Please, give it a read! Part II will be up soon with even more monsters, scares, and a terrifying conclusion!
Content warnings: Suicide, Self-Harm, Semi-Gruesome Death (not gore, not descriptive), Religious Imagery, Supernatural Events
“Why don’t we have a mom?”
“Where is everyone?”
“How come everyone is so happy all the time?”
My daughter is old enough to start asking difficult questions. I realize that she has no clue what happened, and soon enough, no one will remember the rapture. No one talks about it, probably because no one even knows exactly what happened. I’m sure it’s against the law to publish any details, in one way or another. We walk in the shoes of Pontius Pilate - we’ve washed our hands from the blood and sacrifice of men whose suffering we sold to purchase peace. At this rate, we’ll all forget about Wanderlust, the creatures in the shadows, the mangled corpses I found at the bottom of the pit, and the voices from beyond the veil of darkness. I figure I should write about it if no one else will.
The Wanderlust project was the first and most important display of humanity’s dominance over the horrors of the universe. Its leaders and its devotees were neither cold nor unfeeling when they bent the forces of nature to their will. They went as far as manipulating supernatural phenomena which, by all accounts, do not exist. They genuinely cared; both about the suffering of mankind and about the blood on their hands. They wholeheartedly considered kindness as they calculated the sacrifices necessary for salvation. Rather than building a tower up, they dug straight down. They brought heaven to Earth by convincing the devil himself to surrender. Such passionate, impeccable litigation against the cruel indifference of the universe was absolutely necessary when they decided that they would not, under any circumstances, wait upon God for salvation. They committed no grave sin, no genocide… then what’s so horrible that I need to write, and that we must remember? Why write anything about them… Wanderlust… us… at all?
We run the risk of forgetting everything (and everyone) we lost in recreating paradise. I think that’s a grave enough sin to discount paradise altogether. The perverse fact remains that Wanderlust delivered on their promised deliverance, cleansed man through fire, and washed away our iniquity; they slipped the surly bonds of despair and sculpted a face for God. Now, he was carved in the likeness of man. I still wonder, though, who first picked up the chisel, and when it all might have begun…
I write this in the year 2096, aged 67. Old, but not so old these days. With the modern state of things, some people even get younger with age… isn’t that stupid? I was 28, wrapping up my PhD in civil engineering, when I first heard anything about Wanderlust. My roommate, my closest friend, Marcus, asked me about it when I came home. He was one year behind me, studying geopolitics, so he was naturally the first person to hear about something like this:
“Dude, did you hear? They finally did it.” He carried a mocking tone in his voice. “They did it!”
“Who? Did what?”
“The UN.”
“Did what?”
“They solved everything!”
“What do you mean they solved everything?”
“You didn’t hear about their new division? The Wanderlust project?”
“No, what did they solve?”
“Everything, man!” I was growing impatient to get any real details out of him. It had been a long day. You can probably imagine that I was starting to see red as I asked him,
“What the fuck are you talking about, Marcus?”
“So you know how a bunch of world leaders went off the radar lately?”
“No… did they do that?”
“Yeah, I’m telling you they did.”
“So what?”
“So, they were apparently finalizing this secret plan for Wanderlust. It’s their new organization. It’s supposed to solve everything.”
I was never knowledgeable in geopolitics, but I knew the UN’s track record, so I asked him, “What did they do, write a strongly-worded letter to world hunger?”
“I know, right?” Marcus immediately agreed with my mockery of the UN, which made me feel confident in my interpretation of the situation. Then, he started reading a statement they had released: “The United Nations of Earth have made it our immediate and ultimate goal to eliminate human suffering, bring about peace, unity, and happiness. The foundation of the Wanderlust program is the first step toward this goal - a step which every nation on Earth, without exception, has taken unanimously today.”
“Every nation on Earth…” I mumbled.
“That’s what it says,” Marcus went right back to mocking me, “listen much?”
“Even North Korea?”
“Every nation.”
“Right, but-”
He cut me off, “I don’t know man, maybe they're just lying but that’s what it says.”
“This has to be a good thing, right?”
“What, peace and happiness on Earth? Good? You really think so?”
“As long as they kill you first, it might be possible,” I stabbed back, “or else I might never find peace or happiness.”
“Just keep an eye out,” Marcus added, “you never know if something might happen.”
“Isn’t it a bit suspicious?” I threw in, with a conspiratorial tone.
“Wanderlust?”
“Yeah. Well, the fact that every country is involved. What could everyone possibly agree on?”
“I don’t know man. Did you like, hear anything I said? Just keep an eye on the news if you don’t trust me.” Marcus started to leave toward his room.
“I guess. Thanks.” There was a slight pause. “So what’s the deal with that alt baddie you were telling me about-”
I’ll end that conversation there, but it helps to know who we were, in detail, to get a sense of why we joined Wanderlust, and why some of us were ready to sell our souls. Oh, and how we managed to sit idly by when people began to die.
Marcus and I were both the type of people to pursue virtue. The type that wanted to be a ‘good person’. We wanted to ‘do good’ and to ‘be good’. Despite our natural skepticism, the stated mission of Wanderlust was right up our alley.
Marcus, being heavily interested in philosophy of all kinds, arrived at the idea that he should ‘be good’ through contemplation alone. He determined it was best to be a vegetarian for the sake of the Earth, and to limit animal suffering as a bonus. He couldn’t maintain this diet; he was only human, after all. But, his intention was real and he certainly acted virtuously most of the time. In fact, he regularly looked for opportunities to do the right thing, often to his embarrassment. He was the type to go “...ma’am is this man bothering you…” to a random pair of strangers simply because he reasoned that “I have nothing to lose if he’s not bothering her, and everything to lose (including my virtue) if he is.”
So, he said, “Ma’am, is this man bothering you?”
“Excuse me? We’re both women.”
Yikes.
Afterwards, he would always complain about how awkward he was, how he wanted to self-immolate to deal with the embarrassment, etc. etc. That was Marcus: virtue, shame, and an odd supply of confidence in spite of it all.
I was more cynical and less knowledgeable than Marcus in general. I arrived at the idea that I should ‘be good’ by messing up pretty bad early in life. I’m ashamed to say that I hurt the people I cared about. I have blood on my teeth. I tell myself that no ‘good’ person has ever had an especially ‘good’ life, and that losing things teaches you what matters. I was a proud nihilist up until I finished college. I would tell you that “anything spiritual is a joke, science is truth, faith is folly, God is dead, etc. etc.” and I would derive pleasure from imposing this view on others. It was a really depressing way to live life; I took it out on everyone, really. Then, I lost a childhood friend, Destin, to depression (which, in all likelihood, I had introduced him to). One day, I got a phone call from Destin’s mother. The details aren’t important, but that phone call changed everything for me. Something about the optimism in her voice, despite the loss of her son, convinced me that I couldn’t keep being miserable. I had to change my behavior for Destin. After that, I really started to see the beauty in the world, and I might have even become an artist. Unfortunately, I was already an engineer because of my addiction to scientific thinking mixed with the arrogant idea that “unlike an artist, I was putting knowledge to use by helping people”. So, I kept going as an engineer, and it turns out I was quite good. All of this is to say: I considered myself in a good deal of karmic debt. I had sins to atone for. What other option was there than to be good? I was different from Marcus in that way - if I chose to do something, my will was unshakeable. It was hardened by suffering. I never needed to prove anything to myself because my determination to make up for my mistakes was absolute.
Both Marcus and I were very good at what we did. We were among the first in line to take advantage of the fresh opportunities that Wanderlust began to provide in the coming years. Our skepticism toward the organization dissolved quickly. We watched as, by 2057, they made an impressive dent in world hunger by redistributing resources obtained through good-willed donations from countries all around the world. People were actually coming together and making a difference.
By 2059 came their lubrication of international diplomacy. Within 5 years, they had settled various military conflicts and crises. Much to Marcus’ surprise, they started by laying out a plan to stabilize the middle-east, a plan which (he told me) would have looked asinine just a decade prior. It went off without a hitch. It wasn’t until 2061 when the suicides started.
Around that time, Wanderlust began to make a serious investment in humanity’s future. They opened institutes for research. The funding that came through these channels pulled both Marcus and myself toward positions in Wanderlust. Thanks to our differing professions, I was predisposed to become a cog in the machine while he was well-suited to become a leader. This difference would ultimately be the reason he would make far graver sacrifices in service of their mission.
I first heard that Wanderlust was looking for engineers a few years after finishing my PhD. A researcher I had worked with, Patricia, who earned her PhD in Switzerland, reached out to me about it. She lived near one of the new Wanderlust headquarters, so she figured she would put in an application. She messaged me:
“... there’s actually really interesting research going on here. Especially in energy, robotics, infrastructure…” and assured me that “none of the engineering seems to get bastardized into weapons or anything military-industrial like that,” since she knew this was a hangup for a supposedly ‘good’ person like me. I won’t go into detail about Patricia or how great of a person she was so that you don’t get completely crushed by the weight of the many truly fascinating people that we lost in the next decade.
Soon enough, Marcus joined Wanderlust in the political leadership thinktank something-or-other department. I eventually followed him when a lot of the private civil engineering industry dried up without the competition that existed before Wanderlust. Marcus and I shared a hotel room at the Wanderlust Global Conference in Sweden, but I was more excited to spend time with Patricia. Patty. My wife. Well, not yet, at the time. I guess I do have to tell you more about her…
Patty must have been the smartest person I had ever met. She was an aerospace engineer, and I met her while I was still in academia researching the design of hypothetical spaceports modeled after the development of airport infrastructure. That’s all boring stuff, but the point is I met a lot of rocket-scientists in that line of work, including Patty. She was visiting the U.S. to finish up her PhD research with us. She always had a fascination for the universe and everything in it, hence her passion for astronautical engineering. The thing about her that really made her stick in my mind was her equivalent devotion to art. Somehow, everything was art to her; on a summer day she would lay a large paper under a tree and trace the shadows that the leaves were casting every thirty minutes. “The Egyptians thought shadows were beautiful,” she would explain, “so they traced them. Once you do that, you’re only a few steps away from proving that seasons are caused by the Sun, that the Earth is a sphere, and pretty much anything else you’d ever want to know!”
With such an open mind, it’s hard to believe that she would ever get tired of life, much less that her will to live would give out sooner than mine. She even made room for the sort of spiritual stuff a scientist would usually scoff at. Unlike myself and Marcus, she wasn’t really worried about being ‘good’. In her eyes, the universe was good. And humanity? Well, that was just a stain on the universe’s good record, if it was anything meaningful at all. Behind her love for the universe was this conviction that humans are pollutants, especially to the Earth, and that something needed to be done about it. This made her purpose as a member of Wanderlust clear and meaningful: fix the impact of humanity on this planet with every tool at her disposal. Wanderlust had convinced her that this was exactly what she was doing. We were all doing the exact opposite.
So... Marcus, Patty, and I met up at the conference:
“Marcus, this is Patty!” I started the meeting.
“Who’s Patty?” Marcus said, with a confused look on his face. Patty grew concerned. “Just kidding,” he followed up, “I’ve heard all about you. All bad things. I mean good things.”
Patty was amused by Marcus’ willingness to fumble his first impression and embarrass me at the same time, so she cracked a smile. “It’s all relative,” she said, “and as long as it’s relative to what I’ve heard about you, nothing could make me look bad. I mean good!”
“Very funny guys,” I interjected, “now that we all hate each other, we can cut to the chase and fight to the death.”
“I’d win,” the two said in unison.
I got back on topic, saying, “I met Patty during that internship…”
Marcus cut me off, “Oh this is that Patty? From the internship? On the east coast? With the dirty blonde hair and the amazing smile-”
“Yes, Marcus, that’s the one!” I cut him off. I am not sure if he was accidentally or intentionally humiliating me. Regardless, he remembered all the affection I held for her, which I had apparently related to him in detail.
“That’s me! I’m the one with the amazing smile,” Patty said.
“I smile pretty good too,” Marcus replied. I expected him to give us a grin to demonstrate, but he forwarded the opportunity to me, “... but not as good as this guy.”
I gave a smile instinctively. Patty added, “You’re right, there’s something to that smile.”
“If you guys kill me with kindness,” I told them, embarrassed, “then we might not even need to fight to the death.”
There was an awkward pause, which Patty broke by asking, “So, how long have you been at Wanderlust, Marcus? What is it you do?”
“Oh, I’m in political leadership these days. Geopolitics background. There’s a lot more going on than you’d expect on the management side.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, yeah. What with all the demonstrations.
“The demonstrations?”
“Yeah, they don’t cover them much, do they? Who wouldn’t like Wanderlust? Apparently they’re accusing us of human rights abuses-”
Patty interjected, “-human rights abuses?”
“I don’t think it’s really that serious, I mean, it’s Wanderlust. And then there’s the conspiracy nuts. You definitely heard about the shooting, the manifesto, that whole thing? Turns out there was a whole group of lunatics. And then that U.S. senator, the secretary of state…”
“That one I did hear about,” I said.
“Well we have to worry about that. Goes to show that nasty rumors will spread even if you do everything right.”
“Maybe you’re not doing everything right, then,” Patty added.
“Well if we were, there wouldn’t be any referendums to leave Wanderlust.”
“Who’se trying to leave?” I asked, surprised.
“Well, Vatican City first of all, and you'd think ‘who cares about them’, but then some catholic nations are considering it. Religion, am I right?”
“I haven’t decided if you’re right just yet,” Patty said.
“I don’t think it's too serious. We’ll win ‘em over and have ‘em back in the family by the end of the month,” Marcus proclaimed.
I chimed in, “Well, as long as Wanderlust doesn’t start killing people, I think we’ll be fine!” That statement was funny at the time.
Just then, a voice chimed in over the intercom at the conference center: “Round two of presentations will begin in fifteen minutes.” We all set plans to grab lunch later and I managed to convince Patty to have some one-on-one time too. But, since we all had wildly different presentations and panels to attend, we parted ways.
We had agreed that the three of us would attend the closing keynote presentation where the board of directors was supposed to reveal the spectacular new plans for Wanderlust this year. One by one, they listed off new initiatives. Within the decade, malaria would become a thing of the past. New collaborations would bring in priests and officials from major religions to restructure Wanderlust’s initiatives for increased ‘morality and spiritual integration’, whatever that means. The only problem they didn’t seem to address was the skyrocketing suicide rate that accompanied the world’s rapid development. It was a pressing issue in the news, so I figured they would at least look into why it was happening. But, with Wanderlust in charge of most research these days, and seemingly uninterested in the problem of suicide, the question went un-broached.
And then, there was their amazing plan for the new Wanderlust headquarters: their first mega-scale infrastructure project meant to benefit all of humanity. The principal chair, who was the second elected principal chair of Wanderlust, started by acknowledging the late first principal chair. He was the one who apparently came up with this whole HQ idea. He wasn’t late as in the opposite of early, he was late as in dead. And wouldn’t you know it, he killed himself just a couple years back. There was something eerie in the contrast between the solemn remembrance of the first principal chair and the excitement with which his grand vision was now being appropriated and presented on his behalf.
I leaned over to Marcus and asked, “Do you think we really need that thing at all?
“Yeah, dude, it’s gonna be huge! You know, huge, and great!” Marcus replied half-listening to my enquiries.
“You don’t think this’ll end like the Saudi Arabian Line project? Or any other failed mega project thing?”
“Nah dude,” he leaned toward me instinctively so that he wouldn’t have to speak loudly, adding, “Wanderlust knows what they’re doing, and people have always been good at building giant stuff in Egypt.”
“Egypt?” I thought. “The pyramids,” I realized. “Wait, Egypt?” I asked myself. The speaker hadn’t mentioned where the project was supposed to be built yet. Marcus knew about the HQ ahead of time and didn’t tell me. Marcus was probably involved in the planning, knowing his leadership position or whatever it was he did for work. He knew what was going on and he didn’t tell me.
Three years into construction, the mysterious headquarters stood triumphantly in the middle of the Egyptian desert, only fifteen percent finished. The complex’s design was a sight to behold, and the list of things this facility wouldn’t do was shorter than the list of things it would. This was all probably according to the principal chair’s plan, drafted years earlier before a single engineer had even joined the project to confirm that it was possible. Around the facility stood temporary settlements for the hundreds of thousands of workers brought in by Wanderlust. In the center of the facility there was, what we engineers affectionately called, “the pit”. It was (and I am not exaggerating, I helped build the thing) a hole spanning fifteen kilometers in diameter. I was the chief engineer for a division from the United States responsible for the design and maintenance of mining equipment. It’s funny how I went from bonafide civil engineer to dirt-digging extraordinaire. Between the massive labor force, the robotic mining equipment, and the construction infrastructure set up in and around the pit, we managed to dig down about 1 meter per day.
Coordination and transportation between the top and the bottom of the pit eventually became a nightmare. Within another year, to fix this problem, the “halo” was constructed. This was the real sight to behold: a ring, the same diameter as the pit, was suspended by cables from thin scaffolds that stood miles apart. So far apart, in fact, that you often couldn’t see a single one! The ring appeared to float, in all its glory, filled with office space and facilities to house the entire leadership of Wanderlust and a small city to boot. In the daytime, sunlight streamed across the five stories of glass windows along its circumference, giving it a blinding effulgence. At night, the floodlights were turned on. These lights hung from the bottom surface of the halo and pointed down - down into the pit and down onto the desert surface hundreds of meters below. This blinding, sterile white light was the midnight sun by which workers continued digging when daytime failed them. I think you get why we called it the halo. Marcus worked up there, a short kilometer’s walk from the cable elevator my engineering team would use to descend from the halo down into the pit.
(I’d love to provide a visual; I’ll get one if enough people like the story. I did try using AI to make some but they sucked and I wouldn’t feel right including them in this document even if they were top-notch artistic expressions of the vibe I’m going for!)
The pit would, supposedly, eventually be filled with God knows what: geothermal exchange stations, computing sectors, anything a burgeoning super-economy might need. At least, that was the story we heard, and had to believe, since no single person was ever responsible for more than a large portion of the ginormous structure. No complete plan was ever released, and this slowly bred renewed skepticism about the competency and effectiveness of the Wanderlust Organization. No complete plan was allowed to be put together either, for ‘safety and security reasons’.
The monotony of the work and the rising global (and local) doubts about Wanderlust’s direction forced me to vent my frustrations to Patty. She was my fiance at the time, but I didn’t get to see her quite as often as I wanted to since she worked on the other side of the halo, and she worked a lot.
“I don’t feel as good about the work anymore,” I told her. “I don’t see the vision for the project. I don’t know why we’re digging. I don’t like the people they’re putting in charge. I don’t like the rumors.”
“Did you hear the ones about the satanic cult? The leadership is all tied up in it, they’re digging a pit to unleash the end times,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You’re not helping.”
“What, you think they’re actually uncovering C’thulu or something?”
“Come on, it’s not that. But you have to admit that Wanderlust isn’t as spotless as it used to be. And it really makes you think twice when you see all the employees in the high-up spots off-ing themselves.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said curtly. I was surprised by how quickly she shut the subject down. She looked away from me. I got the sense that this discussion had abruptly become about something she was dealing with, so I pivoted.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I won’t pry.”
“Don’t.”
“Alright, just let me know-”
“It was Cindy.”
“Your boss?”
“My friend.”
“What was Cindy?”
“She stopped showing up. She’s dead.”
“Jesus Christ,” I was shocked, “did she-”
“Yes.”
This did not help dampen my own fears at the time. A project manager on a satellite design project committing suicide… you have to see why this all felt like some sort of strange conspiracy. The details just kept building up.
Patty continued, “She was the only one who really knew what the whole point of those satellites was. But then, I guess there’s a lot of that going around. You’re right. But I don’t get it. I don’t know. She was so motivated. She loved the work. She went in to talk to the higher-ups. You know the type of meeting. On the top floor.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, she said she had a meeting. I guess she let it slip that it was with the board of chairs. Well, she actually seemed pretty proud that they were starting to recognize her.”
“Patty, you mean that stuff is true?”
“Well, if you’re looking for evidence, there’s Cindy. Meeting on the top floor. Never seen alive again. Suicide.”
“So you do think there’s something to all the cult stuff?”
“I don’t know. That’s what they say about the meetings.”
“The meetings,” I mumbled. My mind was too busy to come up with anything else.
“I don’t know. Cindy didn’t know. You should look it up. They’ve got details online.”
In the silence that followed, I got the sense that she had already looked it up, and knew exactly what the rumors were saying.
“Oh, Patty. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Words can’t even express…”
“Yeah,” is all she said.
In the silence that followed, I must have shed a tear. Patty, seeing it, probably decided to jump back into being supportive, despite clearly not sitting in the proper headspace herself. She wiped a tear of her own, then continued:
“Hey, well I think you should at least make the best of it. You should ask the guys, and maybe get some closure on your work.”
She was referring to the rogue band of engineers I used to take lunch breaks with, and occasionally destroy at racquetball. They were ‘the guys’, but it wasn’t all men. They were from all walks of life: satellite engineers, infrastructure engineers, software engineers, you name it. Later that week, we were set to have dinner together, so I made sure to bring something up:
“I don’t really have a clue,” was the prevailing sentiment from everyone at HQ working on the pit. We tried fitting each of our pieces into one picture, but it didn’t come together. Sam’s testimony was the weirdest, since he was a nuclear engineer. Apparently, “a lot of weapons-grade fissile material” was going to play a key role.
Recent changes had been made to a constellation of some-thousand-number of satellites that was meant to be sent up. Andrew designed the attitude and pointing systems, and now that a new instrument was added, the satellites needed to spend a lot of time pointing down (at Earth) instead of up.
According to Angela, the pit was going to enable access to some massive new fuel reserves, leading to a record-breaking energy supply. Knowing Patty, and knowing that she had likely heard about this, added to my understanding of her concern about Wanderlust. Someone as climate-conscious as her and certain that humans are a ‘plague on the Earth’ must be seriously stressed about this new frontier in fossil-fuels. It wasn’t clear what we would even need this fuel for, according to the guys.
That’s when I tossed in my own story about the digging. We had uncovered some ancient runes during excavation of the pit. On the one hand, I was excited to find something so fascinating. On the other hand, I was frustrated that these ancient structures were giving trouble to our diamond drill bits. The guys confirmed my suspicion that this was unlikely to be the case given diamond’s superior hardness. I reported it to the higher-ups and even showed them photos of the jet black runes set into the sandstone pillars we had found. Their only reaction was acute disappointment that we had slowed down our digging for such a trivial archaeological find. “Just blow it up!” they told me, “And make sure to get all of it.” This was supposedly to ensure we never ran into this harder-than-diamond obstacle again, but felt like he had some sort of hatred for those pillars.
Leslie, who was a scientist, had been running unusual astrophysics simulations. Apparently, the recent solar probe had uncovered a lot of new details about the Sun’s inner workings. Apparently, they were looking into why certain chain reactions, which might lead to the Sun’s catastrophic collapse, were not already taking place. She told us, “It feels like they’re asking us how to blow up the Sun. I’m more curious why these chain reactions don’t take place naturally.” She added that this was all wrapped up in a nice narrative about how lucky humans are to have such a stable solar system to call home and how thankful we should be for our place in the universe next to a star which, against all odds, could have imploded long ago.
A bioengineer told his own little story about some disease they were working with. It was this super-bug, resistant to all sorts of antibiotics. Apparently, germs had slowly started to build immunity to all of our treatments, and Wanderlust wanted to get ahead of them. You know, to prevent pandemics. So, they turned up the bacteria’s reproductive rate and forced some severe evolution to create these super-bugs and then pre-emptively find cures against them. Not a bad story, but you can imagine how unpleasant it was to hear that a lab (in the building where you work) has an incurable, super-reproducing ultra-disease just lying around.
In short, we didn’t get any clarity about any of our work. Plus, our conspiratorial minds started to eat away at our sanity. We ended the night on a bad note, but I was determined to get some answers for the subset of us who worked on the development of HQ, the halo, and the pit. Maybe I could find some details about the bigger picture and build some confidence in the fact that Wanderlust leadership was taking all of its work seriously, with an eye toward safety.
“I have a friend,” I told the group. “Marcus, he’s an old friend. He works at the top of the food chain, or close enough. I’ll ask him what he knows.” In my mind, I was wondering how I could approach Marcus without sounding like a conspiratorial lunatic. I wanted to avoid simply rattling off end-of-world scenarios only tangentially related to Wanderlust projects.
The collective nodded, and, satisfied by the prospect of impending answers, broke up into smaller clusters to start more personal discussions about this and that, the husband, the kids, and the work.
I knocked on Marcus’ office door, and he answered:
“Come in.”
The door slid open. Marcus was not behind his desk, but was sitting on it. He was clearly just thinking, and not working, when I stopped by. His hands were clasped together, and he was rubbing his thumbs against each other.
“Sorry, man, I don’t mean to interrupt,” I sheepishly muttered.
I thought something was strange about the room. Something definitely was. His desk was cleared of any papers. His bookshelves were unusually empty. Most of his personal effects were nowhere to be seen.
“No, it’s not a problem. What’s up?”
“Woah, are you moving out?” I asked him, without much further thought.
He paused for a moment, carefully considering what to say. “I, uh, yeah. There’s a lot of new stuff coming and there’s gonna be some changes.”
“You’re not getting fired, are you?”
“No, not fired. They know I’d do anything for Wanderlust.”
“You would?”
“Once you really get to know what Wanderlust is about, like I have, you go all-in.”
“That’s actually what I was hoping to ask you about.”
“What?”
“About what Wanderlust is about. I’m actually really confused about all this.”
“Do you like your life?”
This question caught me off guard. “I guess. Maybe not my work. What are you talking about?”
“You should like your life. You should really love your life. You do great things, you’re a great guy. Patty’s amazing. You have it all.”
“I don’t ‘have’ Patty. If anything, she has me.”
“You know what I meant. You have a good thing here at Wanderlust.”
“But what is Wanderlust even doing anymore?”
“We’re doing more than you can imagine. And you’re important.”
“Important in what way?”
“You just are. And you have to keep going.”
“Are you just saying that because you’re in charge and you need someone to keep digging?”
“I’m saying that because you’re my friend. You have to keep going, no matter what. And only do things you’re proud of. Don’t be ashamed. Be proud. You’re a good man.”
“I don’t understand, Marcus.”
“You will.”
“Marcus-”
“Listen, I have to prepare for some important stuff. Do you mind?”
We went back and forth for a little while longer, but Marcus was as cryptic as he could possibly be. Our chat only made things worse in my mind. My oldest friend wasn’t willing to tell me anything that could make me feel better. He only repeated that “you’ll understand once things change,” and “Wanderlust is bigger than any of us,” and "persevere under uncertainty,” etc. etc.
Since Marcus wasn’t helping me get to the bottom of anything, I would go and have a chat with the bottom of my wonderful pit. As a lead civil engineer, I could proudly state that I was indirectly responsible for maybe 1-2% of the digging that comprised the pit. Now that the digging was done and a foundation had been installed, I finally decided to visit the bottom. I went at night, since it was night. Duh. I was looking for some peace and quiet anyways, after all the debating and interrogation. The halo floodlights were mostly turned off, since construction wasn’t ongoing, save for an occasional spotlight casting a bright circle onto the cement floor of the pit every couple-hundred meters. I got a chance to see the sparse grid of illuminated spots as I descended in the cable elevator, its motor whirring and the cabin swaying in the gusty wind.
I was suddenly aware of the complete darkness of the pit, save for those few spotlights; hell, even with them, it was mostly blackness. I thought of the kilometers of empty space beneath me. I had never been afraid of this elevator, but I contemplated how terrifying it might be if a serious gust of wind hit. The cabin, suspended by cables, could sway hundreds of meters before slamming into the nearest edge of the pit without me even knowing, since the walls of the pit were as pitch black as anything else. The wind calmed down as I descended into the pit. “Oh yeah,” I reminded myself, “no wind in the pit! That’s the great thing about pits.” I was distracting myself from the more pressing fear emerging in my mind. I could get lost down here, at least until morning. How could I tell left from right, or one spotlight from another? I couldn’t get my bearings using the stars because, looking up, I could only see the bright specks from under the halo. “There goes that idea, Mr. Genius Engineer.” I would have to stay close enough to the elevator cabin to see its green overhead indicator light. As I neared the bottom of the pit in complete silence, I got uncomfortable. “Hello darkness, my old friend!” I shouted out, nervously, to kill the silence. Sure enough, my message came back a few seconds later.
‘Hello!’ the darkness shouted back at me.
I stepped off the elevator onto solid ground. It was truly a dark, desolate pit. The air was cool and moist. When I was under a spotlight, I could see my breath fogging up. Between spotlights, I could hardly see anything. There I stood, admiring the quiet and the darkness, not knowing if I was looking toward the edge or the center of the pit, when a whisper from over my shoulder split my heart in two:
‘Hello,’ it rasped.
I snapped my neck over my shoulder in horror. When I saw nothing, and no one, I slowly realized that this was my shout from earlier, finally echoing back from the far side of the pit. A quick calculation confirmed this suspicion: almost 15km, that's 15,000 meters, there and back, speed of sound, that's about one minute and thirty seconds, give or take. I breathed a sigh of relief. I really was alone down there. Until then, I hadn’t considered that I might not be alone!
“Good one, you big o’l pit!” I yelled.
This time, I waited for an echo, but was shocked again when I heard a blood-curdling scream. It seemed to come from every direction. The scream was almost human, that of a grown man. Then, with the sound of a loud crash, it stopped. My heart was pounding in my chest. “I need to get the fuck out of here!” was my only thought. I didn’t look for a rational explanation this time. My head swiveled to find the green light on the elevator cabin, but as I spun around, the lights shut off. Not the cabin light. Every light. The halo was shut off! I went into a panic. “My phone!” I realized that my phone was in my pocket, and I frantically fished for it. I pulled it out, but before I turned on the light, I heard more loud crashes from every direction. Occasional screams, loud bangs, and the sounds of bones snapping filled my periphery. I didn’t count the crashes then, but I would soon come to know exactly how many there were. I turned on my flashlight and began to sprint through the darkness which seemed to truly have no bounds.
I shined the light in front of me as I ran in whatever direction constituted my best guess toward the elevator cabin. Even with this light, though, I couldn’t see anything but cement and darkness ahead of me. So, like an idiot, I started looking side to side as I ran, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything at all. With my attention pulled away from the open space in front of me, I failed to notice what I had tripped over, or that I had even tripped, until my face met the cold, hard cement. Dazed, and twice as terrified as before, I jumped up and dashed for my phone. Then, with a tremble in my hands, I pointed it back to where I guessed I had tripped. To my horror, it was a body. I can barely describe what it looked like. It certainly didn’t look like anyone in particular. I only remember that it wore a Wanderlust office uniform, and it was not in one piece. My mind was racing and before I knew why, I reached for the exposed nametag that lay beside it. Before I even touched it, I read it: ‘Marcus K’. My hand stopped short of the nametag and recoiled to my mouth as I keeled over to vomit, but the release of vomit never came. Instead, my intestines curled up into a knot. I stood up, shocked, and turned away from the gruesome scene. Hyperventilating, I started back out into the darkness, only able to mumble “fuck fuck fuck fuck…” as I stumbled along.
I had thirty minutes to think about everything I had seen and wander in circles through the darkness before I finally stumbled upon the elevator cabin. The green light was still on. It was strange, but I didn’t think much of it given the circumstances. I threw the brake lever and pushed the button to ascend. The warning alarm blared like a war horn, giving me another good scare, and I looked out into the darkness as the elevator began to ascend. After ten minutes, give or take, I was back at the halo facility, limping through its halls. The rest is a blur. The facility was dark and quiet. I found someone, I told them what I saw, and I spent the night in one of the facility’s hospital clinics. The facility had not lost power; only the halo’s lights themselves had been turned off. Looking back now, I know that this must have been on purpose. It was done to hide the events of that night and to let the whole world see the gruesome scene at the bottom of the pit in the morning.
