I was nervous that this mine plot wasn’t going places, but after a bunch of thinking (and a bunch more NOT thinking), it really started to go somewhere. I’m happy with where it’s going, so I’m gonna keep at it! I wonder where Derek could be.

Word Count: 3,891

However, I don’t mean to make life in the mines sound wonderful. Like a battlefield, we had our casualties. We were constantly watched by our superiors. I saw children, through birth and death, watched by floating, spherical drones. They, the poor children, had no way of escaping the mines, trapped for eternity beneath the surface! Although I had come by choice, I could tell by the looks in their eyes that this was not the life they wanted. The battlefield was no place for children, and yet they were ordered to perform the same labor as I was.

And even down in the mines I still saw The Leaf, permeating our tranquility. It could not be stopped or hidden – every day, drones would pass us by to ensure that we were working, and on their chassis they bore The Leaf. They floated nonchalantly by us, as I measured and calculated, and as Derek dug and chiseled. Were the drones real? None of us ever got close enough to touch one, so we could never be sure if they were programs within our glasses or if they were true mechanical objects. And if we were to remove our glasses, they would surely have spotted the action.

So, for years, we continued working under the assumption that if we touched the drones, looked at them, or misbehaved in any way in front of them, that we would be severely punished. And with that assumption, we lived about knowing that the drones would leave us alone in our rooms and during personal hours.

Yet, those days did not last. One day, years after I’d entered the mines, while Derek and I were lounging in our room, a drone appeared to pass by. But it stopped. It stopped in front of our enclave, turned around, and entered. For a moment, it simply floated around, spinning its spherical body to observe the area. We looked at each other, and then at the spinning drone, sure that it was going to do something, not sure if that something would be terrible or awesome. Derek, brave as he could be, walked up to it hoping to find some clues. When the drone kept spinning, he mustered up his strength and raised his arm high. His entire arm was shaking rapidly as he brought it down and whacked the drone with his hand. To our surprise, his hand passed right through it.

All that time, the drones had been fake. We had been working under false pretenses. I began to wonder how much hold they had over me down there, and if it was as much as they had on the surface. At the same time, I knew that the discovery that the drones were fake would cause an uproar within the caverns if word ever got out.

The drone just floated away as if nothing happened. Derek and I chose not to tell anybody about the incident. It wasn’t an easy choice. We argued for hours about what to do.

“If we don’t let the others know,” I remember saying to him, “they’ll feel as trapped down here as they always have! Give them a bit of hope. The least we can do is let them know that these things can’t harm anyone.”

“Yeah, yeah. You say that now, before it’s harmed you. But after something comes for you, you’re going to wish you hadn’t opened your fat mouth.”

“You may be right, but what the hell else can we do?”

“We can keep our mouths shut and let things continue on as they have for centuries. No need to disrupt the status quo, Vince.”

“No – we need to disrupt it. We need to let everybody know about this, so that they know… that they know they have a chance. I know not everyone likes it down here in the same way that I didn’t like the surface. Why force those who would rather be somewhere else to stay down in the mines?”

“We live in the mines, we die in the mines. Vince, that’s how it’s always been. That’s the law of Cydia. We’re here because everyone on the surface needs us. And if we disrupt the status quo down here – if we make people think they can just up and leave anytime they want – what happens to the people on the surface? What resources do they have to survive?”

“You don’t even have proof that people live on the surface. How can you accept that the surface exists without seeing it for yourself?”

“I have you here, don’t I?”

“I haven’t been here your entire life – and who says I’m not lying about being from the surface?”

“I trust you, Vince. And I know you had your reasons for coming down here. So you’ve got to drop it – you’ve only been here for eight years. I’ve lived here forever. You think you felt trapped on the surface? How do you think we all feel down here? It’s not exactly a liberating experience, even if you think so. If you so much as touch a hair on the society we’ve all worked so hard to form down here, shit will explode. Families will break down equipment and try to escape. People might be killed. Vince, I don’t want to be responsible for that. People down here, they get hurt plenty enough by the rock.”

He looked at me like that, a face so filled with passion that I knew there was nothing I could say to make him change his mind; so I agreed with him. I let him keep his secret, and I participated with him in keeping it. But life in the mines – for both of us – was fundamentally changed from that point on. We became lazier about our work. On the way to the cafeteria, we’d stall, throw our picks around, and wait for a drone to pass by. Inside, we were laughing at it – as if we were better than it. I wanted to make that laughter audible; I still thought everybody in the caverns should know the truth about the drones.

The day after we’d discovered the fake drone, news from the surface arrived via our glasses. The pit in my stomach always deepened when there was news from the surface. Since everyone woke up to find the news downloaded to their specs, it always affected the mood around the caverns for the rest of the day. There were only two kinds of news that the surface bothered to transmit down into the mines, and both were urgent. The only question was whether the news was good or bad.

In that day’s case, it was mixed. Like the surface, the mine caverns were separated into districts as they worked their way around the planet. A new bridge had been built using some of the Slate our district had been mining over the last month, and we were being praised for our effort. We all received extra pay, which most people probably used to buy more food, or glasses, or whatever frivolous things that they wanted. That was great news – everyone always wanted more money, and now they had it thanks to that bridge.

Yet, as if to laugh at us, the news also stated that the very same bridge collapsed three days after it was completed, killing nine people. Our pay was subsequently docked by the exact amount it had been raised. The bastards in management liked to toy with us, it seemed.

The uproar this caused almost made me blurt out the secret about the drones. After only a day, I was cracking – all I wanted to do was let everyone know, but Derek had me by the throat. Seeing that I was about to slip during the workday, he put a hand on my shoulder and shook his head no, as if my news would only make the situation worse. Morale around the entire complex dropped, and our production began to stagger. I could never have imagined that management might have intended for that to occur, that there was something deeper happening to Cydia – and to me. I could have never imagined that something so innocent might become something so involved.

The bridge was the trigger. When the bridge collapsed, for whatever reason it did, something happened in the mines. Not just to its people, and not just to me – the mines themselves changed. I began to notice more structural flaws in the metal. Taconic Slate was never traditionally brittle, so it was odd for me to see cracks in the walls.

I shook my head. A bridge had fallen; what reason did I have to think that there wouldn’t be any damage? None at all, I reasoned at the time. And just like that, work continued on as normal. Within days, everyone was back to their normal routine – just like on the surface, we all had our motions we went through from day to day. Not even nine deaths could stop our motions. Like a unit, we moved forward on the battlefield. Nine causalities was no reason for us to stop fighting. That was what I enjoyed so much about the mines; as a group, we were phased for only a moment before coming to the realization that we needed to work for the people still alive, rather than the ones who had died.

We thought: a bridge collapsed, so we will now work to gather the resources to build a new bridge. Everyone thought this way, without exception.

That afternoon, Derek and I were goofing off at our station. It was our last hour of work for the day, and both of us were hoping we could get off a little early by avoiding the drones, knowing that they couldn’t harm us either way. He took his tools and bore into the Slate, picking out large chunks of metal and sending them my way, where I stuffed them into the light tram to be sent to purification. We wasted the hour doing half the work we should have done, ignoring when a drone passed us by. As we bore into the rock, I could have sworn I felt some extra air current flowing from between a few cracks. I mentioned it to Derek, who told me to ignore it, since we were nearly finished for the day.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

I never wondered what would happen if someone was fired from the mines. I didn’t think it was possible; I just figured they would be taken off the payroll and not be able to afford food. I was doubtful that they were sent to the surface, and even if they were, I’d never seen anyone fired. My assumption was that it never happened. That also meant I accepted that I might be down in the mines for the rest of my life when I came. But all of those assumptions were shattered when I woke up the next morning and Derek was missing. He wasn’t just out wandering the caverns – his bed was still made. It was as if he hadn’t even gone to sleep the night before.
In a panic, I got up and began browsing around the room. No sign of him. Not even footsteps. Derek Marland, my roommate for the last eight years, and my only salvation in the mines, had disappeared from existence. Without him, I was alone.

Rather than do my job, I wanted to spend the morning looking for him. This was something that had never happened to me before, and nothing that had ever been reported by someone else. Back on the surface, it might not have shocked me that someone would get out of bed earlier than me, make their bed, and leave for the day. But that didn’t happen in the mines, because everyone invariably woke up at the same time to begin the same work. In the mines, we were one unit. What happened to Derek wasn’t supposed to happen. To make sure that it hadn’t happened, I spent the morning scavenging the caverns for his presence. When the search bore no results, I came to the conclusion that what could not have happened had indeed happened, and I was frightened to think about just what had happened to him over the course of the night.