I think it’s time to get things rolling. Meet Vincent Torsten, our main character – and a man who has found purpose in the Taconic Slate mines of Cydia. Happy reading!

Word Count: 1,835

They say that 80% of Cydia is made of Taconic Slate. Although it looks diverse on the outside, filled with trees, wildlife, water, humans – it’s interior is almost entirely made of that special metal. Five kilometers below Cydia’s surface begins a never-ending core of that most precious resource, more precious than the air we breathe and the water we drink. Known less formally as Slate, it is the foundation for all of our tools, machines, silverware, homes, buildings, and more. Without Taconic Slate, we would not be the civilization we have become.

That’s where people like me come in. You see, I am a miner. For most of my life I’d worked in various mines across my home world of Cydia, digging up that most precious resource for the good of our species. The miners around me, they all know how dangerous the job they do is – to each other, we are like soldiers. We risk our lives for our people from day to day. When one of us falls, the unit as a whole continues on. And because of that unit, society can flourish. When that unit fails, when we fail to gather Taconic Slate, something terrible inevitably happens on the surface. We live together, we breathe together. When we’re not mining, we’re doing everything else together. When you’re five kilometers below the surface, time is never a scarcity.

It’s traditional for miners to be born in the mines, and to die in the mines. In that sense, we’ve formed our own tightly-knit community. I, however, was an exception – I came from outside the mines, from the surface of Cydia. Cydia is a strange world, a world that I feel I have some undetermined place in. As soon as I saw that there was an opening in the mines, I took the job immediately as a means to find my place in this world. After several years of adjustment, it’s safe to say that I enjoyed being in the mines far more than I had enjoyed living on the surface. It’s as if, five kilometers below the crust of Cydia, there’s no reason to keep secrets to yourself.

We are one ant colony. We work, coordinated. We keep no secrets.

These unwritten rules, they’ve governed my life for years. It was my unstated job to oversee that the mine shaft’s walls were always structurally stable. There was never an issue finding Taconic Slate; the entire mine shaft was composed of it. We were simply dismantling our own home. In retrospect, we should have known that there would be consequences to this – but it never crossed our minds. We needed the Slate, just as we needed water and air.

Not mining? Why, that never even crossed our minds. Not once.

Myself and my buddy Derek, we lived in the same enclave, an offshoot of the vein below District 107. We would sit in our rooms and joke about tunneling up to the surface and scaring the kids that lived there. People from the underground, springing up dirty, like corpses from their graves. We’d laugh over our cups of gin and get a good night’s rest, if we decided to acknowledge that it was night.

The ceiling of our little enclave, it would show a fake sky, projected from the ground. A hologram. If Derek and I both thought it was night, it would become night in our room. So we’d frequently fight over what time of day it was – in our heads, anyway – and watch the hologram struggle to interpret our thoughts.

“Vince, don’t be such a dick. I’ve been working hard!” He’d plea to me, wanting to go to sleep.

“Yeah,” I’d say, and let him take control over the time of day for a moment. When he had relaxed his guard, I’d quickly change it back to daytime, blinding him momentarily. He’d throw a little fit, and I’d toss him the bottle of gin. After a swig, he’d roll over on his bed and laugh.

“You know I wouldn’t sleep if I didn’t have to,” he’d say, softly.

“Why do you think I keep making it daytime?” I’d say, chuckling. He’d take another swig of gin, and we’d find compromise – half day, half night. His half would be night, if the hologram was smart enough to figure it out. And it usually was. On Derek’s nighttime side, the stars’ reflections would twinkle on the Slate walls. Seeing this beauty, I’d always concede my side of the sky to night, and we’d fall asleep.

We’d go about in that way from day to day, from month to month. I made sure that all of the cuts in the slate we made didn’t compromise the integrity of the cavern, and Derek would chop it down. We’d melt the Slate and send it through a light tram to the surface, where it would be made into all sorts of things. Most of us never saw those things. But we wished we did.

Sure, there were light trams built for humans not too far off, and at intervals across the network of caves and caverns, but they were restricted to higher-level staff members who had important duties on the surface. More often than not, this never bothered me. I never found anything interesting about the surface either way – but Derek, who had been born in the mines, yearned to see the surface just once.

He said that he wanted to see the real sky. I told him that it was no more real out there than it was inside of our enclave. I don’t think he wanted to believe me, but I know that he accepted the fact. I also think he knew what to expect.

Others who lived not far off from Derek and I would often join our nightly conversations. We’d pass around the gin and tell each other what we had done that day. How much of our quota we had filled. How much pay we were making. What we were spending that pay on. Down in the mines, we have our own economy. Our own ecosystem. It’s an entirely separate world from the surface.

The only reason we can survive down here is thanks to those damned artificial trees. Scientists on the surface invented them decades ago, and it was less than five years before I entered the mines that the last tree on Cydia was torn down to be replaced by its artificial counterpart. They pump out atmosphere – breathable atmosphere – almost endlessly and on their own. They derived this technology into grass, plants, flowers. All foliage on the planet, replaced by its technological counterpart. But that wasn’t why I came down into the mines.

I lived in one of the Tychon districts; the east side, District 28. Tychon is the capitol of Cydia – or became so after the last tree was uprooted. It was a huge political stunt, a rebranding of several countries into a single entity. At that moment, we became a unified planet; we didn’t have countries anymore. We were nothing but Cydia – in our eyes and in the eyes of our trading partners. And that was commemorated with a new flag. Almost ironically, and perhaps out of spite, the flag was dubbed “The Leaf.” A mechanical-looking green droplet, it meant to display our technological prowess over nature. That we had dominated. That somehow, nature had lost to humanity – and humanity didn’t care.

The Leaf is now a prominent symbol everywhere. To show patriotism, The Leaf was plastered on everything from cigarettes to glasses to buildings. It was made known – relentlessly – that there was a new world order, and that it was one of peace and prosperity. It was then that things got mundane; I couldn’t count on my fingers the number of times I’d heard that peace and prosperity was soon to come, even before the unification. And afterward, I never heard anything but – and I certainly never saw anything.

Cydia’s capitol moved to Tychon, as did all of the former world leaders. Tychon exploded with activity. Jobs opened. Buildings doubled and tripled in height overnight. The skyline turned bluer. People were happier. It was as if a miracle had occurred in Tychon, but it still wasn’t peace.

Nobody cared about the last tree anymore. Within days it was completely forgotten about, and there was nonstop talk about the next chapter in Cydian history. And to begin that chapter, the government’s first move was to mandate the ownership of glasses – a set of augmented reality tools for the common man. With glasses, we could all take control over objects around us. Shine light where there was none. Communicate without a terminal.

They weren’t new when this happened. In fact, most people already owned a pair. The government’s move was simply to cover the few remaining Cydians that didn’t.

Most of the time, one could dodge looking at The Leaf by removing his or her glasses. It was rare for companies and consumers to physically print documents, posters, or flags – everything could be digitally displayed through the glasses. This always-on communication shrunk the world down to a pea-sized easily digestible unit. It became a daily tedium to communicate with people.
So it was for me. I’d been wearing glasses for years, but it wasn’t until the Cydian world government arrived did their use truly explode. While it was an exciting time, it also ushered in a new age of mundanity in life. Nothing was ever unexpected. Nothing was unreported. Nothing was unfamiliar. If anything were to happen – anywhere in the world – I would have known about it instantly.

Down in the mines, that didn’t exist. Nobody was safe from the unexpected, even with our glasses on – especially me. On some level, I ignored a decent amount of information that passed through my head. On another level, I chose which information I thought would benefit me and make life more interesting. In the mines, officials only sent out announcements sporadically, perhaps to alert of a potential cave in. There was less information to parse, so even if I was doing the same thing every day, it didn’t feel nearly as repetitive as it did on the surface. There may be a warning of a potential cave-in, announced to occur in two hours. It might not happen for three. Nobody knew, so we’d continue on.

We were soldiers. We would shrug off the warning, move a few hundred meters to the left or right to avoid serious injury, and keep going as we were. The surface depended on us. I depended on us. To continue living within the interesting world of the Slate mines, we all had to preserve the mundane world above.

For those of us like me, who had lived on the surface, that was just our motivation to keep working. To become soldiers. Because although the battlefield is an intense and exciting location, it cannot exist without a home front to protect.