Down felt good to me. It felt natural. It comforted me.
Down was where I craved to be. Heights were never
comfortable, so it seemed logical that I suddenly
found complete ease when I descended below the city.
Few have access to the lower areas under the structure
of Mr. God’s world. These places were secretive and their
openings few and tucked away cleverly inside other structures.
It hadn’t taken me long to exercise my new freedoms
and informations. The city was where I walked every spare
moment. I saw it all, it seemed. Sure, the dwellings were all
the same, so I didn’t actually go everywhere. The function and
scope of the Earth was of complete interest, though.
No one ever knew how it all worked. Mr. God did,
but he was the exception. No one ever talked about it. No one
cared about the actual nuts and bolts of the world. I did. The
more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn
everything.
Above ground was extremely mundane. I’d grab
my lighting supplies and research all nooks. No one would
question a lighting repairman. The only place I never went
was God’s spire, as I promised to never be in proximity to him
unless he called.
Along the way I found well-stashed entries to the lower
levels. With enough time I discovered how they were logically
and repetitively placed at intervals inside of rooms inside of
buildings. They weren’t guarded, but entry was electronically
limited to those needing access.
There was initially a strange feeling. Earth crowded
around. There were no windows. Sound seemed different. I
tried not to think about ground above and below crushing in on
me. Claustrophobia took over some people, so they worked
above. Others found trouble being in the open, so they were
chosen to go below. Below was snug. It was also dark.
All light was artificial down here. It made my repair
facade completely acceptable. Stewards never stopped me or
asked questions.
As days went onward, I had discovered the birthing
areas, the clothing manufacturing space, water treatment
facilities with their massive turbines and sewage reclamation
machines, toilet paper recycling, medicine makers, and a
variety of automated areas to provide almost everything we
used in the city. There were several levels the city below.
None were for living, though. Everything below was working
and storage and utility.
On the surface I tried to get beyond that perimeter of
buildings which seamlessly corralled humanity. At the end of
the Earth where sky met ground were those annoyingly bland
and lifeless structures. There were no entries. There was
no way to access the roofs. Walls were slick and featureless
with dark windows high up where lights came on at night and
went off with daylight. Nothing on the slate provided any
information on anything in those buildings or beyond.
Part of my answer came under ground. When I
pushed the perimeter of Mr. God’s domain under the Earth
I discovered passage upward to space beyond the ring of
guarding structures. It was apparent that the buildings were
nothing more than thin walls protecting the sky as it touched
the ground.
Along the sky was a wealth of green muck. Metal
blades several times taller than a man slowly scraped off the
stuff on the sky, fresh sky appearing beneath. All that green
fuzz was shoveled away by other mechanisms and processed
into our food wafers.
A kind of tiny organism flew about in myriad. It was
limited by a mesh ceiling far above and disinfecting in the
airlocked doorways. These tiny things unlike anything else I
had ever seen were somehow living within the green stuff on
the sky. It was all very strange. I never even thought about
the food and how we make it. No one ever talked about it. It
seemed so bizarre. I got used to it.
My most vexing discovery was under the third level.
From the third level at one, specific point in a fairly obscure
hallway leading between water, electric, and sewage areas was
an opening with a cramped stairway going down hundreds
of feet into darkness. It appeared as if the steps went down
forever.
I did go down until the blackness ensconced me and
my mind panicked. My legs ran me back into the light of the
corridor on the third level. Lungs were breathing heavily, my
thoughts gone, and only self preservation controlled me. That
lone, mysterious descent niggled me for weeks.
When I finally made a plan to solve the unknown
destination, I took my lighting supplies and went down with
some hand-held lighting to help me see. Spare bulbs came
to be useful as I exchanged burned out fixtures at the bottom
where a single doorway stopped trespass. Ultimately, the
curiously long stairs led to the only door through which I had
no allowed access.
That door was like the egress to it: black. On the metal
door were several indented lines crisscrossing. Joined into
those lines were very colorful plastic shapes which pivoted and
moved along the recessed lines. It made no sense at first. It
seemed broken.
Whenever I have the chance, I visited the door.
Whenever I had the chance, I thought about the mystery of the
broken shapes cluttering the door’s surface. The conundrum
occupied me beyond anything else in life. As I saw life drain
from people in my lethal purview, image of the door obscured
my consciousness.
The door became more of an obsession than anything
else in life.
One visit to the door had me caught and questioned by
a water worker. Nothing came of it, but the hallway down was
oddly off-limits to normal people. I said I had to repair the
lights, and the interrogation ended.
From then on, I knew I had to avoid that bizarre door.
To carry out obsessions, I used toilet paper and wire cutters to
make reproductions of the shapes on the door. In my apartment
I would endlessly stare at and manipulate the shapes.
And then my answer was delivered through endless
fidgeting with the ersatz paper shapes. They came together to
form a strange graphic shape. I went to discover if the shape
was broken and perhaps correcting it would provide a clue to
what the door was for.
When I went back and slid the pieces into place to
match the symbol, the door unlocked. The clunk of the lock
unlatching was clear, obvious. I proceeded. The door’s symbol
was the handle and lock, so to speak: once you let go of the
symbol, it fell back apart, the door locked again.
What was through the door made clear why that nonelectronic
locking mechanism was employed. Down on the
fourth level of the city existed another city, of sorts, but far less
populated. More curious was the population itself.
I don’t know how many people were there, but it
wasn’t the millions above. There might have been a thousand
or more. Maybe less. They had no specific leader or Mr. God.
They were a mess of people living in filth and muck within
cubicles and sparse communal areas. Everyone had water and
food, same as above, but they lacked almost everything else.
Even the clothes were bizarrely colored and patched. No one
looked alike, while above were very few differences between
all the citizens.
Worse was the frightening image of these creatures.
Human, but bloated, rutted, worn, beaten, and clinging to drugs
for life and enjoyment as well as motivation. Their faces were
ancient. Bodies were sagging. It was like monsters from the
most horrific dreams of a child. Beady eyes peered from within
folds and flab on large heads. Hair: there was hair everywhere
on these beasts. Women and men looked quite alike, aside
from lack of hair on the female faces.
They shambled about. Some strange sedative or
medicine was dispensed to control their behavior. None
of them cared about me, their eyes glossy and wandering
constantly. These people carried unusual and unknown
implements tucked into their individual garb. Speech was
minimal and slurred.
Disguised in the endless wrinkles on their skin were
two scars above the eyes on their scalps.
After a hour of wandering through them, I decided
to leave. On the way to the exit, I witnessed a couple of
these foul beings fighting. What the dispute was about didn’t
seem clear. Others of their sort watched with some joy.
Entertainment came from the event. When it was over, one lay
dead. The other was silently triumphant. No one cared about
murder or wrong down here. This event--the death of one--
brought laughter and smiles for a small time.
They had their own law. Perhaps they were lawless. I
didn’t want to be obvious or get too entrenched. It was a horror
to merely be among them, their eye-watering stench, and the
unsightly dirt and dark of their environs.
As I constructed the symbol on the exit door, some
passing bag of flesh motioned to me with upturned hand and
two fingers spread skyward.
“Peace,” it clearly declared, “Peace!”
I stared at the person, then went through the door and
locked it again.
The curiosity of the second city would stay with me. I
pondered it as I continued murdering throughout the surface
world.
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