Ah, things are finally getting a little more interesting. Now that Torsten’s doing dirty work for The Embassy, he might become privy to some of the secrets down in the mines. Things he didn’t learn in his previous eight years living there.

Word Count: 8,629

Before I left, I asked the man for his name. I asked if he was some sort of embassy to the underground from Inland above. I asked what plans Inland had constructing these tiny sub-underground bunkers, and why he was really here. Tough questions; I didn’t really expect answers.

He said that if I wanted to, I could call him The Embassy. Said it made him sound like someone important. That was all he gave me; it was enough to chew on. I nodded to him, gripped the device he’d tossed me, and headed back towards the door.

After I’d left, Maiya was already standing there. She’d been waiting for me to exit, but I didn’t expect her to follow me as I walked out of the room. “What are you doing?” I asked her, hoping she’d stop walking, turn around and go back to The Embassy.

“I’m coming with you, aren’t I?” She double-took back at the door, and then looked at me.

“You overheard my conversation?”

“No, I had been told I would accompany you before you came. I hope that’s alright.”

It didn’t matter that I had requested her to come with me – The Embassy had planned to have Maiya tag along the entire time, probably as surveillance. I was just digging myself in deeper, much deeper than five kilometers underground. I told Maiya that she could come, not that she wouldn’t have come if I’d told her not to. But now that I knew she’d been instructed to go with me from the start, I was much less enthusiastic about having her around.

I didn’t have plans to go to the plant right away. I kept staring at the instrument in my hand, wondering what to do with it. Wondering, if anything, what it did. It didn’t look like a gun, though it had an open hole at one end. It was white, polished just like The Embassy’s room. It didn’t have a trigger, though it had a button that I was afraid to press. It didn’t take ammo, but I could sense that if I pressed the button on its surface, something would jet out of the nozzle that might hurt someone else. The design reminded me somewhat of the power tools Derek and I used to bore through the Slate. More likely than not, most of the thing was made of Slate.

When I asked Maiya what it was, she said she had no idea. I kept a light on and we walked through the darkness, together, back to my enclave.

“Are you going to the purification plant?” she asked me. I told her that I wasn’t, and it got her flustered. I told her I’d go in the morning – whenever it was morning – and she jokingly overpowered the ceiling of my enclave to show daytime when I’d let my guard down. I sighed, and told her that it would be “morning” in just a few hours. The time when people woke up to begin their day of work. When the sound of chisels and explosives rang across the caverns. The morning activity of the mines was nothing but my own, personal alarm clock.

I told her to go back to her place and let me sleep. Instead of doing that, she sat down on Derek’s bed. Then laid down. I wanted to ask if she was going to sleep there, but before I could she had fallen asleep. I sighed, and fell asleep myself. I only got a good hour in before it was time to wake up and check out purification. I guzzled down some breakfast, woke up Maiya, put on my ear plugs and walked out the door. Maiya lagged behind me a bit, but I knew she’d catch up. Together, we took the path west of my enclave, through the living area and out to the purification plant.

Unlike the rest of the mines, the purification plant was suspiciously dark. I couldn’t make out why this was, though I guessed it had to do with why The Embassy had me inspecting the place.

So, somebody wasn’t doing their job. From the looks of it, the entire place wasn’t doing its job.

The entrance to the purification plant is a huge widening in the cavern walls at the end of the living area where my enclave is located. The cavern widens into a tall atrium, vented at the top for smoke to bellow so that inhabitants don’t choke. The plant itself is massive, and towers almost to the top of the atrium, hundreds of meters high. In the purification plant’s atrium, I always felt like the ant I truly was, making my little ant tunnels and scouring for my little ant resources.

A light tram, nothing but a glowing blue beam of light, passed through the entrance to the atrium. It stopped in front of a large conveyor belt that went into the plant, but for some reason the conveyor belt wasn’t running. No noises came from the plant. I took my ear plugs out to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything, but the entire atrium – usually alive with footsteps and crushing rock – was silent. Slate piled up on top of the conveyor belt where the light tram ended. With work beginning for the day, it had already begun spitting out new chunks of Slate. Any more, and the conveyor belt might have broken.

Maiya and I approached the plant doors, hoping to be let in somehow, but the entrance was locked. “Do you know of any other doors into this place?” I asked her. She nodded, and began showing me around to another side of the building.

“The architect who designed this plant always includes six means of entry for security reasons. Here’s the first.” She pointed at another door, but it, too, was locked. We tried four other doors located similarly around the building. Some were hidden behind massive boulders of pure Slate. Others were out in the open. But all of them were locked. We had no way of entering the building and completing The Embassy’s task. I looked around once again for any other means of entry. We couldn’t break the windows without disturbing whoever might be working in the building. The doors were locked.

Then I saw the conveyor belt, and ran towards it. As I tried to climb up, Maiya shouted at me. “Are you insane? We can’t go in through the conveyor belt. We’ll be killed! They melt the Slate in there.”

“Well, if they do, they’re not doing it right now. And it’s the only way in. You’re the one who wanted me to listen to The Embassy so badly, so you might as well just climb up onto this thing with me. Don’t worry, I won’t let us die.” To be honest, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when we entered the building through the conveyor belt, but I walked in anyway.

The belt seemed to be broken. Whether it was the intense load of Slate being pushed upon it by the light tram or some problem further up, I couldn’t tell. Maiya shone a light from her glasses on the area, though there were small red lights lining the tunnel inside the building that the belt ran through. Although we came to a maintenance ladder quickly, I heard something up ahead that I believed to be the cause of the breakage. As I moved away from the maintenance ladder to approach the sound up ahead, I felt a cobweb hit my face.

The condition of the tunnel only deteriorated as we moved further in, chasing that sound. I looked like nothing had passed through that place in years. The cobwebs grew more numerous, and we saw some automatons embedded within the walls of the tunnel that were clearly deactivated. Not much further ahead did we see the source of the sound: A lonely man with his uniform on, hitting the walls of the tunnel with some heated beam. It came out of a device not unlike the one given to me by The Embassy. I wondered if it was the same device.

“Sir?” I shouted to him, my voice echoing down the metallic tunnel. “What are you doing in here?”

“What? Who’s there?” he asked. His voice was raspy; he was older than I thought. “I’m repairing the conveyor belt. It’ll be fixed soon, so clear yourselves out of here!” He swatted cobwebs away from his face, and welded the metal walls further. “Yep, any minute now she’ll be up and running, just like she used to be.”

Maiya and I walked closer to the man and began observing his work. “Used to be?” I asked. “I thought that this plant purifies all of the Slate that gets mined down here?”

The man was so riled by this statement that he almost stopped welding. “Hah!” he laughed. “This building hasn’t purified anything in fifty years. But if I just give it a little push…” He turned up the heat on his torch and began melting the walls of the tunnel away.

I reached in and grabbed his arm. “What are you doing? You’re going to damage the tunnel!” But the man kept welding, kept melting the sides of the tunnel. I started to think that he wasn’t trying to fix the conveyor belt, but break it further in order to halt the purification plant’s operations. Was this the man that The Embassy had warned me about? Was this the man I was supposed to “deal with”? I looked at him, still welding away even with my hand gripping his arm, and I was sure of it.

“Let go of my arm!” he shouted, his loose old skin struggling out of my grip. I didn’t relinquish my hold on him until I felt a jerking motion beneath my feet. The red lights in the tunnel suddenly glowed brighter; the cobwebs were swept away by some strong wind whirling through the tunnel. The old man rejoiced, “It’s working! It’s finally working…”

I felt the conveyor belt begin to move beneath my feet, taking Maiya and I with it to parts unknown. However, one thing about out destination was sure: If we made it deeper into the factory through this tunnel now that it was active, we weren’t going to be able to get back out.