Differential heat system… offline... running on engine output
Life support... operating within mission parameters
Non-newtonian liquid substructure.. reforming
External pressure… ???
Well, that wasn’t good.
The capsule continued to sink, now 5 miles below the surface. It was cold, damn cold. They’d theorized that the heat system could conk out around this point, as the hull restructured itself. And the hull was definitely restructuring. Large dents and divets seemed to pop in and out of existence, almost like fabric caught in a strong wind. Each time, the shell popped them out again within nanoseconds- the noise was horrendous. It sounded like a giant was chewing on the capsule, trying to get at the precious meat inside.
I was now in full thermal gear. Ironically they sent me down with a down sleeping bag, which wouldn’t work if it got wet. So It would be useless if the capsule popped; though I suppose I would be a red smear at the bottom of the ocean that didn’t need a sleeping bag if that happened. Score one for the sleeping bag. So down it was, the lightest weight material they could find in a endeavor where everything was weighed down to the gram. They didn’t even let me keep my necklace. Down down down we go.
Down I continued, shivering all the while- the engine’s heat a bare whisper through the -40 degree bag.
I’d always liked the idea of being an explorer. I do well in small spaces. As a teenager I’d go camping and pretend I was in a spaceship escape pod with only the small interior of my tent to survive. At the time I had no idea I was preparing for what would be my greatest adventure.
The capsule had cameras, no windows. There were running lights that it used to navigate around obstacles with some sort of artificial vision. Sometimes on the display I thought I saw huge shadows lurking away at the edge of the light, as if everything down here was a vampire. They were probably just rocks.
Since everything was automated, all I had to do was wait. 5 days. While we sunk slowly to the bottom. To the site. To unmecca. To Cresht.
I did pushups and ate bland rations, I was only allowed one hot a day due to the capsule’s energy restrictions. The entire space of the thing was wide enough for maybe two and a half of me to lie side by side, and tall enough that I could sit up, but my head would bump the ceiling if I sat up on my knees. All of my gear and food was in the enclosed space with me, nothing attached to the bulkhead of the capsule so that it could freely flex and reform.
Basically I found myself in a silver-gray bubble that wobbled and shook around me. Some deep part of me knew I was falling a foot a minute. I managed to ignore most of that weirdness and read, watch tv, study the target- all while my tiny world flexed, shook, and fell around me.
Now, though, I was a little nervous. Things were uncomfortably cold and the trip was soon to be over. Looking at my display I could see a countdown in feet- the capsule predicted we only had about 900 ft, or 15 hours, to go.
14 hours later, the lights from the bottom began to show on the screen. A forest of them. Some spotlights illuminating sandy floor encrusted with alien growth, some blinking signal lights that, beckoned, inviting me to land. Then of course the slow sweeping yellow of emergency lights. Still going after over a year without surface contact.
What the hell happened down here?
More details come into view. The emergency lights played across a massive, milky white globe set into an outgrowth of craggy flesh-rock. An eye. In the half second strobes I made out the various metal plated umbilicals and depots that had winnowed their way into the side of the mountain. Into the side of the corpse.
Well, good. It was still here, so I wasn’t going to get fired when they shot the messenger. We’d been worried- well I’d really been the only one worried, the rest of the research team had all had spontaneous and convenient family emergencies the day after Creshtnet went down.
A particularly awful crack snap crunch sounded from the barrier behind me as it reformed and hardened for the I-zone. I checked the readouts again.
Differential heat system… offline... running on engine output
Life support... failing
Non-newtonian liquid substructure.. compromised
External pressure… ???
Makes sense, we didn’t design the capsule to enter the I-zone, and without a technician inside to steer the mountain’s brain I wasn’t getting any help. The depth indicator had stopped going down, which meant I had stopped and was on top of … something. Was it human, or cresht? I ran a handshake protocol to see if any umbilicals or airlocks are under me. Nothing except errors and gobbledygook. Cresht then. Fuck.
Nothing to it, but to do it.
All cresht tech had shut down a year ago when the station went offline. Not a word from any of the 400 souls in the I-zone when things went south. That’s to be expected though- they were on direct interface, not the bounceback we all are used to on the surface.
The thing most people don’t understand about cresht tech is that it is proximity based. The closer you are to the source, the more powerful the effects. Human tech doesn’t work like that- your email is your email whether you’re right next to a computer or in the middle of the wilderness. I’m sure you might have read in the paper that while most of the world only woke up with a bad headache, almost every southern coastal town in Australia and NZ woke up vomiting. And that was in the most optimistic of cases.
Now that I was in the I-zone, the cresht display on the side of the main screen had come alive. I very diligently refused to look at it. It’s funny, you spend a year without the cresht and you sort of forget about it, about them, go back to doing things the old fashioned way. I was out of options, though it was either become the first person to interface since … whatever happened, or die in my shiny metal capsule and make it 401 corpses down here.
Well, 402. Sorry big guy.
It took me a while to finally build up the courage to actually look at the display. I felt like I was 14 and sneaking into R rated movies to feel up girls again. So timid, each time a little braver as I inched my eyes towards the screen, each time failing to bring them all the way.
In my defense, we had no idea whether or not creshtnet killed them. Big breath in and just look at the center of it…
I regret to report that that first interface feeling of having your psyche fisted open by a giant arm made of ice? Yeah it’s still there. There were a bunch of new, other skittering things that ran past the arm though, out into me. That was new.
The umbilicals slithered up immediately to interface with the capsule. They worked first try, a silent godsend given we hadn’t been able to test the capsule with creshtnet down. I experienced the deep, overwhelming sense of calm that indicated a successful docking. I felt the cresht begin to prepare my body for entry, pulling off the down bag and pulling on the hazard wear under the capsule’s bed.
Though instant understanding flooded every pore of my soul, I could not access the memories. It was as if the net itself has amnesia, or a concussion… My eyes flicked back up to the massive unblinking eye that hung above me in the depths. Was there a tinge of red in that milkiness? Did these idiots manage to concuss the fucking mountain?
Again, frustration- I could understand what higher dimensions looked like, I could peel apart the layers of an atom and see the trends in my friend’s and families moods over time, but nothing about the mountain.
And so in frustration I asked the one question that I was giving funding to come all the way fucking down here and ask.
“Do the Cresht know?”
I had known from the moment of interface, of course. Of course they knew. They’d unrolled our little lab experiment like a newspaper and spat at what they saw. Fevered lice snibbling away in the corpse of a chosen son. Pushing buttons and trying to make him move like some massive macabre puppet. Worse, Eavesdropping on their holy plane. Worms. Worms. WORMS, DESECRATING WORMS.
Of course the Cresht knew. And of course, they were coming to grind us into ash.