We’re starting to learn more about what’s happening to Cydia beneath the surface; how districts are being mined empty and sections of the mines are set to collapse. We also learn that Maiya has more to share with us that she hasn’t yet.

Word Count: 11,990

The door was on an offshoot of some of the scaffolding I had seen earlier. Oddly enough, it wasn’t locked, so Maiya and I proceeded inside. A myriad of pipes and wires lay exposed on the ground, ripped and torn from the walls. A puddle of groundwater soaked an exposed wire that I nearly stepped on. Luckily, Maiya pointed out my nearly deadly mistake, and I moved my foot out of the way before I could step into the water. Someone had clearly come down this way to tear down those wires.

The narrow hallway forked in several directions thereafter. Since no rooms inside of the purification plant were meant for humans, there were no offices or employee lounges. Instead, the entire factory seemed to be automated, with the scaffolds only available to provide maintenance technicians with a means of getting to equipment in need of repairs. Every pathway was a maintenance pathway. No matter which way we went, we would end up in an area blooming with robots melting down and purifying the Slate. Boiling it in large pots with other metals to form alloys. Cooling it into large chunks of pure metal. We had three choices.

“We could split up,” I said.

“No. No… he’s down that way. Come on.” Maiya picked up her pace and walked to the right, down another narrow hallway, until she reached a door on the side of the wall that read “JANITORIAL STAFF”. I didn’t get why she thought the man would be inside of a janitorial closet until she opened the door, revealing a large room stocked with supplies.

But still, no man was inside.

The room wasn’t protected or lined with any walling; it was just bare wires and pipes, and a metal floor. There was a refrigerator, and a whole arsenal of weaponry lined neatly across the walls – where there was metal to hang it from, anyway. I saw cleaning supplies, power tools and food wrappers all over the ground. How anyone could have lived or slept in that room, I couldn’t say – but somebody was. Somebody was holding themselves up inside of the purification plant, and he wasn’t home at the moment.

Maiya walked in and took a look at the man’s guns. “This idiot could really hurt somebody. I don’t think he has any idea about what kinds of weapons he’s carrying around. Someone must have given these to him.” She held up a Mu Gun. “You can’t just buy these.” She slipped the Mu Gun into her pocket, to keep it for herself. I wondered why should would take a Mu Gun and not one of the more dangerous weapons – I couldn’t see how we would handle a dangerous man without dangerous weapons ourselves.

Up on the surface, everyone owns these kinds of weapons.Maiya didn’t need to know that I knew about every weapon in this man’s arsenal, or that I hadn’t seen firepower like this in eight years, so I didn’t mention it to her.

If a man didn’t have these weapons, he’d be useless in the event of a gang assault. These kinds of events are surprisingly common. When things were peaceful, they were downright tranquil. But when a gang decided to come around town, you’d better be at your windows with a laser glock. Set it to only use, say, half power, so you don’t kill them. Once they’re knocked out, the crisis was averted. The police force always arrived soon after to haul the gang members away, but another gang would inevitably come with time.

There are no suburban cities on Cydia. There are no rural plains. It’s all building after building after building. High-rise after high-rise. You wouldn’t even know that Cydia had a skyline.

But I didn’t think that was what Maiya wanted to hear. What she heard instead was the patter of footsteps as someone other than the two of us marched through the halls. The man was coming back.

He approached, and stepped through the door to see us. “What the hell?” he shouted, and stepped back. “How did you guys get in here?”

“The entrance, how else?” I said. “We’ve been sent to have a chat with you.” I could tell the man felt threatened. He looked terrified, so I tried to calm him down. “No, don’t worry – nothing’s going to happen. I’m just here to make sure you’re doing your job.” As if I was an inspector. I looked at his weapons, neatly hung on the walls. I looked at him, a skinny, fit man. He looked completely harmless. I could never see him using the guns. I suppose that’s why I was so afraid of him.

He saw me looking at the guns. “Standard issue, my friend. They’ve been inside this building for ages. Never been used. Listen, I don’t know how you got through the entrance, but you need to evacuate immediately. This is no place for pedestrians.”

I turned to Maiya, not sure what to say to the man. I had no proof beyond The Embassy’s word that he was doing something wrong. Maiya tilted her head and looked at him funny. “What’s the internal temperature of the vats in the osmosis chamber?”

“None, they’re empty right now. No Slate has been flowing in or out of this building for a week now.”

“Well, Slate should be flowing in there now. An old man downstairs repaired the conveyor belt, and Slate is now heading in large quantities to the vats. If the vats aren’t online, the pipes will clog. I suggest that you go to the osmosis chamber to rectify the issue.”

The man’s face became paralyzed, and he immediately turned around and began sprinting down the hallways to the osmosis chamber, the path to left of the fork Maiya and I had passed earlier on. I used my glasses to map the area so that I wouldn’t get lost, and began following him to the chamber. The entrance led to a scaffold overlooking the football field-sized chamber. Below us were six gigantic cylinders that together spanned the entire room. These vats were supposed to be filled with boiling metal. I could see that soft, heated Slate was entering the room through several conveyor belts and filling the vats, but, without adequate heating, the soft lumps of metal just sat there. No purification was taking place.

The man pulled down a control panel with his glasses and began activating, one by one, the heating systems for each vat. From there on, he calmly fine-tuned the controls to ensure that everything was stable. He pulled down more control panels, and kept working. In the vats, the soft Slate began turning into a reflective, dark liquid.

“Say,” he mentioned while he was working, “you said you met an old man repairing the conveyor belt. Where is he now? He’s my father, you see. He should have let me know that he fixed the conveyor belt, so that this wouldn’t happen.”

God dammit.

I couldn’t let him know that Maiya willingly let the man die. I had to fudge the events so that this man wouldn’t lose his mind when I needed him most. “What was your father doing, repairing the conveyor belt like that? We met him, right before he fixed the belt. Unfortunately, once he fixed it, he didn’t seem to know how to get out of the tunnels.” I paused, then continued, “He didn’t make it out. We were in a maintenance shaft at the time, there was nothing we could do.”

Even with that, I still felt guilty. I felt responsible for Maiya’s actions, because I didn’t have the nerve or knowledge to stop her. The man stopped working at the control panels for a moment and hung his head low. “Good riddance,” he whispered to himself, then started working once again, double-checking to make sure that the settings for the vats were proper.

Maiya’s hand began to inch toward the Mu Gun she’d lifted from his room.

“Good riddance? That man was your father,” I said.

“Why do you think I put him to work in the conveyor belt?” The man turned around from his control panels, and brushed them aside from behind his back. They hit the wall and shattered into millions of sparkling particles of glass, then faded out of existence. “I didn’t want him dead. Listen, this plant isn’t in very good shape, if you haven’t noticed. Its use is declining every day. Most of the parts haven’t been repaired in decades. To top it all off, the amount of Slate left in these districts hasn’t been promising.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“You work for Inland, too, right? Inland was probably going to shut down this plant soon enough. I didn’t want that to happen – I came in here alone, a week ago, when the plant stopped working. I locked myself in and began working to fix it, but when the conveyor belt broke I couldn’t run tests.”

“So you brought in your father?”

“No, he came by himself, looking for me.”

“So, he found you, and you put him to good use.”

“Well, yes and no. But I need to know that this will be said in confidence – strict confidence.” I nodded. “Well, not too long after I locked myself in, I started running some routine maintenance tests to learn what was broken, and why nobody had been ordered to fix it. The readouts were suspicious at best. Half of the equipment in this plant is broken, but I slowly began to learn why it hadn’t been repaired.

“The amount of Slate in this district is dwindling; we’ve dug almost to Cydia’s core in this section. In some instances, we’ve been given clearance to mine beyond the safety barriers, deeper than we should be mining. In essence, we’re out of resources to repair this mine. The Slate coming in right now, that’s probably some of the last of it, and it’s going to be used for construction on the surface and not for down here.

“But that wasn’t what really mattered to me. I also noticed that the ground beneath this atrium was unstable, and that those in the shafts below have actually been mining on the ceiling, weakening the supports. This whole atrium is going to collapse. At that point, I made my repairs less of a priority than I did of making sure that nobody was in the atrium. As I did so, I continued researching seismic events, and the results were pretty grim. A private message I located in one of this plant’s databases mentioned that the entire district was due for relocation in the next month.

“My father, wondering where I was, suspected that I was the cause of the commotion in the atrium. He found his way in through a door I’d forgotten to lock. Usually, during a relocation, the old folks don’t make it anyway. It would have been a lot more painful for him to go through that and not make it through the trek. So I told him that the conveyor belt needed fixing so I could repair the rest of the plant, and he went to work in order to help me out.”