Now, I'm nobody special, but my uncle on my Mother's side is. I've only ever met him a handful of times, but he was nice enough from what I can remember. Not terribly memorable, though. When I was younger, I never really knew what he actually did, in terms of employment. My mother told me that he worked for the Government. That's also what he told me himself. Really nothing beyond that.
This wasn't really a cause for concern in my life. I mean, why should I have cared? I only started thinking about it after he disappeared. He stopped coming over for holidays, and my Skype conversations with him ceased completely. I went to my mother for answers, obviously. But she just said that he "relocated". I was 16 at this point, and smart enough to realize that this blatant non-answer from her meant she wasn't going to talk about it. I started thinking that the worst had happened. That he'd been in an accident or something, and that my mother was grieving.
But... nobody else seemed to be talking about him. My dad and him were never particularly close, but you'd think that he'd say something about it, right?
In any case, I kinda forced myself to push this into the back of my head. If he really was gone, then I guess I'd have to move on. I wasn't terribly close with him either, after all.
But then something happened a few months afterwards. It was around midnight, and being the slacker that I am, was up writing a paper for school. I took out my headphones and got up to use the washroom when I heard voices coming from downstairs. I assumed it was my parents, but upon listening closer, the male voice was not my dad.
It was my uncle.
It sounded like he was arguing with my mom about something, but trying to keep as quiet as possible. I listened closer, and began making out sentence fragments.
Stuff like "I have to go" and "They don't know how to fix it, I wasn't supposed to know." I kept hearing one word sprinkled in throughout the entire duration in which he was talking. "Ocean."
I considered going down and seeing what was happening, but he left before I could make the decision. I heard him storm out of the house and start his car before speeding off.
I really did want to mention to my mom the following morning, but she was acting like nothing had even fucking happened. Obviously, there was some sketchy shit going on here. But did I really want to know? At the time, my answer was no. I still had my own life to live, after all. If this was a rabbit hole that I didn't have to go down, then I wasn't going to.
Fast forward 8 years, and I've moved out, landed a software development job and am living by myself in the city. I hadn't really thought about my uncle since. I mean, it was kind of weird that nobody brought him up during subsequent family gatherings, but again, fuck that rabbit hole.
However... I think I've changed my tune on that. It was a Thursday night and I was browsing the internet. I started off with reddit, YouTube, etc. before launching Tor to see if there was anything more interesting on the deep/dark web. I didn't find anything particularly noteworthy until I stumbled upon some forum where they were discussing a multitude of topics ranging from paranormal encounters to... government conspiracies.
There was one thread that caught my attention.
"Weird shit going on in the ocean?"
The ocean. Memories of my uncle flashed through my eyes. I had to read it. The basic gist of the discussion went something like this:
The original poster had a brother with some vague government job who had gone missing recently. The night before, the brother showed up at their door, incredibly frantic and mostly incoherent. He was droning on about something related to the ocean. Problem was, his speech was so fragmented that the OP couldn't scrape together any cogent meaning. Abruptly, he apologized before running off, leaving the OP stunned.
His attempts to get into contact with his brother afterwards yielded nothing. He was a ghost. The only thing that the brother had given him was a thick set of paper documents that had been burned to the point of falling apart upon the slightest touch. He could only make out the first page, which simply had the words " 'Ocean Conspiracies' - Test site CK-X9 - Analysis."
The comments were filled with people either calling his bluff, pretending to be government agents, or making theories.
A few of the comments that I distinctly remember were these:
(Sorry for the offensive language if you care. I didn't write this).
"None of you fucking faggots better talk about this on the normie sites. They know what you're searching up. They know what you post, wherever you post it. Mention anything about these ocean conspiracies, they'll come after you."
But here was the reply to the comment above:
"Just shows that you literally don't know what's going on here. People know about it. Not a lot, but they're out there. They don't give a shit about outsiders trying to search. They won't find anything. The only thing they care about are people who know about it, and can prove what's going on, like OP's brother probably was."
What followed were a bunch of people asking him about he knew, and these were his replies.
"Look, I was never high-clearance, so I only know bare-bones surface level shit. There's something going on in the Arctic and Pacific oceans. Something weird. Maybe the Indian as well, although I don't have confirmation of that. Hell, I don't have confirmation for any of this. It might all be a diversion. I've even heard rumors that it's only in the Dead Sea. But it's not just one thing. It's a bunch of shit that seems to be isolated, which worries them. They usually take place in the middle of nowhere, but there's been incidents near coastlines as well."
"What's going on? I don't know, exactly. Like I said, bare-bones. The fact that I'm aware something's going on at all makes me a liability. Even more cause I don't work there anymore. Of course, they're still tracking me. But I'm pretty sure that they can't track this. I'll tell you about what I've heard, though. One of the biggest things is that the government has very limited control here. They can't always predict or contain whatever's going on. Also, calling them 'Ocean conspiracies' is likely a diversion tactic. They're not really conspiracy theories if they're actually happening, right? They know this. They know what they're doing. Ignorance is bliss."
"There was a drilling project under the codename 'Heaven', out in some remote part of the Pacific. I'm not sure what they were drilling for, or if any drilling even happened at all, but I've been told that the water's shallow over there. Like, waist-level shallow. That's the issue. The geography doesn't make any sense. One second, there's an infinite blackness below, and then suddenly, you're standing on a surface. There's something wrong with that surface, I assume. But nobody ever found out what. The rig was decimated after a week, like an invisible fucking meteor had crashed into it or something. No surviving accounts."
"I heard this one from a freighter crew member. Apparently, he saw what they refer to as "Aqua-Arachnids." Giant spider-like things that walk on the water surface. The worst thing about them is their heads. They look to be wrapped in some kind of wet gauze, but their eyes can be seen through it. They're definitely human eyes."
"Alright, I really dislike talking about this shit, so I'll leave it off with this. Something that happened at a beach resort in Mexico. A mother's watching her kid splash around in shallow water near the shore. No danger there, right? Suddenly, it looks as if the child gets pulled under. But it doesn't make any sense. The water was only up to her knees, but she disappears completely. The mother starts running towards where her child was, but she pops back up mere seconds later. Somewhat fazed at first, she simply starts splashing around again, like nothing had ever happened. However, there was a black marking on her arm that wasn't there before - a triangle with a square in it. Not cut like a scar, but like a permanent tattoo. I'm thinking that this one has to be related to the drilling rig."
"Look, there's a bunch of other shit that I'll post if I think I can get away with it. And if I feel like it."
His comments ended there, but I've been monitoring that user for updates ever since. I've considered messaging him personally, but that's tentative for now. Not until I can get a better sense of what's going on here.
Obviously, the OP's story about his brother kind of creeped me out, eerily resembling what happened with me and my uncle. I've been thinking about it some more. After he ran away, we did get a lot of "friends" of his coming by, almost always while I was home alone. I'm also not sure if I've been seeing indistinct men in suits at a higher rate than I should be. I just never paid any attention to them. There's also this guy at my office who's been trying to hang out with me after work, but I've stared at his screen before. He's just typing gibberish.
Maybe I've been in this rabbit hole for longer than I've known. What did my uncle do? What's going on in the ocean?
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