His mind soon went to Constance whom he had left in the fourth below. He didn’t know what had happened to her as he continued his journey. If she had come with she surely would have died along with Penelope.
His mind then went to Blue. It felt like time had slowed down during his time in the underground. He couldn’t believe it had only been a little less than two weeks of wandering and searching. He couldn’t imagine what Blue would be doing down here. Perhaps this had been the job she had spoken of in her voice image.
As the thoughts drifted from his head he continued the climb up the small mountain. Smoke chuckled slightly; he called this a small mountain though he had never actually seen a mountain, neither in the distance nor up close. He had no real frame of reference to know if this really was a small mountain or nothing more than just a large hill. It sure felt like a mountain to him. He had been used to flat ground everywhere. If there had been any deviations in the ground they had been manmade and never lasted long before they’d get filled back in or levelled off.
The office house looked closer as he rounded the small mountain. He could begin to see the faux-wood textures of the siding and the plastic glass that allowed the light from within to illuminate the surrounding area. He couldn’t quite see inside the office house but he knew it wouldn’t be long before he could.
It took him much longer than anticipated to reach the top. By the time he reached the flattened patch he had begun to breathe heavy. Sweat beaded from his forehead and rolled down his face. He growled as he collapsed to his knees as he caught his breath. He wasn’t out of shape by any means, for a person in the underground at his age he could be considered pretty fit. Elevated land had just never been a part of his life unless he made his way to the surface.
He staggered back up to his feet. He could feel the pain in his legs screaming as he took a step forward. He approached the door; it looked to be made of the same faux-wood the rest of the building had been made from. The words ‘Portia Lincoln: Manager to The Engine, Section #12846’ had been carved into the door. Smoke wondered if they had to change doors whenever a manager had to be replaced. He then wondered how often they changed managers. Odds are it was a lifelong position. If they didn’t give him Blue they may be changing the door sooner than later.
He knocked and waited for a response. If he could get Blue out and be on their way without any bloodshed, he’d take that option. The texture his knuckles felt told him the door had been made of real wood. He could hear rustling on the other side of the door
He knocked again. Once again he could hear someone inside moving around. His knocks were being heard. This could be a test, a test to see how many knocks it would take before he’d come in. It was possible. He didn’t care either way. As he knocked again he could feel the surge of wonder shift through him. What was on the other end of that door? Would how he entered matter? Was the door even locked?
He didn’t hear any more shuffling - that didn’t matter. He grabbed the wooden handle and twisted. He could hear the sound of the mechanism as the door opened. The interior of the office house was brightly lit with electric bulbs. Papers were scattered around in a form of organized chaos on the several desks that lined the walls. In the center of the room, a woman sat behind a desk with a bright red typewriter. She sat and continued typing as he entered. “Three knocks… interesting,” she said with a voice that soothed his nerves. “Welcome Mister Callahan, and forgive me for not greeting you. I am just finishing up this report.”
“What report?” Smoke asked. He felt a genuine curiosity enter him as he asked the question.
She finally looked up from the typewriter. It had been difficult to see the details of her face with her bright blonde hair covering the majority of it as she looked down. Now he could see the kind, green eyes that hid behind them. Her face had been nothing fancy, not exactly a homely woman but certainly not fetching by any means. Her smile revealed the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth – a sign of many years of laughter. “The goings on in this office is of nobodies concern than my own. You’d do well to remember that Mister Callahan,” she said as she stood from the chair.
She had a slender body with high breasts. She looked to be fit, thin from a high metabolism. Her arms were long and ended with claw like fingers. She stepped towards Smoke with a smile that seemed too sincere for his comfort. Something about it made him uneasy. “Portia Lincoln I assume,” he said with a sour look and attitude.
She nodded, “I am, and you’re Smoke Callahan. The pleasure is all mine.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Smoke said too low for her to hear.
Portia’s nonchalant demeanor angered Smoke. She had been dancing around what he wanted to know and she knew he knew it.
“I was told I’d be able to find Blue here,” Smoke said as he straightened himself up.
“Yes,” Portia said. “Blue Lang, a stubborn girl, but will make a great manager someday.”
“Look, I don’t have time for this,” Smoke sneered, “I came a long way and lost a friend to one of your men for this. Bring me to her.”
He did his best to prevent his voice from wavering. It was all for naught though. The woman, though having a thin frame that Smoke likely could break with his bare hands, intimidated him. It wasn’t a shock either. It took a person of immeasurable strength to run an engine like this, even if she was only one of many. She approached him and placed her hand over his ear. Not wanting to be rude he mimicked her motion and they both smiled. As they brought their hands away she said, “In due time Mister Callahan. In the meantime you can be rest assured she is safe.”
“Let me guess, you’re going to take me on this grand tour Robert mentioned.”
She nodded with the same smile she had on before, “That is correct Mister Callahan. I’m going to show you everything you need to know about this engine. Then I’ll take you to Blue. If you have any questions pertaining to the engine feel free to ask. If the questions are not relevant please keep them to yourself. Understood?”
Portia was much more intelligent than Robert. Smoke had assumed as much, though he didn’t expect her to know he’d try and derail the entire tour before it had begun. He took a deep breath and began to think. He could see Portia watching him and studying his every move, learning how he moved in every moment. It wouldn’t matter what he tried, it wouldn’t be enough to get the upper hand on this woman. He knew it, she knew it. Smoke finally nodded.
Portia grinned and grabbed her scarf that had been hanging on the coatrack hidden behind the door. “Wonderful,” she said as she wrapped the scarf around her neck. “Let’s begin.” The two of them stepped out of the office house and Smoke could see farther than he’d seen before of the engine. Even at this height it looked as if the engine never ended, “This, as Robert probably said, is the Engine What Runs the World.”
“How does an engine run the world?” Smoke asked. He knew he’d get a lengthy explanation, but he’d wanted to know more about the engine since the first moment he’d laid eyes on it.
Portia’s eyes flared as he asked the question. He could tell it’d been a question she’d been asked many times before. “It doesn’t necessarily run the world. It’s just a catchy name for what we have. But it does play a major part in how the world is run and the survivability of the people in the underground.”
“Care to explain?” Smoke asked feeling a little more perturbed than before. His sense of wonder had not left, but the growing annoyance with this woman was beginning to make him feel increasingly petulant.
“It’s a really long story,” she said, “Follow me and I’ll explain everything as we go.”
“Lead the way,” Smoke said trying to calm himself down.
The two began to walk down the stairs of the small mountain. Smoke watched as she walked down the steps with grace and ease, something he couldn’t muster. “It all began with The Apocalypse War,” she said. “The world was in chaos and people were dying all around. People had begun to tunnel under t
he ground and make living places there. It was as safe as a person could be from the ravages of violence. About twenty-five years into the war, some people decided to build a device that could render the technology of the war useless. The world would be safe; people would still die, but not in droves as before. In some sort of miracle they managed to find the only spot where the war had yet to really do any real damage.
However, the war had ended before any part of the engine could be built. There were no winners, countries dissolved and everyone began to live in a dog-eat-dog sort of world. Construction began regardless. It would be ready just in case the world began fighting again.”
“Why did it take so long to dig? If the engine hadn’t even been started by the time the war ended that means it took them over twenty five years to dig… what… twelve miles under the ground?”
“Nice try Mister Callahan,” Portia said looking back at him with a grin. “I am not at liberty to discuss just how far down we are. Nice try though. Anyway, that is a good question. It took a long time to get this far down mainly because they were trying to keep everything a secret and the heat of the earth, the farther down they dug, was a killer; quite literally. All it would take was news of the tunnel to have fallen on the wrong ears and the whole project would have been compromised. It also took some time because the workers needed places to stay so they built the beginnings of what would eventually be the underground. That, Mister Callahan, takes time. They also got seriously held up trying to find a way to keep the underground cool enough to support life. By all rights everyone down here should be dead. Hell, by all rights anyone under the third below should be dead from the earth’s natural heat.
Anyway, work on the engine began and roughly a hundred and fifty years later they finally completed it - an engine capable of supporting life as well as disposing of it. Majestic in its own way while also terrifying to those whose minds are unable to grasp the sheer size and function.”
Smoke followed along her every word. He didn’t want to miss anything, “So they turned it on after it was built?”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “The records are a little fuzzy and scattered since the engine’s genesis. I do know however that it did eventually get turned on after the acts of one man took hold and threatened to turn the world into a war zone once again. A man who went by the name Alex Cooper. We don’t know if that was immediately after the engine was completed or if it was years after.”
Smoke racked his brain for a moment. He knew the name from his encyclopedias. “The last of the frozen men,” he finally said.
Portia smiled again, “You know your history. I’m impressed. Well, one thing they don’t tell you in the history books is how he led an attack on the oxygen suppliers, claiming the air was perfectly breathable. He was right, but that started a domino effect. Do you know what a lynch pin is?”
Smoke didn’t want to seem rude so he avoided the scoff at the question, “It’s something that holds various parts of a structure together. If someone would take out the lynch pin it could be catastrophic if the structure is big enough.”
“Now let’s take the man Alex Cooper and ponder what he did, taking out the oxygen suppliers. He showed the people how the government had been lying to them their entire lives. That brought the whole of the enterprises on top of him as well as the government.
Several battles and skirmishes that began to bleed into other parts of the world eventually turned it into a full on war. People from all over were picking sides, freedom from a benevolent tyrant or a good, clean and safe life. People were once again willing to fight and die for nothing more than an ideal in which they didn’t or couldn’t know how it would end. Not just the people on the surface fought either, the underground as well as a group we don’t really know much about began to fight as well.
They started up the engine but it took too long and the fighting had stopped before the engine had a chance to do anything. In fact, it had to power up. That took a lot longer than the original designers had intended. In fact, it took two hundred years for the engine to build up the energy it needed to stop the fighting and the wars. It only takes a year now, but at this size it just took time to get all the gears moving.”
“What did it do?”
Portia hung her head, “They didn’t know what it would lead to. They wanted their utopia, a place to which they could bring freedom as well as peace and harmony.”
“What did the engine do?” Smoke asked again.
“What it was designed to do. It released a massive electromagnetic pulse through the earth. It shut down anything that contained microchips or computers. I know a lot of this doesn’t mean much to you, considering you’d have gone your whole life never seeing a computer, knowing its function or anything of the sort. So when I say it sent an electromagnetic pulse, I want to help you realize just what it did to the world.”
“I’ve read the history books,” Smoke said with a sneer, “That was the new Dark Age, the end of the Common Era and what paved the way for the Magic Era and the New Era.”
Portia nodded, “That’s right. The people of the engine didn’t know what it would do though, there was no way to know the sort of impact it would have on the world. They sought to end the violence - they failed in that endeavour. They just forced the people to kill each other in more primitive ways.”
“Okay, so that’s the history of the engine,” Smoke said, wanting to move on, “What does it do now?”
Portia pointed to the ceiling, “See all those pipes and vents that go through the roof?”
“Yeah,” Smoke said not sure where she was going with this.
“Now, see all those sprockets spinning those chains?”
“Yes,” Smoke said sounding more annoyed with Portia than he had intended, “What’s your point?”
Portia’s smile faded as they left the small mountain and continued towards the path Smoke had previously taken with Robert, “When people started migrating to the underground and as the population boomed, they needed air, more than what the engine had been designed to handle. We fixed it so the underground was not only livable, but comfortable.
These pipes and vents pull air from the surface and vent it to the various levels. Same as with water. I’m sure you’ve noticed at some point in your life that water is always readily available in any level, even in the gulags of the ninth below.”
“Gulags?” Smoke asked. It was a term he hadn’t heard before.
“It’s an old term; I read it in our library and found the similarities comical. I now refer to the ninth below as the gulags.”
Smoke shrugged, he still didn’t get what gulags were. He didn’t feel it to be important at this time so he motioned for Portia to continue. “We keep the underground alive,” she said with a sign of pride in her voice. “We weren’t quite sure just how humanity would do it, staying alive in the dark. We helped in any way we could. The boilers provide the electricity needed to light the bulbs that illuminate the floors,” she paused for a moment. He wasn’t sure if it had been for pointless dramatic effect or if she had been trying to find the right words to use. “We who run the engine also decided that we would use the engine to halt the progress of technology as best we could.”
“That doesn’t sound promising for humanity,” Smoke said with an accusatory tone. “People need to progress to evolve. You’re trying to halt our evolution. What happens when someone smart comes along and tries to change things? Do you use the engine to stop them before they even have a chance to begin?”
“We haven’t used an electromagnetic pulse for probably a hundred and seventy years now,” Portia said ignoring every word Smoke said. “Good thing too, we found the power the electromagnetic pulse the engine emits was enough to fry the light filaments in the bulbs that light the underground. More people would die and it would be on our hands. Regardless, we don’t need to, we have a different alternative.”
Smoke knew what she would say before she said it, “You bring them down here t
o work the engine.”
Portia nodded, “That’s right. We have a large number of people who work for us outside the engine who fill us in on the goings on of the above worlds. When they find someone who has a talent or a way to create a scientific breakthrough that could revolutionize the world we send our scouts to bring them down here. They then work on the engine and for the engine. If they come willingly and can accept what the engine does and that their contribution will be remembered for all eternity, they are permitted to do what they need to do for the engine.
Those who refuse to come of their own free will are taken down here by force and thus are re-educated to accept the engine and all it does. It’s a harsh truth, but one people always eventually come around to. One way or another.”
Those last words hit Smoke in the chest like a mallet. “Which one was Blue?” he asked. He believed he knew the answer but didn’t want to guess it either. It could be the precursor as to how easy or difficult it would be to bring Blue from the underground.
“Blue was a difficult child,” Portia said sorrowfully. “She’s a smart girl. She knew the best thing for her to do in order to escape was to leave the tower as quickly as she could. When our scout came to get her she wasn’t there. From there on Blue continued down to the underground looking to get lost within the masses. She managed to make her way to the ninth below before we caught her. Considering she’d never descend alone, she always had someone with her, either waiting for someone to join or finding a friend to go down with.”
“Why would that make a difference?” Smoke asked.
“We don’t kill. The people of the engine are not killers. We are permitted to defend ourselves and can cause as much pain to another as we so choose. But we do not kill. That is our strict rule.”
The Engine What Runs the World Page 20