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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

     Something touched his hand.

     He wasn’t sure if he’d been asleep just then, but he was sure as heck awake now. He scrambled and thrashed for just a moment, both ecstatic and terrified that his wish for an end to the emptiness had finally been granted. What did I just touch?!?

     He flicked on his light.

     The machinery of the walls had returned again, this time in the form of an enormous skyscraper-sized vertical pillar, way in the distance to his left. The pillar stretched as high up as he could see, and equally far below. Nearer to him, a long, horizontal tank hung suspended from the pillar, braced top and bottom with sturdy trusses. This tank was loosely ringed in some sort of narrow catwalk. Peter had just passed within a meter of this walkway, and his hand had just brushed against the handrail.

     It was about 3 meters above him now, meaning he’d just barely missed it. But during his sleep, his weight had become very, very low (maybe a newton or two) meaning he could send himself drifting back upward with no more than a single stiff tug on the line. It was tight for a moment as he pulled, and then slack as he drifted.

     He gripped a hand around the rail as he passed it, pulled himself toward it, swung over, and planted his feet on the walkway, gripping the handrail to keep from floating away. And that’s how he sat for about a minute, letting his heartrate subside and his mind collect itself. In front of him, the cable he’d been using to descend continued to drop, although since he was no longer descending with it, it just kind of curled on itself lazily in the space in front of him. He contemplated unhooking it from his harness and leaving it around the rail so that he could walk around more freely, but thought better of it. If Louis decides to line up anytime soon, I don’t want to keep him waiting.

     “Louis, come in!” Peter tried his radio again. “Louis, be advised, I have not found the bottom, but I have landed on an artificial walkway of some type, and am currently 99% weightless. I…” He looked around nervously, and remembered that he still had a job to do down here. “I now await ascent and escape as a primary priority, but will commence with the planned search for pirate treasure as a close secondary. Line up when ready. Over.”

     Wow.

     He shined his light all around. There was nothing but darkness above and below and to either side. He couldn’t even see the opposite wall; there may as well not even be an opposite wall anymore. All he could see was the cable, and the catwalk, and the enormous tank it surrounded. If he didn’t know any better, or if he’d hit his head and woken up here, it would have been natural to assume that he was floating in outer space, on a station or a base… Well, aside from the light, of course; outer space had stars and sun and light.

     He started to move, pulling himself hand-over-hand along the walkway. This wasn’t his first time moving in zero-g; he’d been on quite a few spacewalks in the orbits above the colony, sometimes on some errand or repair, or even to earn a merit badge. Of course, he’d never done it deep underground, but the principles were the same: keep at least one hand or foot secured at all times, don’t go too fast, keep your head on a swivel.

     As he rounded the end of the tank, he found himself staring at what looked to all the world like an enormous rocket nozzle. That didn’t make a lot of sense, so he continued on, expecting it to resolve into something more sensible. But no; as the catwalk took a turn behind a radiation wall, he realized that it was, indeed, a spacecraft engine. In fact it was one of many, grouped in array on the back of the tank. He turned back and examined the tank itself in more detail. Now that he was looking, there seemed to be seams and hatches periodically along its length, and what was that at the other end…? Were those windows?

     “Louis, be advised, I found a spaceship down here. If you’re reading me, (and I know you’re not, but if you are,) you heard that right. It’s a spaceship, docked to the wall of the chasm. It’s got a… Uh… Seems to be a nuclear thermal propulsion pack by the looks of it. No weapons and minimal armor along the rest of the fuselage, so I’m assuming it’s a civilian vessel…? A hundred… Hundred-fifty meters long. About? Doesn’t look like it has atmospheric capability… No, uh, no paint job or markings either that I can see. So that’s weird. Color of aluminum, dusty aluminum. Looks extremely old. Uh… Yeah. Over.”

     He turned around, and crawled down the walkways in the opposite direction, toward the ship’s nose. He stopped where the catwalk stopped, and stood looking at the panel before him.

     “Louis be advised, I am attempting to enter the vessel through what I assume to be the forward airlock. Over.”

     He wrapped his fingers around the handle, and, scarcely daring to breath, he pulled.

     It was locked.

     Suddenly, his radio warbled with static, and a voice came through. “Who’re you?”

     Peter stumbled backward and almost let go of the catwalk completely. “AGH! AGH! GET AWAY!” His heart threatened to beat out of his chest, and he shined his light this way and that, up, down, from one side of the ship to the other, off behind him into the dark, everywhere he could think to look for whoever had spoken. He saw nothing at all around him, but ‘nothing’ was certainly a thousand times worse than ‘something’, since it allowed his imagination to fill in the blanks with whatever hideous, hungry, alien thing that it pleased. “Louis be advised, I have made contact with an unknown life form!” He yelped. “I don’t know what it is, please help please help where is it you gotta bring me up Louis over…”

     His comm crackled again; whoever was talking must have a rather old radio to be sending such a poor signal. “…Are ya lost?” The voice asked. It wasn’t Louis, but it sounded human enough, for whatever that was worth. An old, slow, quiet sort of voice. The voice of an old man. Sounded friendly enough, for whatever that was worth.

     “Uh…” Peter steadied himself on the handrail again, and reached into his tool belt to pull out a knife. He never went anywhere without a knife; that would just be poor sense. His eyes continued to search about for signs of whoever had spoken. “Uh, uh, my name is P-Peter Harrison…” He stuttered. “I’m… I’m 13 earth-years old and, uh… And I went down a hole and I ended up in outer space, so… Yeah, I’m lost. Who are you?”

     The voice seemed to take in this information slowly and mull it over before finally mumbling. “Well I… My name… Hrrurmmm… I’m… Why, I’m Thomas Fisher, lad! Just me, just Old Tom… But… Huh… Not much fishing to do up here, hum? Don’t do much of anything except watch nowadays…”

     Peter nodded, confused. “Uh… Okay… Uh… Where are we? How did you get down here?”

     “Uhhrrmermm… Uh-humummerrr… Hrrrrrmmm… An accident… Yeah, ehh… Yeah, just an accident. But that was a long time ago…” From within one of the ship’s higher windows, a light suddenly shown. Warm, yellowish light. Slowly, a few other windows began to light up, in a pattern coming down toward the airlock. Peter got the sense that he’d somehow awoken ‘Old Tom’ from his sleep, and the mysterious old man was only now dragging himself out of bed and down the stairs to come greet his ‘guest’.

     “Uh… Uh, accident…?” Something clicked in Peter’s mind. “Wait, was that second set of footprints yours?” He asked. “Are you the Captain’s second in command, who he pushed down the hole to keep his treasure a secret?”

     “Eh?” Tom sounded almost as confused as Peter.

     “Uh, uh, I mean… I mean are you a pirate? I mean! Never mind, no, I mean… I mean, we found some tracks going up to a hole. There were two tracks coming and only one leaving, so we thought maybe somebody fell down here, and maybe it was a pirate and they were burying treasure, and… Yeah. I wondered if that was you. If you fell down here before I did.”

     Old Tom seemed to ponder this for a moment. “Herrrm… Yer sayin’… Yer saying you came down from above? How’s that make any sense??”

     “Uh… Yeah…? Where… Wait, where’d you come from then?” Peter frowned.

     The latches on the airlock rotated. A status light by the frame flickered green, and the hatch swung open.

     Now Old Tom himself was standing there in the light, a hunched form almost as crooked and strange as the aliens of Peter’s imagination. And he was wearing a suit just as ancient and queer as his voice; ragged and scrappy, with rusted seals and patches here and there. The sun visor was missing, the radio was repaired with a bit of tape, and a pair of enormous floodlights had been welded to the shoulders, giving his upper body the almost laughable appearance of a goofy, wall-eyed face, with the helmet as a nose.

     Tom put his hands on his hips and stared through a grimy visor at Peter’s confused expression. “Me…?” He whistled. “Me, I came up from below…”

     That was an awfully strange thing to say, and as Peter stared at his host with warry knife still held at the ready, the possibility crossed his mind that Tom was completely insane. If movies and stories were anything to go off of, strange old men who live alone run a high risk of devolving into babbling coots. By voicing the absurd idea of having originated from a place even deeper than this, Tom seemed to have placed himself squarely in this category.

     …But… But Peter recognized that this had been a very strange day so far. Nothing about this hole made sense or even necessarily fit with the laws of physics, so although he decided to take everything Tom said with a grain of salt, he would definitely hear him out with an open mind.

     “So… Like, uh… Is there like… A city down there, or something? Where you grew up?” Peter glanced downward. “Like, do your parents and people all…?”

     “Uh? No, no… No, back when I offended the void I was just like you; back then I knew the stars and the light… But they put me down there, way deep down there… And that’s where I was stuck, until I made my way up here, found this ship, settled down, and never let go again…”

     “Wait, ‘they’? Who’s ‘they’? Who put you down there?”

     Tom stepped over to the railing and glanced down. “Eh… Oh, just an accident… Just an accident.”

     “…Oh. Uh… Okay.”

     Tom’s helmet swung toward Peter again, and Peter caught a glimpse of black eyes. Jet black eyes, without irises or whites that he could see, like tiny pits, staring out at him from behind the visor. The black, empty eyes seemed to be fully taking stock of Peter for the first time now. Only now did Tom notice the boy scout insignias and pins on Peter’s shoulder, and the knife in his hand, and the cable still hitched to the harness in his belt. Peter lost sight of the black eyes as Tom’s head glanced away to follow the cable off the catwalk and out into the void, where the slack was coiling, then up into the far heights, where it disappeared out of sight.

     “So what did you say was up there?” Tom asked.

     “Uh…” Peter scratched his head. “Uh… Nothing much. There’s an abandoned mine, about a kilometer deep… And then above that, there’s the rim of Lilian Crater… And… Yeah. All total, I guess we’re about 2 or 3 kilometers below the surface now, depending on how long I was asleep during the descent.”

     “…Surface?” Tom frowned.

     “Yeah. Surface.” Peter blinked at him. “Wait… You do know we’re beneath a moon, right?”

     “…Well I’ll be…”

     “Yeah! I mean… What? How is this news?? We’re—this is ALL underground! We’re under the surface of New Oregon…!” Tom cocked his head curiously, obviously unfamiliar with the name. “It’s the moon of the gas giant Ares…?” Peter waited for the body language of recognition as he prodded, but it never came. “Around the star Bethsaida! I grew up in a colony called Charleston about 10 kilometers south of here! Louis and I just found this pit really deep underground, and that’s how I got here! This is underground! This is ALL underground!”

     “…I’ve… Heard of the Bethsaidan system I think…” Tom scratched his chin. “It’s a red giant, ain’t it? And there’s a tidal-locked planet with a habitable day side, right?”

     “Right… That’s Stronius. It orbits a few million klicks further out…”

     Tom scratched his head. “I… Never been to the Bethsaidan system, myself.”

     Peter stared at Tom.

     Tom stared at Peter.

     Peter blinked, and Tom shrugged.

     “You don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on either.” Peter sighed. “Do you?”

     “Nope.” Tom lied.

     “…Well, how long have you been down here, anyway?”

     “Years… Maybe less, maybe more… I dunno. It’s all relative.”

     “…Hmm. Alright.”

     “You wanna… Come in, kid?” Tom gestured a thumb over his shoulder toward the airlock. “Have a bite…? I got some canned meat… Canned peaches… Beans… Coffee! You like coffee?”

     “Uh…” Peter recalled some old Aesop about candy from strangers, and decided that its applications probably extended as far as coffee. “Uh, no, I… Uh…” He pointed to the cable hooked to his harness. “No, uh… I gotta stay outside. Louis is probably gonna reel me up any second now, and… Y’know. I want to stay tethered until then. Don’t want to miss it when it happens.”

     “Hmm.” Tom nodded, eyeing the cable again. “Yeah… Yeah, that’s right. Right sensible, that.”

     “I dunno, but it’s really weird that he hasn’t reeled me up yet.” Peter attempted to sound casual as he laughed. “I mean… He was all gung-ho to reel me up anyway, and it’s nothing like him to keep lining down for hours and hours…”

     “It’s probably the time shift.” Tom nodded knowingly. “Time runs slower the further into the black you go.”

     The revelation caught Peter unprepared. “It… Really?”

     “Oh yeah…” Tom continued his tale with a hint of pride, encouraged by Peter’s reaction. “I’ve climbed a ways down, sometimes, and when I come back up not an hour has passed… And then other times, I climb up, and when I come back down I find food spoiled… It’s an exponential sort of function, by my figuring.” Peter didn’t know what ‘exponential’ meant, but it certainly sounded cool. “Seems ta me yer friend probably don’t even realize anything’s wrong, if he’s far enough up… He just feels minutes or seconds…”

     “…Really??”

     “Yeh.”

     “…That’s kind of insane.”

     “That it sure is…” Tom agreed. “Sure ya don’t wanna come in, lad? No tellin’ how long he’s gonna be with his realizin’, and I make a nice, fresh pot—"

     “Uh, no!” Peter backed away. His knife was at his side now, but still gripped tightly. “I mean naaaah. I mean… Uh… No, sorry, no, I think I’ll stay out here. Just… Thanks, but no. No thanks. Sorry. Thanks.”

     “Oh, alright, alright, I didn’t mean to be pushy, you just stay the course there, son. Stay the course…” Tom turned away from him and floated over toward the railing again. “You feel free to have a look around then, I suppose… This ain’t my ship, after all, its just an old heap with more leg room than the one I came in… You have yer run of the place.”

     “Okay. Yeah. Alright cool, hey, thanks!”

     “Yeah.”

     Peter replaced its knife in its sheath and stared floating rapidly down the catwalk, again towards the engines at the rear of the ship. Not that he was particularly curious about them, he just wanted to be free of Tom’s company. And not that he was particularly distrustful or afraid of the man, he’d just had a sudden, powerful sensation that his brain had become completely and entirely full, and needed a moment to sort things through. Compose himself, think it all out, review the facts, wait until he wasn’t so flustered.

     He rounded a corner out of sight of the airlock, and found himself with an arm wrapped around a valve on the side of the rocket.

     So. He considered a moment. Time shift. How would I even test that?

     His first thought was to throw a stopwatch high upwards and keep a second one in his hand, then compare them when the first came back down. But he didn’t have a stopwatch, and the clock in his suit was built into the helmet, so he couldn’t really do that either… He began feeling over his suit for any other tool. He had the flare gun (down to 2 out of 4 flares now), some climbing gear, a knife, a multitool with a bunch of equipment for fixing his suit, a small flashlight…

     The flashlight. It reminded him of Louis’s light, which had shown down through the mineshaft for so long… Until it started getting inexplicably redder and redder and disappeared… And he also remembered how the flares gradually turned blue when he launched them downward…

     That’s it! That’s the key!

     Red light has a longer wavelength than white light, and blue or purple light has shorter. Peter recalled that in astronomy, that’s how they measure the relative speed of distant stars; by measuring the degree to which the wavelength has been ‘red-shifted’ or ‘blue-shifted’ one way or the other. Suppose something similar was happening here? Suppose that instead of changing the speed of a light source through space, the speed of the light source through time was altered? Wouldn’t the same effect be produced?

     Eager to test the theory, Peter drew back his arm and threw his flashlight straight upwards. It left his hand and sped away, spinning end over end, its beam periodically flashing over him like a strobe.

     As it traveled upward, the spinning and flashing gradually slowed down, and, (true to his predictions,) the light faded to a reddish shade even as the spinning slowed. The miniscule local gravity took several minutes to bring the light back down again, and as it accelerated past Peter, it returned to its normal rate of spin and color. Then, as it continued on into the distant blackness below him, it appeared to grow brighter, and bluer, even purplish. The flashing grew more and more rapid, then the light grew more and more blue, then more and more purple, before finally passing out of the visible spectrum entirely and into the ultraviolet. And then the light was gone.

     Tom was right.

     Peter was glad things were finally starting to make sense. Or make a sense, at least.

     “Waste of a good flashlight…” He heard Tom mutter over the radio.

     “But WHY is it like this?” Peter demanded, looking back over at his host.

     Tom was perched on the handrail, peering straight down. “I dunno.” He lied.

     Peter pondered all these strange things for a moment more, then shrugged, and turned away to continue exploring the ship. Maybe if he could find out what type of vessel this was, or how it got here, it could yield more clues. He started his journey by climbing down from the catwalk and starting across the ship’s ventral hull, gripping feet and hands into ladders and seams in the plating, and occasionally affixing a piton for safety. He found a pair of wide doors across the bottom of the ship, likely concealing a cargo bay or a work area of some sort, which implied it must be either a freighter, an asteroid mining rig, or some kind of utility vessel.

     The cargo bay was surrounded by something else of greater interest: a row of enormous floodlights, each almost a meter in diameter, bolted to the ship just rearward of the cargo bay. Light! Peter perked up when he saw them. Those are some incredibly huge lights! Way bigger than the ones on my helmet! Maybe now I can actually see what’s out there! He floated up to the first light in the row, turned it away from the hull so the glare wouldn’t blind him, and threw the switch.

     It flared to life.

     And when he saw what it illuminated, he was both disappointed and amazed.

     He saw that this was not a tunnel, or a pit, or a chasm, or a cavern. Rather, Peter found that this black emptiness was merely a small stretch of some entirely new world. An expanse, as infinitely wide as it was deep. It stretched off in every direction, in front, to the left, to the right, and everywhere except the wall behind; still so great and bottomless that its far reaches remained pitch black.

     But now Peter was able to see that the expanse was not quite empty. The floodlight’s powerful rays had reached far enough into the void to bring back the dim forms of monolithic metallic towers. Each of them was several kilometers tall at least, and never less than fifty meters in diameter.

     The closest and nearest tower was the wall itself, to which the ship was docked. During his descent, Peter must have dropped down right next to it. But there was another tower about three hundred meters from the ship’s bow, then another two hundred meters beyond that, another one some distance further, and so they continued off into the black, their arrangement and spacing irregular and haphazard.

     Peter panned the light up and down to examine the towers in full.

     All along their great heights, they bulged with machinery and structure and pipes upon pipes upon pipes, with never a window or door. Here and there along them, like hanging bats, there were docked silent dusty spacecraft; of which the one beneath his feet was among the larger.

     Peter shown the light as far as possible upward, and could just make out the very top of a nearby pillar, where its pipes and scaffolds branched out to interlink with those of the other pillars, and form a sort of ceiling, above which could be seen traces of the natural rock. This entire place, this entire world, this entire inexplicable openness, everything from the initial crevice, to the machinery on the way down, to this bizarre upside-down industrial city around him, all existed as part of the same complex. An incomprehensible, unspeakably vast facility; unmanned, unpowered, and decayed terribly, for it was ancient beyond years. An eldritch machine.

     He shown the light down, and saw the nearest tower finally end, in a tangled mass of pointed antennae what must be two or three kilometers below.

     Which meant they weren’t pillars or supports; they didn’t reach the floor.

     Which meant that there was nothing supporting the ceiling.

     Which meant that this stupid place was just as stupid as ever.

     “Why’s this place so stupid??” Peter asked Tom, when he could no longer hold in his incredulity. “What the heck even is this? Who built it? And why? And how? And how… How far down does it go? What are these pillars for? What’s down there???”

     “You ask a lot of fool questions, boy.” Tom snapped.

     “Yeah, well, do you know the answers?!?” Peter snapped back. “I just want to know where I am!”

     “Go to hell!”

     There was silence over the radio channel for a few seconds. “Sorry.” Peter offered. “I didn’t mean to ask so many fool questions…” He wasn’t sure exactly why asking questions would such a bad thing, but he supposed it was kind of obnoxious, and being obnoxious is a bad thing, and thus worthy of apologizing for.

     “Didn’t mean to curse ya to hell, boy.” Tom apologized back after a moment. “Bad joke. Seeing as how we’re already here.”

     “Huh?”

     “Yeah… We’re in hell.” Tom repeated. “It ain’t an inferno like they say. It ain’t fire, or heat, or light… Ya don’t get to walk around sayin’ hi-do to the devil and playin’ cards with all the sinners who’ve gone on before… No, hell is loneliness, son. Hell is where you cry out fer help and there ain’t nobody to help you. Hell is where you look and you look and you cannot see, for the dark that’s around you reaches inside and fills you right on up, your soul carved free of creation and drenched in whatever’s beyond. Hell is where God can’t see you on account of the dark, and there’s nothing to watch except yourself, and it leaves you as empty as the natives…”

     “Well… Well that’s stupid.” Peter scoffed. “This ain’t hell.”

     “Aw, sure it is, kid, y’know me, I wouldn’t joke about that.” Tom made a spitting noise (which you’re not supposed to do in a helmet but whatever.) “Oh, it’s a misery alright, to just look out into that dark and feel them all looking back… The natives… Heh… Y’know, the demons ain’t the wardens of hell, y’know, kid? Demons’re just more prisoners; sinners too, don’t you know. Everybody who’s ever been wicked gets thrown down here, and who holds the key? Who holds the key, Pete? Not demons, no. Not Satan, no, not a sucker like the devil. It’s certainly some creature God would’ve built to handle the loneliness and the empty black. None other than the natives…”

     “No way would God let me go to hell!” Peter insisted. He stepped away from the floodlight to look up at Tom. “I go to church!” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I read the Bible! And I prayed earlier, on the way down! And God answered my prayer, so I know he wouldn’t let me go to hell! I’m like hell-proof!”

     “Well, there must be some damned reason you’re here!” Tom’s helmet spun in his direction. “Ain’t nobody gets here by accident, there’s… Ya must’ve… Ya must’ve done something to offend the void…! Must be some reason, some purpose… Why…? Why…?”

     “Oh yeah? Well then why are YOU down here?” Peter shot back.

     Tom’s voice, which had been building in volume, seemed cut short for a long, tense second. When he spoke again it was quiet, and he turned away. “Ah… Just an accident… Naught but an accident…”

     Peter was beginning to seriously question his host’s sanity, and was beginning to feel like saying so. “Well I!” He announced. “I think you’re crazy! You’re just babbling about hell and darkness and weird craziness, and none of it makes any sense!”

     Tom looked at him. Tom looked back at the black. Tom looked at the ship, and then toward the other ships on the other pillars, and then at Peter’s cable. His voice had a different tone when he spoke again. Quieter, with a strange edge to it. “I could show you.” He offered.

Description

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

     Something touched his hand.

     He wasn’t sure if he’d been asleep just then, but he was sure as heck awake now. He scrambled and thrashed for just a moment, both ecstatic and terrified that his wish for an end to the emptiness had finally been granted. What did I just touch?!?

     He flicked on his light.

     The machinery of the walls had returned again, this time in the form of an enormous skyscraper-sized vertical pillar, way in the distance to his left. The pillar stretched as high up as he could see, and equally far below. Nearer to him, a long, horizontal tank hung suspended from the pillar, braced top and bottom with sturdy trusses. This tank was loosely ringed in some sort of narrow catwalk. Peter had just passed within a meter of this walkway, and his hand had just brushed against the handrail.

     It was about 3 meters above him now, meaning he’d just barely missed it. But during his sleep, his weight had become very, very low (maybe a newton or two) meaning he could send himself drifting back upward with no more than a single stiff tug on the line. It was tight for a moment as he pulled, and then slack as he drifted.

     He gripped a hand around the rail as he passed it, pulled himself toward it, swung over, and planted his feet on the walkway, gripping the handrail to keep from floating away. And that’s how he sat for about a minute, letting his heartrate subside and his mind collect itself. In front of him, the cable he’d been using to descend continued to drop, although since he was no longer descending with it, it just kind of curled on itself lazily in the space in front of him. He contemplated unhooking it from his harness and leaving it around the rail so that he could walk around more freely, but thought better of it. If Louis decides to line up anytime soon, I don’t want to keep him waiting.

     “Louis, come in!” Peter tried his radio again. “Louis, be advised, I have not found the bottom, but I have landed on an artificial walkway of some type, and am currently 99% weightless. I…” He looked around nervously, and remembered that he still had a job to do down here. “I now await ascent and escape as a primary priority, but will commence with the planned search for pirate treasure as a close secondary. Line up when ready. Over.”

     Wow.

     He shined his light all around. There was nothing but darkness above and below and to either side. He couldn’t even see the opposite wall; there may as well not even be an opposite wall anymore. All he could see was the cable, and the catwalk, and the enormous tank it surrounded. If he didn’t know any better, or if he’d hit his head and woken up here, it would have been natural to assume that he was floating in outer space, on a station or a base… Well, aside from the light, of course; outer space had stars and sun and light.

     He started to move, pulling himself hand-over-hand along the walkway. This wasn’t his first time moving in zero-g; he’d been on quite a few spacewalks in the orbits above the colony, sometimes on some errand or repair, or even to earn a merit badge. Of course, he’d never done it deep underground, but the principles were the same: keep at least one hand or foot secured at all times, don’t go too fast, keep your head on a swivel.

     As he rounded the end of the tank, he found himself staring at what looked to all the world like an enormous rocket nozzle. That didn’t make a lot of sense, so he continued on, expecting it to resolve into something more sensible. But no; as the catwalk took a turn behind a radiation wall, he realized that it was, indeed, a spacecraft engine. In fact it was one of many, grouped in array on the back of the tank. He turned back and examined the tank itself in more detail. Now that he was looking, there seemed to be seams and hatches periodically along its length, and what was that at the other end…? Were those windows?

     “Louis, be advised, I found a spaceship down here. If you’re reading me, (and I know you’re not, but if you are,) you heard that right. It’s a spaceship, docked to the wall of the chasm. It’s got a… Uh… Seems to be a nuclear thermal propulsion pack by the looks of it. No weapons and minimal armor along the rest of the fuselage, so I’m assuming it’s a civilian vessel…? A hundred… Hundred-fifty meters long. About? Doesn’t look like it has atmospheric capability… No, uh, no paint job or markings either that I can see. So that’s weird. Color of aluminum, dusty aluminum. Looks extremely old. Uh… Yeah. Over.”

     He turned around, and crawled down the walkways in the opposite direction, toward the ship’s nose. He stopped where the catwalk stopped, and stood looking at the panel before him.

     “Louis be advised, I am attempting to enter the vessel through what I assume to be the forward airlock. Over.”

     He wrapped his fingers around the handle, and, scarcely daring to breath, he pulled.

     It was locked.

     Suddenly, his radio warbled with static, and a voice came through. “Who’re you?”

     Peter stumbled backward and almost let go of the catwalk completely. “AGH! AGH! GET AWAY!” His heart threatened to beat out of his chest, and he shined his light this way and that, up, down, from one side of the ship to the other, off behind him into the dark, everywhere he could think to look for whoever had spoken. He saw nothing at all around him, but ‘nothing’ was certainly a thousand times worse than ‘something’, since it allowed his imagination to fill in the blanks with whatever hideous, hungry, alien thing that it pleased. “Louis be advised, I have made contact with an unknown life form!” He yelped. “I don’t know what it is, please help please help where is it you gotta bring me up Louis over…”

     His comm crackled again; whoever was talking must have a rather old radio to be sending such a poor signal. “…Are ya lost?” The voice asked. It wasn’t Louis, but it sounded human enough, for whatever that was worth. An old, slow, quiet sort of voice. The voice of an old man. Sounded friendly enough, for whatever that was worth.

     “Uh…” Peter steadied himself on the handrail again, and reached into his tool belt to pull out a knife. He never went anywhere without a knife; that would just be poor sense. His eyes continued to search about for signs of whoever had spoken. “Uh, uh, my name is P-Peter Harrison…” He stuttered. “I’m… I’m 13 earth-years old and, uh… And I went down a hole and I ended up in outer space, so… Yeah, I’m lost. Who are you?”

     The voice seemed to take in this information slowly and mull it over before finally mumbling. “Well I… My name… Hrrurmmm… I’m… Why, I’m Thomas Fisher, lad! Just me, just Old Tom… But… Huh… Not much fishing to do up here, hum? Don’t do much of anything except watch nowadays…”

     Peter nodded, confused. “Uh… Okay… Uh… Where are we? How did you get down here?”

     “Uhhrrmermm… Uh-humummerrr… Hrrrrrmmm… An accident… Yeah, ehh… Yeah, just an accident. But that was a long time ago…” From within one of the ship’s higher windows, a light suddenly shown. Warm, yellowish light. Slowly, a few other windows began to light up, in a pattern coming down toward the airlock. Peter got the sense that he’d somehow awoken ‘Old Tom’ from his sleep, and the mysterious old man was only now dragging himself out of bed and down the stairs to come greet his ‘guest’.

     “Uh… Uh, accident…?” Something clicked in Peter’s mind. “Wait, was that second set of footprints yours?” He asked. “Are you the Captain’s second in command, who he pushed down the hole to keep his treasure a secret?”

     “Eh?” Tom sounded almost as confused as Peter.

     “Uh, uh, I mean… I mean are you a pirate? I mean! Never mind, no, I mean… I mean, we found some tracks going up to a hole. There were two tracks coming and only one leaving, so we thought maybe somebody fell down here, and maybe it was a pirate and they were burying treasure, and… Yeah. I wondered if that was you. If you fell down here before I did.”

     Old Tom seemed to ponder this for a moment. “Herrrm… Yer sayin’… Yer saying you came down from above? How’s that make any sense??”

     “Uh… Yeah…? Where… Wait, where’d you come from then?” Peter frowned.

     The latches on the airlock rotated. A status light by the frame flickered green, and the hatch swung open.

     Now Old Tom himself was standing there in the light, a hunched form almost as crooked and strange as the aliens of Peter’s imagination. And he was wearing a suit just as ancient and queer as his voice; ragged and scrappy, with rusted seals and patches here and there. The sun visor was missing, the radio was repaired with a bit of tape, and a pair of enormous floodlights had been welded to the shoulders, giving his upper body the almost laughable appearance of a goofy, wall-eyed face, with the helmet as a nose.

     Tom put his hands on his hips and stared through a grimy visor at Peter’s confused expression. “Me…?” He whistled. “Me, I came up from below…”

     That was an awfully strange thing to say, and as Peter stared at his host with warry knife still held at the ready, the possibility crossed his mind that Tom was completely insane. If movies and stories were anything to go off of, strange old men who live alone run a high risk of devolving into babbling coots. By voicing the absurd idea of having originated from a place even deeper than this, Tom seemed to have placed himself squarely in this category.

     …But… But Peter recognized that this had been a very strange day so far. Nothing about this hole made sense or even necessarily fit with the laws of physics, so although he decided to take everything Tom said with a grain of salt, he would definitely hear him out with an open mind.

     “So… Like, uh… Is there like… A city down there, or something? Where you grew up?” Peter glanced downward. “Like, do your parents and people all…?”

     “Uh? No, no… No, back when I offended the void I was just like you; back then I knew the stars and the light… But they put me down there, way deep down there… And that’s where I was stuck, until I made my way up here, found this ship, settled down, and never let go again…”

     “Wait, ‘they’? Who’s ‘they’? Who put you down there?”

     Tom stepped over to the railing and glanced down. “Eh… Oh, just an accident… Just an accident.”

     “…Oh. Uh… Okay.”

     Tom’s helmet swung toward Peter again, and Peter caught a glimpse of black eyes. Jet black eyes, without irises or whites that he could see, like tiny pits, staring out at him from behind the visor. The black, empty eyes seemed to be fully taking stock of Peter for the first time now. Only now did Tom notice the boy scout insignias and pins on Peter’s shoulder, and the knife in his hand, and the cable still hitched to the harness in his belt. Peter lost sight of the black eyes as Tom’s head glanced away to follow the cable off the catwalk and out into the void, where the slack was coiling, then up into the far heights, where it disappeared out of sight.

     “So what did you say was up there?” Tom asked.

     “Uh…” Peter scratched his head. “Uh… Nothing much. There’s an abandoned mine, about a kilometer deep… And then above that, there’s the rim of Lilian Crater… And… Yeah. All total, I guess we’re about 2 or 3 kilometers below the surface now, depending on how long I was asleep during the descent.”

     “…Surface?” Tom frowned.

     “Yeah. Surface.” Peter blinked at him. “Wait… You do know we’re beneath a moon, right?”

     “…Well I’ll be…”

     “Yeah! I mean… What? How is this news?? We’re—this is ALL underground! We’re under the surface of New Oregon…!” Tom cocked his head curiously, obviously unfamiliar with the name. “It’s the moon of the gas giant Ares…?” Peter waited for the body language of recognition as he prodded, but it never came. “Around the star Bethsaida! I grew up in a colony called Charleston about 10 kilometers south of here! Louis and I just found this pit really deep underground, and that’s how I got here! This is underground! This is ALL underground!”

     “…I’ve… Heard of the Bethsaidan system I think…” Tom scratched his chin. “It’s a red giant, ain’t it? And there’s a tidal-locked planet with a habitable day side, right?”

     “Right… That’s Stronius. It orbits a few million klicks further out…”

     Tom scratched his head. “I… Never been to the Bethsaidan system, myself.”

     Peter stared at Tom.

     Tom stared at Peter.

     Peter blinked, and Tom shrugged.

     “You don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on either.” Peter sighed. “Do you?”

     “Nope.” Tom lied.

     “…Well, how long have you been down here, anyway?”

     “Years… Maybe less, maybe more… I dunno. It’s all relative.”

     “…Hmm. Alright.”

     “You wanna… Come in, kid?” Tom gestured a thumb over his shoulder toward the airlock. “Have a bite…? I got some canned meat… Canned peaches… Beans… Coffee! You like coffee?”

     “Uh…” Peter recalled some old Aesop about candy from strangers, and decided that its applications probably extended as far as coffee. “Uh, no, I… Uh…” He pointed to the cable hooked to his harness. “No, uh… I gotta stay outside. Louis is probably gonna reel me up any second now, and… Y’know. I want to stay tethered until then. Don’t want to miss it when it happens.”

     “Hmm.” Tom nodded, eyeing the cable again. “Yeah… Yeah, that’s right. Right sensible, that.”

     “I dunno, but it’s really weird that he hasn’t reeled me up yet.” Peter attempted to sound casual as he laughed. “I mean… He was all gung-ho to reel me up anyway, and it’s nothing like him to keep lining down for hours and hours…”

     “It’s probably the time shift.” Tom nodded knowingly. “Time runs slower the further into the black you go.”

     The revelation caught Peter unprepared. “It… Really?”

     “Oh yeah…” Tom continued his tale with a hint of pride, encouraged by Peter’s reaction. “I’ve climbed a ways down, sometimes, and when I come back up not an hour has passed… And then other times, I climb up, and when I come back down I find food spoiled… It’s an exponential sort of function, by my figuring.” Peter didn’t know what ‘exponential’ meant, but it certainly sounded cool. “Seems ta me yer friend probably don’t even realize anything’s wrong, if he’s far enough up… He just feels minutes or seconds…”

     “…Really??”

     “Yeh.”

     “…That’s kind of insane.”

     “That it sure is…” Tom agreed. “Sure ya don’t wanna come in, lad? No tellin’ how long he’s gonna be with his realizin’, and I make a nice, fresh pot—"

     “Uh, no!” Peter backed away. His knife was at his side now, but still gripped tightly. “I mean naaaah. I mean… Uh… No, sorry, no, I think I’ll stay out here. Just… Thanks, but no. No thanks. Sorry. Thanks.”

     “Oh, alright, alright, I didn’t mean to be pushy, you just stay the course there, son. Stay the course…” Tom turned away from him and floated over toward the railing again. “You feel free to have a look around then, I suppose… This ain’t my ship, after all, its just an old heap with more leg room than the one I came in… You have yer run of the place.”

     “Okay. Yeah. Alright cool, hey, thanks!”

     “Yeah.”

     Peter replaced its knife in its sheath and stared floating rapidly down the catwalk, again towards the engines at the rear of the ship. Not that he was particularly curious about them, he just wanted to be free of Tom’s company. And not that he was particularly distrustful or afraid of the man, he’d just had a sudden, powerful sensation that his brain had become completely and entirely full, and needed a moment to sort things through. Compose himself, think it all out, review the facts, wait until he wasn’t so flustered.

     He rounded a corner out of sight of the airlock, and found himself with an arm wrapped around a valve on the side of the rocket.

     So. He considered a moment. Time shift. How would I even test that?

     His first thought was to throw a stopwatch high upwards and keep a second one in his hand, then compare them when the first came back down. But he didn’t have a stopwatch, and the clock in his suit was built into the helmet, so he couldn’t really do that either… He began feeling over his suit for any other tool. He had the flare gun (down to 2 out of 4 flares now), some climbing gear, a knife, a multitool with a bunch of equipment for fixing his suit, a small flashlight…

     The flashlight. It reminded him of Louis’s light, which had shown down through the mineshaft for so long… Until it started getting inexplicably redder and redder and disappeared… And he also remembered how the flares gradually turned blue when he launched them downward…

     That’s it! That’s the key!

     Red light has a longer wavelength than white light, and blue or purple light has shorter. Peter recalled that in astronomy, that’s how they measure the relative speed of distant stars; by measuring the degree to which the wavelength has been ‘red-shifted’ or ‘blue-shifted’ one way or the other. Suppose something similar was happening here? Suppose that instead of changing the speed of a light source through space, the speed of the light source through time was altered? Wouldn’t the same effect be produced?

     Eager to test the theory, Peter drew back his arm and threw his flashlight straight upwards. It left his hand and sped away, spinning end over end, its beam periodically flashing over him like a strobe.

     As it traveled upward, the spinning and flashing gradually slowed down, and, (true to his predictions,) the light faded to a reddish shade even as the spinning slowed. The miniscule local gravity took several minutes to bring the light back down again, and as it accelerated past Peter, it returned to its normal rate of spin and color. Then, as it continued on into the distant blackness below him, it appeared to grow brighter, and bluer, even purplish. The flashing grew more and more rapid, then the light grew more and more blue, then more and more purple, before finally passing out of the visible spectrum entirely and into the ultraviolet. And then the light was gone.

     Tom was right.

     Peter was glad things were finally starting to make sense. Or make a sense, at least.

     “Waste of a good flashlight…” He heard Tom mutter over the radio.

     “But WHY is it like this?” Peter demanded, looking back over at his host.

     Tom was perched on the handrail, peering straight down. “I dunno.” He lied.

     Peter pondered all these strange things for a moment more, then shrugged, and turned away to continue exploring the ship. Maybe if he could find out what type of vessel this was, or how it got here, it could yield more clues. He started his journey by climbing down from the catwalk and starting across the ship’s ventral hull, gripping feet and hands into ladders and seams in the plating, and occasionally affixing a piton for safety. He found a pair of wide doors across the bottom of the ship, likely concealing a cargo bay or a work area of some sort, which implied it must be either a freighter, an asteroid mining rig, or some kind of utility vessel.

     The cargo bay was surrounded by something else of greater interest: a row of enormous floodlights, each almost a meter in diameter, bolted to the ship just rearward of the cargo bay. Light! Peter perked up when he saw them. Those are some incredibly huge lights! Way bigger than the ones on my helmet! Maybe now I can actually see what’s out there! He floated up to the first light in the row, turned it away from the hull so the glare wouldn’t blind him, and threw the switch.

     It flared to life.

     And when he saw what it illuminated, he was both disappointed and amazed.

     He saw that this was not a tunnel, or a pit, or a chasm, or a cavern. Rather, Peter found that this black emptiness was merely a small stretch of some entirely new world. An expanse, as infinitely wide as it was deep. It stretched off in every direction, in front, to the left, to the right, and everywhere except the wall behind; still so great and bottomless that its far reaches remained pitch black.

     But now Peter was able to see that the expanse was not quite empty. The floodlight’s powerful rays had reached far enough into the void to bring back the dim forms of monolithic metallic towers. Each of them was several kilometers tall at least, and never less than fifty meters in diameter.

     The closest and nearest tower was the wall itself, to which the ship was docked. During his descent, Peter must have dropped down right next to it. But there was another tower about three hundred meters from the ship’s bow, then another two hundred meters beyond that, another one some distance further, and so they continued off into the black, their arrangement and spacing irregular and haphazard.

     Peter panned the light up and down to examine the towers in full.

     All along their great heights, they bulged with machinery and structure and pipes upon pipes upon pipes, with never a window or door. Here and there along them, like hanging bats, there were docked silent dusty spacecraft; of which the one beneath his feet was among the larger.

     Peter shown the light as far as possible upward, and could just make out the very top of a nearby pillar, where its pipes and scaffolds branched out to interlink with those of the other pillars, and form a sort of ceiling, above which could be seen traces of the natural rock. This entire place, this entire world, this entire inexplicable openness, everything from the initial crevice, to the machinery on the way down, to this bizarre upside-down industrial city around him, all existed as part of the same complex. An incomprehensible, unspeakably vast facility; unmanned, unpowered, and decayed terribly, for it was ancient beyond years. An eldritch machine.

     He shown the light down, and saw the nearest tower finally end, in a tangled mass of pointed antennae what must be two or three kilometers below.

     Which meant they weren’t pillars or supports; they didn’t reach the floor.

     Which meant that there was nothing supporting the ceiling.

     Which meant that this stupid place was just as stupid as ever.

     “Why’s this place so stupid??” Peter asked Tom, when he could no longer hold in his incredulity. “What the heck even is this? Who built it? And why? And how? And how… How far down does it go? What are these pillars for? What’s down there???”

     “You ask a lot of fool questions, boy.” Tom snapped.

     “Yeah, well, do you know the answers?!?” Peter snapped back. “I just want to know where I am!”

     “Go to hell!”

     There was silence over the radio channel for a few seconds. “Sorry.” Peter offered. “I didn’t mean to ask so many fool questions…” He wasn’t sure exactly why asking questions would such a bad thing, but he supposed it was kind of obnoxious, and being obnoxious is a bad thing, and thus worthy of apologizing for.

     “Didn’t mean to curse ya to hell, boy.” Tom apologized back after a moment. “Bad joke. Seeing as how we’re already here.”

     “Huh?”

     “Yeah… We’re in hell.” Tom repeated. “It ain’t an inferno like they say. It ain’t fire, or heat, or light… Ya don’t get to walk around sayin’ hi-do to the devil and playin’ cards with all the sinners who’ve gone on before… No, hell is loneliness, son. Hell is where you cry out fer help and there ain’t nobody to help you. Hell is where you look and you look and you cannot see, for the dark that’s around you reaches inside and fills you right on up, your soul carved free of creation and drenched in whatever’s beyond. Hell is where God can’t see you on account of the dark, and there’s nothing to watch except yourself, and it leaves you as empty as the natives…”

     “Well… Well that’s stupid.” Peter scoffed. “This ain’t hell.”

     “Aw, sure it is, kid, y’know me, I wouldn’t joke about that.” Tom made a spitting noise (which you’re not supposed to do in a helmet but whatever.) “Oh, it’s a misery alright, to just look out into that dark and feel them all looking back… The natives… Heh… Y’know, the demons ain’t the wardens of hell, y’know, kid? Demons’re just more prisoners; sinners too, don’t you know. Everybody who’s ever been wicked gets thrown down here, and who holds the key? Who holds the key, Pete? Not demons, no. Not Satan, no, not a sucker like the devil. It’s certainly some creature God would’ve built to handle the loneliness and the empty black. None other than the natives…”

     “No way would God let me go to hell!” Peter insisted. He stepped away from the floodlight to look up at Tom. “I go to church!” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I read the Bible! And I prayed earlier, on the way down! And God answered my prayer, so I know he wouldn’t let me go to hell! I’m like hell-proof!”

     “Well, there must be some damned reason you’re here!” Tom’s helmet spun in his direction. “Ain’t nobody gets here by accident, there’s… Ya must’ve… Ya must’ve done something to offend the void…! Must be some reason, some purpose… Why…? Why…?”

     “Oh yeah? Well then why are YOU down here?” Peter shot back.

     Tom’s voice, which had been building in volume, seemed cut short for a long, tense second. When he spoke again it was quiet, and he turned away. “Ah… Just an accident… Naught but an accident…”

     Peter was beginning to seriously question his host’s sanity, and was beginning to feel like saying so. “Well I!” He announced. “I think you’re crazy! You’re just babbling about hell and darkness and weird craziness, and none of it makes any sense!”

     Tom looked at him. Tom looked back at the black. Tom looked at the ship, and then toward the other ships on the other pillars, and then at Peter’s cable. His voice had a different tone when he spoke again. Quieter, with a strange edge to it. “I could show you.” He offered.