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Brutalist Stories #54

Grave Ascent

By Brutalist StoriesPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Mirny Diamond Mine Siberia

The hole appeared one day. 24 hours later, people began to disappear; it’s been going on for decades. For what reason or for what end none of us know, despite our best efforts. There’s plenty of us still free, there’s plenty of us left to try and fight and figure out where they’re taking us… all in vain.

I look down at my hands, leather mitts scarred from a life of tracking and pushing through the rock and dirt as our commander reads out the list.

“Eighty-two confirmed disappearances in the last twenty-four hours alone, people. That brings our total up to just over two-thousand this year.” He sniffs and rubs his nose, pauses for a second, a man of consideration, we all know, if he’s taking a moment, it’s required. “Now, brothers and sisters, the struggle is real. Each year, month, day, more and more are disappearing and we’re working on it. We’re working with all the resource we can muster, and you and I, us right here, we’re on the front line of that. We send you down, into the depths, into the tunnels, sometimes you don’t make it back and we lose another, but I have to ask you, is it worth it?”

“YES, SIR!” we cry in unison.

“Good, I knew you wouldn’t let me down. The price of human life is not placed on the individual, it is placed on the collective. The price of one of us, is the price of all of us. If we do not search for everyone with the same heart and soul of which we would search for our own mother and father, then we are lost. Every person that goes missing, every human that disappears, is your mother or father or brother or sister. It is this which makes us human, it is this which holds us and binds us together.”

He bows his head and breathes heavily, the plumes of steam coming from his nostrils highlighted in the dark by the spotlights on the tunnels entrance, the silhouette of his immense jawline drawn out and twitching.

“If we search for one, we search for us all. We as a race are only as good, only as justifiable as our attempts to help others. This is what you must remember when you are in the depths. This is what you must reassure yourself with when you are in the dark. You must think that if you don’t return, if you are taken to that other place, there are a band of brothers and sisters here who will come looking for you and use all their powerful might to search until their own end.”

“YES, SIR!” again in unison, and I know he’s right.

It’s hard, when you’re in there, down and down, crawling through the rock and mud and dark. There’s a fear down there that you can’t describe. Sometimes we go down in pairs, but that brings with it its own problems. Say one of you disappears while the other is there, looking directly at you? I’ve heard accounts of people that have seen it happen, their mind pulling itself apart. So, they prefer to send us down by ourselves. Search and toil, till death, for those that have gone, and to try and understand more for those that still survive.

We step onto the gigantic elevator, my comrades strapping down their webbing, fixing helmets, loading guns and the commander shouts, “Grave descenders, today we shall be heroes.”

Building inspiration: Mirny Diamond Mine Siberia

Musical inspiration: Architects – Broken Cross

science fiction
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About the Creator

Brutalist Stories

Short sci-fi stories in 500 words or less deriving from the stark style of the functionalist architecture, that is characterised by the use of concrete.

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