literature

Freefall

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“It’s completely safe,” he reassured me. 

Another rumble shook the room and a stream of dust fell onto the paper he’d handed to me only moments ago. I glared at the man sitting across from me as he leaned back in his chair and shifted his weight uncomfortably, but said nothing more. I snatched the pen out of his hand and scrawled my name on the dotted line. 

Time was running out.

The glowing counter on my helmet’s transparent display ticked down the final minutes. The descent had felt like a lifetime, even at this velocity it had taken 27 hours falling in complete darkness. The tunnel had been dug for the experiment itself, lucky it was so easily converted for the mission. 

Yes, lucky.

I clutched the steel black canister in my hand, a loaded gun and I was the only one with the guts to pull the trigger. At the center, it was waiting for me. The machine had set off a chain reaction; a reaction, it seemed, no one fully understood. It was as if it were replacing the hot iron core with one of pure force, at least that's what the calculations were speculating. Dark energy, or antimatter, or whatever the newscasters were calling it these days, was pulling the Earth apart at the seams, collapsing into itself. 

 Perhaps we had become too enamored with the possibilities of the future. We presumed ourselves so above nature, emboldened by our perceived control, we forgot how delicate the natural order truly was. If only we had respect for our roots, had honored our home, had known when enough was enough… But none of that matters. I am a Marine. My duty is all that concerns me.

“The tracks will take you down,” the man explained as I became familiar with the craft that would be home for the next day or so. “It’s a set course straight to the center, but we only need you to go halfway.” 

“Why,” I asked without looking up.

“We only need you to reach the outer mantle, once there you can activate the canister and drop it through the bottom hatch. After that, the tracks will reverse and bring you back home.”  The bastard couldn't even look me in the eye as he said it. I shut the door without a second thought.

Another quake thundered through the insulated capsule, this time shaking me to my core. My hand held fast as I rode through it. This was only the beginning they told me. Soon the water levels would rise, engulfing whole cities and eventually the entire seaboard. Mountains’ sturdy foundations would buckle and crack under their own weight as gravity increased and crushed everything into the molten core. The good news was we’d all be dead by then.

I checked the timer again. One minute left. I steeled myself for what I knew was coming.

It’s a funny thing, “certainty”. The physicists had been certain. So had Ptolemy when he postulated a Geocentric universe, and so everyone believed him, until the day Copernicus proved him wrong. The bureaucrats and the politicians, and all the scientists sitting on the feds payroll, they just knew that the machine would work, that it was safe. There was only the slightest, most infinitesimal chance that it could spawn a black hole. Think of the energy, they said. Clean, reliable, inexhaustible. No more hunger or strife. It could lead us into a new age, a better age… But I am a Marine and my duty is all that concerns me.

“The catalyst inside that canister is kept in perpetual suspension. The counter can’t reach high enough for us to send it alone, it needs manual activation,” the voice played over the loud speaker, reverberating all around me as I prepared for launch. They never did elaborate. I suppose they thought I wasn’t smart enough to understand. They were probably right.

Thirty seconds. I readied the canister and typed in the passcode and the black device came alive with a bright blue light. I opened the bottom hatch and placed it carefully inside. “Gravity Eater”, as one of the scientists had named it, was in place and ready to unleash hell. I laid back in my chair and waited. 

I could hear the metal strain worse than ever, twisting and contorting as I got closer, and I briefly wondered what it will be like. I remembered reading about the “Noodle Theory”, that as you approached the event horizon of a black hole, the tidal forces would stretch and elongate you like a piece of linguine being sucked down a drain. They honestly didn’t think I knew, that I really couldn’t figure it out. There was never any chance of the tracks taking me home, hell they’ve probably collapsed at the surface by now.

It wasn’t that they thought me too stupid that offended me, it was the belief that I wasn’t brave enough to accept it regardless.

My suit, that last line of defense, clung to me. Multiple layers of ceramic and graphene gripped every part of me in an almost loving embrace as the gravity intensified. I closed my eyes and focused on the sound of my own heartbeat. I imagined, and not for the first time, the sound of the chimes outside my childhood home, a simple homestead so far inland and so far from any fault lines. My wife’s face floated in front of me, her dimpled smile shone as she held our infant son. She stood out in the wheat fields, and a cool summer breeze blew through her sandy curls and I let out a sigh. I gave a short prayer that they had made it out of the city before the planes were all grounded and the mass evacuations had led to complete chaos. I never got a chance to say goodbye, and it was goodbye. 



I am a marine. My Duty is all that concerns me.

I wrote this on Memorial Day two years ago for a prompt about falling to the center of the earth. I was pretty literal with my interpretation of the prompt, but I like to think I jazzed it up a bit with the flashback framing device. I'm open to constructive critique, though. Thank you!
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