#15 – The Wheelhouse #2

“It’s probably going to be you,” said Tuner, her flat voice betrayed by the way that her eyes flickered up at him twice and then away.

“Yes, that seems about right,” said Holder.

“We’re the cleanest system right now. Fewest defects. And you’re you. And I’m me. I can manage this system better than you.”

“Yes, that seems about right,” repeated Holder.

“But you probably won’t come back,” continued Tuner. Thin fingers writhed through her short hair, pulling it to tension. “Almost no one ever does.”

“Yes, that seems about right,” sighed Holder, slumping down into a chair at the opposing side of the small, tin can room. It wasn’t dirty. How could it be dirty? There was nothing to dirty it and nothing to do but clean it. But it was degraded in a way that was maddening; there was nowhere for the eye to settle that did not have some form of defect or damage.

He briefly considered strapping himself to one of the outtake valves like Baker occasionally did, when the stress became too much.

But there was something moving beneath that, too — a feeling of curiosity. He had no choice but to admit it, he was interested. It was something different. Something that he would never thought to have experienced and, if he turned it around in his mind, something that might actually have meaning.

It would be nice to see something real. Something real that wasn’t contained within an eight by eight cell, or some dark winding passage. Even in the terror it would be beautiful. What was it like? It was already hard enough to get used to being uptop. Everything was so immediate.

In the system, there was a constant, imperceptible delay. It couldn’t be detected; you were born into it, it was natural to you. But the world could never quite work in sync with the mind; they were two disparate beings, one always playing catch up to the other. Part of the training involved an isolated environment, where the speeds could run much faster and each person could acclimate. His first experience had been…

There wasn’t a word. There had never been a word.

And beneath all of these jagged thoughts, rippling below the surface, were all the glorious stresses of potential failure. What if he never got there? What if he got there and they couldn’t resolve the situation? What if he got there and then couldn’t get back, dying alone with nothing more than his own thoughts, the salvation of everyone else encapsulated forever within a lost mind?

He closed his eyes.

He could still see the body. A pale outline of a thin form.

In the close-lidded darkness, he saw a bright, blue flash.

“They voted,” said Tuner.

“I expected longer,” said Holder.

“They chose me.”

Holder’s eyes snapped open.

#14 – The Wheelhouse #1

“I’m getting alerts from all over,” said Tuner, staring at the display, a glowing orb flashing in the corner of her vision. “It’s happening everywhere and no one knows why.”

“What is ‘it’ exactly?” asked Holder, warily.

“People just–just falling. Just failing. They seem fine and they just… fall apart,” said Tuner, her usually flat affect momentarily shattered. “Something in the system is wrong. It’s not properly maintaining their functions. It’s reporting that they’re healthy… when they’re not. They’re dying. They’re just standing there and dying.”

“If it’s everywhere, it has to be some sort of system problem,” reasoned Holder. “That should make it easier to track, not less. It has to be something big that’s changed.”

“The systems are built to be separate and modular for exactly that reason,” remindedTuner. “There’s nothing that should affect every system at the same time, let alone in such a specific way. And no one can figure it out so far. They’ve run all of their diagnostics. Everything seems clean, uptop and down below.”

“It has to be a problem within the core programming,” Holder said, though he knew he was out of his depth. “Within the original data. What are we supposed to do?”

“We could… we could go to the Wheelhouse,” she said, tentatively. She immediately looked away, cringing slightly even as she said it. “That’s what everyone’s saying now. That we need to elect someone to go to the Wheelhouse.”

“The Wheelhouse,” repeated Holder, with a shake of his head. “No one’s been to The Wheelhouse in three decades. God only knows what’s going on in there.”

“If this continues at the rate it’s been going… we only have a decade. Maybe less, they can’t decide whether it’s increasing in frequency or if that’s just a statistical anomaly, the data set is too small,” said Tuner.

“Yes… but… the Wheelhouse?” asked Holder, hesitantly. “Exactly who is up for election in that?”

The Wheelhouse was all that remained of the eighteen developers; those who had built the very structure of the system which held all of them. They were, of course, long dead, but before they had died they had managed to save as much as they could of their memories, in a separate facility that could only be accessed uptop.

There were still scientists in the world. but there were still issues that would occur; things that could not be gleaned from intellect alone. The overseers remained as a fail safe mechanism; ever-present and as close as it could be to all-knowing, but unable to affect the world directly.

It wasn’t like taking a portrait of a person. Over time, each entity lost its coherence. Every time the overseers were consulted they had lost just a little bit of their former selves, their personalities, their wholeness, becoming these jagged creatures, amalgams of programmed thought. Photocopies taken from photocopies in an endless cycle of degradation and abstraction.

And it was for that reason that The Wheelhouse was an entirely separate system. It could not be accessed or interacted with through either the virtual world or any of the systems in the physical one. It had to be connected with directly. And that involved surviving the pilgrimage… both ways. There were countless people who had failed. Who had never been heard from again.

“There’s been a motion to select three systems, and each system will send out one person,” said Tuner. “Viginti was trying to figure out whether they could override the max uptop amount, but they haven’t been successful yet. They wanted to send pairs, but that would leave the uptop with only one.”

“Fantastic,” said Holder, his mind paging through the myriad of tales he had been told by his peers as a young boy–and the slightly more believable but no less terrifying tales he had been told again as an adult.

There were ghost stories told about The Wheelhouse. Exaggerations and extrapolations from the few who had made the journey in all the decades past. He couldn’t explain why it was so terrifying. Maybe it was because they were ghosts, in a sense; pale fragments of people long dead.

They said that sometimes the developers could not remember that they had died; that they had no knowledge of what they truly were and instead believed themselves to be living people trapped inside of a simulation.

Or, even worse, they would beg to be taken outside. They would beg not to be left there yet again.

#13 – Transmission #5

Breathe.

Wait, was that a thought–or was it a sound? It wasn’t her voice, though it did seem to come from inside of her. It wasn’t her internal monologue–which coursed through her mind just a little more confident, self-assured and, for some heretofore unexplained reason, British–that told her now to, at very least, keep up the basic capacity of life.

Walk.

Breathe.

“I can do that,” she said, with an inexplicable sense of quasi-pride. Is this what madness felt like? She had heard of the insanity of solitude, but she had suspected it took more than a few minutes. And everyone in the district was a little insane; it was to be expected, mere glitches in the fabric, inconsistencies between space and time. Chanter began to walk down the road towards the snowy hillside, one step at a time; towards the dense forest of trees which outlined the township, all flowers, repetition and random.

Walk.

Breathe.

She focused on each step, one ahead of the other, and stared upward into the pale blue sky. There were glitches in the clouds. They were torn in jagged lines; half-flowing, half-still. She had seen them like this before, in brief moments of time; she had spent small portions of her childhood, lying wherever she might, and looking for the captured, locked pieces of sky.

Occasionally a bird would get stuck in one and hover there… sometimes for days, once for more than a month… before just abruptly disappearing or racing to catch up with brethren that had long been deleted.

Walk. 

Breathe.

But once she got to the forest’s edge, what would she do? From there, there was no way to get out, there was only a constant series of just-almost-similar chunks of exterior space, with small, glowing things to collect and to prize. You could go north, east and west forever but south only exactly three times. She didn’t like the forest; it gave her motion-sickness, and the constant,, repetitive cherry blossom trees only increased the feeling.

Walk.

Breathe.

At the edge of the forest it occurred to her that no directions had been given, and she wasn’t certain why she had chosen the direction she did–but for the fact that she had come from the other direction already. Everything ended either in the forests or the cliffs, however, and she had never purchased a rope, and she absolutely hated the idea of mining.

Something was wrong; there was a stillness. In fact, all there was, was stillness. The forest had frozen; blossoms half-fallen, leaves swaying in a nonexistent breeze. As she stepped into the forest she expected the harsh, crunching sound of leaves underneath her–which seemed to occur even when the leaves were, apparently, moist and wet, or even not there at all–but there was nothing.

Walk. 

Breathe.

Experimenting, she raised a foot and lowered it again. Nothing. She walked through the silent, still woods and jumped, just slightly, as she noticed her arm passing through a blossom entirely. She didn’t feel anything–not a thing–but she hadn’t seen a clipping error since she was a child. The sunlight which fell to the forest floor was dappled but did not alter, in any way, as she walked over it; a frozen pattern across the landscape.

Walk.

Breathe.

She wondered if somehow she was simply receiving prompts from some sort of scheduling system, some kind of over-soul which guided the inhabitants, whispering to them their needs. But, of course, she didn’t need to walk, and she never actually needed to breathe, though the system had always seemed averse to letting her sit underneath a pond and stay there. But she’d always wondered where the frogs went, once they jumped in–and the answer had been, nowhere, they disappeared the second they touched the water from above.

Walk.

Breathe.

At least, however, she wasn’t getting tired–she didn’t feel fatigued, not at all. And they did feel fatigued, when they exerted themselves–it was necessary to exercise, to flood the system with–

Run.

Wait–was that just–

Run.

#13 – Transmission #4

Chanter was pushed aside by urgent feet; the temple was emptying behind her, its inhabitants moving forward to the crowd within the street. The little child lingered behind and Chanter stood there, empty, hollow and invisible as she always was to them.

A hole in the crowd opened as a few people pushed their way forward. But the voices were just a wall of noise to her; she couldn’t make out anything but the feeling of fear; the songs of horror. She wondered if she should leave by the temple’s back door.

But as she looked back, the thin line of reality blurred at its edges. There was a flat canvas before her, and then nothing at all. There were legs beneath her, and then nothing at all. There was breath within her… and then nothing at all.

Static-filled, lock-step, crawling — walking — kneeling? Incomprehensible, impossible (am I?) broken

moments

that unraveled — choking? Dry — were those her hands? Wait — were those her feet? Did she have feet? Or was it sky? Like rough

unbroken

twine, a cord of endless light and the hesitation of moment unfurled and falling sideways, tossed to-and-fro like

ice

like burning fire ice adrift on dark waters, dark moonless waters — and breathe, breathe, breathe 

breathe

And suddenly

resolve

Chanter stood trembling at the doorway of the temple wondering, impossibly, if she had been there the entire time or if she had even ever been there at all. Or could it have been the same thing that took…

The boy?

But there was no boy. Chanter felt herself walk-falling down the too-perfect steps of the temple, looking up and down the hard-packed road; the street deserted and empty. She turned her head, a darkness eclipsing her; the temple was empty.

She was alone.

She looked down at her wrist to see nothing at all; just bare skin, impossibly bare skin. She rubbed her arm up and down in a daze, a fevered daze, feeling light and sick, immaterial and insubstantial and the panic did she exist?

Did she ever exist?

Turning around, whipping her hair, half-stumbling through the street in a panic — Chanter ran into her home, nearly slamming into the door even as it opened automatically before her. And it was her home, her small home, her cozy, quiet, invisible home — just as it had always been.

But there were no flickers. There were no lights. In the pantry, there were no glowing, half-visible objects to eat or to order. She threw open her plain wardrobe; empty, no clothing to select, nothing to buy, no hovering points or half-taken scores.

Where am I? Chanter took her breaths deep and slow. If she was a glitch, had she been returned to her world? An empty world alone and devoid of… would she be here forever? Would she be trapped here forever?

Would they notice uptop? Would they see that she was gone? Would they — could they… would they even care? Unthinkingly she looked down at her wrist again, trying to gauge the passage of time — in those weak, half-hour chunks they allotted their time into — but she was denied even that small comfort.

Breathe.

#12 – Transmission #3

Children were controlled. They had to be; the population needed to be sustained according to extremely specific, narrow protocols. So children weren’t created because of love or sex or any of those messy, natural reasons, they were created on a schedule. When a person died, genetic material was taken from two hosts and a new child was grown. And then that child, once its consciousness emerged, was delivered to the next pair of waiting, pre-licensed parents.

At least, that was how it was supposed to go. No one really knew what had happened with Chanter she had just appeared out of whole cloth to them, not requested, not scheduled and — it was very difficult for her not to assume — not wanted. Since she existed outside of the system, she had no assigned parents. And though someone uptop could have altered it, could have forced her into the queue, could have given her a lineage, a purpose, a meaning…

They just… never did. It was a failing that had occurred long before Chanter had the knowledge or voice to question it.

So that is how Chanter had lived out her life; as a ghost. She had no needs, not really. Children were, for the most part, automatically taken care of by the system; put through routines that taught them, that tested them. And the people around her did care for her, as needed, from time to time. But there was no family that she could call her own. There was nothing that she knew as hers.

And maybe, somehow, this is offered her a perspective that grew beyond the mechanical tethers of their shared experience. She felt like her consciousness was an ever-growing balloon extending out and beyond the thin veil of electrical impulse reality, encompassing a wideness of space and time.

Sometimes there’s a moment like flicking on a light in a dark room, when a consciousness turns in on itself and seemingly verifies its own existence. This was the moment that she was experiencing now: a supreme consciousness of being, a sudden realization of self.

And then the clamor bled back into the air, into her pressurized surroundings. Voices returned, all at once; so much so that she wondered if there had just been a glitch, like her. And then, she realized, there was panic; she felt it, sensed it, before she saw it. Just outside the temple door, there were people crowding around in the street. And in the very center of all of them she could see someone — lying on the ground, not moving.

She did not want to move closer. So she did not. Yet, in another timeline, in another layer of reality, she felt as though she did. She felt separate from this alternate self; as though the split from her doppleganger was so recent that she could catch up, if she moved fast enough. That she could just slide into that alternate reality and find herself moving through the crowd to reach to that fallen person; a young boy dressed in blue.

But she did not move and her alternate self faded away, lost forever; that reality would never exist. She did not want to move any closer; she did not want to become responsible. Her entire life she had been blamed for small things, random things, things that just could not be explained. Her existence itself was a curse and the things that she touched became a glitch. 

She did not believe this. But she did.

A brief hiatus and we’re back!

Unplugged took a brief hiatus but is now back and on schedule. Which doesn’t matter because no one is here… yet!

#11 – Transmission #2

Every passing day seemed like a blur; a smeared liquid pool of color and time. Chanter could not say what she had done yesterday; the day before, or the day before that, though she could pull up her logs and see the same meaningless patter repeating itself again and again. There was nothing but the purchase or the discovery of some new and gleaming experience, and Chanter found herself disenchanted with these parceled, partitioned moments of time.

A memorized sequence of footsteps found her in front of the district center; an ornate building in the fashion of the temple, or perhaps a tea house, or perhaps both, which seemed to grow continuously larger with time. On matte, textured walls, bulletins were displayed — little missives and transmissions coming in and out through the ether, reaching to them from the other settlements. Birth announcements, death announcements, queries and complaints. They were always different… but always the same. Behind her, she could hear the scraping sound of the brushes down the street.

In some quiet, manufactured vacuum of event and time, Chanter was alone. Somehow she had simply managed to trickle through a thousand dust-laden conversations and introductions to emerge clean and clear on the other side. A ghost in a city of the dead, she spoke to no one and no one seemed to notice her. It was easy, in this place. There was a… calm. A calm that she almost dare not disturb; a placid pool, mirrored and bright. Was she lonely? They were always alone. It was not a question with an answer.

Chanter shrugged her shoulders and pulled her jacket closer to her, conscious of the distraction within the cold. It would have been so easy — too easy — to always be comfortable. It would be madness. People could only function in a sort of quiet, pervasive discontent. If there was nothing to be unhappy about there was nothing to strive for, and if there was nothing to strive for then… then there was nothing at all.

Inside of the tea house, she felt the temperature rise — just barely warmer, a degree or two that hovered close to her skin. Faces that she knew better than her own were catching up on news, making purchases, buying food. One of the district’s younger children, Skipper, was sorting through lessons with her parents; a glowing book of moving pages.

Chanter had never known her parents.

Chanter was a glitch.

#10 – Transmission #1

YOU ARE IN QUADRAGINTA
IT IS THE 24TH OF SEPTEMBER
IT IS THE YEAR 153
IT IS 10:00 IN THE MORNING
THERE ARE 0 ALERTS
THERE ARE 0 WARNINGS
YOU ARE CURRENTLY 24 YEARS OF AGE
YOU ARE CURRENTLY HEALTHY
YOU ARE SAFE
IT IS YOUR FREEDAY

Chanter stared, stock-still, breathing shallow, at the blinking numbers scrawled across her cream-white ceiling, a glowing cord of light: 10:00. 10:00. 10:00. She could envision her body moving, like a ghost, above her, but she could not seem to summon the energy or lactic acid to complete the task. She wondered if this was what it was like to die: to simply lose the will to move forward anymore, to be unable to muster the energy. Maybe it was this inner spark of light that died and then you were just — gone, unable to tether yourself to existence any longer.

But she was just being lazy.

She dragged herself up from her thin, black floor mat, reaching out towards the eerily luminescent, unnaturally steady rice-paper walls that made up her small, empty cube. She had never bothered upgrading the size; it had never seemed important to her. She looked down at her clothes; an embroidered, red-silk robe, which floated lightly against her skin. She wondered if she should leave now. She wondered if she should just stay. She stared across the room, at a brightly illustrated painting of crashing ocean waves and imagined them crashing upon her.

What was the point, really? It would be a reduction to say that her goals didn’t matter, that her life didn’t matter, that her fabricate world didn’t matter — as with anything, it was all relative, and she could not imagine that anything could be more real or more meaningful than anything else; it was only a matter of perception, of context, of will. Yet that clock, which turned to 0, turned to 30, turned to 0, turned to 30 again, that clock was driving her to madness. Each creeping of it across the long linear strand of time was making her feel as though her skin was pulling off her flesh, as though her bones were screeching and screaming.

“I should go out today,” she said, to herself, the hollow sound of her voice falling flat and unnatural within the chilled air; of perfect temperature, of perfect humidity. That thought affirmed, she went through the motions in a way similar to falling down a mountain; a free fall effect from one task to another, to wash, to get dressed, to clean and finally to stand before her door and take one deep breath before pushing out into the bright white, blinding light.

Cherry blossom trees were now in full bloom; she knew this not from the trees themselves, but from the pale, faded flower petals which were strewn across the street. Wanderer slowly scraped by, brushing the flowers away from the path, slow, even strokes dissolving the petals against the stone-paved black roads. Miller was further down the street, repairing the lantern-lights one by one; further down the hill, Chanter could see a dozen people or maybe more, down at the market, buying and selling their wares. She buried her hands within her pockets. There was a cold chill in the district air.

#9 – Uptop #3

There was a long pause; a silence that seemed to crash around Holder’s ears in impenetrable waves. The room seemed brighter and hotter, now.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Holder, finally, circling around the table, at once afraid to get closer yet drawn inexplicably forward. “Tuner, does this make sense to you? Come over here.”

“I… don’t want to,” Tuner responded, thinly, standing at the screen, her hands hovering over the input field. Holder wondered if he had ever heard that uncertainty in her voice before; he certainly couldn’t remember it. “I can do everything I need to do here.”

“I don’t… it doesn’t make any sense,” repeated Holder, helplessly. Sender’s pale, thin form lay limp, cold and discolored in front of him. And that alone would have been shock enough. But it wasn’t just that.

Her body was thin and her eyes sunken. He could make out nearly every bone in her small frame. It was always a shock, seeing people uptop. They were always thinner, paler — though, of course, he only had a sample size of three. But they weren’t like this.

“How could this happen?” asked Holder, looking up. Tuner’s eyes were scanning the screen; she didn’t respond to the question. “Tuner? …Tuner?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sharply, in frustration. “I don’t know. Everything is OK. The diagnostics are OK. It shouldn’t be like this. It can’t be like this. An–an embolism, maybe–an embolism, or an aneurysm… It can’t be this.”

“Okay, calm down,” said Holder, taking a few steps away from the body on the table. He felt a sickness rising in his stomach. “We need to figure out… what if it’s everyone? What if they’re just… starving to death down there?”

“No, no,” said Tuner, shaking her head. “No one else has died. Everyone is fine.”

“Yet,” said Holder. “We can’t know. Something might be wrong with the feeding system, but… this makes no sense, how could the diagnostics say nothing? We need to pull someone else up. Pull up Speaker.”

Tuner nodded, visibly relieved to have something that she could do without thinking. The platform began to vibrate again in front of Holder. He winced and looked away; Sender’s lifeless head lolled back and forth, like a broken doll, her hair shorn short and skin grayed, faintly mottled.

“What are we going to do?” wondered Holder, trying to speak over the sound of the descending platform — trying to concentrate on anything else. “Speaker and Baker are both almost helpless. It will take at least three months for Weaver to be able to survive uptop. At least. Most take closer to six.”

“Maybe Speaker isn’t as bad as we think,” said Tuner, shrugging.  “Though according to these logs, he did spend all yesterday chasing butterflies down at the marsh. I don’t think butterflies even spawn in the marsh.”

“It’s only two more years until you’re sent down again,” pointed out Holder. “We thought we’d have Baker, Sender and me — now it’ll just be me and two people who have never even been uptop before.”

“We can worry about that when we come to it,” said Tuner, biting her lip. “Maybe Baker will be OK again after I finish a full detox.”

#8 – Uptop #2

Tuner’s hands danced quickly through the pale light of the input field, her eyes fixed on the screen; a beautiful but cold interaction. The platform holding Baker shuddered, vibrating — for a moment standing still in time — and then finally creaked its way painfully into the floor. Holder wondered how long it would last; how long it could last. Though they maintained the system as best they could, there was only so much the infrastructure could take. It was a sick beast, constructed in haste of mangled parts, half-finished blueprints and desperation.

“Had Sender finished all of the sequences?” asked Holder, watching Baker’s form grow shadowy and indistinct. A certain dizziness struck him, and he step-staggered away from the emptiness of the dark. “All of the training and simulation modules, was she fully trained?”

“I don’t know; her file is closed because she’s dead,” said Tuner, her focus never wavering from the screen. “Probably not; we still thought Speaker had at least one more left in him.”

“Because they say she’s dead,” corrected Holder. Even so, they could teach her. As crazy as it might sound, for one person to teach another. Yes, they could makeshift a sort of living tutorial — it would be fine. “Speaker’s almost senile. Last time he was Uptop, he turned half the town into tamipets for a fortnight. Do you remember that? I was a–”

“Where am I!?” came a panicked, muffled shout from below; it was Baker, waking up. There was a thumping sound; flesh against metal. “Position me! Position me! I’m not on the correct plane!”

“It’s fine Baker, just relax,” shouted Holder downwards, lost in his own thoughts. “Tuna, who was after Sender?”

Tuner shrugged. There was a rattling sound from down below, and a vibration went up through the walls.

“No one had been selected yet. Probably selected now, now that Sender’s dead,” she said, looking up and toward her left. “Yes. Weaver has been selected. He was probably notified just now.”

Tuner frowned — in so much as she could have any form of expression — and then sighed.

“Baker has been sent down. But it won’t let me pull up Sender. Because she’s dead,” said Tuner, looking up at Holder, expectantly. “Should I pull Speaker, instead?”

“There has to be some kind of override for that,” said Holder, with confidence that he didn’t really have. He walked over to Tuner and leaned over to view the screen. “Have you tried going into the console settings?”

“It’s not a game, there aren’t cheat codes for the artificial fabric of reality we live our lives in,” said Tuner, mild irritation passing over her face and then dissolving into her seafoam complexion. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you, the console settings just let you interact directly with the system rather than going through the interface.”

Holder reached up and scratched the back of his head; it felt strange, having his hair buzzed short. He was still learning parts of the system and he had never needed to raise the dead before. But Tuner had been called up many years before him, and she knew the system inside and out. So if she didn’t know how to do something…

“Is there a way you could alter her status and flag her as alive and then pull her out?” asked Holder. Tuner only sighed in response. “Okay… you tell me, what do you think we should do?”

“We could pull up Speaker,” suggested Tuner, pragmatically. “At least until Weaver finishes his training.”

“I mean about Sender. If she’s alive in there, the system’s not going to know to maintain her vitals,” said Holder. “She could be in danger now.”

“Yes, she could even be in so much danger that she’s dead,” said Tuner, turning her head to look at him pointedly. “You’re not going to stop on this, are you?”

“Not particularly?” Holder hadn’t known the girl well, but he did know himself — it would be weighing on the back of his mind. He honestly wasn’t certain if it was altruism, curiosity or a blend of both. Things didn’t quite seem real to him these days. Probably because most things weren’t.

“Alright,” said Tuner, her hands moving — reluctantly at first, and then faster. Holder could see her focus shifting and becoming more intense; regardless of her protestations, she did enjoy manipulating the system. Holder had very specific suspicions about several incidents, which had occurred before he had been called Uptop. Such as the time when it had rained fish… for sixty eight days.

But it wasn’t immediate. Holder cautiously inquired with Tuner a few moments later only to be rebuffed without so much as a glance. Realizing that he was actually only providing her with a distraction, he decided to take a break.

Holder walked down the narrow metal hall, the dim orbs of light in the ceiling illuminating at his every footstep. He turned into the small common area and sat in the kitchen, opening a ration pack. He was greeted by a dry packet of multi-colored sawdust and a tinny can of filtered water, which he mixed together in the box that it came in. It tasted vaguely like spaghetti and sorrow.

“I’ve got it,” came Tuner’s voice, just as Holder finished choking down the room temperature gruel. He returned just as the floor began to open, and a grinding, metallic sound echoed forth from the depths.