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Page 30.
23. Underworld Retro
 “What are you thinking, Jared?” asked Stella.
They sat facing each other on the floor in the gloomy cell deep in the underworld beneath Olympia House.
“I’m wondering if we should risk making a run for it.”
“I was worried, but my focus was on tracking you.”
“What did you encounter?”
She folded her hands together in her lap and looked down at them, as if gazing into a cloud of memories. “I went down, down, down. Sometimes the stairs were broken. Everything here is very ancient. A thousand years, I would guess. In some places I had to hide because scary creatures went stalking by.”
“Like what?”
“Fighters from other worlds. Things that looked like dinosaur chickens with faces from hell, and long deadly claws. I feared for my life. More than that, I feared that you would lose me so I couldn’t help you.”
“You poor sweet thing. Those must be the combatants for the arena.”
“So I would guess. Others were android or robotic. I was able to model their electron flow configurations and calculate how to disable them if necessary.”
“Did you have to disable any?”
“One.”
“How did that go?”
“He was a very large, lumbering wetbot made from animal cells and steel parts. He smelled me, I think, and snarled and came running toward me in a dark corridor full of hazy light. He had big teeth and yelled very loudly. I could see down his throat. His mouth was red inside, and wet with hunger and saliva. I was able to scan his instruction boards and de-instruct him.”
“And?”
“He fell down dead and started burning and sparking.”
“Brave girl.”
“I was scared.”
“You were.”
“I was.”
“I am proud of you.”
“I will help you if you want to leave here.”
Jared rose and hugged her. “We’ll do it together.”
“I will go with you.”
It was so Stella. What did that mean? I will go with you...
A thousand things. I trust you. I am loyal to you. I am yours…
I love you.
Time down here was meaningless because there was neither day nor night—just eternal darkness since ages ago.
Stella had found him, had managed to pick the lock using her holoprobing fingertips, and had opened the cell where he had been left to die of hunger and thirst. Those goons were never going to return.
Hand in hand, they started walking on the dry, dusty stone floors.
Some areas were pitch-dark. Others were illumined by sickly green phosphor mushrooms growing in crevices.
The huge flooring blocks were dotted with bits of rock that had crumbled over centuries.
They were in the underworld.
Beasts howled constantly in the distance. It was a death-wail from another world. A great carnivore, stolen from its jungle or canyon somewhere in the galaxy, made this sonorous, endless mourning song that reverberated and picked up the death songs of other doomed living things.
At one point, cautiously taking one step after another, he thought: Orpheus with no Eurydice. Then he realized that she was there beside him, a demi-human right out of mythology. This time they would either leave the underworld together, or perish together while trying.
In some places there was a lot of pressure. His head pounded, and he seemed to hallucinate. The mourning song of beasts ebbed and flowed as they passed from one region to another.
Glowing things fluttered by. A flaming bat flashed past. Evolutionary adaptations to ocean bottom. Did the universe still exist? Was his past life real, or was the only reality this stinking hole, with eternal fear and acid boredom? Had he perhaps grown out of the walls here, with a set of dreamlike memories of a never-never life built into him?
“I’m cracking!”
She held his hand all the more firmly, squeezing it.
“Can you get a signal from outside?” he asked.
Her facial waves contorted, then relaxed. She shook her head. “Too deep.” She strained once more. “Not even Lelli.”
They passed through intermediary rooms of unknown purpose. In one of them, a desiccated, mummified dinosaur creature lay slumped in a corner, as if it had died while trying to stand on its huge hind claws one last time. All creatures were desperate to save their lives.
He shuddered at the thought of the mountainous bulk of the Olympia House surrounding him. If but one of these hundred-ton blocks (and they were in the myriads) should fall…
At times the pressure eased, and he was relieved to feel a cold breeze, though tainted with a smell of animal manure and rotting meat or blood.
He tried to clear his mind of such thoughts. Once more Jared turned to his stack of books. He knew them too well to be captivated in any way, and let them fall from him. Nonsense words about a nonsense world that did not exist for him here.
Still squeezing his hand timorously, Stella said: “I hear water.”
“Oh no. What now?” Jared whispered.
They stopped and listened.
A waterfall?
Jared held out his hand. “Come, Stella, meet our nice new friends.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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