After seemingly endless seconds, Marcus snapped out of his daze and actually started to walk around the place. The voice had to come from somewhere, he told himself. And those rocks did not move by themselves either. There was a secret to this place, something he didn’t quite understand yet, but intended to figure out. And did the voice not save him from getting torn apart by the prowling wolves? Surely it could well be just a ruse to lure him into yet another death trap, to be consumed by yet another creature this wretched world had given birth to. But somehow Marcus didn’t feel all afraid. On the contrary, something about this place filled him with a sense of peace he had never known in all his years.

After walking along the towering stone walls enclosing the meadow, he turned towards the center, where a small hill of green grass drew his attention. Upon getting closer, he spotted a small hole in the ground, not much larger than his hand. A faint glow emerged from this hole, just barely visible in the bright sunlight, but nevertheless there.
Marcus squat down in front of the hole and asked, “Hello? Are you the voice I heard?”
But he got no response, just the faintly pulsing blue light in the depth. Marcuse contemplated reaching out for whatever it was, but then again, he would much rather keep his hand attached to his arm. He walked over to one of the sparse trees that had taken root on this meadow, picked up a particularly long stick lying below it and returned to the hole. After pushing the stick into the hole, the light disappeared momentarily. Just for a moment, Marcus thought that he had offended or hurt whatever was within the hole, but then the ground started quaking violently and the hill itself disappeared into a gaping hole in the ground, which was framed with metallic walls. Artificial lights flickered to life, illuminating a ladder leading down into the deepest blackness. Having been born in a bunker himself, Marcus had a very good idea what he was looking at, but then again, something was vastly different from the bunker at home. For one, it was untypical for a bunker to have a glowing button on the outside to open the door. After all, the bunker’s very purpose was to keep whatever was inside safe and sound by keeping all the bad stuff out.

Marcus looked around once more, pondering whether he should really descend that ladder that seemed to go down infinitely. Of course ‘not doing it’ meant having to go back empty handed and he was not all too keen about being punished for running off. He certainly imagined the entry to the garden of Eden quite a bit differently, but he figured that the books he had read took a few liberties in their descriptions.

Marcus swallowed his fear, put the rifle over his shoulder and began his descent down the old ladder. More often than not, he almost fell because his foot only found air where there should have been a rung or, which was even worse, rungs falling off when he shifted his weight on them. He kept climbing down and soon lost all track of time. The daylight from above had long since disappeared and the dim light bulbs on the walls were his only source for light or orientation.

Eventually, he arrived on a solid metallic surface burrowed beneath the remnants of the hill that had falling into the hole when it had opened. A thick cable, easily the size of his arm and multiple hundreds of meters long rested on the metallic case, attached to its top on one side and torn on the other side. It took Marcus a moment to realize what he was standing on, but he had seen it before, albeit never in working condition. He was standing on the elevator that supposedly once had connected the surface with the depths. He figured that the upper end must have collapsed, making the cabin crash to ground level within seconds. Considering the state of the meadow above, it must have been ages since that happened. Quite possibly this bunker was left from the ‘before times’. That the door was still operational after all this time was a miracle by itself. Nevertheless something bothered him. Someone had saved him and moved those stones. Someone was down here. But who could have survived in this depth for such a long time? And how?

Marcus shook his head and decided that he would find out soon enough, one way or another. He then proceeded to remove some of the dirt and eventually uncovered a hatch leading down into the cabin or much rather what remained of it. He pushed the heavy cable aside and forced the match open by pulling on it with all his might. Eventually the hatch gave way and Marcus fell on his butt, the handle in his hand and the rest of the hatch falling down into the cabin, the sound breaking at the walls a thousand times, causing his ears to ring.

After the continuous echoes had finally subsided and nothing had come out to eat him, Marcus slowly calmed his heavily beating heart and peered into the dark cabin. He pulled a flashlight from his backpack and shone it into the empty room, expecting to see corpses, but there was nothing there but dust and some cobwebs.

Marcus fixed the flashlight to the front of the rifle with a small piece of hemp robe and climbed down into the demolished cabin. He swerved around his rifle, making the light of the flashlight dance across the deformed walls but eventually he stopped at the gaping hole, where once the doors of the elevator had been supposed to be. He stepped out into the grand hall which had a distinctively different feel than the chasm he had just come from. Aside from the doors which laid scattered in front of him like limbs torn from a body and then forgotten, it seemed like he was in an entirely different compound now. Both the walls as well as the ground were made of a strange material which seemed to be solid rock, but was somehow still different. A number of portable lamps littered the pathway, but their lights had long since burnt out. Marcus proceeded down the hallway, coming past a number of derelict desks and whiteboards. A number of metallic cubes with black frames stood on those desks, but Marcus could neither make heads nor tails of any of it, however something was apparent. People were not ‘living’ in this strange bunker. This was a place where people worked on something. As Marcus kept wandering, it became ever more apparent, that this place had been a research facility of some sort. There was a large mass, some sleeping quarters and, of course, a number of laboratories, which obviously had not been used by anyone in a long time.

Eventually, Marcus came across what he recognized as a checkpoint, much like the one used near the entrance to the bunker he came from. Fortunately however the doors had long since fallen out of repair and it was easy for Marcus to kick down the once sturdy and powerful door that was supposed to keep unauthorized wanderers like himself out.

Beyond the door, he found himself in a yet once again distinctively different room. He stood in front of a large wall seemingly consisting of constantly changing lines. Light ran along that wall at a haphazard speed and each time it did, the patterns seemed to change.

As Marcus stepped into the middle of the room, the room itself suddenly disappeared, causing Marcus to try to yank up his rifle and shoot at whatever, but the rifle itself was gone too.
Now the voice from before said from behind him, “Welcome. I’m so glad you made it. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but when I opened the entrance, I must have burnt a line on accident.”
Marcus hurled around, trying to pinpoint where the voice was coming from, but there was nothing where he was now. Just a vast, foggy emptiness, filled with a strange blueish light.

“Who...where...what are you?!” Marcus finally managed to ask.

The voice, apparently only now realizing that he was freaking Marcus out, said, “Oh dear, where are my manners. My apologies, just let me get myself cleaned up.”
Before the astonished eyes of Marcus, the foggy emptiness morphed into the room he had stood in before, only this time a Caucasian male stood before him, wearing clothes of which the likes Marcus had never seen before. He was rather tall and a tad on the fat side and smiled like an idiot.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he suddenly said, while Marcus was still trying to figure out where his rifle had gone.
“I am the ghost in the machine. But please, call me Ede.”