Earthscraper

The lift was slick with a damp wetness as the rickety metal cage dropped Ina lower and lower into the Earth. The metal rattled against the mesh screen, the only thing keeping her from falling nearly 600 feet to her death, but she peered into the dimly lit darkness below almost absentmindedly. This was far from her first venture into the Earth’s depths, and she knew with absolute certainty it was far from her last.

Flashes of yellow light flickered past as the lift dropped at a dizzying speed, past fissures of rock and sediment through the densest, toughest part of the Earth’s crust. She could already see the bottom approaching, the ground rising to meet her at an alarming pace. Just before the seemingly inevitable crash came, the lift jerked to a crawl and descended into place on an enclosed metal deck.

The air smelled of dirt and decay, an all too familiar scent that Ina found had a way of settling into her clothes and nestling against her skin. At night, when she went home, she spent hours trying to scrub the smell off, though why she bothered even she couldn’t say. No matter how much she scrubbed, the smell clung to her. It filled every part of her until nothing but dirt and stone were left.

"Ina!"

She sighed as she pushed the door latch open and stepped onto the platform.

"What’s up, Joe?"

Joe was a middle-aged man with a red face and slight paunch who heavily favored his right leg after a rig accident. He was also one of her most trusted site managers. She had been through several in short order, and Joe could take a lot of abuse, particularly about his years of useless education.

"We’re just about to start scanning the leftmost quadrant if you want to survey?"

Ina nodded. Letting Joe take a limping lead, she followed at an amiable pace. Already, construction was going well. The crews had laid the foundation and had begun erecting the metal frame that would one day become the skeleton of an earthscraper.

No one had heard of such a thing fifty years ago. It was a novel concept proposed by the ambitious minds of Alek Voorstead and Halle Black, who would later go on to found Composign Upmining, the very same company by which Ina was employed. As the population continued to grow, space above ground became a limited commodity. Housing all those people was a crisis in the truest sense of the word. But Voorstead and Black proposed a solution. What if, rather than trying to build homes on an already overcrowded planet, they could build them in a place with almost infinite real estate? They were, of course, talking about building underground homes. The idea was slow to catch on, but as the world became increasingly overpopulated and options became fewer with each passing decade, Voorstead and Black’s idea was no longer a crazy fever dream. It was downright practical.

That was when earthscrapers were born. To all intents and purposes, they were nearly identical in form and construction to the skyscrapers one might find above ground. The only noticeable difference was the windows, which were, in fact, not windows at all. Rather, they were video displays of life above ground, capable of capturing environmental images of rainforests, mountains, oceans, and gardens. It wasn’t quite the same as being able to step out your front door and into the wide-open air, but it was far better than the alternative.

Ina trudged through the muck and silt, ignoring the tingle of vibration along her forearm. It left a sensory ghost behind when her implant finally stopped quivering against her skin. It had taken years to get used to the feeling of it, the almost imperceptible tremble along muscle and bone. It was jarring at first but became less noticeable as time went on. Of course, the implants were essential to life above or below ground. Each person’s implant held the collective history of that individual’s life: their health and vitals, earnings and stocks, pensions and investments, employers, medications, and even eating habits and physical activities. Everything was recorded and stored in the implant. But it did so much more than that. It also provided access to bank records, accounts, search engines, and translations. It was the knowledge of the known universe, planted beneath the skin and ready to use from birth.

Joe led them off the designated path and into a corner of uncharted, unexcavated material. Drones and scanners were placed at regular intervals throughout the quadrant, along with several monitors offering views of the contents of the earth several hundred feet below them.

Sitting before the monitors was a man with a shock of dark hair peppered with gray and a somber expression on his face.

"Chuck," Ina nodded a greeting, leaning over the back of his chair to peer at the monitor. "Anything worth mentioning?"

"Hey, boss. I was waiting for you to show up. The scanner picked up some kind of foreign object. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I wanted you to take a look and see if you could figure it out before I disregard it."

"Show me."

Chuck pulled an image onto the screen. Buried nearly 100 feet below them was an almost circular object. It appeared to be made of metal, but Ina couldn’t be certain without taking a closer look. Her brow furrowed as she studied the strange object, trying to discern what it was.

"I’m not sure," she confided after careful scrutiny. "It could be nothing, or it could be something. There’s no way to tell from this scan. Send a probe and drone to retrieve it. Better safe than sorry."

Her words set a flurry of activity into motion. Next to them, Joe opened a large metal chest. Nestled into the neat black satin lining was a sleek, white drone. It was equipped with a drill and scanner, which Joe promptly programmed with coordinates. Ina watched with mild interest as the drone quickly took flight and began scanning the earth. After two quick passes over the entire area, the drone dropped to hover mere inches from the ground, then disengaged its drill and thrust it into the dirt. A small cloud of dust filled the air around it, and the drone was completely obscured for a moment.

As the drone worked, it continued to scan. Ina could see the updated images on the screen before her, and she watched patiently as the drone’s drill sliced through the bedrock and silt and dug deeper and deeper into the earth, angling slowly toward the foreign object. When the drone was far enough ahead and still forging a path, Joe pulled the probe from within the metal chest.

It was nothing more than an insulated wire with a claw attachment, but it would allow them to grab the item and pull it up from the depths so they could get a better look. Joe made his way toward the small, circular hole the drone had cut and dropped the probe inside. He worked the wire, dropping it slowly inch by inch, letting gravity do most of the work. After several minutes, he smiled at them in triumph.

"I got it," he called, pulling the wire back. The muscles in his arms flexed and grew, swelling with effort as he continued to put one hand over the other, drawing the line back foot by foot until, at last, the claw emerged from the hole. Eager to see what it held in its metallic fingers, Ina stepped around the computer console and approached Joe.

It was small, hardly larger than a tennis ball, and a perfectly round sphere. It was a curious little thing, but what she found oddest was that it was made of copper.

"I’ve never seen anything like this before," she breathed, reaching out and plucking it from within the probe’s grip. Brushing the bits of dirt away, she revealed a flawlessly smooth, unblemished exterior. However, as she looked closer, Ina realized that wasn’t entirely true. There was something there, around the center of the sphere.

"What does this say?" she murmured, peering closer.

" Scimus ut cadat mundus, fiatque iterum quod fuit olim."

It wasn’t English, Mandarin, Russian, or any other language she was familiar with. Brow furrowed in thought, she flipped her forearm and placed the sphere just above it. The sphere twitched in her fingertips, and she released it, leaving it to hover over the place where her implant lay in her arm.

"Translate," Ina ordered the implant. The sphere spun round and round where it hovered, and the faint tingle of the implant vibrating beneath her skin traveled along her bones to her elbow. Mere seconds passed before a holographic image appeared above her implant.

"Let the world as we know it fall and become again what it once was…" she whispered thoughtfully. "What the hell does that mean?"

She didn’t have to wonder for long. The moment she spoke the words aloud, the sphere began to shudder and crack. Bright light emanated from between the fractures, and the sphere’s copper exterior broke apart. The pieces fell against her wrist, and Ina struggled to catch them all, but moments later, they began to knit themselves back together into a new shape.

Ina stared at the once-sphere, trying to understand. However, the moment it had taken its new shape, her implant began to vibrate violently.

"Oh, shit," Chuck murmured. "Access your bank accounts. Now."

Ina pulled up the information on the hologram before her and watched as all the cryptocurrency in her account dwindled to zero.

"It’s happening everywhere," Joe breathed, face stricken. "All blockchain currencies are being destroyed."

"How is that even possible?" Chuck asked, his voice shrill.

"Someone’s unleashed a virus," Joe replied, glancing at Ina. "I think I know what the sphere was trying to say."

"Oh God," Ina breathed, hand against her mouth. "What the hell did I just do?"

******

Eldon sat in the dying light of his lantern, trying desperately to warm his hands. They were always cold, even in the summer. It didn’t matter how many impossibly thin sweaters he was given to wear or how many gloves with holes eaten through them he put on, a chill lived inside him, a cold that burrowed down to the bone and settled there so that even on hot nights, he awoke clammy and frozen. That was the reality of living in poverty.

Pushing aside the strip of cloth that served as a door to his sheet metal home, Eldon gazed out at the city beyond. It was a place the others liked to call Patchwork City. It had been named decades ago when traditional currency had fallen to cryptocurrencies like the now antiquated bitcoin and those that once had enough to scrape by were left with nothing at all.

Many, like Eldon, had been forced to sell their homes in a desperate attempt to buy whatever currency they could, but it was never enough. So, they were forced to move together, rely upon each other, and pool assets so they all might find a way to live and work together to navigate this new world.

Places like Patchwork City began cropping up. The city took on the moniker for its appearance; homes were made of any material that could be foraged and salvaged, like sheet metal and plywood. They were basic structures absent of luxuries like heat or cooking stoves. The few that could scrounge and salvage lamps from the nearby junkyard were the only ones with a light source beyond fire, and even then, it wasn’t much.

Eldon’s eyes lingered on the sprawling city. It grew larger by the day. More and more families had moved into the neighborhood, no longer able to afford a life that was never really meant for them. But all that was going to change.

When Eldon planted the sphere, he wasn’t sure it would ever be found. In truth, he had planted dozens of them at varying depths across the area, hoping that one of them would be found. And at long last, one had.

Upturning his forearm, he activated the hologram of his implant. He reveled in the sight of the blockchain currencies falling apart thanks to his virus. At long last, things were going to be set right. The rich would topple, the impoverished would rise, and the middle class would return. That was the dream he held onto when he created the Social Liberation Army, the future he thought of when they made the virus designed to orchestrate the downfall of the current economic system. The government would say they were domestic terrorists trying to destroy their country, but they couldn’t be more wrong. The Social Liberation Army was fighting for the people, the people their country had forgotten about, the people trapped in his city, and every city like it. They were fighting to return life to those who couldn’t take it for themselves. And Eldon was sure they would take it. They would take back the lives they once had and set the stage for a social and economic revolution.

Eldon’s lips curled into a smile as he thought of the city around him burning to the ground, the people within already transformed into a prosperous future, and gave a contented sigh.

Soon, the world would be set right again. They would return to the natural order of things and the way things used to be.

And Eldon couldn’t wait.

THE END

Bio: Murray Eiland is Managing Editor of Antiqvvs Magazine and a science fiction enthusiast. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technology.

E-mail: Murray Eiland

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