Chapter 22 — The Cable Splicer Beneath the Sea

Steady Beat

Ten days after the Vạn Lý ship docked at Vũng Rạng port, Sơn stood in front of a small house in a town more than a hundred kilometers away, holding a simple gift bag, his palms sweaty even though the weather was already cool in autumn. This was his first in-person visit since the funeral three years ago.

The door opened, Duy's mother stood there, her hair was much more gray than Sơn's memory, but her eyes still retained the familiar warmth. "Paint," she said, her voice shaking with emotion. "I'm really here."

"I'm sorry it took so long," Sơn said, bowing to her according to the rules he had learned since childhood.

"Stop apologizing." She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the house. "It's okay if you come."

They sat and talked all afternoon, about Duy, about old memories, about Sơn's current job, about the recent storm and the story of the cable line being saved at the right time. Duy's mother listened to every detail with special attention, sometimes nodding, sometimes smiling, as if each story Sơn told was a piece of the puzzle that helped her understand more about the meaning of what her son had left behind.

"Duy will definitely be proud of you," she said when Sơn was about to leave, holding his hand tightly again in front of the door. "Not because I saved someone. But because I learned how to live on without losing myself."

Before leaving, Duy's mother gave him a small, old wooden box. "I've been keeping this for a long time, planning to give it to you one day when you're ready," she said. "Now I think that day has come."

Sơn opened the box, inside was an old notebook, Duy's familiar handwriting covered every page, recording his scuba diving experiences, tips on troubleshooting, and scattered among the dry technical pages were idle questions similar to the habit he used to tell Thư and Bách before the last dive: what is his favorite food, what would he do first if he won the lottery, where would he most like to go in his life.

On the last page, a hastily written line, perhaps recorded right before that fateful trip: "This job taught me one thing, no one is so good that they don't need others. If one day I am no longer here, I hope the person who continues this job will remember that more than anything I have ever taught."

Sơn stood silently before those words, feeling a lump rising in his throat, not a familiar pain, but a deep understanding, as if Duy, even though he was no longer here, still found a way to tell him the most important thing, it was just that it took three years for him to be truly ready to read and fully understand it.

Sơn left that house with a feeling of relief that he had not experienced since Duy's death, not the relief of letting go completely, but of carrying that memory in a different way, a way that no longer made him break down every time he remembered it.

On the way back to Vũng Rạng, Sơn stopped by Bách's residence, carrying Duy's old notebook, not to show off, but because he wanted to share a part of his old teacher with those who are continuing on that path with him. Bách read through a few pages and nodded thoughtfully.

"He's right," Bách said, closed the notebook, and returned it to Sơn. "No one is so good that they don't need others. I think that's also what I learned most clearly from that day in the crevice."

"Do you still think about it much?" Sơn asked, genuinely concerned about the psychological state of his teammate who had faced a dangerous moment with him.

"Yes, but not in an obsessive way," Bách replied, thinking for a moment before continuing. "It's like a reminder, not a wound. Every time I try to do something alone, carelessly, I remember the feeling of being stuck in that crack in the rock, and automatically slow down." Sơn nodded, understanding that feeling better than anyone else. "That's exactly how a memory should exist," he said. "Not to punish me forever, but to remind me to do better."

Two weeks later, Sơn was at Liên Hải's Network Operations Center, an office building located in the middle of the city, completely different from the ship space and ocean floor he was familiar with throughout his career. Trung invited him to attend an incident summary session, where all data about the LH-CN1 line was presented to the company's board of directors.

"This is the central monitoring board." Trung led Sơn through a large room with dozens of screens hanging on the walls, each screen displaying the status of a different cable line spread across the sea. "Line LH-CN1 is in that corner."

Sơn looked in the direction Trung was pointing and found a small screen displaying a simple graph: a steady blue light, flashing at a fixed cycle, indicating a continuous test signal running along the length of the cable to confirm it was still operating normally. That flickering rhythm, steady and steady, reminded him of something else, much closer.

"Does anyone call that beat?" He asked, curious.

"The technical guys here jokingly call it the heartbeat of the cable line," Trung replied, smiling. "When it's regular like that, people know the gland is healthy. If that rhythm starts to go haywire, that's the first sign that there's a problem, sometimes even earlier than the official warnings."

"How is your mother these days?" Sơn asked, remembering the private story that Trung had shared on the deck in the middle of a stormy night.

"She's completely healthy," Trung replied, the smile on his lips was much brighter. "I just visited her last week, bringing a new set of spare communications equipment with me, just in case a similar situation happened again. She scolded me for worrying too far, but I saw she kept it carefully at the head of the bed." Sơn laughed, imagining that scene. "Maybe she also learned to be more prepared, like someone I know."

"Are you talking about yourself?" Trung asked, squinting his eyes jokingly.

"Maybe," Sơn replied, not denying. "Excessive preparation is sometimes what saves lives, I learned that the hardest way possible."

They both walked closer to the central monitoring panel, where dozens of other cable lines were still operating silently on the ocean floor, each line carrying its own story, a separate community depending on the durability of the slender cables running through dark waters that few people had ever thought about.

Sơn stood looking at that green light for a long time, an association suddenly appeared in his mind that he couldn't help but smile at its coincidence. For the past three years, Chu Tuệ Lam had checked his heart rate before each dive, a number he had never really paid attention to other than that it needed to be within the allowable range. Now, standing before another heartbeat, of a system he had helped revive in the midst of a storm, he realized that both heartbeats were somehow telling the same story: about perseverance, about resilience, about continuing to function despite being broken.

His phone vibrated slightly in his pocket. A message from Minh Thư, now officially accepted into the diving team after completing the additional training course she registered for as soon as the ship docked.

"Mr. Sơn, we just received a new mission, another cable line needs routine maintenance offshore. Will you participate?"

Sơn looked at the message for a moment, then looked back at the steady rhythm of blue light on the screen in front of him, feeling a certainty he hadn't felt this way in the past three years. It was not certain that everything will always be absolutely safe, the sea had never promised that to anyone. It's the certainty that, whatever happens next, he will no longer had to face it alone, and that, in the end, was the real lesson that Duy left him, a lesson that he was now ready to pass on to those who come after him.

He texted back a short line: "Yes. When does it depart?"

Then he stood there a moment longer, in the middle of a room full of surveillance screens, listening in his head to the steady beat of a cable line in the middle of the ocean, steady, persistent, not noisy, but never stopping.

Outside the glass door of the surveillance room, the city continues its daily life, millions of calls, messages, and transactions quietly flow through cables deep on the seabed that most people never think about, until one of them breaks. Sơn closed Duy's notebook, put it in his pocket, and walked out of the building, preparing for his next trip to sea.