The point of no return....

"In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive."
— Haruki Murakami

The bottom of the trench is dark.
The water should be cold.
But by tectonic happenstance
and random crustal fold,
the geothermal gradient
in these parts is immense,
and harvesting that energy
is naught but common sense.

The hydrostatic pressure
and the temperature are hell. 
The phosphorescent lifeforms
look like Hades' spawn as well.
A hostile work environment
for human or machine,
but splice them into Rifter,
an amalgam, a marine

Technician that can physic'ly
sustain the kind of stress
that living on the ocean floor
near thermal vents suggests.
Now scramble up their Psyche,
make them crave adrenaline.
That's the part from which there's no way back
to whom they might have been.

Now an aquanaut custodian
of geothermal plants
providing cleaner energy
than fossil fuels. The rants
of dire climate degradation
rendered all but moot
by Rifter techs, once human,
who have been rebuilt to suit.

Headline San Diego....
....Fusion power's here at last.

A rif on the characters and technology depicted in the novel Starfish by Peter Watts.

Image by Scott Clarke from http://www.rifters.com/real/gallery/rifters.jpg depicting characters and setting from Starfish by Peter Watts. Attempts to contact the artist have been unsuccessful to date. Credible objection to the use of the image will be honored by it's removal.