For some reason, I had a lot of trouble writing today’s stuff. Either way, this scene opens the door to the next most crucial part of The Collapse: The creation of The Collective and what Cydia’s plans for dealing with a disaster really mean.

Word Count: 25,868

We arrived at the building – Curie was right. Wandering around the campus on the outskirts of district 137, neither of us were able to find a single entrance to the building. I looked up at the building’s top, hundreds of meters high, grander than most other buildings in the district. It’s polished white edges contrasted its mirrored green-tinted windows. On something like the hundredth floor, I could see the broken window that I had been tossed out of.

I called Curie over, and pointed it out to him.

“And you survived that fall, boss?” he asked, amazed.

“Stop calling me boss. And I did, with not a scratch on my body. I’m sure I have this fetch to thank for my life. Though, on some level, I think they knew I wouldn’t die from the fall – otherwise they wouldn’t have thrown me down. At any rate, we need to get into this building. If we had something blunt, we might be able to break the windows.”

“Are you insane, boss? I mean, Torsten?”

“What do you mean? We can break the windows and just walk in.”

“Yeah, and get caught by security. If the place is locked up tight enough to have no entrances or exits, then security must be prowling every corner. We need to get in safely, without making a fuss, if you want to find your friend.”

I was about to suggest something, but he pulled out a shovel that had been strapped across his back. “Get digging,” he said. “We’re going in from the bottom up.” I took the shovel, unsure of the best place to begin digging. Curie told me it didn’t matter, just to stick it in the ground and watch.

I took the old shovel and put it in the ground. Instantly, a cylinder of soil burst from the ground and planted itself next to where I had dug in the shovel. I lifted up the instrument, wondering what had happened. Curie looked at me, baffled by a simple shovel, and laughed. “You’ve been below the surface for a long time, haven’t you, boss? What kinds of tools do they make you use down in the mines?”

“I told you not to call me boss.” I looked down at the shovel in my hands. “Nothing like this; mostly explosives. How old is this shovel, anyway?”

“Actually, it’s brand new. I built it from old parts. It’s a Curie original! It actually uses parts from a light tram. At the tip of the shovel is a dense nanobot cloud. When the tip hits an object, the cloud is released and converts the object to light, then transports it a set distance away before returning to the tip of the shovel.”

“Why bother making it look like a crappy old shovel, then?”

“So people won’t steal it, of course.” He reached behind his back and grunted as he heaved out another shovel. “I’ll help you. If we move quickly, they probably won’t notice what we’re doing. We can break through the building’s foundation with these, too. We’ll just have to be as quiet at possible.”

And so we dug, and dug. Something about Adam Curie reminded me heavily of Derek Marland. Perhaps it was the way that he moved; the way that he enjoyed everything he was doing. He was smiling as he dug into the ground, lifting up cylinder after cylinder of soil from the ground. Uprooting the fake grass. He could smell his goal – it was deep below the ground, and it was within a few strokes’ reach. As fast as I dug up the soil, he dug it up faster.

Eventually we hit a pipe beneath the surface. Curie wiped the sweat off of his head. “This must be the start of the foundation. This pipe is probably for communications; I doubt this building has a steady water supply.”

“No, it does,” I said, remembering The Embassy’s office. As I thought about it, I wondered how I’d come to be in his office, in this building – and then I remembered that I’d come through a light tram. There was an entrance to the building; it was just underground, in the mines. Inland didn’t need this building to manage their affairs in district 137. They needed it to manage their affairs below district 137. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what the pipe was for, after I knew that.

I looked up at how far down we had dug. We were at least fifty meters below the surface, and only just hitting this pipe. “Curie, this isn’t for communications. This pipe is the entrance.”

“What?”

“It’s a light tram. The pipe is shielding the transit line. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we can use it if this is in the middle of the transit line; touching it is a sure-fire way to kill ourselves, and the beginning of the tram is down in the mines, caged in with Taconic Slate. But there may be a structural opening in the building if we follow the pipe; we just need to be careful not to break it open, or else we could wind up touching the bare transit line.”

Curie looked nervous about digging further, but stuck his shovel into the ground anyway. We followed the pipe, all the way to Inland’s building. And, just as I thought, there was a massive opening to let the transit line through. With all of Cydia’s technological advancements, nobody had ever come up with a way to pass through a solid wall without cutting a hole in it.
That was brilliant for us. We just walked through the hole; instant entrance.

We stepped into somebody’s empty office, the floor freshly carpeted. I saw a desk, and a water cooler. The chair at the desk was pushed in; nobody was there, and I doubted that anyone would enter soon. To be cautious, I looked at Curie and nodded to him, signaling that we should exist the room as soon as possible. As we crossed the office, we saw the pipe covering the light tram’s transit line cross with us, over the ceiling, only to open as a bulb of blue light on the other side.

A light tram for each office. An office for each light tram.

We left the room and exited into a humongous spiral staircase. We were close to the bottom; here the hallways were narrow, and I could overlook the core of the building. It seemed like the entire center of Inland’s facility was empty, save for various floating platforms. At the bottom of the structure, not far from where Curie and I stood, was a tall dome with indentations over its surface, like a golf ball.

Curie and I walked downward, surprised that Inland’s facilities extended so deep underground. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been surprising – they were a mining company, after all. But to see what their facility was used for was rightfully surprising, and although it should not have been, it was also equally fascinating.

As we neared the bottom, I was able to make out the floating platforms that hung around the core of the building. Strapped to each one was a tube containing fluid, and suspended in each tube of fluid was a fleshy mass resembling half of a human body. The dome structure contained controls that moved the floating platforms around, and as each floor became filled with platforms, the entire group of platforms shifted upward, filling up the column that was the Inland building.

Awestruck, I watched as a distressed human body was punched out of the dome with great force, only to be caught and suspended in midair by one of these glossy white platforms. Curie and I ran down the remaining steps to reach the dome. Looking around for the controls, Curie found that the dome itself was hollow. After a minute more of searching, he managed to pull down an entire virtual control panel.

Panes of glass floated around the entire structure; tubes of human flesh simply passed right through them. Together, Curie and I began examining the controls. Every time a body passed by us we cringed and closed our eyes. Neither of us could stand to look at the sight; although I did not know any of these people, I knew what Inland was doing. I knew because of what I’d overheard on Earth.

Inland was, without a doubt, the primary sponsor of Cydia’s fetch project. I wondered if, somewhere in this mess of tubes, my original body was floating. Lifeless. Half destroyed. Organs hanging, dangling like Christmas ornaments, as if my mutilated flesh were a tree. A soulless, useless tree.

I began looking for Derek’s body among these tubes. I knew it was a futile search; there were so many. Half of my district had been put in fetches. I would never be able to find Derek surrounded by half of an entire district.

“Hey, Torsten!” Curie shouted. “This thing has a door, and I think I’ve got it opening up now.”

I looked over at the dome; an arc-shaped entrance did seem to be opening up. As it opened, I began to see what was inside, and just how everyone’s body was being processed. In an elegant, yet rather disturbing, way, everyone’s unconscious bodies were lined up and carried across the inside of the dome. Hundreds of these unconscious people lined the walls of the inside of the dome. As I stared at the lineup of bodies, the ground began to shake, first slightly, and then violently.

The force of the tremors topped Curie and I over onto the floor. Curie hit his head and lost unconsciousness temporarily, but my fetch kept me awake throughout the entire event. Tubes began to fall. Bodies moved around. When it all ended after about a minute straight of strong tremors, I got up and looked around and outside the dome; several tubes had broken on the ground, and the fluid was leaking everywhere. Scraps of human tissue floated downstream with the blue liquid that preserved it. I caught my first up-close glimpse of one of the bodies; what it looked like to be transferred into a fetch.

The head looked shrunken, shriveled. Wires wrapped around the skull, and exited behind the neck. Throughout the rest of the body these wires propagated, attached to temperature sensors, heart rate monitors, and all kinds of various electronics to ensure that the body stayed alive during the transfer. As for the missing organic components of the cadaver in the tube, I could only imagine what they had been used for; what sick and twisted designs Inland might have had in store for the “scrap” parts of the human body.

Behind me, Curie began to shuffle and regain consciousness. As he lifted himself up, his black hair covered in the flowing blue runoff, pointed out something in the corner of the dome that I hadn’t noticed before; a light tram. Unconscious bodies came through the exit of this one-way tram and were immediately strapped to the wall – in a similar fashion as I had been when Maiya and The Embassy dealt with me – and shifted around the inside of the dome.

I looked to see if, by some twist of fate, Derek’s body was anywhere inside of the dome. My gut, unfortunately told me it was far too late for that. That if he had come through here at all, he was already in a fetch – already set to be Inland’s guinea pig.

We both heard footsteps; Inland employees had felt the tremors and rushed out into the core of the building to see if anything had happened to their precious store of bodies. Unable to locate anybody I knew, I directed Curie out of the dome, who sealed it up using the same command he’d found to open it. We both took the glass panels and began tossing them out of sight, letting them shatter off in the distance before anybody could know we had touched them.

We began to escape through the stairwell. I was ashamed of myself for finding nothing – yet I felt, and knew, that Derek was somewhere inside this facility. If he was here, I now had no idea where to look, and I didn’t have the time to search every room in the gigantic facility. As I pondered, I heard Curie’s frightened scream and turned around.

Two Inland security officers had found him just before he’d gotten onto the stairwell, and I had kept running. From in front of me, I could see more officers coming down the stairwell. We had been spotted, and were under assault for our crimes of trespassing. As the officers neared me, I readied my fists and gave them a beating from hell; my fetch was so strong that it easily overpowered the officers. After I was free for a moment, I turned around and dashed back to rescue Curie from the grasp of the his two attackers.

Although I sprinted as fast as I could to reach him, I was too late – the two men began hoisting him up and carrying him away, cuffed. I reached for my Mu Gun, hoping to use it to dislodge Curie from their hold, but another shot was fired before I could do so.

I looked around the room; where had the shot come from? Another shot was fired; a strip of light flew across the room and hit one of the officers in the skull. He toppled over, blood gushing from his temples.

In the confusion, Curie scrambled away, and more gunshots came from within the room. Within three shots, the second officer was dead. Together, the two officers rested in a pool of crimson, their blood intermingling with each other’s. I looked around the room. Facing straight up, into the circle of white, floating platforms and corpses, I shouted, “Who’s there?”

To my surprise, the shadow of a person appeared from the stairwell above. As they jumped down from their balcony, I began to make out who our savior had been – but as I did, I didn’t want to believe it. From the shadows came Maiya, bloodstained, with a look in her eyes so murderous that my legs wouldn’t even take me a step back.