Wicked Prompts

DIGGING THROUGH TIME - RELOJANDO CRONICOS

Kyle was an upstart from the seedy side of London. His origins were Central African but he grew up with the Nigerians, Indians and Pakistani's who attended the special prep-school to which only smarter kids were accepted. He had a lazy right eye that seemed to wonder off in search of something more interesting, while the left tried to hold a conversation.

The eye and his chubby frame contributed to a deficit of speed and coordination, making sports a sorry endeavor. Kyle opted to spend more time with books than balls, excelling in math and science, and then winning the coveted Reloj Engineering prize when he was only fifteen.

Despite Kyle's odd appearance, the delegation of scientists and philanthropists from the Reloj Foundation were even stranger. One of them had an almost effervescent glow beneath his albino complexion. The others dressed in trench coats that swayed like silk but looked more like human skin.

Kyle's parents expressed their gratitude to the strange visitors with tea and biscuits, practicing their broken English, which the delegation had little trouble understanding. Kyle himself didn't get very excited. He always made an attempt to focus his mind, think logically and suppress any emotions with the assurance that nothing was ever as expected. This was the key to his extraordinary discipline, unbridled for a teenager and envied even by his professors.

Suppressing emotions and rebellious thoughts was the first important thing Kyle learned to do as a young boy. He lay awake at night listening to his parents argue. They screamed their fears at one another. Fears of money, illness and infidelity. At first it frightened him into knots he could feel in the pit of his stomach. But soon enough he learned to think of other places, other worlds even, where the yelling receded into a background of white noise. From there he learned the world was nothing more than the thoughts in his head.

Kyle's project was an experiment with light particles that could penetrate the most dense materials, including lead and bedrock. The delegation told him there was a very practical use for which they wanted to apply his research, and invited him to join them on their expedition.

When his parents learned the endeavor would be in Central Africa, where they had grown up, they were considerably more skeptical. Certainly there were no great engineering feats taking place on the continent where genocide and civil war had become the norm. Only after continued begging from Kyle did they relent. Twenty bars of gold, enough to purchase a flat in central London, didn't hurt either.

Kyle read from a holographic text while his lazy eye remained vigilant over his travel companions. The effervescent man from the delegation that had visited him in London and a tall woman with a large oval head, accompanied him in the pod as they descended rapidly through the Earth's crust.

He'd never read of such structures and technologies before but here he was witnessing them. The holographic reader had been injected into his temple just before they departed.

"Don't worry," said the doctor before the injection. "It's twenty-first century. No risk of contamination."

Kyle wasn't sure what the doctor meant by that comment but the tube into which they were now descending made the holographic reader seem insignificant. They were headed into the mantle he was told. The competing gravitational forces and atmospheric pressure there (not to mention the heat) would be immense, though they would be protected in the pod. They would need those forces from which to draw energy on the project, his nameless effervescent companion had told him.

"What are we building here?" Kyle ventured to ask twenty minutes into the descent.

"The foundation and infrastructure for a great city and its transportation system," said the man. The effervescent man's words were like his appearance. They seemed to have an underlying glow to them, or a reverberation of sound that undercut the air, or bypassed it, Kyle couldn't be sure. It was almost like the man wasn't speaking at all. Like his words were going directly into Kyle's mind instead.

"Like a train going through the center of the Earth?" asked Kyle. "Are we digging a hole to China?" He himself didn't know if he was being sarcastic. The sarcasm was a defense mechanism when he felt uneasy or stupid compared to the task before him. Only this time, given what he'd witnessed with the pod, it didn't seem all that implausible.

"More like a China of the past," said his companion. "But not only China."

Kyle was already missing his parents and friends at school. The last few days had been like some surreal hallucination. He'd flown in a private jet chartered by the delegation. It was his first time in any jet, and he'd never seen a jet like the one they flew in. It was sleek and the wings didn't seem large enough to support flight. He'd studied enough aeronautical engineering to know that much.

They arrived in Tangiers fifteen minutes after taking off in London. Something else that hardly seemed plausible. From there they took an SUV into the dessert. They drove for about seven hours before arriving at a fenced compound. Armed guards in dessert military garb greeted them. They wore masks that concealed their faces and held small silver wrist bands that appeared to be weapons, but hardly large enough to do much damage.

Inside the compound Kyle was given a small room to take a nap and something to eat and drink. That's when the doctor came to visit him.

"For an examination," he said. The doctor looked him over carefully, but quickly. No instruments, stethoscope, or blood pressure gauge. Just a once over with the eyes and two fingers on the exposed skin of his lower neck.

"Would you like me to fix the eye?" asked the doctor.

"What do you mean?" Kyle asked.

"The muscle tendons and nerves are misaligned. I can correct it."

"I like it the way it is," said Kyle, apprehensively. After all, none of the doctors in London were able to correct it. At least not without surgery that might risk his vision. He certainly wasn't going to trust African healthcare facilities.

Soon after the exam the delegation returned. They brought him into a large dome structure. The dome's material appeared to be the same as the trench coats the delegation wore. It flowed in the breeze like a tent but had the elasticity and form of skin.

In the middle of the dome was a large circular door. Lights glowed around the rim and illuminated below it some hundred feet or so. The door was about ten feet in diameter. Kyle looked inside and saw smoothly cut stone around the edge of a tunnel that descended at least the hundred feet he could see.

Then more lights illuminated. A reddish glow extended deeper into the tunnel. For miles it seemed to Kyle. As far as he could see. Like looking off into the horizon, eventually the light blurred with the landscape, creating an illusion of the infinite.

"What is it?" asked Kyle. "Where does it go?"

"To the center of the Earth and the Universe itself," said his effervescent companion.