In the Future

Underwater discoveries

Location: China
Year: 2035
Synopsis: While mapping a seabed, a Chinese crew discovers a military operation.

The China National Offshore Oil Corporation, abbreviated CNOOC, was a state-owned Chinese company that extracted oil from the seabed.

A crew of three was aboard a CNOOC vessel. Two women and a man supervised 50 autonomous underwater robots. Many machines that were used to map the seabed in a certain area. They were controlled by sonar repeaters that acted like a GPS, locating each computer. Electromagnetic waves didn't go very deep into the sea, so neither GPS, radar or lidar were used. Sonar repeaters only.

In the long, narrow room filled with robot-linked displays, one of the two women was doing his work shift.
Meanwhile the other two were having lunch. They talked about the new funds that the company was about to pocket, thanks to which their wages would increase. Eating peanuts, the woman in the booth watched the screens, idealizing those robots as a real milestone in human history.
In the past people had to rely on their instincts to observe the sea by sailing ships. Then the diving suits were invented. Subsequently, more advanced technologies such as submarines allowed exploration of the farthest depths of the sea. And finally the robots arrived.

They were basically a computer with a program installed, and a motor mounted that could record data via electronic sensors.
Now the level of automation had reached the point that the more expensive software allowed a robot to operate autonomously. No longer needed a person remotely controlling the computer with a controller, at least not for fairly easy tasks.
The human-robot communication system was the cloud robotics system. Each data was transmitted, by robots or hand joysticks, to a company server farm on the mainland, which computed the information and sent it to the receiver. This method eliminated the need to equip the robots or ship with computers that added weight in the first case and took up space in the second.

When a robot saw a huge object, the day of those three changed. The woman saw the data, and she immediately called her colleagues. She showed them the sonar image. The robots used for that job weren't equipped (because they didn't need) a camera. The workers on board who were viewing the scan only had to rely on interpretation.

But suddenly a torpedo hit them. That object discovered by the sonar was one of many mines placed by the army for a military operation. The torpedo was launched from a UUV submarine, the size of a truck and with a throw of thousands of meters. Within seconds, the oil company's robots detected the approaching weapon and the crew saw them on the screen. But that torpedo was so quick to hit the ship that their brains were shut down even before realizing. 

The terrible disaster was censured by the government, but the people responsible for that stupid misunderstanding between the two government agencies were severely punished.