Sunday, March 02, 2008

"The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it. 'Honourable sir?' he said.

'What is it?' said the captain testily.

'We seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred metres.'

'What of it?'

'I'm reading 15,000 metres, honourable sir. And still falling.'

'That is foolish. There is no such depth.'

'Ah, sir,' he said, 'it is shallower already.'

Beneath the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea, The kraken sleepeth. And now it was waking up. Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises.

'See,' said the navigator. 'Three thousand metres already.'

The kraken is not amused.

'Er,' said the navigator, 'one thousand metres?'

The factory ship rocks on the sudden swell.

'Five hundred metres?'

And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance."

-Good Omens