The Disturbing Fate of MS Cascadia

My name is Daniel Mercer and I'd been captain of the Pacific Crown Cruise Ship for 9 years. Every October we sailed from Vancouver to Yokohama to spend the winter running trips out of Japan. I spent the last hour before departure in the main lobby where I usually talked to passengers as they came aboard. It was part of the job. People liked to meet the captain on the first day. They saw the uniform and the four gold stripes on my sleeves and most seemed reassured to see the man in charge. A young couple asked for a photo with me. Their little boy was shy and stayed behind his mother so I put my hand on his shoulder and we took the picture like that. He was about six the same age Leo would have been. I smiled for the camera, wished them a good trip and checked the clock. I knew the ship well. We had 2000 passengers and 1200 crew and I'd spent enough time on board to know when we were running at full speed without having to check. But that afternoon I just wanted to get back to our cabin without having to stop and talk to anyone. Claire was already there. We'd been married for 14 years but since our son Leo died we'd hardly spoken. We didn't argue or blame each other. We just stopped talking about anything important and eventually we barely talked at all. She'd be in bed when I came back from work or I'd go to bed after she'd got up. Most days we were like two people sharing a flat rather than a married couple. Every October we sailed from Vancouver to Yokohama, then spent the winter running cruises out of Japan. The crossing took 16 days, most of them at sea and I'd talked Claire into coming with me. I thought being in the same place for two weeks might give us a chance to talk properly. I didn't know if it would help but I couldn't think of anything else to try. We both knew things couldn't carry on as they were. She'd come aboard early before most of the passengers because she didn't want to have to talk to people. I told her she could come up to the bridge whenever she liked. I knew she wouldn't though. Once we were out of Vancouver I left the first officer in charge and went down to our cabin. On the way I passed the dining room where a waiter was polishing a handrail. It looked clean already but that was how things were on the first evening. Everything was fresh but after a few days the corridors would smell of the food we'd served at lunch. There was a vase of flowers on the desk in our cabin. Claire had moved it into the bathroom and put it in the sink. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her suitcase open beside her. She'd unpacked her nightclothes but nothing else. A bottle of water sat next to her still unopened. I asked if the cabin was all right. She said it was. I asked if she wanted to go down for dinner but she said she'd rather have something brought up. I'd thought she might say that. She took her evening tablets while I was there. Her doctor had changed the dose twice since the spring. They helped her sleep. Leo had been sick when he died 13 months before. We'd taken him away for the weekend and he'd drowned in a lake while neither of us was looking. Claire was getting his towel out of the bag and I'd gone to the shop by the car park to buy ice. We'd told the story so many times to the police, the doctors and everyone else involved that we knew exactly how to explain it. We'd talked about it with each other too, mostly at night when we couldn't sleep. He'd been wearing blue shorts. Claire had packed three pairs for a two-night trip. I'd started asking her to come on the crossing in the summer. By then she was spending most of her time at home, sleeping during the day and staying up late at night. I was away so often that I didn't really know how she was managing. I thought a couple of weeks on the ship might help. She wouldn't have to cook or worry about appointments and I'd be nearby instead of on the other side of the world. She agreed the third time I asked. When the food arrived, she ate some bread and a few potatoes then lay down on the bed without changing out of her clothes. I stayed until she fell asleep, then went back to work. Every night I walked around the ship before bed to check that everything was in order. I'd done it for years and hardly had to think about it anymore. The passenger decks were still busy so I took the lifts at the back of the ship down to the lower levels. It was quieter there. You could hear the ventilation system, the walls were bare steel and the engines made the floor vibrate. The last place I checked was the abyssal lounge. It was the lowest passenger area on the ship, a bar built below the water line with thick glass panels covering most of the floor in the middle. During the day you could look straight down into the sea. That was how the cruise company sold it anyway. People loved the idea of having a drink with the ocean under their feet. At night it was a different place. The lights outside the ship only reached a short distance into the water just enough to show the foam trailing behind us. Beyond that, there was nothing to see. The glass was perfectly clear but it might as well have been painted black. You knew the sea was down there and you knew the ship was moving through it but you couldn't see what was beneath you or how far down it went. There was no way of telling whether you were looking at a few feet of water or a drop that went on for miles. You could look straight down and still have no idea what you were looking at. The marketing people loved the lounge but I'd never liked it much. It was too quiet compared with the rest of the ship and the glass made people behave strangely. I'd seen passengers lying on their stomachs to look down and others who wouldn't walk across it at all. At night, with the bar lights on, you mostly saw the room's reflection. If you stood in the right place, you could see your own face looking back at you with the dark water somewhere behind it. The barman was getting ready to close when I came in. He showed me a loose handle on one of the cupboards so I made a note of it, signed his checklist and checked both exits. It was the same routine every night. I moved to one side to get a better view but it made no difference. There was nothing below the ship's lights, only the darkness and miles of water. I switched off the bar lights and went back to the cabin. I woke later with the bathroom light shining into the bedroom. Claire wasn't in the bathroom or in bed. Her shoes were gone but her coat was still hanging by the door. I checked the nearest lounge and went to the reception desk. By the time I reached the lift, I was getting annoyed. She'd taken her tablets, she barely knew her way around the ship and if she wanted to go for a walk, she could have woken me. On one of the lower decks, a cleaner said he'd seen a woman heading toward the abyss of lounge. He thought it might have been her. The lounge was unlocked. The staff needed to get in after hours, even when the bar was closed. Claire was sitting on the glass floor about halfway across the room with her shoes on the carpet beside her and was looking down into the dark ocean. I stood in the doorway for a while. She hadn't heard me come in and I couldn't tell what she was doing. From where I was standing, I couldn't see what she might be looking at. I wondered if she'd fallen to sleep sitting up or if the tablets had left her confused again. Then I noticed how carefully she was watching the floor as if she could see something I couldn't. I went over and touched her shoulder. She looked up at me, almost annoyed that I'd interrupted her. "Leo is cold," she said. I looked down through the glass, but there was nothing to see. Just the reflection of the lights and the dark water below. I asked her what she meant, but she didn't answer. She seemed quite happy to sit there so I helped her put her shoes on and took her back to the cabin. She walked fine. In the lift, she leaned against the wall and watched the numbers change. She didn't say anything about where she'd been or why she'd gone down there in the middle of the night and I didn't get an explanation. Her feet were freezing when I got her into bed so I put another blanket over her. It was a little after two. I lay awake for another hour, thinking about what she'd said and wondering whether she'd been dreaming. I knew she'd been struggling since Leo died and the tablets sometimes made her muddled so there were reasonable explanations for most things she did. But I kept thinking about the glass floor and the water underneath it. We were miles from land by then, moving through water so deep that it gave me the chills. Whatever was down there, we wouldn't have seen it from the lounge. Eventually, I got up and left her a note saying I'd be on the bridge in the morning. Then I lay down again and listened to the air vents until I fell asleep. I was on the bridge by seven. The night report was routine. We were on schedule and the wind had picked up a little, but there was nothing to worry about. When I went back to the cabin at eight, [BLANK_AUDIO] was sitting up in bed with the television on. She'd eaten the banana I'd left out the night before. I asked how she was feeling, and she said fine. She remembered going down to the lounge. She said she'd woken up too hot and decided to take a walk rather than wake me. She remembered sitting on the glass and said she'd heard me come in, though I wasn't sure that was true. When I asked her about what she'd said, she looked at me. A minute later, she asked what time it was and the conversation was over. The doctor came by that afternoon and lowered her evening dose. Claire was quiet while he spoke to her, answering his questions without looking at him much. After he left, she asked me whether I'd told him about the lounge. I told him you'd been out walking. She looked at me for a moment. I had plenty to do that day and didn't see her again until the afternoon. She was sitting by a window on the top deck with a book in her lap. When I asked what she was reading, she showed me the cover. I'd never heard of it. She said it was good, though she hadn't got very far. She'd washed her hair and changed into a clean jumper. It was the first time in a while that I'd seen her make much of an effort with herself, and I was glad. I asked if she wanted to get some air on deck, but she said she was comfortable where she was. At dinner, she ate more than she had the night before. We talked about the woman in the next cabin who'd been on 31 cruises and apparently had a complaint about everything. Claire had overheard her arguing with a waiter and told me about it. Claire smiled, but then she seemed to lose interest and went back to her food. Halfway through her coffee, she asked how far below the water the lounge was. "About four meters," I said. It changes depending on how much weight we're carrying. Then she asked if the lights outside the ship stayed on all night. Most of them. Can you see anything when they're on? Only what's close to the ship. It gets dark pretty quickly. Then she asked whether anyone had ever seen anything unusual through the glass. I said not that I knew of and asked what she thought she might see. Nothing, she said and carried on drinking her coffee. I couldn't tell whether she was just curious or whether she'd seen something the night before. I wanted to ask her again, but I didn't want another conversation that ended with her shutting me out so I let it go. At half past ten, she said she wanted to go back to the lounge. I still had work to finish, but I put it aside and went with her. The bar was closed and the lights had been left on low. Claire walked straight to the glass and sat down in the same place as the night before. She took off her shoes and set them beside her. I sat on a bench a few feet away and tried to get through my emails. After a while, I looked up. She hadn't moved. She was looking down through the glass and I couldn't see her face clearly from where I was sitting. I put my phone away and went over to her. There wasn't anything to see below us, just the lights from the ship fading into the dark. I asked if she wanted to go back upstairs. Not yet. So I sat down beside her. Eventually, she put her shoes back on and came with me to the lift. In the cabin, she got ready for bed as usual. I stayed up to finish some work while she lay down. When I finally turned off the light, she was facing the wall. I thought she was asleep until she spoke. Do you think it's cold down there? I asked her what she meant, but she didn't say anything else. I waited a little while, then asked if she was awake. She didn't answer. I lay there for some time before I fell asleep myself. The next morning, I asked the chief engineer to send me the plans for the lower decks. I told him a passenger had been asking questions about the glass floor in the abyssal lounge, which was true enough. The lounge was surrounded by storerooms, pipes and pumps, and the lower part of the ship was divided into watertight sections to stop a flood from spreading through the hull. Heavy steel doors separated each section and would close automatically in an emergency. The lounge sat inside one of them, with a watertight door at either end of the corridor outside and I couldn't see what else I expected to find. Claire had spent most of the afternoon out of the cabin. She'd walked along the covered deck and then sat in the library for a while. At dinner, she told me that when Leo was little, she used to take him down to the harbor to watch my ship come in. Apparently, he'd wave at every ship that passed because he thought I might be on one of the others. I hadn't known that, and when I asked how often they'd done it, she said they'd gone whenever they had the chance. Then she went back to eating, leaving me to try to picture the two of them standing at the harbor, Leo waving at ships that had nothing to do with me. I couldn't remember her ever telling me about it before, but I'd spent so much time away that there must have been plenty of things I'd missed. She had two glasses of wine with dinner, even though the doctor had told her not to drink while taking her tablets. She'd eaten well, she'd been out of the cabin, and we were having a conversation without either of us struggling to find something to say. I didn't want to spoil the evening over two glasses of wine. After dinner, she put on her cardigan and waited by the cabin door while I called the bridge. When I finished, she was still standing there with her hand on the handle, so I asked if she wanted to go somewhere. Downstairs, she said. I told her I'd come with her, and we went to the abyss lounge together. There was nobody else there that night, and most of the lights had been turned down. Claire went straight to one of the benches and sat back with her hands in her lap. She looked comfortable, almost at ease, in a way I hadn't seen for months. I sat beside her, and for a while we didn't say anything. "He's down there," she said. "Who?" I looked down through the glass. The water was almost black, and the lights outside the ship only reached a short distance beneath the surface. Every so often, a patch of foam passed under us, catching the light before disappearing. At first, I thought it was a reflection. There was a pale blur beneath the glass, somewhere beyond the lights on the hull, but when I shifted my head, it seemed to move with me. I leaned forward, trying to see past the reflection of the room. It looked like a child. I couldn't tell how far below us it was. The lights weren't strong enough to show much, and the water was moving, but I thought I could make out a head in shoulders with something pale trailing behind. Then it seemed to turn. I pulled back so quickly that my shoulder knocked against clairs. I looked at her, then straight down again, but whatever I'd seen was gone. I could still see the dark water and the occasional streak of foam passing beneath the ship. Nothing else. I moved to the other side of the panel, then crouched to look at a different angle, but all I got was the reflection of the lights along the wall. I told myself it had been something floating in the water, perhaps a piece of plastic from one of the containers we'd been warned about. The sea was full of rubbish, and at night a few scraps of white material could look like almost anything. I was tired, too. I'd been sleeping badly for days, and I'd spent more time than I cared to admit, thinking about Claire and the things she'd been saying. The mind could play tricks on you when you gave it enough to work with. When I tried to picture it clearly, I couldn't even be certain that it had been a face. "Did you see that?" I asked Claire. She didn't answer. Her attention was still fixed on the water, and that small smile hadn't left her face. I kept checking the same patch of water, telling myself I was only trying to prove that I'd been mistaken. Claire moved a little closer to the middle of the panel. "He's taking his time tonight," she said. I turned to her. "Who's taking his time?" She glanced at me as if she'd forgotten I was there, then looked back through the glass. I wasn't sure whether she'd heard me properly, or whether she'd decided not to answer. I wanted to ask her again, but I found I didn't particularly want to hear what she might say, and I took my hand off the glass because I felt really creeped out. I was trying to tell myself it was foam and a bit of light, and two people who hadn't slept properly in a year sitting here in the middle of the night. Somebody opened the door behind us. It was one of the night stewards, the young lads who cleaned the bars after closing, and he stopped dead when he saw the two of us sitting on the floor. He put his bucket down by the bar and looked at the glass, and I wanted him to see it, too, so I pointed. Look, that's our son. He came over and crouched down next to me and looked for a good few seconds while I tried to find it again so I could do. show him exactly where. All I could see was the water going past, and his white shirt reflected in the glass. "Captain, I can't see anything," he said. My mouth had gone dry. I'd just pointed at the floor, and told a member of my crew that my dead son was under the ship. "That's fine," I said. "Leave the cleaning for tonight." I told her we should get back to the cabin. She folded the blanket over her arm and followed me into the corridor. On the way to the lift, I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. I'd spent 22 years at sea. I knew what the water looked like at night, and I knew how easily reflections could fool you. When we reached our deck, Claire went straight to the cabin and started getting ready for bed. I stayed by the lift a moment longer, trying to work out why I was so reluctant to leave the lounge. I couldn't honestly say I'd seen a person. If someone had asked me to describe what I'd seen, I wouldn't have known what to say without sounding crazy. The bridge rang at twenty past four. Another warning had come in overnight about the lost containers, and the first officer wanted me to see it. It was raining hard on the bridge windows, and the wipers weren't keeping up with it. We were four days out of Vancouver by then, south of Alaska, a long way from anywhere. A fishing boat had seen two of those containers floating north of our route the evening before, and nobody could say how fast they were drifting. The first officer, Malik, wanted to slow down and give the whole area a wide berth, and I agreed with him. It wasn't an emergency. Malik had been with me for years. He didn't make a fuss, and on night shift, he'd tell me about his two daughters back in Bradford, who were both cleverer than him, according to him, and both going to be doctors. When we were settled on the new course, I left him in charge, and went into my office behind the bridge. There was a message from the hotel manager. The first time through, I'd been thinking about the lounge. A passenger had heard her wrist by the lifts at the back, and the ship's doctor had already seen tour. I'd had two or three hours sleep. Every time I shut my eyes, I could see something pale under the glass, but the steward hadn't seen anything. He'd have told somebody by now, too. I wanted to talk to him before the whole crew knew about it, and I hadn't worked out yet what I'd tell them. The last thing I wanted was them thinking I was seeing ghosts. The ship rolled harder all morning, and people were holding onto the rails and the corridors. None of the warnings that came in could tell us exactly where anything was. Claire came up to the officer's dining room for lunch, which surprised me. She'd slept late and seemed better for it. She asked about the weather, and I told her we'd slowed down and changed course to avoid the containers. "Can we go down tonight after the bar shuts?" she asked. "I'll be working. I can go on my own." I told her I'd rather she didn't, at least until we'd spoken to the doctor again. She looked down at her tea and slowly turned to the cup on its saucer. "I should have been watching," she said. "I waited, but she didn't go on. I was doing something else. It can't have been more than a minute." I looked out through the dining room windows. The rain had started again and there wasn't much to see. "Clear," I said, but I didn't know how to finish. We'd talked about that weekend plenty of times, but there were certain parts we never got to. We'd come close sometimes, and then one of us would change the subject or find a reason to leave the room. I had my own version of those minutes, and she had hers. I'd never asked her to tell me exactly what she'd been doing when I was away. I wasn't sure I wanted to know or what difference it would make now. She finished her tea and went back to the cabin without another word. By late afternoon, the rain had got so heavy and I felt a storm coming. We slowed down again when the radar picked up something ahead and to starboard. It disappeared from the screen in the rain, then showed up further away. We couldn't tell exactly what it was, but a container that had taken on water might have only a foot or so above the surface, and in that sea, it could be almost impossible to see. We kept watching the radar and adjusted our course as more information came in. At six, the hotel manager called to say he was closing the abyssal lounge early. The ship was rolling too much for the staff to carry drinks safely across the room, particularly with people sitting on the glass floor. I told him that was fine and went back to my work. I picked up the phone to call Claire, then put it down without dialing. She knew I didn't want her going back to the lounge alone, and I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't turn into another argument. I assumed she'd stay in the cabin. When I finally got a few minutes free, I went down to check on her. The cabin was empty. Her coat was still hanging by the door, but her shoes were gone. I knew where she'd gone. I could have called the lounge and asked someone to bring her back, and she 'd have been upstairs in ten minutes. There was no reason to make a personal matter into something more complicated, especially with the weather worsening and the ship already dealing with the container warnings. I wanted to go down there myself, and I wanted to find out whether what I'd seen the other night had really been there. I kept telling myself I needed to find out and put it behind me. The truth was, I wanted to see it again. I rang the bridge. Malik was trying to work out how to get us around the area where the containers had been spotted, and I knew he needed me up there. The weather was the worst we'd had all week. Visibility was poor, and we still had no reliable idea where the containers were drifting. In 22 years at sea, I'd never left the bridge in conditions like that. I'd even written up an officer once for doing it. I told Malik to hold our current course and call me before making any changes. Then I said I was going down to find Claire. I didn't tell him she'd gone to the lounge on her own. He would have sent someone to fetch her, and I didn't want anyone else involved. I clipped my radio to my belt and took the crew stairs. She was sitting in her usual place on the glass, with only the small lights along the walls left on. "I asked you not to come down here on your own," I said. "I know." I went over and knelt beside her. My radio crackled almost at once. Malik had picked up something on the radar, ahead, and to starboard, and wanted me on the bridge before we changed course. "I'm coming," I told him. I stayed where I was. "He was here a minute ago," Claire said, pointing to the glass in front of her. My radio went again. The lookout had spotted something low in the water, but lost it in the rain. Malik wanted to turn further to port, and I told him to go ahead. He acknowledged the order, then started talking to someone else on the bridge. Then Claire took my arm. "Listen," she said. "I could hear the engines, the ventilation system, and the radio against my belt. Nothing else." I asked what she'd heard, but before she could answer, a deep noise came through the floor, followed by a sharp crack that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the ship. The whole lounge shook. I grabbed Claire and caught the doorframe as the floor tilted beneath us. A table scraped across the room and something smashed against the wall. The lights flickered and the engines dropped to a low, uneven rumble before cutting out altogether. The lights went out and came back a second later, dimmer than before, and then the red emergency lights took over. For a moment, neither of us moved. Then my radio burst into light with several people talking at once. Bridge, this is the captain. What happened? Mollick told me we'd struck something along the starboard side. He'd stopped the engines and sent crew to check for damage, but they didn't yet know what we'd hit. As he spoke, an alarm started in the corridor outside the lounge. A moment later, the warning buzzer for the watertight doors began sounding. I pushed open the lounge door. Its frame had shifted, but it still moved, and I got Claire into the corridor. Crew members were already heading towards the machinery spaces with torches and radios. One stopped when he saw us and asked if we were all right. "Take her upstairs," I told him. "Get her to the passenger decks and stay with her until I send for you." Claire caught hold of my sleeve. Claire, go with him. She didn't let go. I looked at her and for a moment I couldn't tell whether she was frightened by the impact or simply didn't want me to leave. I put my arms around her and kissed her forehead. "I'll be right behind you." The crewman said he knew the quickest way to the passenger stairs and took her by the arm. I watched them head towards the forward end of the corridor. I could have followed them and been upstairs a minute later, but the The bridge was already calling for reports from the lower deck. and I knew there could be damage to the machinery spaces. The crew stairs at the aft end led more directly back to the bridge and I could report what I'd found on the way. My radio crackled again. Malik wanted to know which sections had been cleared and I told him Claire was on her way up and that I was checking the lower corridor before heading back. I had a duty to the people still working below and I couldn't leave the bridge guessing about the condition of the ship. I told myself I'd be upstairs within minutes. Claire looked back once before the crewman led her around to the corner. I knew the watertight doors were about to close but I thought I had time to reach the crew stairs. I started down the corridor trying to get a clear report from the bridge over the radio. Then I heard the heavy steel door behind me begin to descend. I turned and ran back but I was too far away. The door came down faster than I'd expected and by the time I reached it there was only a narrow gap left. I dropped to my knees and tried to get underneath but the bottom edge hit the floor with a heavy bang just as I reached it. The locking mechanism engaged. I was on the wrong side. I pulled at the manual release but it wouldn't move. The door was designed to hold against the pressure of the sea and there was no way to lift it by hand. I tried the radio but the interference was so bad that I couldn't get a clear answer from anyone on the bridge. Somewhere beyond the bulkhead I could hear crew members shouting to each other but I couldn't tell what they were saying. I stepped back and took out my radio. I was the captain and there were people waiting for instructions. For now all I could do was keep trying the radio and wait for someone to answer. Malik finally answered the radio and I could hear the strain in his voice when he relayed the ship's status. The first compartment was flooding badly. They were trying to contain it but water was getting into the adjoining section and the pumps weren't keeping up. I don't think I'd understood until then how serious it was. But the compartments were filling faster than we could empty them and the ship was losing the very thing that kept it afloat. Two compartments were taking water and if the flooding spread into another the ship wouldn't be able to maintain its stability and nobody could tell us how much time we had. I knew those compartments by name. I'd studied the plans only days earlier and I knew exactly what it meant when the pumps couldn't keep up. I saw water running down the wall beside the bar coming through the join between two panels and spreading across the floor. It wasn't a great deal but the pressure must have been immense. I had no way of knowing whether being on the bridge would have changed anything. But I hadn't been there to make that decision. I'd left Malik to do it while I sat twelve decks below him looking into the water because I wanted to believe there was something down there. The radio came alive again. Malik said the chief engineer didn't think they could hold it which I already had figured out. I pressed the radio close to my mouth and asked him how long we had. He went quiet and then he said they were trying to get down to me. Anyone they sent would have to come down into the flooding and cut that door out of its frame. "Don't send them," I said. "For years I'd been the person who reassured everyone else." When something went wrong, I made a decision, gave an order and expected people to trust me. Now I was standing alone in a dark lounge listening to my crew struggle to keep the ship alive and there was nothing useful I could tell them. I thought of Claire going upstairs with the crewman. At least she'd made it out of the lower decks I tried to picture her somewhere safe. The radio kept calling my name. I picked it up and answered because there was nothing else left to do. Malik, find out if my wife made it upstairs. He said he would. The water had reached the carpet by then from the wall behind the bar and from a second leak down by the back door. Somebody came on the radio asking when to start putting people in the lifeboats and I told him to go ahead. A minute later, the announcement came over the speakers, clear as anything. Malik came back with news of Claire. She'd got up to her lifeboat station on the top deck. I thanked him and sat down. Malik said they'd started loading on the high side and asked me if I could still hear him. "You have command," I told him. I knew what I'd done. I could hear the ship straining above me as she went further over paying the price for my absence. I was so tired of being the captain. As the freezing water hit my chest, I closed my eyes and waited to be a father again. Breaking news. We interrupt our regular programming with a major developing story. The passenger ship traveling from Vancouver to Yokohama has sunk in the North Pacific south of the Alaska Peninsula after colliding with an unknown object in heavy seas. More than 2,000 passengers and crew were aboard. The death toll has not yet been confirmed, but officials fear it could be in the hundreds. Rescue teams are still searching the area, racing against worsening weather and hundreds of people remain unaccounted for. The footage changed to Vancouver's cruise terminal. Families stood behind barriers, some holding photographs, others staring at their phones. A woman was crying into her husband's coat. We can now confirm that the ship's captain was not on the bridge at the time of the collision. He is among the missing. Authorities have not yet explained his whereabouts in the moments before the vessel went down. We will bring you further updates as soon as they become available. The broadcast returned to the North Pacific. The rescue vessel had slowed its crew scanning the water. A few pieces of wreckage floated on the surface, rising and falling between the waves. A life jacket drifted past the camera. There was no sign of the ship itself. Then the picture cut to black. Hey guys, Rex here. I'll let you get some rest. Wherever you're watching or listening from and whatever kind of night you're having, I hope these stories have made the world feel a little less quiet. Take care of yourself, get some sleep and remember. There's always another story waiting for you here. Until next time, sleep well. Good night.