Aha, and NOW we pass the halfway point. I’m writing faster so I can hit 60,000 words this year – I decided that 60,000 seems like a nice length for this story. Also, I realize I haven’t been updating here with the days as frequently; I apologize. I’m just a little swamped with work!

Word Count: 30,565

My soul slowly moved its way across the abyss. Although I had no senses, I could function entirely on my own, and I used this ability to follow Maiya and Curie’s souls to the ends of the abyss. As we traveled, I took it that we moved from one box to the next, across a network of boxes and souls. I communicated with others, and gained their knowledge. Information flooded into me; I could accept and reject what information I desired. And yet, these people, floating in the abyss with us, never once released their names or identities.

Perhaps that had been inside of the abyss for so long that they no longer had identities. Perhaps, just perhaps, they had taken in the identities of everyone else around them – as I was doing myself – become one analogous being.

All around me, the same thoughts coming from each soul. They didn’t ask, they just ate information from my brain. They knew who I was, they knew what I did, they knew where I was going and who I was with and where I had been. There was no escape from these souls; as I partook of their knowledge, I began to feel as though I didn’t want to try and escape.

I heard Maiya thinking. “Keep moving,” she said to us. “Don’t listen to them, the path is just ahead.”

We continued moving, sightless, soundless. Thinking back, it’s hard to comprehend how we knew where we were – we simply knew. We knew where we were going, and we knew how to get there. Maiya didn’t have to say what she said, but it was a welcome reminder.
Eventually, we came to an area with what felt like wind blowing, if I could relate it to a feeling. In my mind, I could feel the pulsating, jarring nature of the wind. Maiya approached what I learned was an opening in another box, though she wouldn’t think where it was located outside of the void. We were being dispensed from one void to another.

As I approached Maiya’s location, the mental wind grew stronger. I could read her thoughts, telling me to embrace the wind, to travel toward it – and then she was gone. Her soul simply vanished.

Panicking, I chased after it, and Curie followed suit. We were both pulled in by the fierce winds and pushed out of the void. For a moment I could not even think, but soon found myself awake, in a body, with my senses fully restored. I moved an arm to touch the side of my head; my ears hurt from being able to hear. As I tried to move my hands farther away from my body, I noticed that I was encased in a glass coffin of sorts. I began banging on the glass, hoping it would break, but to no avail.

Outside of the glass, I could see the blinking lights of laboratory equipment dispersed throughout a dark room. An unknown woman in a lab coat approached my container, looked at me, and smiled slyly. She brought down a panel from above, and tapped in a password. The latches on my container immediately opened, and I was free. I stepped out from my glass prison, and when the cage shut I turned around to view my new body.

This one was different. This one was strange. It was not strange because of how it looked, but rather because of how it didn’t look. I was myself again – my old body, as if nothing had happened. I turned to the woman in the lab coat next to me. “Thank you for letting me out. I’m looking for two other people who should have been with me, would you happen to know anybody named Maiya or Adam?”

The woman laughed. “This is Maiya. The room is empty; this is my research facility, and only mine. Adam is over here, we can unlock his container now. He should be inside of his fetch.”

We both walked over to the container, where I saw the new Curie. I was shocked at the sight; the fetch had no visible features. In fact, its skin was black as night, without highlights to create a form. It was as though he had no identity in that fetch. There was no face to make out to determine expressions from. Just blackness, darkness as deep as the oceans.

We let him out, and his reaction was palpable. He was in shock, wondering what had happened to his body.

All Maiya could do was apologize. “I’m sorry, Adam. On such short notice, this was the only adolescent-sized fetch that I had prepared. Getting the equipment to set itself up from inside The Collective isn’t easy, you know. Mental commands are difficult to hide from residents. I hope you’ll forgive me for now.”

I was so unsure what to think about Maiya now. Was she a scheming murderer, or my personal savior? What was she really doing?
She looked at both of us. “You’re safe now. But you should stop meddling. What you saw in there you already know too much about. That’s why you were called upon by The Embassy, and that’s why you were thrown out of the mines. The more you know about it, the more damage you can cause and the less time we have.”

She paused, then spoke again. “You can’t leave anymore. I’ll get my ass kicked if you pull another stunt like you just did. I know you need to find Derek, but you can’t tamper with equipment you’re unfamiliar with. And you shouldn’t deal with Inland. Let people do their jobs.”

“What is your job, exactly?” I asked her, not expecting an answer.

“My primary work is with fetches. I’m working with the Cydian government.”

“So, you’re not actually an Inland employee.”

“Of course not. I was sent into the mines to investigate the deterioration of certain caverns and to ensure that districts in particular danger were outfitted with fetches. Contrary to what you’d think, I don’t try to kill as many people as possible. It’s my job to save people; I also work on The Collective, that neural network we just came out of. It integrates with fetches; when a fetch is destroyed or badly damage, it sends the soul inside to The Collective so that it can be placed in another fetch.”

She paused. I knew she wanted us to leave, but I wasn’t sure where we were, or what building we were leaving from. I was utterly confused; why did Maiya save us, and what was happening to Cydia that would alarm her so much? I decided that it was best to keep the conversation going, for my own motives. “So, how did you end up working for The Embassy?” I began, looking to track her history back to its beginning.

She pulled down a panel, as if to try to ignore me and ask why I was still around. Finally, she tossed it away. “I do research for the Cydian government. More often than you’d imagine, they sent some of us, in covert operations, beneath the surface to ensure that production is smooth. This time, however, it was with a different purpose. The government is suspecting structural instabilities beneath the planet’s surface, and several of us went down to investigate. However, residents of the mines are not supposed to know about these operations or about the structural state of the caverns.”

“Ah, and I knew about how the atrium with the purification plant had collapsed?”

“No. Derek, and then you, were the first two to point out structural instabilities in the core of the mines. To investigate, I told The Embassy to release a drone into your room to search your memories. When it reveal—”

“What? Those things… can search memories?”

“Well, not precisely. They’re programmed to search for certain patterns and recognize those patterns as thoughts that might propagate and disrupt the delicate social structure in the mines. They were developed up here, on the surface, in these labs.”

“But they’re not real. We touched it.”

“And it recorded that, as well. Everything regarding your interaction with the drone was recorded, it Derek was determined to be a hazard to the social structure in the mines.”

“So, what exactly happened to Derek?”

“That, I do know. The Embassy dealt with him; although that’s not my area, I was able to catch a glimpse of what was going on. When I saw that Derek was not returned to his enclave, I assumed the worst, and I went out on patrol to make sure that nobody was coming to take you. Of course, you came out to see me soon enough. I supposed that, seeing you, The Embassy might reveal to me where Derek had been taken so that I could rescue any others also taken away, but he assigned us to that mission in the atrium to stall.

“Derek was taken even further beneath the surface, by light tram, to a chamber called the Renaissance Room as a test subject. Research primarily takes place in the Renaissance Room – research that people don’t want you to know about. Research like The Collective, and my research of fetches. There, Derek was most likely transferred to a prototype fetch, for testing purposes. It’s almost certain that the test failed, and his soul was discarded.”

I wasn’t sure what to think, now that I knew what had happened to Derek. Although I still didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, I knew the odds – but I felt a strange need to find the Renaissance Room and destroy it. Maiya seemed unfazed by the presence of the room, and continued on with her talk.

“What they don’t tell you, is that the fetches are a safety mechanism. When your fetch is destroyed, you’re sent to one of the many hubs of The Collective. In the event of a national disaster, it could save hundreds of thousands of lives.”
“That sounds good to me,” I said. “Who doesn’t want lives to be saved?”

“Of course,” Maiya said, sulking. “Well, here is Cydia’s distress call: It’s running out of electricity, and becoming rather overpopulated. As we market fetches, sell them in clothing stores and such, the Cydian government will bring in capital. That capital will be invested into building more hubs for The Collective – eventually, there will be enough hubs to house any number of human souls.”

“That’s excellent!” I said joyously.

“It would be, if Cydia wasn’t running out of electricity. The government…” she signed, and took a deep breath in. “The government plans to use these souls as an electricity source, instead of sending them back to hospitals. Most souls will return to hospitals, to create an illusion that the technology works as desired. But every so often, one will not. I also think that, to further this gain, there are other covert operations in practice to purposefully weaken the structure of the mines.”

I stood there, awestruck for several moments. “Won’t people notice that their loved ones aren’t returned to fetches?”

“Did anybody but you and I notice as everybody was replaced down in the mines? And even if somebody did notice, they wouldn’t be in their fetch for very long. On the grand scale over decades, enough citizens will need repairs and replacements that plenty will make their way into The Collective without ever being noticed or missed.”

“That unbelievable. In fact, I don’t believe it at all. Are you just trying to make me leave?”

“No. You experienced it for yourself, inside of those boxes. Those souls there, one of them could have been Derek’s. That entire area was a soul dumping grounds. All of the souls in there, if left, just exchange thoughts and eventually assimilate with one another, until they’re all identical. At this point, none of them have any identity left in them; no individuality to seek out a new fetch or live life as a human being. They’re just souls, for power.”

I stared blankly at her face until she decided to speak again.

“And, you can’t leave. Neither of you.”

“What?” Curie said. “Why not?”

“I need both of you to help me. Something is happening to Cydia, and I want to find out what it is. Both of you have fetches now; you can go wherever you like and wherever your souls can travel. I have a feeling that things are going to change on Cydia, and not for the better.”

Neither Curie or I could disagree with her, and I thought of it as a welcome opportunity to go back down into the mines and see if I couldn’t navigate my way to the Renaissance Room and look for Derek – or his soul – when I got there. Of course, I had no idea what I was getting into, and just how dire Cydia’s situation was. There was no way I could have known that the innocent crack from the mines, with its small gusts of wind, could cause so much death and destruction.

And yet, the fear was palpable. Like Maiya, I sensed a deep disturbance beneath the surface, tied directly to my experiences in the mines over the last eight years. I thought that it was time to show Curie what life was like, living as a soldier on a battlefield – firsthand. Together, we looked at each other, and then back at Maiya.

“Alright. We’ll help you,” I said. “But you’d better not be screwing us over.”

“Not in a million years, Vince. If the planet lasts that long.”

“Good.”

“I’m suspicious about The Embassy – all the embassies underground, actually – and I’m sure you’d agree he’s the first person we should talk to about strange activities going on underground. Just be careful; you know what can happen.”

And that was how I went to my fourth job – from working on the surface, to drilling in the mines, to working for The Embassy, and finally for Maiya. The last formal job of my life.