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Endless Levels
I didn't write this--it was a tale on the SCP Foundation that I read a long time ago and found really inspirational. I read it while I lived in Japan, and it was gone only a year or so later--the Wayback capture shows it existing in 2010 and the next time it checks in 2012 it's gone. I've thought about it often since then, and today I thought to look using the standard tale URL format and found it once again, so I'm posting it here to preserve it.
It was written before articles had comments or rating, so I don't know what it was supposed to mean. But I love the story.
Endless Levels
The floors stretched on endlessly, everybody knew that. It didn’t matter if there were legends, old ones, warped ones, about the end of the levels, about how high enough up you would find that the levels ended and another world began, or that if you went low enough you’d find a bottom, it wasn’t true. Taani knew that, everybody did…but it never hurt to wonder, as she leaned against one of the columns, since the railings were old and had a tendency to give away when unsuspecting kids leaned against them.
She looked up. A few dozen floors were illuminated, but then the lights dimmed- her great grandmother had once told her about how many more floors were illuminated, but one by one the generators had been going out. The generator on their own floor sometimes flickered and the lights would go dim and it would grow cold for days on end.
She looked down. Fewer floors were illuminated below, but if she squinted, she could see, far far down, a small ring of illuminated floors down, down, down. A warm breeze rushed up at her from somewhere infinitely below, and she sighed. It smelled like rotting eggs, gross and dizzying…but it was warm. But it carried something else with it. The smell of the dead, and of their inhuman groans, trapped by broken staircases and barricades.
“Taani!” She jerked back from the open column, staring into the darkness to the top, beyond where the floors were illuminated. “Taani! Get away from there!” Her mother chided, the older woman rushing up and pulling her away. Her mother was one of the startled, they called them, her hair prematurely gray, her fear of the bottomless column unfathomable. It was a common disorder, supposedly caused by looking into the darkness for too long.
Taani tuned her mother out as the woman pulled her back through the level, past the filthy, overcrowded food courts, and the cramped crafting stations- where much of the machinery that produced clothes and food for them had broken down or gone dead to conserve the generator’s power. Finally, she was pulled into the living stations, tiny cramped rooms, that sometimes whole families were forced to share together.
She ate her meal, a tasteless mixture of eggs and the protein wheat they grew, and then was ushered out the door to work. Taani could count herself lucky, after all, she worked in the farmer ring. A wide ring where the floor was replaced with dirt, and tasteless crops, and animals. Although as of the later years, the animals were growing thin, malnourished. Even the too-bright lamps overhead, brighter and stranger than any other light on the whole level flickered sometimes, but they had strange properties, making the plants grow where they otherwise wouldn’t, and whenever she stayed in the gardens too long her pale skin turned pink and would peel.
She was on chicken duty today, the plump greasy creatures, only partially feathered, with their scabby claws and sharp beaks were a horror to work with. The females were bloated and rarely moved from their nests on their atrophied legs, while the males…they had to work in pairs just so that one could trap and keep ahold of the large males, with their sharp talons and high, bright red feathered crests, while the other collected eggs from the pecking females.
Her partner in the gardens, a boy of the same age named Gim, helped bandage her hands afterwards, and she did the same for him.
“I hate chicken duty.” Taani growled. “I hate it. I’d rather have goat duty.” The goats, fierce little creatures, would eat anything presented to them, and weren’t above biting- sometimes hard enough to amputate a finger or two, and when angry they would charge, knocking the wind out of anybody close enough to present a target. Gim, who never said much, just shrugged.
That night shift, as the lights were manually dimmed, she sat up and checked to make sure that her mother was asleep, and stepped over her cousins who shared the living room with her on her way out the door. There were very few people during night shifts, but they still warranted avoiding. There was no faster way to be in a bad situation than to run into one of the crazies during night shift, when nobody would help you.
She shivered, checking around a corner before darting towards a small group of lights. Near the edge of the column, a group of the oldest members of the level sat, at the bottom of the stairs that led up and down to more levels. Taani spotted other children and young adults gathering to listen to the stories, and took a seat looking away from the speaker, dangling her legs over the column and looking up, into the infinite darkness.
“Once, there was only one level-“ a storyteller started. Telling a story about one infinite level that circled into a massive sphere. There was water, water so deep you could not see the bottom, covering much of it, and the rest of the sphere was covered with rich, fertile earth in which an endless garden grew, interrupted by huge living structures where many, many people lived. They had no word for billions, as there had not been that many people in so long, but the sentiment was there.
Taani could not even fathom it. The storyteller spoke of their levels, how they’d been buried inside the sphere. Of course, it wasn’t a true story, everybody knew that the levels went on forever, but still. She looked up and squinted. The topmost lit level she could see (she had visited it once, a full forty stories up) flickered, it’s dim nighttime lighting hard to spot…before something dark moved over the edge. A limp body tumbled through the dark column and whisked past them.
She frowned. Disposing of bodies in such a way was usually frowned upon, but when there was not enough room in the farm ring to bury them, it was a necessity.
It went down, down, down, and disappeared into the bottomless black, and she pulled her legs up from the edge and scooted away as the storyteller continued to spin their tale. A tale that, if one had the desire, they could start climbing up through the levels, up and up until they emerged onto the surface of that mythical sphere, where an orb made of fire lit up a roof so high it never ended.
Taani enjoyed the stories, but she thought nothing more of them.
Years passed, and Tanni went from a young girl to a tall woman, taller even than her father had been, a lucky quirk of genetics. And in those years, the dozens of levels that were lit grew to a scarce few, a handful and a half, she thought. Eight. The levels were more crowded than ever, and filthy. The air was often sour and quickly became overheated, the food was scarce, and crime and theft were at an all time high.
And then there were the shakes. It only happened every few months, perhaps, but sometimes everything would tremble and shudder and shake. They could hear levels lower cracking, and sometimes people went tumbling over the edge.
Her mother had passed, blessedly, and the old woman’s body was dumped unceremoniously down the column that she feared so much, and it wasn’t until then that Taani thought back to stories of her childhood as she paused and clung to a column, after all just leaning over could get her easily bumped and she could fall down the column with all the people jostling about. The moans of the dead were louder than ever, the next level down still operational…but full of them. She looked down the stairs, that had been destroyed, leaving an open gap that the dead could not cross. One of them, decayed gray, groaned and stumbled near the edge, falling into the nothing.
At that moment, she was suddenly struck by something that the human race had all but forgotten. Spontaneity.
She didn’t go to work that day, and started to walk up the stairs, unnoticed by all but one, as Gim followed her with his eyes quietly from where he was eating. And then she was out of sight, moving up. The stairs went in a constant spiral around the openness of the column, and up and up she went. At the top of the eighth floor, the last lit one, she had to stop and catch her breath.
Nobody went into unlit levels. Not only was it a taboo to no end, there were occasionally…sounds. Not like the shuffling or moans of the dead, no, but other sounds. A soft skittering, a scampering, like chickens on the bare floor, but much, much larger. But whatever was there never came down the stairs…and they never went up She stopped, then, looking at the shadows that consumed the staircase.
She swallowed hard. What if there were no food stores left on higher levels? No water? What if she walked until she died, or there were the dead up there? Or something even worse? Taani looked back down…at the crowded people, the smell of human filth, and then hurried up the stares. People stopped and gawked, whispering among themselves as she vanished into the shadows.
To her surprise, her eyes adjusted to the darkness after the first level, where she had to stop, blinded, only the dimmest glow from the column lighting the way. She heard nothing, and four stories later, it was so silent she could hear her heartbeat and getting chilly, although the occasional breeze from the column bought a warm blast of air.
Without night cycles to guide her, she lost track of time. Once, she heard whispering and the sounds of something moving in the dark, and she ran further up the stairs to avoid them. Another time, she heard somebody say something in a language she didn’t understand, and saw two color-changing orbs hanging in the distance of the level, then they moved away and vanished. Here and there, she would find discarded containers of water and food, and scavenged.
She became more and more used to the dark over the days, weeks, perhaps had it been? And thinner, she thought, traveling. Before long the intermittent periods of silence and whispers and movement became standard. She saw many orbs, she had decided they were eyes, watching her in the dark here and there, and sometimes the shakes started and paused again.
Then she saw light. It was just a tiny sliver of light, beaming down from the column, but it was there! She leaned over the edge of the ruined level and stared up. It was coming from above, a tiny pinpoint of light. She ran up the next dozen levels at full tilt, and the pinprick became a small, but brilliantly bright point. As she slept that night, the ground shook again, and there was a mighty crack.
Taani cautiously leaned over the edge of the column again, and drew back, startled, when dust and dirt rained down on her hair. Watching in the light, she could see little bits of dirt and stone come down every so often. Fearing that perhaps a level above had collapsed (she had never heard of such a thing, but it could happen, right?) she proceeded cautiously. This time, as she climbed stairs, she was very aware of things following her, as glances back into the shadow betrayed more as the light grew.
She would catch glimpses of clawed, talonlike feet, like a massive mimic of those of a chicken with dark skin, or of a sliding tail. And the color-changing eyes in the dark. Sometimes she saw dozens of them. But she paid them no heed, the light streaming from above fueling her intense need to move up. Up and up. Food was becoming scarce, she was dehydrated, but the light was getting brighter, closer.
When she collapsed from exhaustion, she was surprised to wake and find that there was food and water set out near her by some silent observer. Glancing back, she saw something, humanlike, but sleek and crouched like an animal, with a jagged silhouette outlining it’s back, dive down the stairs. It wasn’t her place to wonder why such a thing was helping her, or if it was her own delusions, but the food and water was real enough, and it gave her a new drive and energy. It was fresh food, too, some sort of mushrooms she’d never had before but had seen growing in the darker levels.
She ate and drank, and whispered her thanks into the darkness, then continued onwards and upwards. Then the unthinkable happened. She reached the top. There was no grand opening onto the surface of the mythical sphere, no ball of fire. Instead she looked up, and there was just a ceiling of dull stone and metal, with a few cracks in it that light and dirt filtered through.
And no more stairs.
Suddenly struck by a wave of despair, she flung herself to her knees and sobbed, so tired and unwilling to continue. She crawled to the edge of the column, and looked down. Far, far down, so far she could only think that she saw a glimmer of light, there were the remaining levels. Perhaps if she threw herself off the edge, she wondered, she could time it just right to shout and warn them that there really was no end, and not to waste their time looking.
And then, “It’s a trapdoor.” She sat upright, the first words she’d heard in her own language since leaving the lit levels, and she turned and stared. Stepping into the light, there was a…creature. No, she thought, a person, the kind she had seen in the dark, that had left her food. “I mean, the way out.”
“Who – what?” She croaked out, voice raspy and tired. And it pointed to a ladder attached to a wall, and she saw the square of raised metal above it. With a handle. Without thinking, she pushed past the creature, ignorant of its spines and claws and daggerlike teeth, and scampered up the ladder, struggling with the handle with shaking hands.
“Counter clockwise.” The creature suggested.
She wasn’t sure what that meant, but tried twisting the handle the opposite direction. It creaked, and heaved, and she shoved upwards and pulled herself out. The light was blinding at first, striking her like a physical blow. She collapsed to the side of the trapdoor and closed her eyes, bathing in the sun. And she stayed there until the shadows of ruined walls around her grew long and the sun disappeared behind him.
A small group of the creatures crept out of the trapdoor during the nighttime (she found it so strange that there was a night shift out here, too) and she finally opened her eyes and looked to them. They were inside what was left of a building, the walls crumbled and worn away – or seemingly torn down depending upon where you looked. Taani sat up, then climbed to her feet, her victory seemingly draining her energy as the rush of it wore off. She stumbled, and one of them, tall and slim, with featureless breasts like a statue of a woman, steadied her with a talon on her shoulder.
“You…what are you…” Taani wheezed, clutching at the creature’s arm. It glanced at the others, before looking back to her.
“That’s not important right now. You’ve been climbing a very, very long way.” The creature guided her, and she felt weak against its strong arms, much stronger than they seemed for their graceful slenderness. It led her to a bench formed by what was left of a thick, concrete wall, and sat her down, sitting beside her. Taani closed her eyes again and leaned against the creature heavily. It’s skin was soft, but textured somewhat like leather, inhuman, but it was alive and comforting for the moment.
Taani fell asleep without realizing it, and slept deep and dreamlessly until the next morning, when the great fire in the sky (which she quickly realized was far too bright to look at directly) woke her, and the creatures bought her a small breakfast. The eggs were raw, but she didn’t mind, although they were curiously colored, a pale blue like the endless ceiling above her, spotted with white smoke, and the plants were curious and tough roots, so strong-tasting they made her eyes water, having no memory of anything in her life so sweet, or so strong.
Still, she ate hungrily, and sipped at the water, so cold and pure it was startling. Then, she sat, silently, watching as the creatures watched her, keeping to the shadows themselves, seemingly reluctant to spend too long in the sunlight with their large, opalescent eyes that shifted colors so readily. The tall woman (she had decided that they were, in fact, women and men, as some were broad-shouldered and smooth-chested, while others had breasts and wide hips) sat beside her again, finally, and drummed her claws on the concrete.
And Taani had a question that came out as a statement, flat and angry.
“You knew the way out.”
The woman-creature nodded. “We did.” Taani turned to her with a growl.
“And you left us down there!” She snapped. “There were so few levels left! And you never thought to tell us?! Or lead us out!? Let us know that there was more than the levels?” Taani bit back a sob and took a deep breath. “You must have heard us…you knew that we didn’t believe!”
The woman-creature closed its eyes.
“If we had known-“ Taani started, and suddenly it cut her off, displaying teeth as long as her fingers, sharp as knives.
“It wasn’t our place to tell you.” It said, smoothly. “It isn’t our fault that you forgot, and left us.” Taani frowned as it continued. “…All that time underground, you forgot how to be humans. You only knew how to exist, not how to live, cramming yourselves into smaller and smaller spaces, clinging to a failing system.”
“But…but we…we were dying…the dead were moving up levels every year!”
“I know.” It looked at her, eyes a smooth, dull blue. “And you had to survive. You had to forget how to be content with wasting away, and learn how to be a human again.”
”I am a human! We all are!”
“Humans explore. They seek out. They do not wait.” It smiled at her, somehow, a subtle movement of the mouth and eyes. “Only those who remember what it is to be human would ever be able to live here, now that the world’s been reborn.” It then got up, and started to walk away on all fours, wholly animal. She followed, watching it’s long tail swing, a spiked club on the end leaving her wary. “Fortunately for you…you’re not alone.”
”With you? With…whatever you are?”
“No.” It didn’t elaborate further, and led her along. They walked over soft, short grass like she’d never felt before, past large branched…things, that reminded her of the garden’s fruit-baring plants, but much larger. Some were taller than her. Some were several levels tall! She touched them, moving slowly with the creatures, feeling unhewn stone and the rough, deeply ridged skin of the large plants. The air smelled…sweet. Different from eggs and humans as it had before. Instead it smelled like dirt and the gardens and water vapor.
They walked all day, stopping only to rest when the light was highest in the sky and it was hottest, then again when it neared the horizon and it started to grow cooler, although not uncomfortably so. But before the light (she asked the creatures, and they called it a son. When she asked what it was the son of, they chuckled and didn’t answer) touched the edge of the earth (she noticed the horizon curved, and had confirmed that it was, indeed, a sphere so massive it had no end) she saw something…familiar.
Houses. Just a short ways away. With lit windows, like the living quarters back on her level. One of the creatures broke to all fours and ran into the…grouping of short, squat buildings, made out of the tall plants and stone and earth, and metal, much to her surprise. As they drew closer still, she watched as the creature that had ran forwards spoke to- a man! A human man.
Taani breathed a deep sigh of relief, and he looked up at her and smiled, her eyes drawn to a massive polished stone jewel hanging around his neck on a chain.
“Taani?” He asked, extending a hand to her, which she cautiously took. “…It’s good to see you finally come out. Come along, we’ll introduce you to the others who’ve come up. You can call me Bright.”
”Like the…son?”
”Just like.”
It was only a few short days later, as she sat in the temporary home for others like her, who had climbed her way up through the levels to escape, that she heard Bright greeting somebody outside, and listened in.
“Hello, Gim, that was your name, right?”
Original source (through wayback) is here.
It was written before articles had comments or rating, so I don't know what it was supposed to mean. But I love the story.
Endless Levels
The floors stretched on endlessly, everybody knew that. It didn’t matter if there were legends, old ones, warped ones, about the end of the levels, about how high enough up you would find that the levels ended and another world began, or that if you went low enough you’d find a bottom, it wasn’t true. Taani knew that, everybody did…but it never hurt to wonder, as she leaned against one of the columns, since the railings were old and had a tendency to give away when unsuspecting kids leaned against them.
She looked up. A few dozen floors were illuminated, but then the lights dimmed- her great grandmother had once told her about how many more floors were illuminated, but one by one the generators had been going out. The generator on their own floor sometimes flickered and the lights would go dim and it would grow cold for days on end.
She looked down. Fewer floors were illuminated below, but if she squinted, she could see, far far down, a small ring of illuminated floors down, down, down. A warm breeze rushed up at her from somewhere infinitely below, and she sighed. It smelled like rotting eggs, gross and dizzying…but it was warm. But it carried something else with it. The smell of the dead, and of their inhuman groans, trapped by broken staircases and barricades.
“Taani!” She jerked back from the open column, staring into the darkness to the top, beyond where the floors were illuminated. “Taani! Get away from there!” Her mother chided, the older woman rushing up and pulling her away. Her mother was one of the startled, they called them, her hair prematurely gray, her fear of the bottomless column unfathomable. It was a common disorder, supposedly caused by looking into the darkness for too long.
Taani tuned her mother out as the woman pulled her back through the level, past the filthy, overcrowded food courts, and the cramped crafting stations- where much of the machinery that produced clothes and food for them had broken down or gone dead to conserve the generator’s power. Finally, she was pulled into the living stations, tiny cramped rooms, that sometimes whole families were forced to share together.
She ate her meal, a tasteless mixture of eggs and the protein wheat they grew, and then was ushered out the door to work. Taani could count herself lucky, after all, she worked in the farmer ring. A wide ring where the floor was replaced with dirt, and tasteless crops, and animals. Although as of the later years, the animals were growing thin, malnourished. Even the too-bright lamps overhead, brighter and stranger than any other light on the whole level flickered sometimes, but they had strange properties, making the plants grow where they otherwise wouldn’t, and whenever she stayed in the gardens too long her pale skin turned pink and would peel.
She was on chicken duty today, the plump greasy creatures, only partially feathered, with their scabby claws and sharp beaks were a horror to work with. The females were bloated and rarely moved from their nests on their atrophied legs, while the males…they had to work in pairs just so that one could trap and keep ahold of the large males, with their sharp talons and high, bright red feathered crests, while the other collected eggs from the pecking females.
Her partner in the gardens, a boy of the same age named Gim, helped bandage her hands afterwards, and she did the same for him.
“I hate chicken duty.” Taani growled. “I hate it. I’d rather have goat duty.” The goats, fierce little creatures, would eat anything presented to them, and weren’t above biting- sometimes hard enough to amputate a finger or two, and when angry they would charge, knocking the wind out of anybody close enough to present a target. Gim, who never said much, just shrugged.
That night shift, as the lights were manually dimmed, she sat up and checked to make sure that her mother was asleep, and stepped over her cousins who shared the living room with her on her way out the door. There were very few people during night shifts, but they still warranted avoiding. There was no faster way to be in a bad situation than to run into one of the crazies during night shift, when nobody would help you.
She shivered, checking around a corner before darting towards a small group of lights. Near the edge of the column, a group of the oldest members of the level sat, at the bottom of the stairs that led up and down to more levels. Taani spotted other children and young adults gathering to listen to the stories, and took a seat looking away from the speaker, dangling her legs over the column and looking up, into the infinite darkness.
“Once, there was only one level-“ a storyteller started. Telling a story about one infinite level that circled into a massive sphere. There was water, water so deep you could not see the bottom, covering much of it, and the rest of the sphere was covered with rich, fertile earth in which an endless garden grew, interrupted by huge living structures where many, many people lived. They had no word for billions, as there had not been that many people in so long, but the sentiment was there.
Taani could not even fathom it. The storyteller spoke of their levels, how they’d been buried inside the sphere. Of course, it wasn’t a true story, everybody knew that the levels went on forever, but still. She looked up and squinted. The topmost lit level she could see (she had visited it once, a full forty stories up) flickered, it’s dim nighttime lighting hard to spot…before something dark moved over the edge. A limp body tumbled through the dark column and whisked past them.
She frowned. Disposing of bodies in such a way was usually frowned upon, but when there was not enough room in the farm ring to bury them, it was a necessity.
It went down, down, down, and disappeared into the bottomless black, and she pulled her legs up from the edge and scooted away as the storyteller continued to spin their tale. A tale that, if one had the desire, they could start climbing up through the levels, up and up until they emerged onto the surface of that mythical sphere, where an orb made of fire lit up a roof so high it never ended.
Taani enjoyed the stories, but she thought nothing more of them.
Years passed, and Tanni went from a young girl to a tall woman, taller even than her father had been, a lucky quirk of genetics. And in those years, the dozens of levels that were lit grew to a scarce few, a handful and a half, she thought. Eight. The levels were more crowded than ever, and filthy. The air was often sour and quickly became overheated, the food was scarce, and crime and theft were at an all time high.
And then there were the shakes. It only happened every few months, perhaps, but sometimes everything would tremble and shudder and shake. They could hear levels lower cracking, and sometimes people went tumbling over the edge.
Her mother had passed, blessedly, and the old woman’s body was dumped unceremoniously down the column that she feared so much, and it wasn’t until then that Taani thought back to stories of her childhood as she paused and clung to a column, after all just leaning over could get her easily bumped and she could fall down the column with all the people jostling about. The moans of the dead were louder than ever, the next level down still operational…but full of them. She looked down the stairs, that had been destroyed, leaving an open gap that the dead could not cross. One of them, decayed gray, groaned and stumbled near the edge, falling into the nothing.
At that moment, she was suddenly struck by something that the human race had all but forgotten. Spontaneity.
She didn’t go to work that day, and started to walk up the stairs, unnoticed by all but one, as Gim followed her with his eyes quietly from where he was eating. And then she was out of sight, moving up. The stairs went in a constant spiral around the openness of the column, and up and up she went. At the top of the eighth floor, the last lit one, she had to stop and catch her breath.
Nobody went into unlit levels. Not only was it a taboo to no end, there were occasionally…sounds. Not like the shuffling or moans of the dead, no, but other sounds. A soft skittering, a scampering, like chickens on the bare floor, but much, much larger. But whatever was there never came down the stairs…and they never went up She stopped, then, looking at the shadows that consumed the staircase.
She swallowed hard. What if there were no food stores left on higher levels? No water? What if she walked until she died, or there were the dead up there? Or something even worse? Taani looked back down…at the crowded people, the smell of human filth, and then hurried up the stares. People stopped and gawked, whispering among themselves as she vanished into the shadows.
To her surprise, her eyes adjusted to the darkness after the first level, where she had to stop, blinded, only the dimmest glow from the column lighting the way. She heard nothing, and four stories later, it was so silent she could hear her heartbeat and getting chilly, although the occasional breeze from the column bought a warm blast of air.
Without night cycles to guide her, she lost track of time. Once, she heard whispering and the sounds of something moving in the dark, and she ran further up the stairs to avoid them. Another time, she heard somebody say something in a language she didn’t understand, and saw two color-changing orbs hanging in the distance of the level, then they moved away and vanished. Here and there, she would find discarded containers of water and food, and scavenged.
She became more and more used to the dark over the days, weeks, perhaps had it been? And thinner, she thought, traveling. Before long the intermittent periods of silence and whispers and movement became standard. She saw many orbs, she had decided they were eyes, watching her in the dark here and there, and sometimes the shakes started and paused again.
Then she saw light. It was just a tiny sliver of light, beaming down from the column, but it was there! She leaned over the edge of the ruined level and stared up. It was coming from above, a tiny pinpoint of light. She ran up the next dozen levels at full tilt, and the pinprick became a small, but brilliantly bright point. As she slept that night, the ground shook again, and there was a mighty crack.
Taani cautiously leaned over the edge of the column again, and drew back, startled, when dust and dirt rained down on her hair. Watching in the light, she could see little bits of dirt and stone come down every so often. Fearing that perhaps a level above had collapsed (she had never heard of such a thing, but it could happen, right?) she proceeded cautiously. This time, as she climbed stairs, she was very aware of things following her, as glances back into the shadow betrayed more as the light grew.
She would catch glimpses of clawed, talonlike feet, like a massive mimic of those of a chicken with dark skin, or of a sliding tail. And the color-changing eyes in the dark. Sometimes she saw dozens of them. But she paid them no heed, the light streaming from above fueling her intense need to move up. Up and up. Food was becoming scarce, she was dehydrated, but the light was getting brighter, closer.
When she collapsed from exhaustion, she was surprised to wake and find that there was food and water set out near her by some silent observer. Glancing back, she saw something, humanlike, but sleek and crouched like an animal, with a jagged silhouette outlining it’s back, dive down the stairs. It wasn’t her place to wonder why such a thing was helping her, or if it was her own delusions, but the food and water was real enough, and it gave her a new drive and energy. It was fresh food, too, some sort of mushrooms she’d never had before but had seen growing in the darker levels.
She ate and drank, and whispered her thanks into the darkness, then continued onwards and upwards. Then the unthinkable happened. She reached the top. There was no grand opening onto the surface of the mythical sphere, no ball of fire. Instead she looked up, and there was just a ceiling of dull stone and metal, with a few cracks in it that light and dirt filtered through.
And no more stairs.
Suddenly struck by a wave of despair, she flung herself to her knees and sobbed, so tired and unwilling to continue. She crawled to the edge of the column, and looked down. Far, far down, so far she could only think that she saw a glimmer of light, there were the remaining levels. Perhaps if she threw herself off the edge, she wondered, she could time it just right to shout and warn them that there really was no end, and not to waste their time looking.
And then, “It’s a trapdoor.” She sat upright, the first words she’d heard in her own language since leaving the lit levels, and she turned and stared. Stepping into the light, there was a…creature. No, she thought, a person, the kind she had seen in the dark, that had left her food. “I mean, the way out.”
“Who – what?” She croaked out, voice raspy and tired. And it pointed to a ladder attached to a wall, and she saw the square of raised metal above it. With a handle. Without thinking, she pushed past the creature, ignorant of its spines and claws and daggerlike teeth, and scampered up the ladder, struggling with the handle with shaking hands.
“Counter clockwise.” The creature suggested.
She wasn’t sure what that meant, but tried twisting the handle the opposite direction. It creaked, and heaved, and she shoved upwards and pulled herself out. The light was blinding at first, striking her like a physical blow. She collapsed to the side of the trapdoor and closed her eyes, bathing in the sun. And she stayed there until the shadows of ruined walls around her grew long and the sun disappeared behind him.
A small group of the creatures crept out of the trapdoor during the nighttime (she found it so strange that there was a night shift out here, too) and she finally opened her eyes and looked to them. They were inside what was left of a building, the walls crumbled and worn away – or seemingly torn down depending upon where you looked. Taani sat up, then climbed to her feet, her victory seemingly draining her energy as the rush of it wore off. She stumbled, and one of them, tall and slim, with featureless breasts like a statue of a woman, steadied her with a talon on her shoulder.
“You…what are you…” Taani wheezed, clutching at the creature’s arm. It glanced at the others, before looking back to her.
“That’s not important right now. You’ve been climbing a very, very long way.” The creature guided her, and she felt weak against its strong arms, much stronger than they seemed for their graceful slenderness. It led her to a bench formed by what was left of a thick, concrete wall, and sat her down, sitting beside her. Taani closed her eyes again and leaned against the creature heavily. It’s skin was soft, but textured somewhat like leather, inhuman, but it was alive and comforting for the moment.
Taani fell asleep without realizing it, and slept deep and dreamlessly until the next morning, when the great fire in the sky (which she quickly realized was far too bright to look at directly) woke her, and the creatures bought her a small breakfast. The eggs were raw, but she didn’t mind, although they were curiously colored, a pale blue like the endless ceiling above her, spotted with white smoke, and the plants were curious and tough roots, so strong-tasting they made her eyes water, having no memory of anything in her life so sweet, or so strong.
Still, she ate hungrily, and sipped at the water, so cold and pure it was startling. Then, she sat, silently, watching as the creatures watched her, keeping to the shadows themselves, seemingly reluctant to spend too long in the sunlight with their large, opalescent eyes that shifted colors so readily. The tall woman (she had decided that they were, in fact, women and men, as some were broad-shouldered and smooth-chested, while others had breasts and wide hips) sat beside her again, finally, and drummed her claws on the concrete.
And Taani had a question that came out as a statement, flat and angry.
“You knew the way out.”
The woman-creature nodded. “We did.” Taani turned to her with a growl.
“And you left us down there!” She snapped. “There were so few levels left! And you never thought to tell us?! Or lead us out!? Let us know that there was more than the levels?” Taani bit back a sob and took a deep breath. “You must have heard us…you knew that we didn’t believe!”
The woman-creature closed its eyes.
“If we had known-“ Taani started, and suddenly it cut her off, displaying teeth as long as her fingers, sharp as knives.
“It wasn’t our place to tell you.” It said, smoothly. “It isn’t our fault that you forgot, and left us.” Taani frowned as it continued. “…All that time underground, you forgot how to be humans. You only knew how to exist, not how to live, cramming yourselves into smaller and smaller spaces, clinging to a failing system.”
“But…but we…we were dying…the dead were moving up levels every year!”
“I know.” It looked at her, eyes a smooth, dull blue. “And you had to survive. You had to forget how to be content with wasting away, and learn how to be a human again.”
”I am a human! We all are!”
“Humans explore. They seek out. They do not wait.” It smiled at her, somehow, a subtle movement of the mouth and eyes. “Only those who remember what it is to be human would ever be able to live here, now that the world’s been reborn.” It then got up, and started to walk away on all fours, wholly animal. She followed, watching it’s long tail swing, a spiked club on the end leaving her wary. “Fortunately for you…you’re not alone.”
”With you? With…whatever you are?”
“No.” It didn’t elaborate further, and led her along. They walked over soft, short grass like she’d never felt before, past large branched…things, that reminded her of the garden’s fruit-baring plants, but much larger. Some were taller than her. Some were several levels tall! She touched them, moving slowly with the creatures, feeling unhewn stone and the rough, deeply ridged skin of the large plants. The air smelled…sweet. Different from eggs and humans as it had before. Instead it smelled like dirt and the gardens and water vapor.
They walked all day, stopping only to rest when the light was highest in the sky and it was hottest, then again when it neared the horizon and it started to grow cooler, although not uncomfortably so. But before the light (she asked the creatures, and they called it a son. When she asked what it was the son of, they chuckled and didn’t answer) touched the edge of the earth (she noticed the horizon curved, and had confirmed that it was, indeed, a sphere so massive it had no end) she saw something…familiar.
Houses. Just a short ways away. With lit windows, like the living quarters back on her level. One of the creatures broke to all fours and ran into the…grouping of short, squat buildings, made out of the tall plants and stone and earth, and metal, much to her surprise. As they drew closer still, she watched as the creature that had ran forwards spoke to- a man! A human man.
Taani breathed a deep sigh of relief, and he looked up at her and smiled, her eyes drawn to a massive polished stone jewel hanging around his neck on a chain.
“Taani?” He asked, extending a hand to her, which she cautiously took. “…It’s good to see you finally come out. Come along, we’ll introduce you to the others who’ve come up. You can call me Bright.”
”Like the…son?”
”Just like.”
It was only a few short days later, as she sat in the temporary home for others like her, who had climbed her way up through the levels to escape, that she heard Bright greeting somebody outside, and listened in.
“Hello, Gim, that was your name, right?”
Original source (through wayback) is here.
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