The telecom had gone silent. So had the bridge of The Kinnerethian. Not entirely silent. Emma was crying and she had sank into a corner. Her sobs masked the silence. Everyone was lost in their own way, observing with the mind's eye the last moments of Professor August.

"Emmet, Emmet" her words punctuated her softening breath. It was as if she too could not breathe.

"Somebody say something." Captain Argyle ordered. He stared down the surface team. They had all assembled and stood together, apart from Emma. None of them had words.

There was a bottle of champagne that someone had opened earlier when the eleven-thousandth meter was reached by the heroic Professor August. They could all still hear his last transmission.

By now he was surely dead. His final words were quiet, gasping, slow. He was losing air with each breath. The exact cause of the engine failure was unknown, but he had become trapped down there. The lights he had turned back on; draining the rest of the batteries after every effort had been made to restart the engines of his submarine. He had wanted to see what was down there and tell them what it was. What else was left to do? Then he spoke until there was no power left to transmit to the surface, to the bridge. He was dead now: the oxygen would have run out minutes ago. They had all just stared helpless at the clock.

But his words, ghost-like, lingered in their ears, echoing like a song:

"It is a seabed of diamonds. The rocks are covered in red crystals and there is indeed life down here. I see living things everywhere."

Then like that song by David Bowie:

"Tell my wife I love her so. I am coming home. Hell, I am home."

There was a fizzing noise as someone, Samual, poured the champagne into the glasses. He left them all sitting there neatly and took one with him as he left the bridge. Outside the railing waited him to pour what he didn't taste over the edge of The Kinnerethian. The rest of the day was spent by each of them in silent remembrance.

Emma eventually wove her way to their quarters. Everyone had loved Emmet August, but perhaps nobody loved him more than she had. He was more than just her husband, he had always confided in her what he could say to nobody else, not even himself. And it was more than that.

Everybody loved him because he listened so carefully and with such curious wonder to anything someone wanted to say. He had a thousand different ways of laughing and the whole world held secret reasons to be full of joy and he gave that joy to anyone he met. People were changed by him, transformed into their higher selves.

People became lost in Emmet's world as subjects of wonder and adoration by him. He loved everyone and they felt loved by him. Nobody was left out. And for Emma: she saw him as he really was. She was the one who got to love him the way he loved all others.

Stolen novel; please report.

Emmet was not naive, he had known all manner of horror and pain. He saw how the cruelty of the world offended the soul of mankind and it bereaved him and angered him. But he kept that darkness deep inside. Only Emma knew the wisdom of his old soul.

When The Kinnerethian had returned to the rest of the world there was a lot of mourning yet to be done. The fate of his final mission was kept a secret until it could no longer be held back. It was a tide of grief. Professor August's adventures and exploration had become legendary. This is because the world was in a state of unsustainable ravages. What he had found down there was that there was a way to reverse all the consumption and a despoiled world. Generations that came before had used too much, taken too much. It was the life work of Professor August to find ways to reverse the damage.

His quest had taken him deeper and deeper into the darkness, searching for ways to renew the world. He had found what he was looking for. In the past there were tremendous extinctions and the world had become ravaged by meteor impacts and the caldera's of Hell itself. Life could exist, even human life, in the measures he had anticipated.

There was a future and a hope because of the bio-technologies he had seeded with his research. And his adventures in the deep were celebrated.

The whole world was shocked to hear of his final adventure. But none so than just one man.

Gareth August was an old man, the father of Emmet. He had gotten the news first. That is why the death of Emmet was kept a secret by The Kinnerethian before they reached shore. His daughter-in-law came to the trailer he lived in and told him personally. Gareth had already known, could sense that his son was dead.

She drove him to the beach.

It was a two-hour drive and very little conversation occurred. Gareth said a few kind words to his beloved daughter-in-law. Mostly just a list of things that she had insisted were present at her wedding to Emmet. He reminded her that she had always made the first moves with his son and that she had proposed marriage.

He told her that every child on earth that would be future generations would be their children. A dying polluted planet was no place to raise children when there was no hope for a sustainable future. One man's sacrifice was her sacrifice and the sacrifice of an old man. Emma did not cry, not this time. She couldn't cry anymore, part of her was in that submarine grave with her husband and felt no fear. Just like him.

Gareth got out of the car and lowered himself down the sea-wall to a beach that seemed to stretch across the horizon, the tide such a distance away to make the sky seem massive and tall where it was like no other sky. A kind of desolate wind moaned like a static.

He walked out where the winds of the Pacific whipped sand across his ankles like a flowing stream. The skies and the water were a gray color that matched his grey colour. He just stood there, his broken heart dying over and over with every beat.

Gray skies and an endless, white horizon. That is the beaches and this is the sound: desperate and dirge like, the sands work in concert blown by the wind like a mist along the ground. It is a music, the music of the world, sang like a funerary song here at this beach.

He remembered Emmet as a gifted child, the one he had taught to love everyone. The little boy who would read Hawaiian Aquarium Guide with a hundred illustrations and memorized all of the species. The little boy whose exuberance infected all the children he played with. He had sang or hummed melodies to his son each night and loved him as the center of his world. The little Emmet that had created undersea landscapes with his toys and watched every kind of undersea adventure from Spongebob Squarepants to Octonaughts to Blue Planet. At five and a half years old he had said:

"Dad I really love you, but I have to go explore the ocean. I will rescue everyone. I just have to do that, okay?"