The crime that landed Axel Hegwir in the prison system of the Siberian wastelands had been to smuggle data across the 'Stream and into the best bidder's hot drives through the tiny cracks he'd found along the Firewall. A modest living could be made on the fringes of a society hungry for unfiltered data, assuming that every day could be your last. A smuggler's existence would be erased from the Archives and wiped from the memory of anyone they had ever met, and his sorry bones thrown into foreign prisons. The illusion that Axel was too small for the authorities to pursue was finally shattered.
As careful as he was, an automated security upgrade blew his cover. Minutes later the Peace Force was blasting him out of his apartment and into the bullet-proof van that would take him away for good. Downloading or smuggling any non-filtered content was considered treason, and the work of a hater.
Hater. The all-encompassing definition for an information society terrorist, underserving of rights or courts of law.
Axel would spend the rest of his rotting life in the Central Prison of Siberia, working the radioactive Russian soil until his body became an almost liquified walking corpse. Replacing haters was cheaper than repairing expensive androids in outdoor maintenance work, and good for the booming economy of private prisons.
But that was not Axel's concern right now. Under the vicious stare of the guards menacing under their black body shields, he was being pushed out of the building and into the mobile unit that would take him and his work team to the fields. A black void had turned up overnight on the brightly lit power grid near the prison. A perfect, round absence of light in the middle of the night worried Central Command and warranted further investigation, so it was Axel and another five inmates sent to investigate and repair whatever had damaged the lights or power cables.
When they arrived in their flimsy protective suits and examined the terrain they never expected to find an actual round, black hole burrowing through the power grid. The working crew gathered around the edges of the massive crater laid in front of them and stared in disbelief. Axel calculated roughly a 75 meter diameter hole, deep enough to lose the bottom of the hole in darkness.
Tonnes of cabling and machinery covered the deserted land in intricate patterns, like a giant circuit feeding off the generators and shooting power through massive bodies of superconductor. The cables were so massive they required ladders to go over them. But on this perfect hole, the cables stopped and a deep dark cavern started. Axel pointed his head camera towards the hole so the engineers back at the plant could see it.
The voice of the engineer crackled back from HQ through the InterCom, breaking their trance.
‘Yeah, I see it. Biggest hole I’ve ever seen, like an open quarry. Here is where the North Link is supposed to go through. Oh wait – it’s a bit further South… this must be a branch of the North Link. Wait… what the hell is that coming up... ‘
Silence. The rest of the transmission had been interrupted or censored by the watchmen, and Axel and his working crew could see nothing beyond the dark hole. Not that it mattered. Their job was to repair the cables and get out of there before the radiation took its toll.
They set up camp and got to work. They would only be picked up again once the job was done, so they got down to business fixing the hole in the ground, binding reams of heavy cable and working themselves to exhaustion. It took a week to build a bridge across the hole, and another week to start binding the broken cables.
Two weeks of the hypnotic buzzing of the heavy machinery was enough to break a man’s will. With tired, angry eyes Axel greased up his gear and double-checked his tools, ready to start on the final procedure joining the two ends of a cable that spanned across the hole. Climbing onto the eight-meter diameter cable he watched the surroundings quickly getting darker as night approached. Around him, nothing but zero degree temperatures and the invisible souls of the prisoners who had laid down those cables fifty years ago.
‘God-damned cold’, he muttered. He hated the miserable weather, the cumbersome protective clothing, the lack of social communication with the rest of his crew – all magnified by the high-pitched lament of the drills and power tools that were getting the job done. The Unity crucifix around his neck gave him little comfort. He went to wipe the starch from his stubble with a gloved hand and puckered his dry lips just to feel them, rough and raw, but his hand stroked the breathing mask instead.
He walked the length of the cable, now a sort of bridge across the gaping hole until he reached the midpoint. He stared into the emptiness on either side of him while he calculated his next manoeuvre.
And suddenly, it all went quiet. A deafening, almost unbearable silence froze Axel in his position. The machines had stopped. After weeks of listening to the constant buzzing, the silence became unbearable and gripped Axel by the throat with force. He swore loudly, as dead machines meant a delay in leaving this place. He looked around the edges of the hole and saw his crew, looking around nervously.
Surrounding them, a thick heavy fog that gained on them, falling into the hole and rendering everything at zero visibility. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then, Axel noticed flashes and strange colours coming from the fog. There was movement and shadows, and he squinted hard to see what was approaching. All around him, as far as he could see, the drilling site was surrounded by figures draped in heavy snow robes with a subtle green glow around them. They appeared out of nowhere and held their position with no visible intentions to move until the silence became thick with foreboding. A woman’s silhouette appeared through the fog, moving her arms slowly as if waving at invisible points in space.
An irrational paranoia crept up Axel's mind. He felt increasingly uneasy, his heart racing, while a primal fear took hold of his senses with no apparent warning. With his heart beating his chest as if trying to break through his ribcage, he fell to his knees.
There was a blast of sound exploding from the ground below. The piercing sound of a million suffering human souls voiced in a single, powerful sound, welled up and exploded all around him. The screaming echoed in sharp outbursts around the well, followed by an increasing amber glow coming from the deep.
The screaming waves of sound shot up from the ground and through his feet, sending shocks of fear through his body with every massive scream coming from the well. Axel felt his throat choke and his stomach burst as he fell, grabbing onto the cable for his dear life, digging his nails into the rubber. Unable to hold any coherent thoughts he let himself loose in a world of agony, let go of his grip and fell into the flaming well.
