sense of the thing that rose from the deep.
The surveys show it clearly—a cavity beneath the oil reservoir. Massive. Anomalous. Unexplained. The corporate communications show it even more clearly—executives aware of the anomaly, pushing drilling forward anyway, prioritizing extraction over investigation.
But there's something else. Something you only noticed last week.
Neptune Seven wasn't the first.
You found references in the communications. Other platforms. Other anomalies. Other "incidents" that got buried in paperwork and silence. Neptune Three in 1987. Neptune Five in 1994. Neptune Six in 2008.
All of them drilling in the same general area. All of them suffering "structural failures." All of them with survivor counts suspiciously lower than their crew complements.
Someone has been drilling into that cavity for decades. Someone keeps sending people to die.
Your phone rings.
The caller ID shows a number you don't recognize. You almost don't answer. But something—curiosity, or maybe that constant singing in the back of your mind—makes you pick up.
"Harper." The voice is familiar but you can't place it. "Don't hang up."
"Who is this?"
"Rashida. Rashida Chen."
Your blood runs cold. "Rashida's dead. She drowned on Neptune Seven."
"Everyone thinks I'm dead. I'd like to keep it that way." A pause. "I need to meet with you. There's something you need to see."
CHAPTER 3: THE REUNION
The pub she chose is in the old part of Aberdeen—narrow streets, ancient stone buildings, the kind of place tourists photograph but locals avoid. You sit in a corner booth, nursing a pint you haven't touched, watching the door.
She walks in at exactly eight o'clock.
Rashida looks different than you remember. Thinner. Harder. Her electric blue hair is gone, replaced by a natural black that she's let grow long. A scar runs from her temple to her jaw—you don't remember that from the rig.
She slides into the booth across from you, orders a whiskey, and doesn't speak until the server leaves.
"You're still digging," she says. "I've been monitoring your searches. The corporate servers, the archived surveys. Someone's going to notice."
"How are you alive?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me."
She takes a long drink of her whiskey. Her eyes—they're different too. There's something in them you recognize. The same thing you see in your own mirror.
"I went down to the generator room," she says slowly. "When the lights went out. The water was already there. They were in the water."
"The creatures."
"They didn't kill me. They..." She stops. Starts again. "They showed me things. The cavity. What's inside it. What's been sleeping down there for millions of years." Her voice drops. "And what happens when it wakes up fully."
"The thing we saw—"
"Was just the beginning. What we saw was like... like an arm stretching after a long sleep. Just a small part of it. The rest is still down there. Still growing. Still feeding."
"Feeding on what?"
Rashida meets your eyes. "On us. On our drilling. Every time we punch through the seafloor, we're feeding it. Giving it a connection to our world. The oil we're extracting—it's not oil. Not really. It's... it's part of it. Circulating through the cavity like blood through veins."
"That's insane."
"I know what I sound like." She leans forward. "But I also know what I saw. And I know that Neptune Eight is launching in three weeks. Same formation. Same depth. Same cavity."
"The executives said—"
"The executives know exactly what they're doing." Her jaw tightens. "They've known for decades. They don't care about oil—there are easier formations to tap. They're studying it. Trying to understand it. Using the platforms as research stations."
"Why would anyone—"
"Because whatever's down there has technology. Or biology. Or something that blurs the line between them. Things that don't follow our physics. Things that could change everything if we could understand them." She finishes her whiskey. "People have been dying for thirty years so some corporate scientists can play god."
You sit in silence for a long moment. The singing in your head grows louder, then fades.
"What do you want from me?"
"Help. There are others—survivors from the old incidents. People who saw what we saw and weren't paid enough to stay quiet. We've been gathering evidence. Trying to expose what's really happening."
"Expose it to who? The government? The media?"
"Anyone who'll listen." Rashida pulls a phone from her pocket—a burner, by the look of it—and slides it across the table. "There's a meeting tomorrow night. A warehouse on the industrial estate. I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to see for yourself."
You look at the phone. At her. At the scar on her face, the haunted look in her eyes.
"One meeting," you say. "Then I decide."
CHAPTER 4: THE GATHERING
The warehouse is exactly what you expected—abandoned, rusting, lit by construction lights running off a portable generator. What you didn't expect is the number of people.
Twenty-three survivors sit in a rough circle on folding chairs. Some you recognize from Neptune Seven—Wall is there, his face older and more lined than six months should account for. Dr. Yusuf sits beside him, his white beard now fully gray. Others are strangers.
And some aren't strangers at all.
"Margaret Cross," the woman introduces herself. She's in her fifties, with Danny Cross's eyes and his jaw. "Danny was my son."
You take her offered hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't know him, but—"
"But you saw what he became." Her grip is firm, her voice steady. "That's why I'm here. I want to understand what happened to my boy. And I want to stop it from happening to anyone else."
Rashida calls the meeting to order.
The stories come one by one. Neptune Three—a man named Peterson who lost his entire crew but escaped by hiding in a supply closet for two days. Neptune Five—a woman named Okonkwo whose husband walked into the water and came back changed. Neptune Six—twins who survived by swimming through the flooded corridors, guided by something they refuse to name.
Each story is different. Each story is the same.
The creatures. The singing. The thing in the deep.
"We've gathered physical evidence too," Rashida says, pulling a box from under her chair. "Samples. Photographs. Video when we could get it."
She spreads the contents on a table. You see glass vials containing water that glows faintly in the dim light. Photographs of shapes that make your head hurt to look at. Video clips that show only static and something moving behind the static.
"This is what they're trying to understand," Rashida says. "This is what they're killing people for."
Wall speaks up. "What's the plan? We can't exactly walk into a newsroom with glowing water and expect anyone to believe us."
"No. But we can document Neptune Eight. The launch is in three weeks. If we can get someone inside—someone with credentials, someone who knows what to look for—we can prove what's happening before it happens again."
Every eye in the room turns to you.
"I'm not going back out there," you say.
"You're the only one who can. You're still on record as a certified inspector. You still have your credentials. You're the only one of us who could walk onto that platform without raising suspicion."
"They know I survived Neptune Seven. They know I saw things."
"They think you've been bought." Rashida's voice is hard. "They think the money was enough. That's their weakness—they can't imagine anyone refusing their bribes. It's why they let Peterson live. It's why they let all of us live. They think silence can be purchased."
You look around the circle. At the haunted eyes. The scarred faces. The people who've seen what you've seen and refuse to let it be buried.
"What exactly would I need to do?"
CHAPTER 5: THE PREPARATION
The next two weeks are a crash course in espionage.
Rashida's network is more sophisticated than you expected. They have equipment—cameras hidden in hard hats, microphones disguised as safety badges, waterproof cases for documents that need to survive flooding. They have contacts inside the company, low-level employees sympathetic to the cause. They have a plan.
"Neptune Eight is being positioned as a standard production platform," Rashida explains, pointing at schematics spread across a table. "But look at the drilling equipment. Look at the modifications."
You see what she means. The drill specs are wrong—heavier than needed for oil extraction, configured for depth beyond the reservoir level. And there's additional equipment: sensors, sample collectors, things that have no place on a standard rig.
"They're going to drill straight into the cavity."
"That's our theory. Controlled breach, contained extraction. They think they can study it without waking it up." Rashida's laugh is hollow. "They learned nothing from Neptune Seven."
"How do I get assigned to the inspection?"
"You don't." Wall speaks from the corner, where he's been cleaning camera equipment. "You volunteer. Tell them you want to face your fears. Tell them you want closure. Corporate loves that psychological bullshit—it makes their liability statistics look better."
"And once I'm on board?"
"Document everything. The drilling modifications. The crew briefings. Any evidence of what they're really doing out there. When it inevitably goes wrong—and it will go wrong—you transmit everything to us before evacuation."
"Before evacuation. Because you don't think I'll survive."
Silence.
"I didn't say that," Rashida says finally.
"You didn't have to."
CHAPTER 6: THE CALL
Making the call is harder than you expected.
You sit in your apartment, phone in hand, staring at the number for corporate's Employee Wellness division. They assigned you a counselor after Neptune Seven—a pleasant woman named Dr. Morton who specializes in "reintegrating offshore workers after traumatic events."
You've spoken to her exactly once, to confirm you were receiving the therapy prescribed in your severance package. You haven't spoken to her since.
The phone rings three times.
"Dr. Morton's office."
"This is Jamie Harper. I need to speak with Dr. Morton."
A pause. Typing. "One moment please."
Hold music. You wait.
"Jamie." Dr. Morton's voice is warm, professional. "I'm glad you called. I've been hoping you would reach out."
"I want to go back."
Silence.
"I'm sorry?"
"I want to go back to work. Offshore. I heard about Neptune Eight—I want to be assigned to the inspection team."
More silence. Then, carefully: "Jamie, this is a significant step. After what you experienced on Neptune Seven—"
"I can't keep living like this." The words come easier than you expected—probably because they're true. "I can't sleep. I can't function. Every time I close my eyes, I see it. I need to face it. I need to prove to myself that I can do my job without breaking down."
"There are other ways to address trauma—"
"I've tried them. Medication makes me foggy. Therapy makes me relive it without resolution. The only way I'm going to get past this is by going back out there and seeing that it was just an accident. That there's nothing supernatural happening. That I can do this."
Dr. Morton is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks, her voice has changed. Become calculating.
"I'll need to discuss this with my supervisors. But I think... I think we might be able to accommodate your request. This is exactly the kind of proactive trauma management we encourage."
"Thank you."
"Jamie—I want you to know that we support you. Whatever you need, whatever resources you require to feel safe out there, we'll provide them. That's a promise."
You hang up.
Your hands are shaking. But somewhere in the back of your mind, beneath the singing that never stops, you feel something you haven't felt in six months.
Purpose.
CHAPTER 7: THE DEPARTURE
The helicopter feels different the second time.
You press your forehead against the window like before, but now the gray waves below don't terrify you—they focus you. Somewhere beneath that churning surface, in the darkness that humans were never meant to breach, something waits. Something that took Danny Cross. Something that changed Patterson and Rashida and everyone else who got too close.
You're going back to it willingly.
The man beside you isn't Wall this time. He's younger—maybe thirty—with a military bearing and eyes that scan the helicopter's interior with professional assessment. His name tag says "KOVACS."
"First time offshore?" he asks.
"No."
"You don't look like rig crew."
"Inspector. Safety assessment."
Kovacs nods slowly. His expression doesn't change, but you see something flicker in his eyes. Recognition? Suspicion? "Big platform, Neptune Eight. Brand new. Lot of new equipment."
"I've read the specs."
"Specs don't tell you much." He looks out the window. "Things feel different out there. Especially this far from shore."
You don't respond. You're busy checking the camera hidden in your hard hat, the microphone in your badge, the waterproof transmitter sewn into the lining of your jacket. Everything is in place. Everything is ready.
"Approaching Neptune Eight," the pilot announces. "Touchdown in five minutes."
You look out the window.
Neptune Eight rises from the sea like a fortress. It's newer than Neptune Seven—cleaner, shinier, all sharp angles and fresh paint. But it's built on the same design, and as you watch it grow larger through the window, you can see the same cathedral-like drill tower, the same accommodation block, the same legs plunging into the waves.
And somewhere below, invisible but palpable, you can feel it.
The thing in the deep.
It knows you've returned.
To be continued...