text: Listen, I don’t know where to begin. I don’t even know how we got here, to be honest. But here we are, and we sure as hell aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So we might as well make the best of it. Here, take a cigarette. I’ve got a few left. I guess you’re probably wondering why it happened. Well, why does anything happen? Just dumb fuckin’ luck, usually. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was just a down-on-his-luck construction worker looking to make some extra cash so I could pay my rent in the winter - construction slows in the winter, you know. Anyways, maybe in hindsight it was all a bit too good to be true, but that’s not what I was thinking at the time. I wish I had. But where I should have been seeing red, I just saw green. The job seemed simple enough: all we had to do was dig. Dig a few holes out in some worksite in the desert, and walk away with two hundred bucks in cold hard cash, every night. That was the catch, though - we could only work at night. The boss said it was because the sun was too hot out there during the day, and we’d be risking heatstroke if we worked while it was still shining. That sounded reasonable enough to me. So I get out there on the first night. There are five other guys out there with me - four with shovels, like me, and another guy there to supervise and tell us where to dig. Each hole had to be at least five feet deep and five feet wide. We spaced out far enough so we wouldn’t bump into each other and got to it. It wasn’t until I was about two feet deep in sand when I realized I had no idea what I was digging for. Maybe some kind of cables were being laid through this spot. I asked the supervisor guy. I didn’t get an answer - he told me he’s paying me to dig, not to ask dumbass questions. I guess he was sort of right. Some private company must want to keep this project quiet. So I played along, and kept digging. After about twenty minutes, we all started to finish up at roughly the same time. We climbed back up to level ground, one by one, and waited for this guy to finish his cigarette and come point us to the next dig site. I watched the lit end of the smoke burn down closer and closer to his fingers - it was just about all I could see in the darkness. He took his time, anyway. When he finally finished he came to inspect our work. He looked into each hole for a minute or two, like he was looking for something in the bottom. Finally when he was satisfied, he told us to fill the sand back in and start digging another hole a short ways away. For a second, we protested. What was the point in undoing the work we just did? But, again, no answers came - no dumbass questions, just digging. So we did as we were told. I, for one, needed the money more than I needed my curiosity satisfied. We dug for about two hours before packing in for the night. Before we left, the supervisor handed us each a couple of crisp hundred dollar bills from a large brown envelope. A hundred dollars an hour was enough to keep my mind on other things - a couple nights of this and my rent would be covered for the month. A few weeks, and I’d be set until summer. So I came back the next night, and the next, and the next. For a while, it was the same - dig a hole, call down the man, fill it in, repeat. The only thing I could figure was that they must be looking for something out here. But what could it be? Buried treasure? Did that tight-lipped bastard ordering us around have a map with a big red X on it, pointing him to this shithole? Whatever it was, apparently we weren’t finding it fast enough, because after a week there were five more shovels and one more cigarette burning in the distance. So our progress was doubled, and we reorganized twice as many grains of sand each night. But the money kept coming, so there wasn’t much to complain about. I had my days to enjoy my new cash flow, and we weren’t working long enough hours to lose much sleep over. I think it was the eighteenth night in the desert. I was onto my third hole of the night. I guess after a while, the monotony started to get to me or something, because I just couldn’t stop thinking about what could have drawn whoever was paying us to look out here of all places. I heard one of the other guys say that this whole area used to be a mountain chain, but over the years the peaks were battered down to sand by the elements. Doesn’t seem like the kind of place anything interesting would be buried if you ask me. But as I was thinking, I guess my body kept digging on autopilot - I was six feet deep by the time I snapped out of it. I could have climbed out and called one of the supervisors over, but something felt different about this hole. As I stood and looked to the bottom of the pit I had dug, something told me to keep going. I can’t explain it... but I had come that far, and I felt like my work wasn’t finished. So I dug the blade into the sand again, and again, not stopping to measure how deep I was going. Of course, the other nine guys had stopped at five feet like normal, so when the cigarette cherries died out and the supervisors came down to check our work, both of them stopped to gaze down at me. One of them asked me why I hadn’t stopped. I told him; something was down there, I could just feel it. I expected him to call me a dumbass again. But to my surprise, he actually called out to the other diggers and told them to drop what they were doing and come over to expand the area I was working on. I hardly noticed them joining in, honestly, that’s how focussed I was. Almost like I was in some kind of trance. I just kept digging and digging, that feeling pushing me to go deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the sand. We must have spent an hour working like that - me digging deeper at the center, the others widening out the walls. Not that any of us kept track. We were all lost in the work. But all of a sudden, I felt a solid clang when I pierced my shovel through the sand. I had struck something, probably a rock, big enough to not budge in the slightest when I struck it. It sent vibrations through the shovel and up my arm, snapping me back to reality for the moment. I looked up and could barely believe my eyes: we must have dug twenty feet deep. How long had we been at it? I knelt down and started scooping sand away by hand so I could try and get that rock out of the way. I realized then that my heart was pounding. I felt anxious, like we were getting close to something big. I pushed the sand as fast as I could, trying to get to that rock - and then, there it was. Only, as I got the sand off of it, and the others noticed I’d found something, we realized it was way too big to be a rock. That, and the top was perfectly round. Like, unnaturally round. Like it was artificial. Manmade. The supervisors called out for us to call it a night. I have to say, it was tough to walk away from what we’d - what I’d - found. I kept looking back at it as we packed up to leave. Hell, I almost forgot to stop for the money I earned. All of a sudden that wasn’t why I wanted to be out here. I just had to know what that thing buried in the sand was. I thought about it all night. I don’t think I slept four hours, and when I did I think I dreamt of the thing. If it was some kind of artifact, shouldn’t some professor type guys be digging it up? Arachnologists or whatever? I guess that didn’t matter, because now I was the one doing it. And now I was invested. The next night I got there almost an hour early. I had to do a double take - since last night they’d put up one of those aluminum sheds that take no time to set up. I guess now that we couldn’t fill the holes in to keep our work secret, this was the next best thing. At least it hid what went on inside. Even though I was early, I wasn’t the first one there. I got to the door of the shed and the first supervisor was standing there, smoking a cigarette. He let me in - a few men were already digging, with supervisors standing at the edge of the hole and looking down on them. More diggers trickled in, and by the time they stopped coming I counted thirty of us with shovels, and six supervisors directing us. A few of us worked to uncover more of the object in the middle of the hole, and the rest of them kept widening the hole so we wouldn’t get trapped. It wasn’t long before we got a clue to what this thing was - as we dug down, we saw that the round top was just the tip of something way, way bigger. It was definitely manmade. Turns out it was some kind of pillar. On top it was carved into sort of an egg-shaped tip about two feet wide, and at the base of the egg there were some kind of decorative carvings - at least, they looked decorative. A flared base separated the top from the main pillar, which was almost a perfect cylinder. It was perfectly circular all the way around, and as we got a little deeper we started to notice it was flaring outwards ever so slightly as we got closer to the bottom. Not that we stopped to measure. We just kept digging, down, down, down, desperate to unearth this thing. And the deeper we dug, the stronger the urge got. We worked all through the night, way more than two hours. We hardly noticed the time passing. We just wanted to see what was down there. It was nearly sunrise when the supervisors had to tell us to stop. We were more than curious. We were determined. The next night, we were ready to start almost as soon as the sun went down. It seemed like there was no end to the thing - the more we dug, the bigger it seemed. Every night for a week, thirty-six men met under that sheet metal roof to see just how far into the darkness we could dig. Then suddenly, we struck something else. The pillar finally came to an end about forty feet from the top. What we found was that it was connected to a huge, flat platform, and this pillar marked a sixty-degree corner of it. Again we realized this thing was way bigger than we had imagined - it seemed obvious that the platform was probably a large hexagon if the other corners were the same angle, and they were probably marked with a pillar of their own. As our mental image of this thing grew, so did our eagerness to keep going. And our workforce had to grow, too, to keep up with the demand. It was delicate work, so we couldn’t use machinery - before long there were over two hundred people on site, working all through the night to expose this thing. Later I found out there were two hundred and sixteen; thirty-six supervisors, a hundred and eighty diggers. Bigger and bigger the hole grew, and every so often it got close enough to the walls of the shed that by the next night it had to be replaced with a bigger one. We got to the point where we were so deep in the sand that the heat of the daylight sun didn’t reach us, and the light wouldn’t penetrate the shed, so we couldn’t even tell day from night as we worked. So we worked through the days, too, with nothing to stop us. I don’t know how long we’d been working like that when I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a break. I had no thoughts of stopping for food, water, or sleep - I felt no hunger, no thirst, and no fatigue despite digging for days without rest. It should have been a disturbing realization. But instead I pushed it to the back of my mind, forcing away any distractions to the process. Finally, after what must have been months in the desert, it was done. We could never have known the size of it when we started. It was on the scale of a football field or a baseball stadium. As we had guessed, the platform formed a huge hexagon, with each corner housing a pillar just like the first one we found. I think it’s called a dais - I heard that word in a video game or something. A big platform used for religious ceremonies and stuff. It definitely gave off a spiritual vibe. Not to mention the effect it had been having on us as we worked. It was hard to take it all in at once in the darkness - you could really only see a few feet in any direction. But once we had finished marveling at it, we kept shuffling around on autopilot. The compulsion to dig was replaced with something else - like a magnetic pull I was drawn to the center of the platform. I couldn’t see the exact center since I didn’t have the pillars for reference, but something was definitely drawing me in. I wasn’t the only one, either. Shortly after I got there it started to get crowded, as all of the diggers tried to reach that spot that was apparently calling to us all. The supervisors were up to something different. They had arranged themselves around us, six of them in a line, with each line radiating from the center out toward one of the pillars. I looked toward the first pillar we had dug up, and saw the original supervisor standing nearest to us, with five others dotting the space between him and the pillar behind them. The six supervisors that formed the ring closest to us was each still smoking a cigarette, and so I could just barely make out that they were each holding a piece of paper. I may not have heard it if I hadn’t seen his lips move in the dim light, but the first one began to read from the paper, his voice barely carrying across the room. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, it was just a dull rumble by the time it reached my ears. But every now and then he’d pause, and the other five would respond all at once, reading from their own papers. Their voices were calming, almost like a lullaby. I could have stayed there forever, I was so relaxed and content. But it didn’t last forever. The voices eventually stopped, and for a moment, there was complete silence. Then, in a quick motion, the first supervisor touched his paper to the tip of his cigarette. The paper burst into flames, and before he burned his fingers he tossed the page high into the air. The others immediately followed, and in the air all we could see were six fireballs floating in the darkness. I turned away in shock and pain, my eyes not used to the light - but the light didn’t care. It kept growing larger and stronger. The light of the flames seemed to activate something in the pillars themselves. They slowly started to give off light of their own, barely noticeable at first, but as the flames died the glow of the pillars grew and grew, until it became unbearable. Even with my eyes closed, the brightness made them hurt. Brighter and brighter, I was sure I’d go blind - then, all at once, darkness fell over us again. When I opened my eyes, the supervisors were gone. Me and the rest of the diggers were left on the platform, huddled at the center, wondering what had just happened. Slowly we began to realize just how strange everything had been up to this point - as we came back to our senses, we started to panic just a little. It was like coming out of hypnosis. Why had we been so obsessed? How long were we out here? And when was the last time we ate or slept? We figured the supervisors just went home for the day, so we might as well go home too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been home, come to think of it. But we quickly realized that wasn’t an option. The entrance to the hole was nowhere to be found. The panic grew. Was this some kind of sick joke? How could we get out? Eventually someone noticed that they couldn’t even see the ceiling anymore. There was no sign of the shed that used to be there. But in the dark we couldn’t be sure. Someone else grabbed a rock and threw it upwards - in response, we heard the thud of the rock as it hit only sand. See, the place we’re in now, it’s not the same platform we dug up. It’s virtually identical in every way - same six pillars, same big hexagon. But we’re somewhere else now. This place, wherever it is, still has sand all around. It hasn’t been unearthed yet. That’s right. We’re underground. No way of knowing how deep underground, either. Now you’ve heard it, you know as much as we do. But we’ve got a few ideas. We figure whoever built these things, ages ago, must have figured a way to use them for transportation. Some kind of mystical understanding of the universe that got lost to the sands of time, literally and figuratively, along with their civilization. We dug one up, but wherever it sent us, there’s no way of knowing. We could be at the center of the earth for all we know. So all we can do is dig. Lucky for us, it seems like we still don’t need to eat or sleep. Or I suppose that’s unlucky, depending how you look at it. Obviously there’s something supernatural at work here, but at least it means there’s a possibility of getting out of here. How long’s it been? Well, you tell me. Every now and then, someone like you comes along who manages to transport themselves here accidentally - like I said, we don’t know how any of this shit works. It teleported us underground, who’s to say it doesn’t affect time too? But if the info we have from people like you is true, we’ve gone through a few presidents since I first got here. Down here in the darkness, though, with no sun to rise and fall and mark the days, time all kind of just starts blending together. So we dig. Some of us dig, still hoping we find a way out someday. Some of us dig because they don’t know what else to do. Some of us do it to keep from going insane. But it’s not all bad. We’ve got a few cigarettes left. Every now and then we’ll light one up and it lets us see how far we’ve come. We try to conserve them, though - only so many to go around. But you’re new here, so go ahead, feel free. I’ll have one with you. Call it a welcome to your new home. Just one question for you.