Core Memory

The drill had gotten deep. This project was putting the Kola Borehole to shame. When they started no one had expected this, it was just another drilling job, searching for untapped oil. The company eventually had enough of the dry hole and pulled the funding, but an eccentric billionaire took an interest and bought out the project.

Robotics experts did most of the work after that, telling the drill head what to do, making sure the coolant was flowing, keeping the structural bracing efforts on track. My job as overseer consisted mostly of standing out by the mine shaft and watching the earth come out of the conveyor belt.

It had turned red recently, not a desert clay red, but a deeper red I had never seen before. The vibrations coming up the shaft were different, they were stuttered, less rhythmic, almost painful to listen to. Something is going on down there, so many kilometers below. The robot nerds said everything was working fine, but they never leave their cubicle lined building with its coffee pots and vending machines. They just look at the screens and graphs. It's not in their contract to come out here and touch the earth.

Only here, at the shaft, can you truly feel the majesty of the deepness.

I felt the sigh long before the alarms went off. Something had been struck, something was released. A pocket of pressure is what they said later, but I knew different. Standing there as the sigh washed over me, I suddenly had a new memory, of a time and place I had never been:

A great sheet of ice, spanning across a continent, not tapering to an edge but ending in a wall, a wall running on and on and on, unfathomable by human comparison. Atop the sheet is an ocean of melted water, decades of warmth in the making. Then a crack appears in the wall of ice, the water begins to seep through, then gush, then rush, then the wall crumbles away in both directions as the ocean is released. The water is relentless. The landscape is scraped down to bare rock and beyond. Miles and miles of water pour through the broken ice wall, creating a new ocean where once had been land.

My mind crumbled trying to comprehend the vastness of the event. Pain burst into my skull, I threw myself to the ground in agony.

#

I woke up in a hospital bed, bandages around my head. The television was on, muted, but showing a disaster scene. The billionaire was in a chair next to me. She spoke, her words sounding faint.

“We found you unconscious at the shaft. The local hospital sent you here for major surgery. Pressure was building inside your skull, the doctors drilled a hole to let the pressure out. Kind of ironic.”

I tried to speak, tried to point at the screen, but found I was unable, too weak to do either.

“You have been unconscious for a month.” She waved a hand in the direction of the TV.

“Yes, that disaster is at the drill site. Two days after we hit that pressure pocket, there was a massive earthquake that crushed the shaft. It also killed nearly everybody within a hundred miles.”

She was silent for a long time after that.

“This was my fault. I wanted to see how deep we could go.”

She stood up, her billionaire mask dropping away, revealing an expression reserved only for those knowingly guilty of atrocity.

“They said I could wait until you woke up. You are the only survivor, please tell them everything you remember”. The door opened as she approached it, people in uniforms I didn’t recognize led her away.

A pair of stern looking people in suits came in. One had a pad of paper in hand, the other seemed too important to take notes. The important one spoke.

“Tell us what happened at the drill site.”

It wasn’t a question.

I tried to recall the events of the day. But the only memory I had left was a massive wall of ice, giving way to a rushing ocean churning across the land. This memory has pushed all others from my mind. I don’t know how long until I regain the strength to speak, but I need to tell them, I need to tell everyone.

Don’t drill too deep, because the earth can remember.