Pioneers

Diggers

As the grind of the machine's humongous drill ground on, as it always did, X292837401 (given the nickname X2928 by his crewmates) idly stared out of the window, as he usually did when it was his shift to pilot the machine. Also, as always, all that could be seen out of the front window of heavily, heavily reinforced glass was dirt and stone. Sometimes the colour of the stone would change. It was red right now. Before that, it was blue. Before blue, it was grey for a very long time, but even before the grey, it was bright, luminescent green and pink for a bit. During that time, the whole crew had crowded into the cockpit of the machine just to catch a glimpse.

There wasn't all that much to do for fun on the machine. The machine itself was built for one purpose: to drill through the crust and find a way to the fabled land of Surface. The design of the machine was made with power and efficiency in mind. The engineers of Under built it to those specifications, exactly. There wasn't any heed paid to notions of fun or relaxation. The people of Under didn't have much of that to go around, in any case. The results were 100,000 extremely bored Underlings back down in Under, and 10 even more bored Underlings on the machine. The 10 crewmates experienced boredom, the likes of which had never been seen by Underlingkind. None had considered that the boredom could actually increase in such a wonderous contraption as the machine.

The machine itself had a cockpit, crew's quarters, mess hall, and lavatory system. It had not been outfitted with a kitchen, as all food had been reduced to nutritional paste for maximum storage efficiency. They had packed enough food to last a lifetime in this way, so quantity was never an issue. An unfortunate side effect of the nutrification process was that it removed all taste from the paste. Every bit of edible substance aboard the machine was completely tasteless, no matter what the label on the nutritional paste dispenser said.

X2928 heard a ding from behind him. He turned to see P1938 entering the cockpit. He had never liked P1938, but they insisted on coming up to the cockpit daily to see if the rocks had changed colour since yesterday.

"Damnit, P1938! They are still red! I'll ring the bloody bell if anything changes!"

"Can't be too careful. They look like a different shade. Wouldn't you say it's more of a magenta now?"

"What the hell are you talking about? That is definitely more of a maroon."

"You're a maroon," he said as he left X2928 to seethe.

Although X2928 would hate to admit it, his little battles with P1938 were one of the only things keeping him sane at this point. It had been alright in the beginning. The first year or so had been a lot of fun, actually. Although the nutritional paste had no taste, the crew was able to convince themselves that it tasted somewhere between water and qubo cakes. Even the rocks had changed colour constantly back then. There was nothing quite as interesting as the luminescent green and pink rocks, but the variety of purples, yellows, browns, whites, oranges, blacks, and teals kept things interesting. Back then, the crewmates had been mere new acquaintances on an exciting adventure. Now, on day 3088, all that was behind them. The crewmates had accepted their fates a long time ago. The panic and terror of being trapped so far above the place they called home was replaced by the boredom they had become so familiar with. After all, what could they do but accept it? There was no way in or out of the machine; the engineers had set the main door mechanism to only unlock once the land of Surface was reached.

Day in and day out, the crewmates would sit at the small table in the mess hall and stare blankly. Every so often, one of the crew would attempt to start a conversation. Invariably, these would always circle back to the same few topics: life back in Under, the colour of the rocks today, or the colour of the rocks some time ago. Around day 2095, even the mention of their favourite luminescent green-pink had failed to inspire any other feeling than boredom. Since then, each time one of the crew attempted to bring up one of these topics, they would get a swift slap in the back of the head by the two members next to them. The only fortunate one in the group would be the one selected to pilot that day, a luxury afforded to them once on a 10-day cycle.