Choo Yi Feng is currently an undergraduate majoring in life sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His short stories have been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Alluvium, the journal of Literary Shanghai, and Curios. His aspirations are divided between becoming a fiction writer and a marine biologist.
An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial
Imagine with me what the experience of biological death might be like: a long sleep, an all-enveloping heaviness, a gentle and irreversible descent away from the world of light and into a mysterious, unknowable plane of darkness. The body grows cold, its metabolic processes slowing down. Skin becomes clammy, bloodless and prone to rupture. Soft tissue melts away, boundaries between body and earth blurred until even hard, mineral bone is chiselled and ground into dust.
<<I’m hungry. It’s like I haven’t eaten in months. Life is lightless, cold, and there is a weight crushing upon my body. There is always a weight crushing upon my body. I am drifting, an erratic tick coursing along my flesh every half-minute or so, in bold defiance of the void before me, scandalising it with my vulgar display of motion, of liveliness>>
For decades, marine science enthusiasts have been obsessed with whale falls: infrequent occurrences where the massive bodies of dead whales are devoured by the lightless abyss, collapsing upon the flat, grey expanse of the ocean floor with all the entropic force of a sub-nuclear missile. Blubbery flesh and decaying tissue is greedily exploited by an eclectic and charismatic community of bizarre sea creatures: chunks of flesh are first shorn away by giant sharks and monstrous deep-sea isopods. The residue hardly goes to waste, and is picked clean by an army of skeletal brittle stars, phantasmal octopuses and squat lobsters. Whale falls are able to support complex (yet transient) ecosystems anywhere from decades to even two centuries. They have been studied intensively as highly effective vessels for carbon sequestration, and their impacts on abyssal communities are well-documented.
<<The carcass calls out to me, its chemical trails of rot hitting me like a wall of heat, sending a liquid fire spreading through my limbs, my nerves stinging and ablaze. A blinding light tugs at a point just behind the soft palate of the roof of my mouth, producing an itch that cannot be scratched. This is what a magnet feels like when placed enticingly close, yet insufferably separate, to its opposite pole>>
Kyeong-Pane Pelagic Mortuary Services has been providing clients with the unique experience of abyssal burials for coming to twenty-five years now. With new footage from our remote deep-sea submersible, we show you the inner workings of a funerary practice that has become massively popular in the past few years.
<<I have reached a twenty-four-hour convenience store along a bygone alley down the middle of a city district where every other door is shuttered and everyone has fled, gone home. The lights are blinding, the cans and packets lining the aluminium shelves glossed in hyper-colour, screaming in glee. It is dark outside. There are shapes and shades that scare me. In here, I am free to eat air-flown Italian pesto with sun-dried cherry tomatoes. Semi-molten butterscotch brownies. Flash-fried Instant noodles with individually-sealed sachets of oil, seasoning, fried shallots and dark sauce>>
The first location our vessel will be visiting is the South Banda Basin in Indonesia, a country well-known for the rich coral reefs its archipelago hosts, and for many, a poignant symbol of the wonders of the underwater world. This burial ship bearing the legacies of eighty of our clients was sunken only eight months ago, and is still in the first phase of abyssal burial. Within hours of its touchdown upon the soft sediments of the vast, grey abyssal plain, a wealth of opportunistic predators emerged from the darkness, drawn by the scent trail of decomposing soft tissue. We documented twenty-two different species that were drawn to the burial ship within this period, including several bluntnose sixgill shark, a new record for the region.
<<I widen my jaws and sink my teeth in, spasming and writhing with my last reserves of strength in order to separate clods of soft tissue and twangy sinew from tasteless bone. The first bite, the first swallow does nothing to fill the emptiness within. I circle around, diving in for another, hurling myself into the orgy of bodies dead and living. In the hazy confusion, the pesto jar spills and is mixed with the golden butterscotch core of the chocolate pastries. A flurry of flavours—tangy, sharp, sickly sweet, greasy, gooey, crumbly, juicy, woody—assaults me. Ruinous flesh for ruinous beings. They slide along my guy, spreading their half-digested richness to fill out the contours of my being over and over. As I consume flesh, it consumes me>>
Moving now to our colleagues further north, we encounter a burial ship sunken eight years ago near the Meiyo-Daisan Seamount in the Sea of Japan. By now, most of the soft tissue has been devoured, and even fine particles of organic matter carefully combed and scavenged by smaller creatures such as spider crabs and octopuses. Osedax bone worms now colonise the hard skeleton that is remaining, boring into the vestigial osseous structures and beginning the process of converting this last trace of a body into ocean dust. Our burial ship here is so densely matted with the sinuous forms of bone worms that from afar, the skulls and femurs take on a fuzzy appearance. One notable tenant of the Meiyo-Daisan burial ship is the legacy of Mr Ryuji Tsugoda, who headed the Tsugoda multinational tech firm during his brief, yet productive twenty-nine-year reign. Mr Ryuji was one of the first individuals to publicly endorse and promote abyssal burials, and thus a key contributing figure to the massive popularity that Kyeong-Pane enjoys today.
<<The shelves were picked clean lifetimes ago, and yet everyone remained—persisting in the light, in the comfort of a twenty-four-hour convenience store on the ocean floor. Now we comb the containers that rise out of the ground, that branch and bifurcate. They grow steel arms and legs but have no heads. They are vending machines arrayed with dozens of slots, mostly empty, but some hosting the occasional prize. Chocolate rounds with peanut butter filling. Alaskan king crab, offered by the leg. Disposable panties. We sift, climb, parse, forage, salvage, disassemble, gather. This place is chronically understocked. Each generation reckons with the possibility that it will be the last, until generations bleed into one another, and precarity and finality become perennial>>
Research and monitoring remain our top priorities. We are constantly planning prospective studies and follow-ups to existing burials in order to verify and substantiate claims of carbon sequestration and to ensure that our projects are truly zero-energy and zero-waste.
<<The first flakes brush lightly against the crown of my cilia as they make their ethereal decent downwards, and it is a while before I recognise the taste of snow. The lights will grow stronger again now, after burning for so long. A storm of fairy dust descends with all the entropic force of a comet. I feel the paper-thin veneer of my shell begin to tremble and rupture with the glee of possibilities>>
We want to know how the legacies of our clients continue to nourish and enrich the abyss, whether it be on a timeline of eight months, eight years or eight decades. One current development that my colleagues are working on is a periodic re-infusion of human-derived nutrients into existing burial sites to facilitate complex, multi-layered successional eco-scapes. The possibilities, like the endless benthos that we are mapping in ever-finer detail, are multiplying exponentially. At Kyeong-Pane, it is not just about what you are buying, but what you are buying into.