The Nature of Change

One Point Five Four Kilometers (Terry 06)

My eyes widen.

My jaw drops.

The door opens onto a vast, gaping cavern, a squat cube machined out of the rock. The circles from the great metal maws of the rock-boring machines still tessellate undeveloped sections of the wall. I squint, and I can see one of them behind the scaffolding along the left wall. Three workers dangle by cables in front of the scaffolding, one gesturing with their arms to indicate something, and my eye tracks the cable up.

And up.

And up.

A draft from the circulating air in the emptiness of the cavern washes over my face, and it hits home how massive this place is.

The two tunnel entrances on the far wall are bigger than this one. WAY bigger. They're just so far away that the perspective squeezes them into mere motes against the lunar immensity of the great rock facade they're set into. One of them curves smoothly away to the left, while the other is... sharper, making a hard right-angle turn and sporting much more brutally direct lighting.

I fix on one person gesturing to a nearby semi truck - a semi truck! - and watch her carefully. As the truck stops and begins to reverse, she deftly flicks a couple of earmuffs over her ears. Lights begin to flash on the top of the truck... and I don't hear anything. No, hold on, there's just the barest hint of beeping, dancing in and out of audibility at the edge of earshot.

"Wow," I gasp breathlessly.

Anita delivers a gentle yet purposeful slap to my back. "Don't just stand there," she suggests, tone trying to be playful but with an edge of her true somber feelings creeping in. I oblige, and notice an older man walking in with a placard up. Last Names J-L. A few others follow behind him, less enthusiastic about their own duties, but they slowly begin to fan out across the immense breadth of the cavern floor.

Keeping the older man in my peripheral vision, I take a moment to really process the layout here.

The cavern itself is split into four main levels, three of which are suspended from the ceiling by cables and braces against the walls. The upper levels are split by the fissure of the lighting array, which sits in its utilitarian, rectangular way in the ceiling running perpendicular to the door I just entered by. Well, not quite rectilinear - the sides of the lighting arrays are canted slightly to either side. It's as if the blunted blade of some ancient giant broke through the ceiling millenia ago and stuck there.

The sides of the cavern are canted, too, although the other way, giving it a squat trapezoidal profile; I'm suddenly reminded of the Independence-class "littoral combat ships", whose unique trimaran hulls had much the same silhouette in a frontal view. Snippets of life aboard my first command - the USS Coronado, one such vessel - flash through my mind, but I dismiss them and continue taking in the cavern.

Catwalks are suspended along the right wall in a sort of inverted staircase, whereas the left wall only has one such catwalk completed. Two more are half-finished, terminating at the scaffolding. Ladders reach up from the catwalks and down from the ceiling floors to an offset meeting in the middle, with elevators at the ends for those unable or unwilling to climb. These elevators are mirrored by huge boxy cargo elevators which drop all the way down to the ground floor.

Along the ground floor, the sides are packed with about three stories of assorted industrial-looking facilities - receiving doors for cargo influx into whatever processing infrastructure lies within the buildings.

It occurs to me how horizontal this place is - and then I begin to ponder how much more horizontal buildings were back on the surface. Down here, we have to go vertical to fit within the limited floorplan of the rock, but conversely - because we have to dig everything out of the rock either way - we can go vertical, by far more than we could on the surface.

"And this is just an industrial cavern! Wait until you see the mining sites and the housing blocks!" the old man says, finally within earshot - it's as if he read the collective minds of everyone, because as I turn my head to focus on him I notice almost everyone else in the vicinity do the same.

I cast a furtive glance out for Anita, spotting her by a spry Asian lady holding up a card for V through X. Vauxhall is quite certainly under V through X, I think on a whim, and I chuckle. Anita raises two fingers and flicks a salute; I reciprocate, and with that I'm alone with these strangers.

No, not strangers; comrades.

"Alright listen up everyone! I'm Bill Souther, but you can call me Bill. I'll be assigning your jobs here!" His deep gravelly voice's intonations are hard to place, but quite distinctive - not quite a proper accent, just the way he stretches and squeezes words. "So I'll call your name and get you your ID card, and you'll follow the line on the ground that matches the color of your card.

I glance down - lo and behold, several lines of colored tape emanate from here to other placard-wielding officials.

He cycles through the names, and I catch a few but let most slip by. "Alex Jefferson!" "Tanner Jeston!" "Clarissa Kai!" "Xavier Kirkland!" "Richie Larsen!"

"Terr... Terry Alfred Lawrence!"

My attention snaps back towards Bill. I step forward to within arm's reach.

"No need to thank me," he whispers. I cock my head a little as he whips a blue card out of a rubber-banded packet of the things. He holds it up, eyes flicking between the card and me. Satisfied, his hand jerks outward suddenly. "Here ye' go, kid. Do good."

I nod in acknowledgement. "You too," I say. We trade smiles, mine thin and strained, his bubbling and jovial despite the hard times. Something about it hints at a great guffawing laugh concealed within his rotund, aging belly.

We part as I follow the line, and down the path of fate I tread.