Hansed’s day had been long enough already. The last thing he needed was the impatient scowl of an upstart Board Member greeting him as he entered the Conference Room.
“Archivist, I’m glad you could join us,” Amarin greeted him, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from her polishedunder-yarn suit. The Head of the Board, second only to the Monarch, smiled with calculated precision.
“I see you didn’t bother to wait for me before starting the presentation,” Hansed grumbled, taking a seat at the head of the table without bothering to take off his worn coat.
The Conference Room was a long, narrow chamber built to accommodate its equally proportioned table. It was lit by luminescent strands of moss; these were nearing the end of their lifespan, as evident by their glaring light. They always burned brightest before the end. Metallic surfaces and chrome cocooned the room protectively, trying and failing to hide the musty scent of the miles of earth surrounding them. As Amarin droned on, Hansed noted the faint tremors of the wall panels with passing interest. At this depth, the rock in which they lived was hot to the touch and slightly malleable, making earthquakes frequent and stable construction difficult. Yet, out of the many issues plaguing their society, Hansed figured the most worrying was the group of pretentious individuals sitting around the table.
The matter at hand was a potential expansion deeper into the uncertain boundary between the crust and mantle, and the resources such a venture would require. The entire concept was utterly foolhardy to Hansed, and he had never been afraid to speak his mind.
“Are we still seriously discussing the Expansion Proposal? We’ve already reviewed the resources such a plan would require, and it is clear we simply do not have them.”
Renthel, Amarin’s sycophant and the Director of Mining Operations, interjected. “We’ve also discussed the housing situation and our need for more chrysalith. You said it yourself, our metallic reserves are nearly depleted. Therefore, it makes much more sense to expand downward, to the unmined areas, than to… to move higher.”
Renthel’s flawed logic rolled along easily, until it ran head-first into an unspoken truth. There was no going up. Hansed had likely heard more of the horror stories than any of his younger peers in the room. He knew plenty when it came to toxic vents of gas, unstable rock, and unnatural, abandoned experiments crawling out of deserted labs. Humanity had buried its every attempt at a successful society in the scarred stone above them, driving itself farther down each time. Now, Hansed reflected, they’d just about cornered themselves. And this Expansion Proposal wasn’t a way out.
“You’re misunderstanding my argument,” he responded, an ounce of annoyance in his tone. “The problem isn’t resource availability. It’s our consumption. The Commonwealth’s progression over these past few decades has not been sustainable. No matter how deep we can afford to excavate, population growth will still be an issue that–”
“So you simply want us to stop reproducing?” Salthax, the Communications Coordinator, interrupted incredulously. Hansed had always wondered how she’d made it to the upper ranks. Her grasp of nuance was about as strong as his faulty left knee.
Renthel shoved himself back into the limelight. “I’m sorry, Archivist, but the rest of us here are more focused onplanning the future of the Commonwealth than obsessively chronicling its dismal past.”
“A future where? It seems I’m the only one here who remembers we’ve used up all our futures. We’ve already buried ourselves. Is this Commonwealth our casket?”
Silence.
Hansed had broken the unofficial rule of the Commonwealth: discussing what lay above. There was a reason normal citizens were not permitted to ascend past the 48th layer. The Board members now found the wall behind him fascinating. Hansed looked down to see his hands were balled into fists; he slowly unclenched them.
“Hansed, we are done discussing this.” Amarin had a knack for making her mood clear, even as her tone remained rigidly professional. “All in favor?”
Five to two; Hansed found his only ally in Alden, the quiet Director of Civil Projects, who was the only Board member he could stand to hold a conversation with.
“Very well. I suppose that settles it,” Renthel declared. A subtle smirk danced on his lips. “Hansed, we respect allyou do for us, but have you ever thought about… alternative positions? I do not know if your goals are aligned with the rest of ours. As you know, we pride ourselves on being forward-thinking and mentally sharp here in the Commonwealth.”
Blood rushed to Hansed’s weathered cheeks. Did that imbecile seriously take a dig at his intelligence? These upstarts, some of them barely a century old, thought they knew how to run a society? In an instant of terrible clarity, Hansed knew this to be the decision that would end the Commonwealth, just as each prior civilization had made their fatal mistake. The secession of the Cenborians, the curtailment of the Salahn’s powers, Project Geneboost… was this how it had all fallen apart, time after time? Was his life’s work truly crumbling? Hansed had reached his limit.
“Have your wish. Good luck running this government on your own.”
Hansed stalked out of the room, twin engines of fury and despair propelling his stride. No one stopped him. Had he actually just resigned? If he walked back in, what would happen?
No. What was done was done. Hansed knew where he was going.
As Hansed strode away from the Conference Room and into the winding, labyrinthine halls of the Commonwealth Central Office, positioned at the top of the habitable region, he glimpsed the city below him through narrow windows and overlooks. Artificial and biological lights spread throughout buildings formed of a composite of stone and nanocrystals first perfected by the Nanotools several millennia ago. People bustled between shops and homes in a steady flow, which had been a trickle in Hansed’s youth three centuries prior. He watched a couple stroll past a house that was slowly collapsing from the mantle’s heat and pressure, barely paying mind to its crumbling facade as they went about their day. This city, this entire race, had been constructed on the premise of constant growth. A foundation as false and uncertain as the shifting, molten walls of their caverns. What growth was left? The space missions had been abandoned tens of thousands of years ago, once the surface of humanity’s home planet became just as toxic and alien to life as Mars. Yetpeople did what they always had. Once the survivors of previous enclaves regrouped, they looked to expand. And so here they were, once again, victims of their innate appetites. Sometimes he just wanted to escape it all.
Hansed passed by hundreds of cubicles and meeting halls. As he ventured deeper, sleek metallic facades gave way to the blunt truth of stone. Eventually, Hansed found himself at the end of a cramped, roughly excavated passage, facing a small gray door and a window. Behind its glass stood a bored official in Commonwealth uniform. She was a middle-aged woman, heavyset, with a dour face upon which her occupation’s long, boring hours were scrawled.
Her expression lit up with interest upon Hansed’s arrival. “Back already? What’s the mission today?” Surmen was one of the only people Hansed enjoyed talking with. He wished he’d gotten to know her better.
“Hey, Surmen. It’s a… personal excursion.” Hansed cursed himself for his idiocy–why hadn’t he thought up a better excuse before arriving?
“Personal? That’s a new one. You know I can’t let anyone into the Lift without official authorization, even the Archivist.” Surmen’s voice was pleasant, but firm.
“I just need to collect some samples for a private project. If the results are promising, I’ll take it to the Board and we’ll make it an official investigation,” Hansed lied through his teeth, struggling to keep his voice level.
“Why? Please, Hansed, just tell me it’s for the good of the Commonwealth.”
“And what if it’s not? You and I both know none of this matters anymore. We’re too far gone.”
“Look… what we have down here isn’t amazing, but it’s a start. You’ve built this society with us; you can’t run now. Whatever you’re looking for up there, Hansed, it won’t be better.”
“Surmen, I just need to see it before it’s too late.” Hansed gestured down towards his time-withered frame, held together by surgical implants and a fading sense of hope.
Surmen sighed, her shoulders bowing under the weight of truth. “Go.”
Hansed opened the door and proceeded to the Lift. The small chrome pod on its vertical track featured large windows forged from Omniron. The Commonwealth barely had the technology to maintain this Andrithean technology, much less create a replacement. The door opened of its own accord as Hansed entered.
Surmen hesitantly queried, “So, where are you going?”
“The surface.”
The closing of the door cut off Surmen’s gasp. Before she could change her mind, Hansed quickly confirmed his destination. The Lift slowly powered up, its mechanisms groaning out of their dormancy. Its acceleration began, imperceptibly smooth, so that it seemed as if the rock walls outside were sliding down as the Lift sped up. Within minutes, the outside was a blur as Hansed raced upward.
The Lift was maintained throughout the depths it traversed by automatons. No humans except the Archivist and a select few government officials were allowed access to the lands above. It was for their safety as well as the safety of the Commonwealth. The wounds left by previous civilizations were still festering after millennia, rendering depths higher than the 48th layer toxic to human life. As the Archivist, Hansed had experience venturing above to collect samples and sift through the remnants of lost ages, but that didn’t make it a pleasant experience. Even he had never been all the way up to the surface, as it was known to be barren and radioactive from the weaponry of eons past. As far as Hansed knew, no one had gone up in his lifetime. There was simply no reason to; any waste that required disposal could be dumped by the automatons, and scientific analyses decreed that human life on the surface would be impossible for tens of thousands of years to come. Why was Hansed so compelled to see the surface of this planet humanity had scavenged, the shell that had been picked clean like a carcass on one of those ancient deserts he had read about in the archives? All he knew was that he needed to see it at least once before the end of the Commonwealth or of his aging body, whichever came first.
The Lift’s interior temperature was precisely maintained, with climate controls more efficient than anything Commonwealth-made. Despite knowing this, Hansed felt as though the air around him grew colder as he approached the surface. He was already higher than he had ever been on previous expeditions, as evidenced by the changing material of the rock surrounding him. As decrepit exit points zipped by him, former ages preserved in time, Hansed felt as though he was in the throat of some giant, unknowable creature. The enfeebled titan was finally coughing him up, expelling the virus of humanity. The tunnel’s walls came into focus as the Lift slowed, composed of stone interspersed with mud. Hansed put on his bio-suit and checked his filters.
As the Lift’s doors opened, the first thing Hansed noticed was the sky. A limitless expanse of dark gray rose above him. There was no ceiling. That simple truth nearly brought him to his knees. Hansed knew about the sky, of course; it was mentioned abundantly throughout the ancient Surface Texts in his possession. Still, for someone who had lived a life defined by the hard limits of stone, open space was a revelation. And the sun! That radiant light in the sky mocked the Commonwealth’s dim artificial illumination. After a few minutes of standing starstruck, Hansed returned his gaze to the ground. Ahead of him stretched a dusty pathway cradled between two mountains of dirt, rock, and debris on either side, their peaks rising beyond his aging vision’s limits. Here was the great dump of the Commonwealth, the depository of centuries of mining operations. Moving specks of machinery glimmered on the slopes: old Ventras, mining robots used that the Commonwealth had been unable to reprogram or control. They still fulfilled their purpose of endlessly redistributing the rubble, despite their creators’ extinction.
Hansed continued walking for hours, until the mountains of dirt had smoothed into gentle hills. Rivers formed from the climate’s acidic rain undulated down their sides, ending in small pools and channels. The great sun had fallen to the horizon now, leaving only darkness in its wake. It was becoming night; he remembered this phenomenon from the archives. Hansed’s pace did not slacken. Humanity had long ago adapted to life underground, through engineering both genetic and mechanical. With the aid of the bio-suit, his body could keep up this pace for days. He will revel in the physicality of this world before it all comes crashing down, marveling at how the weariness of its terrain mirrored the contours of his own aging face.
A flash of green jolted Hansed out of his trance-like state. His suit was pestering him with a biosignal. “That’s impossible,” he muttered to himself. The suit must have been malfunctioning, succumbing to entropy like everything else the Commonwealth had tried to preserve. Just one look at the barren mounds of dirt, interspersed with rivers that would burn to the touch, confirmed the scientific consensus: life on the surface was impossible. Yet the suit persisted, pointing out irregular patterns in one of the pools of water a few thousand feet to his left. Against his better judgment, Hansed followed the signal.
The pool looked much like the others that Hansed had seen up close: a murky, shimmering lake interspersed with rocks and other detritus that had fallen from the slopes. A yellowish-green oily sheen, illuminated by the rising moon’s faint glow, covered the lakebed. Hansed conjectured it was composed of excess chemicals that had oversaturated the water. At his suit’s insistence, he nonetheless activated his zoom to get a closer look at the cloudy lake.
Life.
Thousands of arrangements of molecules, too complex and ordered to be simple compounds, yet vastly different from any cells Hansed had seen in diagrams. Tiny structures, membranes and alien organisms, pulsed in a rhythm unknown to humanity, colliding and consuming each other, breaking apart at the seams and rejoining. Even as he watched, some sort of electricity pulsed throughout a cluster of these not-cells, prompting a spreading ring of charge outwards. He zoomed in farther, seeing data encoded in ways impossible for any organism, on scales far smaller and more intricate than his own. The information was shifting and rearranging in a pattern that was nearly comprehensible to him. Were these tiny, impossible organisms… thinking?
Hansed zoomed out. It was all within that slimy greenish layer on the bottom of the pool, an entire ecosystem thinner than a sheet of paper. With his suit enhancing his vision, he saw that the living surface extended along the river, up towards the hills. Hansed’s legs raced ahead, dragging his reeling brain with them.
Up on the slope of accumulated rubble, Hansed nearly tripped over a small brown spike jutting out of a rock. He looked down to see a strange sprout composed of interlocking spines that had seemingly fused with the stone. Examining the ground more closely, Hansed could see small webs of ropy material woven between various bits and pieces of rubble. Weird, oily masses that were only partially solid inched their way up the hill against gravity’s pull. And beneath it all, that same layer of electric life provided a nearly translucent foundation. There was a biosphere here, one barely recognizable even to the machinery of his suit. He had simply been too far away to see it initially. What did this mean for the Commonwealth? Could they use these strange organisms, harvesting their chemical outputs or constructing nanochips out of the electric cells?
Hansed’s suit once again interrupted his musing, with an even more insistent pinging this time. Danger. Biohazard detected. Vitals compromised. That was impossible! The suit was built by the Gnemians–it could withstand any biohazard known to humankind!
Known to humankind…
Hansed’s eyes grew wide with fear, their whites lambent in the moon’s rays. No human civilization, no matter how advanced, could have predicted this anomaly. He felt a sudden clawing at his throat and coughed violently. The urge to cough remained. Hansed ran back down the mountainside, his bioengineered endurance flagging as another form of life took up residence in his cells.
The sun had just risen over the horizon as Hansed stumbled back to the Lift. His legs felt strangely cold despite the suit’s climate conditioning. The cough had worsened, and strange fluids were oozing out of the pores of his skin. Hansed’s vision blurred as he unlocked the Lift, before a sharp, sourceless pain racked his body and he fell forward onto the metal floor.
Awareness dimmed, but the pain remained. As the Lift closed and began bearing him downward, Hansed’s darkening vision barely registered the growing lump in his chest. With a rending of flesh and an outpouring of fluid, the mound broke open; a scaly, clawed mass emerged, its carapace glinting in the light of dawn. The organisms had found a host, repurposing Hansed’s tired old cells for their needs.
The sun rose on new life.