I’m going to admit it: Even *I* didn’t think Torsten was going to end up going to Earth. I’ve surprised myself! But I think it’s going to be a good way to reveal that the Cydian government is preparing for a planetary collapse, and will give Torsten motivation to try and save the underground world.

Word Count: 21,123

How could I have not noticed these changes? My entire body was different – even my skin color was slightly darker. I was no longer wearing my miner’s uniform. My body was significantly taller, my hair shorter, my face skinnier. I was not the same person as I had been the night before, and yet I felt no different. I began feeling around my body, looking for changes that The Embassy and Maiya had made – looking to see if any body part was missing.

It was only when I came to my neck did I learn what had become of me, for as my hands moved along the back of my skull, they felt a loose flap of skin. The flap lifted up entirely, and underneath it I felt the cold sting of metallic ports – just like Maiya’s.

Whatever had happened to Maiya was happening – or had already happened – to me. Instinctively, I reached up and pulled a glass screen out of the air to begin searching about my condition, which reminded me that I should technically not have been able to see that very screen. I immediately pushed the screen aside and looked at my new face in the mirror. I spoke; my voice sounded the same. I examined my mouth, cheeks, ears, brow, and finally my eyes.

I could see small integrated circuits inside of my eyes. I pulled down a glass screen and moved it in between myself and the mirror, then set it up to magnify the image of my eye. A detailed view showed that my entire eye was nothing but a mess of these circuits, and I had reason to suspect that the rest of my new body was built in a similar fashion, not the least of which was the presence of the ports on the back of my skull. I felt the ports again to see if I could recognize what they were for, but they all seemed foreign to me. Lost and confused, I hung over the sink in front of the mirror for several minutes before regaining my composure. I pressed my hand hard against my forehead, then used it to bring down another screen from above.

I searched for information about what had happened to me. When the results page came up blank, I grabbed the glass screen and threw it against the peeling wall of the bathroom, where it shattered. The shards hit my body and caused me pain – each piece of glass felt like a pin pricking against my skin until it faded away.

What was happening to me? How was I able to feel virtual objects?

Frightened, I left the bathroom and returned to my bed. I heard knocking coming from rooms beyond, and tried to ignore it. Every creaking noise around me drove me insane – and so I shut myself out. There was nothing in my world but myself and that bed. And there, I quietly thought, and briefly fell asleep. It was through a dream I had that I drew the parallel between my plight, the presence of The Embassy, and the so-called disappearance of my community down in the mines.

Perhaps, I thought, The Embassy was trying to tell me what had happened to Derek after all. Perhaps he wanted me to know what happened to the entire district. That he had replaced their bodies with mechanical counterparts, turning them into visibly – but not mentally – different people. But for what purpose, I still could not comprehend.

About an hour after falling asleep, I woke up to a clanging noise in the room next door. My door was somehow propped open; I got up and went outside to investigate. The banging became louder as I approached room 503, the room just down the hallway from mine. I knocked on the door a few times – definitely not loudly enough. I knocked again. No answer came from the person inside. Eventually, I simply took both my fists and pounded on the door.

A young man covered in grease opened the door. Behind him was a mess of parts, gears and wires, spread out on the floor, the furniture – pretty much anything with a flat surface.

“Could you keep it down a bit? I’m trying to sleep,” I told him.

“Sure thing, boss,” the man said. “Sorry for disturbing you; I didn’t mean no harm by it.”

I could see he was sincere, but that he wanted to get along with his work. “What are you working on, kid?” I asked, curious what all the parts behind him were for. Dark pieces of Slate were finely cut to form triangle-shaped sheets of metal. Circuit boards and small chips looked like they had been tossed around the room. Lights – real lights – were wired to their own boards and scattered about.

“It’s a Corpus Lock, boss. Someone’s gotta bring over those lowlifes from Earth. That someone is me!” I looked at him strangely, not believing that he bought that Earth crap as well. “Oh, I’m sorry. Have you not heard about Earth?”

“No, I’ve heard about it. I’m just having a hard time believing it. I’ve been out of touch with the times, you could say.”

“Oh, it’s real for sure. They’ve got a lot of water there, too, but no electricity. All their buildings are made from stone. The whole place is really primitive, and scientists are estimating that Earth is more than nine light-years away from Cydia.”

“When did all this happen?”

“About four years ago, but I only got interested in Corpus Locks in the last two years, boss.” He walked to the back of his room and came back holding a large, star-shaped object. With six prongs, it was massive enough to fill a good portion of his door, and looked far too heavy for him to carry for long. When he set it down on the floor, I could feel the vibrations traveling through the Slate. He didn’t turn it on; it didn’t look like it was hooked up to a power source. “Yep, you can hook these up to any door and create a portal to another Corpus Lock. That’s how they found Earth.”

I remembered that project; it had been announced long before I went beneath the surface. They – the scientists participating in Cydia’s space program – sent contraptions called Corpus Locks hurling away at the speed of light. But that was decades ago; I was still a teenager when it happened. To think that so many years later it had actually borne fruit was incredible. That the Corpus Locks has worked was even more incredible. And now, this kid was building them on his own!

I didn’t want to tell him to stop; he had every right in the world to continue producing the Corpus Locks. But in my state, I couldn’t think with the noise. Cowardly, I apologized to him and told him to keep up the good work, then walked away.

As a turned my back to him, he said, “By the way, nice fetch you’ve got there.”

“What?” I said, turning back around.

“Those ports, on the back of your head. You’re in a fetch, right?”

“How could you see the ports? Do you know something about them?” I walked back up to the kid. Something was strange about him; he could build his own Corpus Locks, and now he knew about the ports in my skull. I stuck around now, to figure out who he was. Perhaps, if he knew about my body, he also knew something about Derek, Maiya, and The Embassy. “Kid, you’re telling me everything you know about this.”

“There’s no way you can’t know about your own body, boss. If you’re in a fetch, you chose to buy one. What’s to say?” I looked at him grimly, and he still didn’t understand my situation. I figured I needed to spit it out in plain words so that he’d get it.

“Kid, I’m not from around here. A few hours ago, I woke up on the grass outside this district with this body. I didn’t choose anything; somebody did this to me.”

“Well, they’re very generous, then. You should thank them.”

Thank Maiya? Thank her for putting me in this body? I couldn’t think of doing any such thing; I wanted to grab her head and twist it off her body. I knew that she was the driving force behind all of the strange things happening in the mines since Derek’s disappearance – the personnel, the killings around the mines and in the purification plant, and my body. I couldn’t forgive her, and I certainly couldn’t call her generous. Merciless, yes, but not generous by any measure of the word.

“I can’t do that, kid. The person that did this to me has done too many other horrible things. So, tell me about this body I’m in. A fetch, you called it?”

“Yeah. They’re ridiculously expensive, so the government is looking to subsidize them. It’s… it’s hard to explain. I mean, I’ve never been inside of one. I hear it’s painful at first, and to be honest, I’d be a little afraid to try even if I could afford my own fetch. I suppose you could say they’re artificial bodies. Except they don’t age or deteriorate. They just house your soul. And if the fetch is destroyed, you can just get your soul sent to a backup fetch. The hospitals around here are starting to get them in.”

If Maiya and The Embassy had shoved me into an artificial body, it explained why I could see and interact with objects I would normally only be able to do so with wearing glasses. The integrated circuits in the body’s eyes indicated that the augmented reality technology in the glasses had been built-in to these fetches.

If the staff members connected to The Embassy underground had been in fetches all along, it made sense that they could switch. But, at the time, I could only imagine that they had been sedated and put inside of their fetches against their will.

A lot changes in eight years. Too much, on Cydia, changes in eight years.

“It’s also how they send people to Earth, boss. To go to Earth, you’ve got to be in a fetch. You know, in case you die. That’s why I haven’t been to Earth yet myself. I want to see what Earth is like, but without a fetch I’m stuck here building the Corpus Locks for the real travelers. The guys downstairs. The big-leaguers in exploration.” He stood there, fiddling with the completed Corpus Lock resting against the door. I suppose he really wanted to use it and leave this dump. I couldn’t blame him.

“Listen, kid. This is very important. Outside of this district is a building belonging to a mining company called Inland. Know anything about it?”

“Not really, other than that it’s always noisy. A lot of the time it’s louder than my construction work here, so I listen to music through my glasses to ignore it. See? I’ve got mine rigged with awesome speakers.” He turned his head to show me the drivers he’s modified into the earpieces of his glasses, and pointed to them with his finger. “Nobody ever comes out of there, though, so I don’t know what they’re doing. There isn’t even a front door.”

I must have been too disoriented to notice that the front door hadn’t been there. I don’t even think I looked back at the building – but I took this kid’s word. It seemed like the building was built only for access from below, which made me suspicious about why it was built. It was new-looking enough that it couldn’t have been very old, but not that many people lived below district 137 before our district was forced to relocate.

I thought about the atrium, and how it had collapsed upon itself. It was too convenient to be an accident – The Embassy sends a lonely guy off on a mission that inadvertently causes the death of one man and the capture of another, just in time for the entire section of the cavern to crumble under its own weight. Then I thought of that man Maiya and I had saved; if he was anywhere, he was likely in a similar position to mine.

“Ever been beneath the surface, kid?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Don’t bother. It’s not much better.” I turned around and waved goodbye to him as he stared at me, still fiddling with the Corpus Lock. He rolled it away from his door and let it slam shut, disregarding the noise. I went back downstairs after that to look for the men and women from Earth that had been gathering there earlier, but everyone was gone. In the lobby was nothing but an open door and a dirty carpet, dirt-stained from all of their shoes. I looked around the hotel; everyone was gone.

During my search, I began to hear voices coming from behind one of the doors in the lobby. I guessed that everyone had gone behind the door, so I opened it. What I found was not a group of people, but an endless void of pure darkness – nothing was inside the room but the sound of voices whispering.

“Hello?” I shouted into the void. No response. Curious, I took one step into the room, only to be instantly surrounded by the darkness. It pulled me in and voided my entire being, until there was nothing left of me but my voice, traveling through space and time. I felt a falling sensation in my gut, as if I were skydiving from the top of Cydia’s double atmosphere. All around me was nothing but darkness. Frightened and overwhelmed, I left consciousness as the void consumed me.