Speaker 1: I work for an environmental risk contractor that assesses long
term stability risks. Most of what we audit are sealed
industrial spaces, old tunnels, refineries, quarry cuts, et cetera. Places
that were shut down decades ago and are now the
local council's problem. Whenever someone reports a smell in their
cellar or a sinkhole opens in a field, methane build
up is the usual concern. Sometimes, ground water ingress changes
the internal pressure enough to compromise whatever plug was used
to seal the site. In worst case scenarios, slow collapse
can propagate outward through the surrounding soil, destabilizing nearby roads
or foundations. That's the sort of thing we're meant to
catch early before an old shaft turns into a housing
insurance claim. The site that came through last Tuesday didn't
look unusual at first. There was a disused mine in
rural Whales, sealed in nineteen forty eight after a subsidence
event killed three surveyors during a post war inspection. According
to the closure report, all ventilation infrastructure had been dismantled
prior to ceiling. The primary shaft was back filled with
concrete and capped. Secondary access tunnels were collapsed using controlled charges.
By nineteen fifty three, ground water ingress had flooded the
lower workings completely, which should have been the end of it,
except a routine atmospheric scan done remotely after a nearby
planning application triggered a geological review flagged something impossible, breathable
oxygen levels inside the sealed shaft, humidity cycling that suggested
active air flow, and most concerning of all, evidence of
internal atmospheric circulation. There should have been no air movement
at all. Even a partially flooded mine left undisturbed for
seventy years settles into equilibrium gases, stratify, moisture, saturates the rock.
Any residual pockets collapse or equalized through microfractures in the
surrounding strata. But the data we pulled from the probe
showed stable internal conditions, stable as if something inside was
regulating the atmosphere. We requested a deeper telemetry pull from
the municipal grid. The mine was drawing power, not much,
barely enough to flag against the regional usage, but it
was there a live electrical load originating from a site
that had been officially discignated from the grid before most
of the surrounding villages were even electrified. Worse still, the
drawer wasn't constant. Every sixty to ninety seconds, the system
spiked with a short search, then settled back to baseline
again and again. That afternoon we received a new assignment.
We were instructed to descend to the lowest accessible level
of the shaft, locate any active ventilation equipment that may
have been installed post closure, legally or otherwise, and disconnect
it manually so the internal atmosphere could equalize naturally over time.
If someone had been using old workings for storage or access,
we'd find out soon enough, and if they hadn't, then
something else was running the air down there. The original
intake stack sat about twenty meters from the primary shaft cap,
half hidden beneath a stand of shrub that had grown
since the site was sealed. According to the decommission report,
it had been stripped of all internal ducting before being
filled with reinforced concrete and capped at both ends. Some
one had gone a step further since then. There was
a welded steel plate over the external mouth, not professionally
but thoroughly enough that the seam had rusted into a
continuous band. The entire thing had then been back filled
with aggregate. At a glance, it looked less like an
intake and more like a short section of collapsed drainage pipe.
We weren't expecting to find anything functional, but when I
swept the thermal camera across the world line, the scene
resolved differently than the surrounding metal. A faint, uneven cooling
pattern ran along the joint, thin enough that I thought
it might have been a shadow at first. I adjusted
the contrast and ran the pass again, same result. The
plate wasn't radiating heat, it was losing it. I crouched
down and pressed the edge of my glove against the seam.
The sensation was subtle, not draft exactly, but there was resistance. There,
a pressure differential across a seal that on paper should
have been air tight. I unpacked the handheld gage and
held the censor head against the world The needle dipped
inward immediately, just enough to register pulling toward the plate,
as if I brought it close to a vacuum line.
The mine wasn't pushing gas out, it was drawing something in.
I called it up to the surface, lead and got
silence for a few seconds while they reviewed the readings.
If the internal system was pulling atmospheric mess downward through
a sealed intake, then it wasn't just circulating air. It
was actively venting something upward from below. And if we
disconnected whatever was running down there without identifying what it
was removing first, there was a chance that whatever the
system had been bleeding off for the last seventy years
would start accumulating inside the shaft instead. The primary shaft
cap had to be cut in sections to avoid fracturing
the surrounding concrete plug. It took most of the morning
to expose enough of the original access ladder to get
a harness line anchored properly. By the time I clipped in,
the light had already started to fade behind the tree line.
The first thing I noticed on the way down was
the flood line. According to the closure logs, groundwater had
filled the lower workings by the early fifties enough that
several inspection attempts in the following decade had been abandoned.
When the access tunnels became partially so merged, the interior
walls should have shown mineral staining from decades of saturation. Instead,
the high water marks sat well below the last recorded level,
at least twenty meters lower than it had any right
to be. Below that. The rock face wasn't slick with
see pitch or softened by erosion. It looked dry, desiccated
in places, the sort of brittle surface you see in
long ventilated tunnels where airflow had been moving continuously for years.
My headlamp picked upon particular drifting through the beam as
I passed the first support frame. We would usually expect
moisture or mist, but instead it was dust fine enough
that it lifted easily from the floor when I shifted
my weight onto the next rung hanging in the air,
instead of settling along the timber braces the way condensation
usually does in flooded shafts. I pause that the first
landing to check the meter clicked to my harness. Oxygen
levels were stable, well within safe operating range. The barometric reading, though,
had shifted since we opened the cap. Rather than falling
the way you'd expect during a descent into open vertical space,
it rose gradually but steadily with every ten meters of depth,
enough that the read out updated twice before I even
at spoil the next section of line. Something down there
was displacing volume upward through the shaft, and whatever was
pushing out had more mass than the air we'd come
in with. The primary junction opened out beneath the ladder
shaft into a low ceiling chamber that split into three
documented routes, two of them terminate and collapsed access tunnels,
the third leading toward the lowest operational level recorded prior
to closure. I unhooked from the descent line and moved
far enough into the chamber to avoid disturbing the air
column directly beneath the shaft, before taking the trace of
pellets from my kit. The design to disperse slowly once exposed,
fine enough to follow ambient air flow through confined spaces
without dropping out immediately. In most sealed environments, they settle
in minutes. I release the pinch into the junction and
watched the particles pull together in an unusual narrow stream,
a slow but consistent draw toward the lowest documented chamber,
directional movement downward, and when I chake the barometric meter again,
the pressure had climbed another increment since I'd left the ladder.
To rule our instrument drift. I cracked open a small
sample container at chest height. The lid flacked slightly as
it came free. The sides pulled inward a fraction enough
to crease along one of the molded seams before equalizing.
Something inside the tunnel system was increasing the atmospheric load
within occupied space, not by introducing additional oxygen the meter
still red safe, but by forcing mass into the chamber
from somewhere deeper in the workings. And if the ventilation
system was still active beyond the lower levels, then whatever
it had been running for for the last seventy years
wasn't just circulating breathable air. It was removing something heavier
than it, which meant cutting power from the surface without
locating the active fans first risked trapping it below the
ground with us there was an any way to disconnect
the system safely without going down to it. The access
tunnel narrowed as it approached the section marked as collapsed
in the nineteen sixty one inspection report. According to the
archive logs, a roof failure had sealed this part of
the workings entirely, a progressive cave in that made any
further descent structurally unsafe. The closure documentation treated it as
a dead end from that point forward, except the obstruction
wasn't there anymore. Where the collapse would have filled the
tunnel from floor to ceiling. The rock had been cleared back.
There were no fracture patterns, no scoring from cutting tools.
The larger slabs had been shifted aside and stacked along
the walls, leaving a passable route through the debris field
beyond it. The tunnel ended at a still bulkhead, a
pressure rated door that had been set directly into the
exposed rock face, recessed along its edges with a composite
seal that still held tension when I ran my light
across it. The hinges were intact. The locking wheel sat
flush against the frame. Stamped along the upper plate or
inspection markings dates that felled decades after the mine had
officially been sealed nineteen seventy eight, nineteen seventy nine, nineteen eighty.
There was no installation record in any of the closure
documents which reviewed, no ownership transfer, no refitting permit, nothing
that explained how a reinforced pressure door had been placed
this far below the ground without anyone noticing. I stepped
closer and pressed my palm against the metal. Through the glove,
I could feel a low pannical vibration, faint but steady
ventilation noise carrying through from whatever lay on the other side.
The bulkhead opened into a chamber that had no business
existing in a mine field before the first motorway was
laid within fifty miles of it. The ventilation assembly sat
bolted to the rock like it had been installed yesterday.
Four industrial fans mounted in sequence along a reinforced housing,
drive belts, tension correctly, facings free of corrosion. The lubricant
port showed a fresh shem Beneath my lamp. There wasn't dust,
caked residue or dried grease, but a thin reflective film
that caught the lights when I moved. Every one of
them was running, running hard enough that the hum traveled
through the soles of my boots. As soon as I
stepped onto the chamber floor. The airflow wasn't being circulated
laterally through the tunnels. It was being forced downward beyond
the housing. The floor dropped away into a vertical shaft
cut cleanly through bedrock, a cylindrical war vanishing into the
dark below the reach of my lamb. I lifted the
thermal camera and angled it toward the opening. For a moment,
the display showed nothing but the ambient gradient of the
chamber walls. Then something passed beneath the lens, a slow
bloom of heat rising from somewhere below the map depths
of the mine, fading again before it reached the lip
of the shaft. I stepped closer. The pressure change made
itself known before the meter updated. A tull eight building
beare behind the eyes, a tightening along the jaw hinge,
as though the helmet strap had been cinched one notch
too far. The vibration under foot deepened, resolving into a
low mechanical tremor that traveled through the support frame and
into my harness. I took the sample jar from my
kit and held it out over the opening. When I
twisted the lid free, the container just collapsed. The sides
pulled inwards so sharply that one of the molded ridges
split along its seam Before I could close it again,
the plastic wipping in on itself, as if I cracked
it open at depth under water, Whatever was rising through
that shaft wasn't replacing the air. It was displacing it,
forcing something denser upward into the tunnels faster than the
system could bleed it off. The seismic lugger chirped once
at my hip, sharp enough to cut through the fan noise.
They bowled it free just as the read out updated
a micro tremor origin depth below the lowest level of
the mine. Before I could flag it up to the
surface steam, something moved beneath the shaft. The pressure waves
struck from below without warning, a hard concussive lift that
rattled the fan housing and kicked a skin of dust
up from the chamber floor. The support frames shuddered as
anchor boats along the shaft lips strained outward in their sockets,
the metal whining against the rock as if something beneath
it pushed up against the entire column at once. On
the thermal display, the shaft filled with another rising bloom, hot,
this time climbing fast enough to smear across the screen
before fading into the ambient gradient of the chamber. The
fans changed pitch immediately. Air flow reversed with a metallic
clatter that ran the length of the assembly as the
system shifted from intake to exhaust. The pressure behind my
eyes eased by a fraction. As the tunnel system began
to vent upward through the primary shaft from somewhere below.
A sound followed it, slow and rhythmic, something periodic, spaced
far enough apart to register as deliberate, carrying up through
the bore, like breath moving through a pipe. Another tremor
registered on the logger. This time the displacement that followed
came with it a heavy push that forced the air
in the chamber toward the exhaust ducks, lifting loose to
breathe from the floor in a narrow spiral. As the
system fought to bleed off the load. Something below the
shaft was moving. Each upward motion drove an entire column
of compressed gas ahead of it, forcing mass into the
tunnel network faster than it could equalize naturally. The ventilation
system wasn't just circulating breathable air. It was venting atmosphere
glowed generated by whatever was coming up from beneath the
mapped geology. The exhaust cycle that followed the last displacement
didn't stop at the chamber. I heard it tear through
the axis tunnel behind me. A sudden, violent shift in
pressure that traveled the length of the passage like a
physical blow. The bulkhead I'd come through slam shot a
second later, the seal hitting the frame with enough force
the rattled dust from the ceiling supports. I turned back
immediately and grabbed for the manual override. The wheel held fast,
locked in place by the load on the other side.
I leaned into it anyway, felt the metal flax beneath
my grip without turning as the pressure differential force the
seal tighter into its seat. Then the intake resumed. The
air in the chamber drew hard toward the shaft as
the fans reversed and the tunnel ahead, the one leading
back toward the primary ladder, shifted along its support frames.
The steel brace inflexed inward just enough to narrow the passage,
rock grinding against the struts. As the load settled back
into the access route, dust lifted from the floor but
didn't fall. Another intake searched it. The frame ahead bowed again, further,
this time until the passage pinched almost shut before easing
by a few centimeters. When the system tried to compensate,
I took a step toward it and stopped behind me,
the fan pits changed. The cycling interval was gone. There
was no pause between inn take in exhaust, no return
to neutral flow. The system had shifted into constant draw,
pulling downward through the bore hard enough that the upper
tunnels began to take the strain. The next intake drove
the pressure back up the access route. The support frame
ahead of me creaked as the rock around it compressed
the floor grating, lifting under my weight before settling again.
If the load kept propagating upward through the shaft, it
wouldn't stay contained below ground. It would rupture through the
primary works through the surface plug. I checked the passage
again between intake searches. It held shape for a moment
or two before narrowing again as the system fought to
maintain the gradient. It wasn't stable. Retreat meant risking collapse
inside a tunnel that had already started to deform under
the load. Staying meant letting the pressure build until the
shaft failed outright. The only route that wasn't compressing lay
past the ventilation housing deeper into the lower works. If
the system was trying to hold something down there, then
the only way out was to go down to it.
The reinforced passage beyond the ventilation housing wasn't taking the
load the way the upper tunnels had, at least not yet.
The next intake surge drove the pressure through the corridor
hard enough that the inspection hatches set into the walls
rattled in their frames, the composite seals along their edges
flexing outward as the internal gradient shifted overhead. The conduit
brackets bowed away from the rock face by a few
millimeters before settling again. When the system compensated, Dust lifted
from the floor grating rather than fall. When the intake eased,
it hung there, drawn upward into a slow spiral that
stretched down the length of the corridor toward the bore.
Another search followed. This one shifted the tunnel geometry enough
that I felt it through my boots, the floor tilting
a fraction as the rock behind the steel framing tug
the strain. I moved when the pressure dropped, advancing a
few meters before the next intake hit, and the passage
narrowed again around the bracing. The pattern repeated move when
the system bled off the load stop when the intake
drew it back down behind me. A support anchor tore
free from the wall with a sharp metallic crack that
echoed through the corridor, followed by the dull scrape of
rock shearing along the ceiling seam thus spilled into the
passageway as a section of the upper support frame dropped
hoigh half an inch in its mound. The route had
come through narrow perfectly where it settled ahead of me,
though the reinforced section held its shape a moment longer
between surges, the pressure redirecting itself down through the lower
ducks instead of forcing its way up through the corridor.
The system was letting the upper works deform to keep
whatever was below from pushing through them. The corridor entered
the sealed operations room. I forced the latch open between
intake surges and stepped inside just as the pressure climbed again,
the door dragging against its frame before ceiling behind me.
The instrumentation along the far wall was still live. Baromentric
recorders flickered across a spread of analog dials and digital readouts,
each one tied back to the ventilation system running somewhere above.
Intake ratios sat well below the marked tolerance line, the
indicator hovering just inside the acceptable range. I pulled the
nearest log book from the shelf and flipped it open.
Maintenance notes ran alongside the displacement records annotations in different
hands across the years, all of which were absent from
any records we had accessed to On the surface. Displacement
amplitude increases when intake drops below recommended gradient. Further down
the recorded drawer matched the reading in front of me
minimum containment threshold. Another intake searched pushed through the station.
The shelving behind me creaked as the load shifted. Unsecured
binders bowing inward with the pressure flex the metal uprights
along the door frame. The composite seal compressed hard enough
that the inner lining lifted away from the rock by
a few millimeters before settling again. When the system compensated,
I scanned the intake channels and the console. The feed
line marked for the lower containment ducks blinked amber, active,
but not fully engaged. Part of the system had gone
off line. The next displacement registered on the seismic logger
at my hip shallower than the last, which meant whatever
was generating the load beneath the shaft had already migrated
upward through the surrounding strata. Another intake hit. The door
seal flexed again in its mound. The system was still running,
but it wasn't holding it. A second passage branched off
from the rear of the station, terminating had a guard
rail set into the floor. Beyond it, the containment board
dropped away into darkness. A vertical cut driven through bedrock
to a depth the original mine had never reached. I
brought a thermal camera up and angled it toward the shaft.
A broad heat signature filled the lower half of the display.
It wasn't a sharp point source, but a diffuse mass
that shifted along the inner wall before fading into the
ambient gradient above. The next intake search hit Before I
could adjust the focus. The floor grating beneath my boots
bowed upward a fraction as the pressure drove back through
the station, the rail vibrating hard enough that I felt
it in my teeth. The seismic lagger didn't chirp. It
rolled the readout climbed slower, rather than spiking as it
had during earlier impacts. No fracture signature or rock fall
displacement from somewhere below the map depth of the mine.
The sound followed it up the bore, low and periodic,
arriving seconds before before the logger updated movement carried through
the air ahead of the load. I checked the barometric meter.
The intake held steady, but the pressure inside the station
didn't drop with it. Whatever the system was drawing down
now wasn't enough to counter was being forced upward through
the shaft. Something beneath the cavern was beginning to overcome
the containment gradient. The system was failing. There was a
service cradle fixed at the inner wall of the boar,
a maintenance rigg tied to the same conduit that fed
the ventilation assembly above. I clipped in and dropped. The
drill shaft widened as I descended the scoring along its walls,
giving way to smoother stone, where the cut it opened
into a natural cavity. Beneath the collapse one. The boar
terminated in a cavern, a natural bedrock chamber formed far
below the original workings, its ceiling lost beyond the reach
of my lamp. Containment ducks had been driven into the
perimeter at uneven intervals. The housing sunk directly into the
rock and tied back into the intake network above. At
the center of it, something had been embedded in the stone.
A vast organic mass looked embedded just behind the stone.
The skin looked stiff, but it was hard to make
out exactly what it was. The surrounding strata had fractured
outward from it over time, worn smooth in places where
repeated in fact, had driven it against the bed rock
again and again. It expanded slowly, a shallow lift that
pushed the surrounding rock outward by millimeters before settling back
into place through a long contraction, each forced air ahead
of it. I slowly approached, light in hand, waving the
beam over segments, trying to piece it together in my
mind's eye. My light agitated a certain spot, a horizontal
seam that shuddered. For a moment. I fixed my gaze
upon it, waiting to see what came through, hoping for
an answer, but was only met by infinite questions. Through
the opening of the seam, which only split a little,
I could make out what was behind it, the pupil
contracting as light fell into its vacuum, the pressure rose,
the ground shuddering, all emanating from what I had just found.
I felt the pressure shift in my ears. A second
before the logger above registered the displacement, the same load
had been dry up through the shaft and into the
tunnels overhead. I stumbled back my light, giving me a
wider view of the bigger picture. Ridges that made no sense,
wrinkles that seemed random, painted the picture of what had
been in front of me the whole time. The opening
was the size of a house, gave a window to
one eye and part of its brow. Humanoid in nature,
but so far removed from our species, something so huge
that a picture it in its entirety would drive me mad.
A sound came with the next burst of pressure, and
what it was doing finally made sense. It was simply
just breathing, sucking in air through its buried nose, expanding
its body little by little, then releasing repeatedly, over and over,
moving sediment and rock in microfractions to escape. The mine
above had given it a chance, loosened up the formations
so that if it did get any sort of leverage,
it would easily climb out, be free, and do god
knows what. The ventilation system was in place to keep
the structure sound. It did nothing to stop his escape,
but slowed it down considerably, countering its efforts in destabilizing
the area. Another intake search hit. The expansion followed, but
the contraction didn't complete. It stalled midway through the cycle,
tension gathering along the embedded ridges with a mass met
the surrounding stone. This time, the surface didn't settle back.
The rock around it shifted instead fractured, seems widening as
the pressure forced its way outward along the existing scoring paths.
Whatever had been compressing passively beneath the mine was no
longer settling between cycles. It was beginning to separate itself
from the bedrock that had held it in place. The
next expansion came harder, not enough to throw me from
the rig, but enough that the guide track shuddered against
this mount as the cavern floor shifted beneath the mass
at its center. The logger above registered the displacement almost immediately.
This time, the amplitude climbing past anything recorded during the
descent I brought the thermal camera back up toward the boar.
The intake was still drawing, but the pressure above hadn't dropped.
Whatever the system was venting off through the shaft was
in keeping pace with what was being forced upward from below.
Along the cavern perimeter, Several of the intake dugs sat dark.
The feed lines inactive with the conduit had gone dead
years before. The remaining housing strained against the load, composite
seals flexing outward as the gradient failed to hold. I
thought about the log book in the station above, maintain
negative pressure gradient at all times. Increased intake reduces upward displacement.
The next expansion began before the last that settled. The
rock around the embodied ridges shifted again, fractured seams widening
along the scoring paths that ran out from the mass
and into the cavern wall. If the intake dropped any further,
if the system couldn't draw fast enough to hold the
load below the shaft, then the rupture wouldn't stay down here.
The titan of a creature would force its way up
through the primary works, through the surface plug and be free.
I hauled myself back up the boar, the service rig
juttering against the guide track as the pressure climbed again
beneath me. The intake controls at the station were exactly
where I had left them, and the channel still blinking
along the lower dugged feed. I grabbed the manual override
and forced it forward. It resisted, held in place by
the load now pushing up through the shaft. The adjustment
rail creaked as I leaned into it, the locking teeth
slipping one notch before catching again. Below me, the next
expansion began. I felt it through the floor, the station
shifting a fraction as the cavern took the strain. Something
the shelving behind me rattled loose as the displacement propagated
upward through the bore. I forced the override again. This
time it moved the intake channel open fully and somewhere
above the fans answered the pitch climbing as the system
drove itself harder against the lower ducks. The barometric readout
dropped in small increments on the seismic lagger. The next
displacement registered late, the amplitude rounding off before settling back
toward baseline. I brought the thermal camera up toward the shaft.
The expansion cycle that followed came shorter than the last,
but it didn't carry the same weight, and when the
contraction began it finished. I felt it immediately. The pressure
shift that had been boning the station walls between cycles
now easing before it could take hold. The floor settled
beneath my boots instead of lifting the barometric readout stepping
down another increment as the system held the increased draw
up in the corridor. The change followed the reinforced passage,
no longer narrowed along its support frames. When the intake
engaged steel bracing that it inflexing inward between cycles, held
its shape, the rock around it settling instead of grinding
against the mounts. By the time I reached the ventilation chamber,
the bulkhead seal that had locked me below had begun
to release the manual over I'd turned under my hand,
stiff but no longer pinned by the gradient. The door
opened a fraction before the intake resumed, the pressure equalizing
across the frame instead of forcing its shut Containment had
taken the load back, and for the first time since
the descent, the upper works weren't carrying heavy pressure anymore.
Even as I moved back through the reinforced corridor, the
ventilation system kept drawing the fans above, maintaining a steady
pull against the lower ducks without slipping back into the
unstable cycling that had sealed the route. Behind me. The
next displacement came late, and when it did, it carried
less force, the pressure shift barely registering in my ears
before the logger updated. By the time I reached the
primary junction, the interval between movement had widened enough that
the dust hanging along the tunnel floor began to settle again.
Between surges. I checked the thermal camera one last time before climbing.
The bloom that rose from the cavern below still spread
across the display, but it no longer climbed a thin
before reaching the shaft lip, fading back into the surrounding
gradient as the system bled off the load. Whatever was
moving down there hadn't stopped. It was still expanding and contracting,
still forcing displacement through the rock with each cycle, but
the shaft wasn't taking it anymore. The ventilation was, and
as long as the drawer held, the chamber below would
keep it down there. For now, the return climb was quieter.
My radio crackled back to life half way up the
primary shaft, static first, then the surface lead cutting through it.
You still with us? We lost you after the pressure spike.
I'm here, I said. My voice sounded thinner than expected
inside the helmet roots compromised below the ventilation chamber, structural
integrities not holding on the load. There was a pause
on the line. You need us to send anyone down.
I looked back once, without answering. Something was found beneath
that collapse zone. Someone not the council nor the company
that had owned the site, had come down afterward and
dueled through bedrock to reach it. Installed a pressure gradient,
built a ventilation system that didn't circulate air so much
as remove it. Not to keep the tunnels habitable, but
to bleed off the displacement every time it pushed upward
every ninety seconds. I thought back to the reports we
had in the briefing, the reason for closure. It's safe
to assume it was all vake, something presented for the
mind to close operations and the mysterious benefactor to begin
operations of containment. I thought about the inspection dates on
the bulkhead, the intake tolerances scrawled in the margins of
log books, the fact that the system had been allowed
to fall partially offline until the drawer dropped low enough
that whatever was down there had started forcing its way
up again. No, I said, this site's not safe to survey. Further,
recommend full reseal on the primary shaft and intake stack.
Puld the line and leave the grid connected intact. Another pause.
You're saying keep it powered. I'm saying cut anything that
lets air in from the surface. I replied, but don't
touch the supply feet of the lower system. Whatever's running
down there is the only thing stopping the mind from
total collapse. Not the truth, but not entirely a lie.
There was a moment of silence on the channel as
that settled. Understood, the lead said, eventually, we'll mark it
as a structural risk. I didn't answer. By the time
I reached the surface, the intake world was already being
prepped for reinforcement, a concrete plug around the show shaft
ready to be recast. The fans below never changed pitch,
and every minute and a half or so, if you
stood close enough to the cap, you could feel the
ground breathe