The social breakdown within the mines is really getting palpable at this point; look like Torsten and Curie will either have to find a way to fix it, or quickly find a way out!

Word Count: 37,599

“You’re insane. Even if I could do such a thing, why would you want me to do so? You’re in a fetch, and a rather pronounced one at that. You won’t be able to fool anybody into making you an eligible subject.”

“How are these subjects usually found, anyway?”

I stepped back into the conversation to let him know. “Judging by Derek’s disappearance after he interacted with one, I would say that it’s the virtual droids roaming the area that have been looking for test subjects this entire time, rather than monitoring our work in the mines.”

“Vincent is right,” The Embassy said. “The droids select who is called down to the Renaissance facilities and what their fate is – it’s all highly automatic. For those who resist capture, I am tasked with ensuring that they are safely delivered to those facilities for the proper tests to be run. Vincent, that man you captured was running from his long overdue appointment in the Renaissance rooms. No matter what he told you, he knew what was coming for him – everything he said to you was most likely a fabrication by him, or his own mental rationalization of the situation he was in.”

“So, we can probably trick one of the droids into tagging us as a test subject.”

“Or,” Curie injected, “I can modify one of them.”

Neither The Embassy nor I knew if Curie had the skill required to modify the code of a droid, but it was clear that all three of us wanted more information about what was happening to Cydia, if for nothing but to help the social order in the mines return to its normal, calm state. The Embassy looked at me, wide0eyed and sad, nervous and shocked, and nodded.

“If you’re truly going to do this, you will need my help to secure the source code of a droid. At the risk of my job, I will get you the source code. Please stay underground in the meantime, in the mines, and I will find everything you need. Vincent, your enclave is still available and open; Adam can stay with you. Don’t make a scene, or somebody less generous than I will have you hauled out again. Don’t think anybody has forgotten who you are and why you’re here.”

“I won’t,” I said. “And thank you for doing this. Come to my enclave when you have the source code available, and I’m sure Curie will put it to good work. Don’t let this stress you out too much—”

“Marco York,” he said. “Just call me Marco.”

“Of course, Marco. Don’t let whatever’s going on get to you – Curie and I will get to the bottom of it. Whether the bottom is on the surface or at the core of Cydia, this fetch business reeks of fish. I know that you think so, too, and I know that you’ve just been following your orders as an Embassy below the surface. But I have to find out what really happened to Derek, and why – not just why you say so, but so I can find a way to save him.”

“Alright. Get out, and be careful. With all of the crumbling slate, mining has been postponed; citizens are becoming restless and violent. A few fights turned into daily struggles. Markets have been destroyed, so many are without food. Just watch your back, Vincent.”

I nodded, and Curie and I left Marco York’s room for the outside. A tremor shook the ground beneath our feet, causing the dust to kick up and partially block out our vision. Through the mist we followed the virtual lights lining the caverns to my enclave where I had spent the solitary night with Maiya. The wires she had plugged into the back of her skull still rested next to her bed, snaking around the structure into the wall. I still didn’t know what they were for, and I was curious to find out.

It seemed that Curie was even more curious than I was, for he noticed the wires instantly and began picking them up. “These are controller cables. What are they doing here, beneath the surface?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what they are. But hey, are you sure that you can interpret the source code of one of those drones?”

“I used to develop some augmented reality applications for glasses in the past. Nothing too complex, but I’ve dabbled. If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s probably a function inside of the droids checking for certain parameters that make a good test subject. If I can change those parameters to match our qualities, then that droid should report that we are meant to be test subjects. Since it seems automated, I doubt anybody will notice that we’re in fetches – especially with The Embassy helping us.”

“I suppose that man was just as fed up with his current job as I used to be with mine, to not mind messing a bit with the system. I know I threw everyone for a loop when I requested to be transferred beneath the surface. But I was having hell up above; I wasn’t enjoying life. I can see now that The Embassy – erm, Marco – isn’t enjoying his life much, either. Maybe we can change that for him.”

Curie nodded, but as he did so we heard a massive banging noise outside of the enclave. Looking outside, I could see that two citizens had left their homes and were fighting over a morsel of food. One man was setting explosives near his enclave, threatening to detonate them. It looked like the second man did not feel threatened, and so the explosives went off – another massive bang – causing part of the enclave to shatter and shards of Slate to scatter.

Screaming could be heard about the cavern. The second man – who had not set off the explosives – was dead, buried beneath a pile of rubble. From his hands the man who he had fought pried the morsel of food, consuming it in one bite with joy. Parents hid their children from the caverns, families backed away into their enclaves.

It wasn’t hard to take notice that nobody was working. Over the last several days, all mining had ceased – presumably because of the increased danger of cave-ins. It was my best guess that several workers had been killed by falling Slate over the last few days, perhaps hours, and that everyone had been ordered to avoid damaging or mining the walls of the caverns, even to gather Slate.

On the surface, I could only just imagine how a shortage like this would affect industry. I felt a new Mu Gun in my pocket; Maiya must have slipped me one in this fetch, probably the one she’d taken from the purification plant, because my old Mu Gun was still at the Inland building back in district 137. I thought about how it was made almost entirely of Taconic Slate, and how it would not exist without such material.

When I thought about it, most everything on Cydia couldn’t exist without some form of Taconic Slate. Food was processed with it; equipment that processed food was made with it. Guns, knives, buildings, bridges – everything was made of Slate. It was the idea material for making everything, and so without it there could only be nothing.

Curie and I didn’t even bother approaching the scene – we simply remained, frozen, inside of our enclave. Curie fiddled with the cables, I watched. Neither of us had anything to say, and we weren’t sure what we would say even if we did. Finally, Curie stopped looking at the cables. “Whoever was using these must’ve been an interesting person.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Oh, right. You don’t know what these are – they’re controller cables. They plug into the back of the fetch; you’ve probably felt the ports on your neck. Using the controller cables, you can move your consciousness along a network. You could connect yourself to, say, another fetch far away and control it simultaneously with yours. The cables have been used, I’ve heard, to control vehicles as well. It’s interesting stuff, so it must have been an interesting person using them.” He tosses the cables in his hand, feeling their weight, and looked at me.

“That would be Maiya,” I said. “She stayed in here with me for one night before I was thrown out. As she slept, she put those cables in her head. When I saw her doing that, I left the room. That’s when Marco found me and threw me out. The strangest thing was, Maiya was also in his office up on the surface. But she’d been sleeping.”

“The controller cables explain things. She must have had two fetches. I’m not surprised, given that all of her research is with them. She might have had one stored in Marco’s office, and connected to it when he took you there.”

I mulled over some thoughts – if Maiya could connect to a second fetch hundreds of stories above the ground, would it be possible for me to connect to my lost fetch in Inland’s district 137 facility? I had a hunch that the Renaissance rooms and the conflict going on at Inland were connected, and I was eager to find out what was going on – but the droid source code wasn’t coming for several hours. If, in the meantime – or even during – I could re-enter the Inland facility without fear of injury or death, I could investigate the conflict within Inland further.

I heard gunshot noises outside. I couldn’t fathom what was happening now, and I was afraid to remain in the mines for too long. But now I was no longer afraid of death; I was afraid of assimilation. If what Marco had said about Derek was true, then he had suffered a fate worse than death – the loss of his identity. All of his thoughts, all of his secrets, they had all been forcibly merged into a locally pooled consciousness. Derek was no longer himself, but some massive super-consciousness. A collective of various other test subjects.
I shivered at the thought of losing my identity before dying. I shook at the thought of never passing away peacefully, contained in the cold world of The Collective for the rest of eternity.

I hated waiting. I hated not having the source code in my hands – in Curie’s hands – and not knowing what was happening to my home. More gunshots. Unfortunately, my enclave had no door; if they wanted to, those being aggressive could have waltzed in and killed both me and Curie freely. Strangely, I never feared the possibility; my mind was so focused on the crumbling walls of our enclave, the cables under Maiya’s bed, the strange conflicts within Inland and the Cydian governments, that death felt like a peaceful escape.

But now that I was in a fetch, there was no peaceful escape for me. There was no foreseeable end.

It was several hours later that Marco arrived with the source code. He handed it to Curie shakily, as though he’d gathered it through rather suspicious means, and I gave him a frightening look to make sure he wasn’t handing us something that would do us in. Curie looked at the source code, scrolling through its tens of thousands of lines, nodding at intervals.

“Thanks, boss. I’ll have this compiled by morning.”

That was all he said, and Marco nodded in response. Still shaking and disheveled, the poor man left us. It looked as though he was limping, though he might have just been walking slowly. I wasn’t sure if he would have the nerve to capture us – but it was necessary. I watched Curie begin to fiddle with the code. He kept scrolling through, looking for the lines that would identify us as test subjects.
“See anything?” I asked him after a few minutes of silence.

“Not yet, but this is very interesting. It’s not like any code I’ve seen before, though I think I understand what’s going on. When this compiles, we’re going to have to configure the droid. Give me another hour or so, and I should have this ready.” He pulled down a few glass panels and began distributing the code and controls and keyboards among them. Within a minute, he was lost in his editing – even if I had called upon him, he wouldn’t have stopped.

For that hour, I laid on my bed and listened to the sounds of gunshots, falling Slate, and screaming at random intervals. I couldn’t imagine what the conflicts were over; I thought, perhaps food was the main concern. With each passing minute, I pieced together what had happened in the mines in the few days that I’d been gone.

Collapses around the caverns must have killed off citizens and destroyed markets, upsetting the social structure and causing mass fear. To that end, there was a humongous food shortage, and many citizens were under the impression that they were going to die anyway. The citizens in fetches, those who had been forcibly transferred by the program at Inland, we being sent back to The Collective after their fetches were destroyed – and I assumed that, due to the lack of people down in the mines, some entity was either killing them off or moving them to another location.

But with the light trams to the surface closed, it seemed that citizens beneath the surface began to worry about their health and well being. Those in fetches might not have known what had happened to them, and were trying to eat regardless. Nobody had any means of escape – there was only panic, panic, panic.

Our squadron of soldiers had devolved into a civil war battlefield. Man against man. Fetch against fetch. It was quickly an environment of survival of the fittest. And, chances were, any citizen that knew about The Embassy was banging on his door, wondering when Inland was going to send help, knowing in their gut that Inland wasn’t about to do anything for them. And that must have drove Marco mad; mad enough to develop a limp in his leg and a coward in his heart.