Excerpt from Hyperthought, Chapter Nine

Twenty minutes later, I found myself flushed out to sea. Vincente had stuffed me inside an old diving sphere…

I scrubbed scum off the sphere's inner wall to see better. The underwater cliffs were ridged with swollen, twisted folds. Slabs of old highways and broken buildings were crushed in layers of sediment. It looked as if centuries of civilizations had been compressed and folded together…

The first hour passed slowly as the sphere rolled down the gnarly bulge, and the convex walls hummed with the ocean's mounting pressure. To my horror, I noticed a dimple forming in one section of the fabriglass sphere. Thank the Laws, the sphere's regulator started increasing internal air pressure to help compensate for the extreme forces on the exterior walls. I held my nose and blew hard to clear my ears. But the dimple kept growing …

Another hour passed, and the ocean current kept nudging my sphere against the cliff. Then I noticed something truly bizarre. The running lights showed I was now rolling under the cliff, into the shadow of a vast overhang. I checked that dimple again. Ça va, a million tiny white lines now branched out from the flaw. The fabriglass was old and brittle. Would it split?...   

Read Excerpts:
From Chapter One
From Chapter Sixteen