Izar had nodded, and, from that day, become obsessed with the idea of underwater fire. He had played incessantly with matchsticks; he had switched the stove on and off, staring at the crown-shaped blaze for hours; he had torn apart wires and sparked them against one another, reveling in their fumes. Throughout his early childhood years, the question that had driven him was how—how he would invent underwater fire; it was not until his adolescence that he had thought to ask Antares why.
“Because trillions of dollars’ worth of jewels lie beneath the ocean floor,” Antares had answered. “But they lie so deep that they cannot be accessed without blazing a path down. And yet no man on earth has found a way to sustain fire underwater. I myself have hired dozens of scientists at Ocean Dominion to attempt it, men with prestigious degrees and accomplishments, but, without exception, all have failed. You will invent underwater fire, boy. Gold and diamonds will form the embers of your flames.”
This night, the eighth of July, marked the end of Izar’s underwater-fire journey. If a fire didn’t flame today, not only would he consider his past to be a dead, dry slate, a barren wasteland, but also his future. It was not written anywhere on his business card, but his true role, the one for which he lived, was not vice president of operations but inventor. He had given the title to himself; this night, he would learn whether he’d earned it.
He longed to know whether he’d succeeded or failed with his underwater-fire mission, but he could not summon the courage . . . not yet. Now that he was at the end of this road, he thought it fitting to pay tribute to the lampposts that had lit his path over the last six years. Most people retained pictures as mementos; he retained implements, which lay scattered all over the floor of his Invention Chamber—ores of iron, sheets of magnesium, rounds of bullets, panes of sensors. An onlooker might view them as dangerous tripping hazards, but Izar knew precisely what each object signified.
He knelt next to a low mound of ash and swept his hand through the granules, watching them trickle through his fingers like black sand. They were the cinders of creators—the cinders of not one person but dozens—and not their bodies but their theories.
Izar had commenced on his underwater-fire journey by consulting scientific manuals, engineering treatises, and technical articles about combustion. They had all asserted, implicitly or explicitly, that underwater fire was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms. “Oxygen is the catalyst for fire,” one chemist had stated, “and water does contain oxygen, but it might as well not, for the act of combustion requires oxygen in gaseous form, not liquid.” “Even a child recognizes that the role of water is to devour fire,” had claimed a physicist, “not to nurture it.” “When it comes to fire,” had declared an engineer, “water acts as the wolf, not the sheep.”
Izar had piled up all the papers and thrown a lit match upon them. A fire had blazed, and its smoke had scorched his eyes but straightened his vision. In his new clarity, he had resolved that the only applicable laws in the universe of his Invention Chamber would be those that he proved or disproved himself.
Now Izar rose to his feet, strode four steps, and, kneeling, thumbed through a crimson-covered notebook that lay half open on the floor with its spine up, like an injured cardinal. Some of its pages were crumpled, others had corners that were softened by water, a few had burnt edges, and all were yellowed, but Izar grinned at the notebook. The night of the cremation itself, he had started scribbling in this notebook. Over the next years, he had written countless chemical and physical formulae into its pages, logging also the outcomes of all his underwater-fire experiments.
Though Izar had chosen the notebook arbitrarily—it had happened to be lying around that night—he seemed to have chosen well, for its length was just right: only one page remained. If Izar succeeded today, he would jot his final note on that page, and it would consist of just two words: Mission accomplished. With those two words, the journal would become the most important object in the Invention Chamber, for it would make his work replicable. If he failed, he would destroy the journal.
A burble sounded. Rising to his feet, Izar glanced at the labyrinth of pipes in the ceiling high above. In his first month at Ocean Dominion he had found the sporadic noises of the pipes irritating—they sounded like explosions of dysentery from a maze of intestines (sometimes, he could hear them even from his office upstairs)—but he smiled at the pipes now as at an ailing relative. The pipes had been with him all these years, their sounds his only source of companionship in his Invention Chamber.
His glance landed on the shelves along the walls. The shelves at least were more organized than the floor, though it was more out of safety than any punctiliousness on his part: The shelves were stocked with hundreds of flasks of flammable liquids and powders, potent enough to burn down the entirety of Ocean Dominion, all the way up to the thirtieth floor. Izar had collected them from all over the world and had experimented with each of them in his underwater-fire mission.
But his favorite memento of his journey lay not in the room but in his bone itself, in the form of a platinum chip. He had obtained the chip three years ago, soon after he’d begun experimenting with melting points for all types of metal—lead, tungsten, titanium, cobalt, iron—and had concluded that magnesium was optimal, for it was able to reach and sustain the highest temperature. He had molded himself a torch of magnesium and stuffed it with an array of combustion powders. With his right hand, he had pulled the trigger of the torch in a pail of water, placing his left wrist directly before the barrel to detect viscerally if any heat emerged. With the first iteration of his torch, he had felt no more than a wisp of smoke. The second iteration had singed the hair right off his wrist. He had then doubled the diameter of the internal gas chamber of the torch, to increase its storage capacity for oxygen. When he’d pulled the trigger in water the next time, the resulting flame, though ephemeral, had shot out so sharply that it had burned the inside of his left wrist clean to the bone.
Doctor Navi—the Ocean Dominion doctor from the company’s earliest days, a gaunt man with shifty eyes that scurried right and left like a rat’s—had replaced the charred inch of Izar’s bone with a platinum chip that he’d claimed would make Izar’s wrist as strong as an anvil. As Izar examined his wrist now, he smiled dryly to think that he, the wielder of metal, contained metal also within him.
When he looked up, his glance fell on Castor, and he recognized intuitively that it was time. He strode toward the robot. Looming to more than three times Izar’s six-foot-four height, Castor stood in an immense tank of water with a bulletproof glass boundary.
Izar knew Castor better than any man he had ever known. So profoundly did he relate to Castor, in fact, that, to his own bemusement, he had taken a knife and carved a hook-shaped scar into the side of the robot’s jaw to match his own.
His own hands had laid Castor’s flesh with the densest of metal alloys, and his own fingers had shaped Castor’s skin with zinc-galvanized steel, to prevent corrosion underwater. He had ensured Castor’s legs weighed more than one ton each, to enable the robot to retain his balance on an uneven ocean floor. He had slid magnets into the soles of Castor’s feet, in order to attract jewels, and he had also added a sieve of sensors, to separate the valuable materials from the worthless ones. He had inserted suction conduits as nerves inside Castor’s legs, to convey the precious metals and minerals to the cylindrical storage vaults in his vertebrae.