Seeker

Part 2 – HONG KONG (18 Months Later)

The tiny submersible moved through the depths of the harbor, photographing everything. It traveled in a zigzag pattern that allowed it, very slowly, to cover every inch of the harbor bottom. Each morning, it would surface to recharge its batteries in the sunlight and transmit its photographs back to shore. Then it would dive again, continuing along the ocean floor.

Somewhere on land, computers examined the pictures it sent, compared them to customers’ requests, and decided if there was anything of interest down there. In a harbor as old as Victoria Harbor, in a city as large as Hong Kong, there was always something of interest under the water.

On this day, when the submersible came to the surface and bobbed in the wake of a large ship, it transmitted, among hundreds of thousands of images, a picture of a slender object made of stone and buried almost completely in sand. To the human eye, it was nothing, but enough of the object was visible for a computer to match it with an odd request from someone on the other side of the world.