Digging Time!
by Rob Wheeler (2011)
Genres: Science Fiction

You are Mendoza, a miner on Pluto. The planetoid is shaking. You need to find your fellow miners and get off this rock before it breaks apart completely.

action: %
response: The shaking stops after three or four tense minutes. This piece of rock isn't going to hold together much longer.

Digging Time!

Twisting, crystalline passages carved out of pink ice and muddy rock lead down deep into the planetoid core. Tremors pulsate through your feet, up your spine, and shifting rock and newly-ground sand tumble from overhead cracks, drifting slowly downward in the near-zero gravity.

Your tracking sensor pings.
action: You check your inventory
response: You are carrying:
an alien digging tool
your tracking sensor
your atmos suit (being worn)
action: You examine the sensor
response: Thirty meters to the artificial north is the signal emitter. It is completely stationary, so Jim or Kevin either left it behind or are themselves immobilized.

Your tracking sensor pings.
action: You examine the tool
response: This was the first artifact that you came across that let you know you were on the right trail to find the missing dig crew. Of alien origin, it doesn't resemble an earthbound digging tool such as a bladed shovel.

This looks more like a corkscrew attached to a five-pronged handle with some kind of stabilizer gyroscope stuck on the end. I suppose that helps you dig "down" in a near-null-gravity planetoid core, which is where you happen to find yourself.
action: You examine the suit
response: The suit is what keeps your feet more or less on the ground, and the air in your lungs. You have about nine hours of fresh oxygen and about two days worth of recycled air before respiration ceases.

Your tracking sensor pings.
action: Go north
response: It's slow going to half-float, half-scrape yourself along a tunnel that wasn't really made for someone your size. Your suit also seems to be chugging and wheezing trying to calibrate, not sure whether the temperature is freezing cold or becoming unbearably hot.

Insulation protects you from the worst of this, but you can feel a cold sweat trickling down your back.

Abruptly, the tunnel dead ends, two meters from the signal emitter, at a solid wall.

The mining tunnel dead ends here, two meters south of the signal emitter, at a solid rock wall.
action: You look at the wall
response: The mining tunnel dead ends at a solid rock wall.

Your tracking sensor pings.
action: Dig north
response: (the solid rock wall)
It crumbles as you touch it, sending debris tumbling in slow motion down to the ground, which at least holds your weight, as negligible as your weight is right now.
action: Look around
response: The mining tunnel dead ends here, two meters south of the signal emitter, at a solid rock wall.

Your tracking sensor pings.
action: Go north
response: As you squeeze through, you dislodge enough loose sand and dirt to cause a small rockslide that seals the passage as soon as you pull your legs through.

A small chamber, round and compact like a bathysphere. Overhead, the ceiling is riddled with vent holes in a swiss cheese pattern. Below, a corkscrew hole winds down like a helter skelter slide, obscuring your view of how far down it goes. A red, wet heat steams up out of it, blurring your faceplate.

Lying dead next to the hole is Jim Alewife. There's no sign of Kevin.

You can also see a signal emitter here.
action: You look at the emitter
response: The blue button on the signal emitter is lit.

Your tracking sensor pings.
action: You press the button
response: You push the blue button. Click.

The light goes out in the emitter. Seconds later, there's a crackle over your commlink. "Mendoza, the emitter just stopped sending its signal. What is your status? Did you find them?"

"I found one of them. Jim's dead. Looks like he died waiting for Kevin to return from exploring a coreward tunnel."

There's a loud crackle about one second before a huge tremor nearly splits the chamber you're standing into two pieces. The hole you squeezed through is buried under more rocks than you'll be able to easily push out of the way, and a gout of steam spits and hisses out of the corkscrew hole.

"The way out just got lost. I'm going deeper," you report. There's only radio silence. You're on your own.
action: You examine Jim
response: You have to wipe at his faceplate to make out his features, which show parched lips and a lolling tongue. Perhaps he died of dehydration, waiting for someone to return who never did. Going down the hole would probably be an extremely risky move at this point.
action: You look at the hole
response: A corkscrew hole winds down into the planetoid core.
action: You wake jim
response: He's dead.
action: You take the emitter
response: You already have that.
action: Go downwards
response: You put your feet over the edge of the corkscrew hole and listen to yourself breathing heavily. Your heart thumping, you find some kind of stupid courage somewhere in yourself, and push off, taking the ride wherever it goes.

The corkscrew slide seems to draw you downward with magnetic power. It can't be gravity -- gravity should be getting less and less accelerative the closer you go to planetoid core, but within seconds you're twisting fast enough to become dizzy. Your hands uselessly try to grab hold, but there's not enough friction. Or too much -- your hands feel like they're burning through your gloves before you can tell there's any slowing of your momentum at all.

You feel your vision collapsing to a pinpoint, and everything is about to go black, when suddenly everything bursts wide open and bright as day.

You are tumbling and spinning in an effective zero gravity environment, in a place big enough to fit two or three mining ships end to end. Giant, ancient crystals grow in funguslike clusters around the spheric volume, spiking up toward the center, looking every bit like the inside of a geode.

Asymmetrically, a single great fossilized tree trunk grows from the far side of the cavernous space from you, with branches that twist and curl and spread and go straight and turn back again -- some kind of null gravity growth that you've never seen in an earthbound tree, which has to contend with gravity and atmosphere and winds. Here in a vacuum, other rules of growth seem to apply.

While it was alive, that is. It does look fossilized. It doesn't, however, look dead.
action: You look at the tree
response: Sitting in the center of the trunk, embedded within it, with the fibers of the tree attached to his head so that the tree seems to be plugged into his brain stem, is Kevin. His eyes are closed, his expression blank.
action: You examine Kevin
response: His eyes open. A line of silver pulsates out from his head, threading through the tree branches, flowing through capillaries. At the ends, a bright glow, a sense of drawing you closer.

Within moments, you are face to face with the face in the tree.

"This planet is dying," croaks a reedy voice. "It will break apart soon, freeing me to enter the void. You will have to help this happen, and then flee."

"What do I have to do?" you say.

"You have to dig."

"Dig?"

"Dig."
action: Dig
response: (the brain tree)
Digging time! You float down to the base of the tree and start digging, at first with your hands. A minute of this and your hands fall upon some sort of hard thing buried in the rocky soil.

After dusting it off and shaking it, what at first felt like a metal box cleans off to reveal an ancient typewriter. An Under-Wood, of course.
action: You examine typewriter
response: The typewriter is a heavy contraption, but looks in good shape for typing.

A large, papery leaf breaks off the upper branches of the tree and floats within reach of you.
action: You get the leaf
response: Taken.
action: You take the leaf
response: You already have that.
action: You read it
response: A large, papery leaf. It's blank.
action: You put the leaf in the typewriter
response: You crank the leaf into the typewriter. As soon as you touch the keys of the typewriter, it begins to automatically clack out text. With a crank and a zip, the paper leaf pops out into your hands, covered in writing.
action: You read it
response: The text of the paper reads:

"The shaking stops after three or four tense
minutes. This piece of rock isn't going to
hold together much longer..."

A sense of disorientation and dislocation spins your head around, and a headache like a piercing dagger cuts into your brain. As you look up, there is an explosion of light, followed by an explosion of darkness, as everything solid breaks apart and flies into the vacuum of space.

A great glowing silver tree floats in the void, seeming to suck all of the light and heat there is into itself to glow brighter. The tree begins to move, its branches turning into arms, its balled-up roots turning into things like fins. You are grabbed, you are enveloped, you are propelled in one direction and the tree in another.

The sun is a distant point of light, recognizably the nearest star, but impossibly small and cold. You are alone.