BACK IN THE tunnel I know best, dressed and prepped for the usual migraine-inducing light show, I pick up the rope and give it a tug to see if it’s still firm. My gloves are covered in the same slimy gunk that makes my boots squelch as I walk, but my sense of purpose outweighs any disgust.
It’s been a year since I found a room inside one of the pods that contained more than just air. I’ve found three in total. The first time I found a small cluster of rocks. They were rough and didn’t seem to serve any purpose. I wondered if they’d somehow been caught up in the city’s growth and left, indigestible, like boulders swept up and moved by glaciers on Earth.
It wasn’t until I found the second room that I began to suspect they had been placed there. That one was discovered at the end of a particularly arduous climb up the interior of one of the thick stalks. There were rocks in there too, but they were shaped.
Some were crude bowls; others were rudimentary tools. That’s a theory, of course, a product of my very human brain shaped by experience on Earth. In this place they could have been made or used for anything. But it was clear to me that they had been shaped by someone wielding a tool. The one I took home has spectacularly even gouges forming the depression of the bowl.
It was so hard not showing it to anyone. So difficult to keep the endless speculation about my find within my own ears. I’m convinced people lived here once, perhaps an underclass scraping a life at the bottom of the city. Certainly the rooms I’ve found things in are nothing compared to the beauty and craftsmanship we saw at the top of the structure. But something about that doesn’t add up for me. I saw things up there requiring technology vastly more advanced than hand-carved stone bowls. Why would there be such a wide gulf between a single city’s inhabitants?
I’m still not even sure anyone actually lived here anyway. It’s so hard to tell when there’s no common cultural reference point. I can look around this place and think habitation is impossible because there are no windows, no signs of water or food storage, no furniture or places that are dry enough to sleep. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Perhaps the ones who used to live here needed damp conditions and constant dark. Maybe they licked the walls to sustain themselves and knew ways to shape the rooms here according to transient needs. My gut instinct still says this wasn’t a city in the sense of a densely populated place. That’s just what we call it. The only person who might have been able to tell us is dead now.
The third room contained things that looked like weapons to me, reminiscent of the flint arrowheads and stone axe heads I’d peered at in museums on Earth. Perhaps that’s what this place really is: a museum. I shake my head at myself. Yet another human concept I’m desperately trying to impose on my surroundings.
Those times, I didn’t come here with the intention of taking something. I just wanted to explore, and if I stumbled across something, I’d take it home. After the first time, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to find something. But right now, I need to, in a way I haven’t before. I’m not leaving this place until I have something I can hold and look at and love in a way Sung-Soo will never understand. I’m never going to let him bully me into losing something ever again.
The floor of the tunnel bucks beneath my feet and I tumble, my grip on the rope made ineffectual by the slime coating my gloves. I’m falling again, in the direction I did before, but this time my feet don’t hit a ledge. I twist away from the tunnel so my mask doesn’t get clogged, which sends me into a spinning, rougher tumble that wrenches my left arm. I hear a sickening pop from my shoulder and then there’s nothing but pain. It crowds out the panic and the desire to try to brace myself. All I can do is swear until I finally land at the bottom of the tunnel.
The emergency icon is flashing over my vision as I try to look up and see how far I’ve fallen. There are more valve ridges than I can count and no rope in reach.
“You have had an accident,” the MyPhys software says. “Do you require rescue or assistance?”
“No.”
“You are injured. Would you like your physician to be notified?”
“No.”
“Initial diagnosis from neural feedback suggests you will be able to walk. You are at high risk of shock. Recommended action: seek medical advice immediately.”
“Shut up.”
“Do you require further advice?”
“No, go away.”
It’s small consolation, but if I’d been knocked out, the chip would have notified Mack and Kay immediately and my excursion would be all over the colony in minutes. I realize I’ve made an error in dismissing the software.
“Open MyPhys,” I say, puffing my breath in and out to try to manage the pain. I choose voice interface, unable to focus well enough on a visual one. Somehow keeping my eyes screwed shut is helping.
“Welcome to MyPhys. Would you like assis—”
“Do something about the pain. Reduce it.”
“Are you aware that artificial reduction of pain at the neural level increases the risk of further injury?”
“Yes.”
“Safety parameters recommend dampening of the parieto-insular cortex for no longer than fifteen minutes. Would you like to proceed?”
“Yes, for fuck’s sake.”
The effect is instant. Before I was nothing more than an unbearable throbbing pain with a mind and voice. Now I feel other parts of my body. The fall less than twenty-six hours after all that climbing has left my limbs strained and aching. I start to laugh and then violent shivering begins. I need to get home. No, I need to get to Kay. I can’t move my left arm.
I open my eyes and look around the area in which I’ve landed. The beam from my headlamp is shining from a place beside my feet. Carefully I stoop to retrieve it and notice what it’s illuminating. The floor here is carpeted with thousands of cilia, each a few centimeters long. I’ve never seen anything like it here before.
The beam moves as one of the cilia at the edge of the area sticks to the headlamp and pulls it away from me. Before I fully realize what’s happening, several other cilia push it along too with what seems to be a reflexive movement. I swipe the headlamp away from them, pulling long strands of sticky mucus with it, and put it back on. It’s tricky to do so with only one hand.
Once I can direct the light, its sweep across the floor and up the curved sides of the tunnel reveals that this entire portion is covered with cilia. Nervously, I cast the beam in the direction they were sweeping my lamp.
There’s an open valve, just another of the many I’ve fallen past, its circular edge clearly visible. But beyond it there’s no more tunnel.
It’s a room. A new one and it’s full of . . . stuff. Hundreds of objects made of metal, plastic, glass maybe. All artificially made and all in one great jumble. Things that must have been swept in there by the cilia.
There’s a tremble at the edge of the valve and I can see it’s about to close. “Open, camera!” I yell and the relevant icon from my lens software appears translucent across my vision. “Record vision and audio only, no immersion.”
I stare into the room and, as slowly as I can, scan the contents with the sweeping movements of my eyes as the valve closes. I can analyze it at my leisure once I get home.
Once it’s shut, I leave the recording running, taking in the band of cilia and end it when I’m satisfied I’ve got it all. The rest of the tunnel remains infuriatingly vertical above me and impossible to climb. I’m stuck.
It’s the longest length of tunnel that’s moved—in my experience anyway—and I’m struggling to map it to what it must look like outside. Has one of the tendrils that twisted in a curve around the lower edge of the back of the city straightened, thrusting the end of itself higher into the air? Is there a chance someone has noticed? It’s unlikely; most of them will be asleep by now and there are no scheduled expeditions this close to the seed ceremony.
I’m desperate to go to the closed valve and force it open, but there’s no way I could walk to it without crushing the cilia. Would I have been swept in there had I landed unconscious just a meter farther toward the door?
It’s reminiscent of tiny organisms that use cilia to move microscopic particles into their mouths, but none of the things in that room showed any signs of being digested. Is it just a store for rubbish swept out of the tunnels? Why not dump it all outside, like we were dumped several times? And where did it all come from anyway?
My head is pounding. I can’t stop shaking and my left hand is tingling. I need to get out of here.
There’s no sign of the tunnel moving back to its original orientation. Usually it returns to normal fairly quickly, but even when it has, it will take time to reach the rope and my usual exit point. The pain suppression will stop way before I can get to Kay and if I try to override the safety parameters she’ll be notified anyway.
There’s a knife in my pack. Mack said the tunnel walls heal themselves very fast. Could I cut my way out? But if I did that, where would I come out? I don’t even know which side of the city I’m in now. I could emerge from the tunnel wall in plain view of the greeters, for all I know.
I close my eyes and take a moment to suppress the panic that’s rising within. Losing my shit is not going to help.
It would be easy to ping the network for a geolocation and from that I could work out where I am in relation to the colony. But the ping would be registered. If someone went scouting for that kind of information, they’d know I’ve been inside the city. I’ve never had to fiddle with that data set before; it would take a bit of time to work out how to cover my tracks, but it isn’t impossible. Short of waiting until I can walk out, the latter part of the journey in terrible pain, I don’t have a choice.
There’s a rendering of God’s city on the server. From the outside it’s been studied a great deal, thankfully, and the structure has a 3-D representation modeled from the external appearance. There was a plan to add in more detail from the original trip into the city at first Planetfall, which was quickly shelved. Mack doesn’t have the skills and I couldn’t face processing the data from our multiple failed attempts to navigate the inner areas. Now I wish I had.
But between the external map, the point of entry into the city and my current coordinates, it’s possible to work out that I’ve fallen about ten meters. It felt like much more. If I cut through where my feet are, I should drop out close enough to where I came in to not be noticed.
Cutting from the inside is so much worse. It feels more visceral. I listen for any accompanying howls from inside the city but there are none. It’s been very quiet tonight. I try not to think about it too much, knowing it will close itself fast enough and that the alternative is much worse. For me anyway.
There’s a drop of a couple of meters down to the ground and my landing is rough, jarring my body and probably making my injury worse. The neural dampening is still in effect, so I don’t cry out.
The coverall is easy enough to undo and climb out of, but my shoulder feels horribly wrong when my other hand guides the fabric off it. Dislocated, I reckon. I rattle off every expletive I know in English, French and the ones in Akan that my grandfather taught me when he was drunk.
I make my way back to the colony. The fifteen minutes are up by the time I get home, stash my gear and get back out of the house again. The software gives me a handy countdown of the last minute so I have plenty of time to build myself up into a tense, gut-clenching wreck of anticipation before the pain returns. It brings me to my knees a couple of meters away from my door, even though I tried to be ready for it. I suck air through the gaps in my teeth to fuel the expletives. Unsurprisingly, the emergency icon returns.
“Would you like assistance?”
“Ping . . . Kay . . . Dr. Reed,” I say between panting breaths.
“Dr. Lincoln is the current emergency physician on duty.”
“Ping Dr. Reed, you fucking piece of shit AI, or I’ll delete you from the fucking server.”
“Pinging Dr. Reed.”