[Original Novella] Down in the Steam Tunnels, Part 2

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That’s when I remembered the professor’s trinket. After deliberating for a while, I decided it was worth a shot, and plugged the fridge into it. Impossibly, it appeared to work. Even more impossibly, it was still working an hour later when my laptop ran down enough that I sought out someplace to plug it in.

I wound up digging a power strip out of one of the boxes, plugging that into the device, then plugging both the fridge and my laptop charger into that. A gift horse scenario. Who cares how it works so long as my groceries don’t spoil, and my laptop doesn’t die? I sat crosslegged on the cold kitchen floor, finishing up the alterations to the article before calling it a night.

When morning came, the fridge was still running. My laptop’s battery read full. “Alright”, I conceded. “Whatever’s in there, it’s not double As”. I turned the device over in my hands, again looking for some fraudulent gimmick and again finding nothing obviously amiss.

I gave up on it for the time being, showered, ate a hastily prepared breakfast of cold pizza and cereal, then biked to class. A physics lecture really should be an evening affair. The brain is never as inelastic as it is during the early hours of the morning. I rubbed at my eyes soon after taking my seat, becoming self conscious about the dark bags under them in the process.

Near as I can tell, those are permanent. If ever you wreck your sleep cycle, even once, racoon eyes stay with you forever. Someone like me, an incurable night owl with a penchant for obsessive investigation, never stood a chance.

I looked around at the sea of macbooks, my own laptop one of the few PCs present. It’s as yet unclear to me how spending twice as much on a computer with the same hardware specs aids the learning process. My eyelids fought every effort to keep them from sliding shut.

How are we meant to absorb such esoteric material while struggling to stay awake? I’d once stocked up on those five hour energy dealies only to discover they really supply about fifteen minutes of wild, manic wakefulness followed by a devastating crash. If that isn’t liquefied meth, it’s got to be something chemically similar.

“-In fact, as the COBE, WMAP, Herschel and Planck probes all confirmed, the quantity of matter and energy in the universe precisely equals the quantity of negative gravitational energy.

That satisfies the chief prediction of the zero energy universe theory. It is the only way we know of that a universe could spontaneously come into being without violating the law of conservation.”

I quite like this professor and would hate to disrespect him by falling asleep in his class. Where other professors come highly recommended if they jazz up the material to make it more approachable and engaging, he delivers only the relevant facts in as concise and clear a manner as I’ve ever encountered.

He won’t bring the beauty of physics alive for you, whatever that could mean, but he does let us know specifically which chapters to study in advance of tests and recommends exercises which promote the retention of what we’ve read. At least in my opinion, everything teachers should be and nothing they shouldn’t. We’re not here to be entertained.

But in this condition, his droning monotone only exacerbated my craving for sleep. I half wished he’d deliver the rest of today’s material through a megaphone. My ears began to perk up, nonetheless, as I recognized parallels between the lesson and the subject matter of the discussion I’d recently had with professor Travigan.

“Now, the mechanism responsible is thought to be particle pair separation. We’ve observed this happening constantly at the very smallest scales, a sort of existential static. Commonly called quantum foam, particles and their antiparticle equivalents spontaneously separating out of apparent nothingness, then annihilating when they collide soon after.

You can get something from nothing, it seems, so long as the debt is eventually repaid. I often liken it to digging a hole in flat ground. You now have a hole, and a pile. Or, just as you can add one and negative one to get zero, you can likewise carry out the operation in reverse.”

He dimmed the lights and turned on the projector. An artist’s rendition of a black hole filled the screen. “So, how was this discovered? As it turns out, there is a specific distance from any given black hole where, as particle pair separation events occur, one of the particles, ejected towards the black hole, is drawn in by its gravity while the other, ejected away from it, escapes.

This accounts for the constant emission of particles and antiparticles from black holes that we now call Hawking radiation. It was quite perplexing before the cause was understood, as of course, nothing is supposed to be able to escape a black hole.”

I felt my mind drawn inescapably towards the black hole of unconsciousness. Regretting, mildly, that I’d turned down a former roommate a week prior when he told me he’d found a reliable hookup for adderall. All too common, particularly in STEM programs.

“The collapse of our universe into existence by this mechanism is thought to have been driven by entropy. Nothingness, or whatever you’d like to call the state preceding the big bang, is perfectly uniform and therefore maximally ordered. Some theorize it was an endless sea of Higgs Bosons.

By contrast, the present state we colloquially refer to as existence is far less ordered if you think about it. And the distribution of that order is anything but uniform! Someone with a naive perspective might look at the high degree of order on Earth and wrongly infer the rest of the universe is equally ordered, in the same way that a child living in a luxurious gated community might wrongly extrapolate from his or her surroundings that the rest of the Earth is an equally lavish utopia.”

He’s a real downer when he talks about this stuff. Seems to delight in it, though. “What are you here for” he once asked an offended evangelical student, “if not to have your illusions destroyed?” No doubt the life of the party, if by some miracle or mistake he’s ever been invited to one.

Today’s afternoon class was literature. Even more tiresome if you can believe it. The sort of people who self select for the course are commonly motivated by the desire to impress one another with elaborate, unorthodox interpretations of works in which, more often than not, the author was perfectly frank about his meaning. As the professor of this course is relatively lax, I finally allowed myself to sleep.

When I got home, against my expectations, the fridge was still running. I checked the little vials, finding that the level of the black stuff had been reduced noticeably while the glow of the blue gas seemed somewhat diminished. Fuck me, I thought. It actually does something.

Not hard to guess his game, though. Casually hand off the device, let me try it out on my own and be fooled by whatever trick it employs. Then I return to him a true believer, eager to gormlessly lap up whatever line of BS he means to sell me. Somewhat more sophisticated than a worm on a hook, but same basic principle.

I set about reviewing the pictures. The cache hidden in the book yielded forty photos, all told. Which were exactly what I’d been let to expect. At first. I admit it was slightly titillating to view nudes of average people, who believed these photos would never be seen by anyone except the scientists carrying out the study.

It was also surprisingly troubling. The mild guilt I felt must be what makes voyeurism exciting for a certain crowd. But for altogether unrelated reasons, the feeling of unease only intensified as I progressed through the images.

No longer simply demonstrating posture, some now depicted the subjects connected by countless long, thin wires from the pins in their spine to an odd machine about the size of an old timey radio, with all manner of analog gauges, knobs and dials on the face. The edges appeared riveted together, the housing made from rough steel.

Through an open service panel in the side I could see row upon row of what I initially thought were vacuum tubes. But, looking more closely, they were instead full of a hazy gas of some kind. I wondered if, were the photos in color, that gas would be a certain shade of luminescent blue.

No. Full stop. Now he’s got me playing along with the delusion. Had the woman who pointed me to these photos done so under his direction? I could see no other plausible option besides folie a deux. All this effort to steer me towards these doctored photos, for what? So that I would come to believe in Orgone?

An investment scam? But I’m as skint as any other student. Recruitment into a cult? I’d seen no other potential members except the unkempt blonde hippie. He’d at least succeeded in arousing my curiosity. What could still be hidden down there? In the humid, dark labyrinth of steam tunnels.

It’s all I could think about during classes. The pitch black, hissing, pulsating web of corridors beneath me. Spreading out organically, like cracks in a window as a stone impacts it in slow motion. Somehow growing, new tunnels sprouting off of existing ones, serpentine concrete pseudopods burrowing relentlessly outward into the cold, dead soil.

It gnawed at me. Every effort to bury it in the back of my mind thwarted as time and time again it clawed its way to the forefront. What’s down there? What could be down there still? What the fuck is down there, hidden in those tunnels? I gave up fighting the losing battle to focus on the lecture and instead left early. For the steam tunnels, of course.

The most well known entrance isn’t difficult to get to. Down a flight of stairs which also leads to the room that the backup generators are kept in. That’s through the door to the right. The double doors straight ahead, however, lead to the steam tunnels. Hence the heavy loops of chains and locks.

Nothing like a deadbolt however. So it was possible, with some grunting, to open the doors just far enough to peer through the crack. That proved to be the limit of what the chains would allow, but it was enough. If only the tunnel on the other side weren’t so dark.

My phone! A millennial’s answer to every problem. I activated the light widget and pointed it through the gap between the doors. On the screen, though grainy, I could make out perhaps twenty feet of tunnel as well as the nearest intersection. Rusty steel pipes snaking down the ceiling and walls, emitting periodic puffs of steam from leaky fittings.

Then, in a flash, I glimpsed a silhouette dart through the tunnel juncture ahead. It was over so quickly I couldn’t convince myself I’d really seen it. My heart rate increased. “Hello?” I called out through the gap. It echoed uselessly down the concrete passage, eliciting no response.

I did, however, hear a faint metallic screech. Like the audio feedback you hear when you place a microphone too close to the speaker it’s connected to. As I strained to hear, I realized it was getting closer. My heart now beating so hard I could hear it, I found I could not make myself run.

I don’t know when the curiosity consumed me. Just that it was now firmly in the driver’s seat and would not allow me to retreat as any sane person would. Instead, I called out again, then put my ear up against the gap, waiting for any reply.

Instead, a hot breath in my ear. This time I did recoil. Nothing visible through the gap except darkness. Over the sound of my pounding heart, I heard the metallic screech recede into the distance. Accompanied by the sound of hurried limping, one foot dragging behind the other.

What was that? Wandering those tunnels, peering out at me through the gap? What the fuck could still be in there? With all other avenues of investigation closed to me, although it frustrated me that he’d succeeded in arousing my curiosity, I returned to professor Travigan.

“Knew you’d be back. Knew it!” he cackled maddeningly. I’d played right into his hands, but could see no other possible direction left to go in. He could get me into those tunnels, and seemed to possess an understanding of their nature I would not find in any book, article or documentary.

“Orgonic null reactor’s still going strong, isn’t it?” I hung my coat on the rack inside the doorway and took a seat before his tremendous polished oak desk. “I just want you to know”, I sternly began, “that I don’t believe a word that’s come out of your mouth since we’ve met. I’m all too familiar with your type.”

He scoffed. “I very much doubt that. Even by my own standards I’m a rather unusual person.” As if to underscore the statement, he withdrew one of the syringes full of black syrup, rolled up his sleeve, then proceeded to inject himself with it. I gaped.

“Oh, this? Never you mind. Just a little something to keep me going.” Drugs certainly would explain a great deal about this guy. “Seems like half the campus is on uppers of some kind” I muttered. He puzzled over that before I spotted a flash of recognition.

“Yes, I suppose you could say that’s what it is. I’d certainly not be...up and about, were I to skip a dose. Zachary sees to it that I don’t forget.” As I studied his wrinkled face, I began to notice something off about his skin. Entirely without color. I could understand why he was pale if he spent all his time holed up in here, but not even his tear ducts or lips were pink.

“Can you get me into the steam tunnels?” I’d wasted enough time indulging his eccentricity. Time to get down to business. He raised his eyebrows. “Is that all you need? Of course. We can go right now if you like.” What? Too easy, I thought. Not like him to be so straightforward. There’s gonna be some kind of ridiculous-

“We’ll go by subway.” Ah, there it is. “You’re confused. There’s no subway that links up with the steam tunnels.” A wry little smile crept over his face. “You’re certain about that, are you? Absolutely, one hundred percent?” I mulled that over, wondering what he could possibly be getting at.

“If you mean in a philosophical sense. I suppose not. I haven’t personally checked, so technically, there exists some infinitesimal possibility that without my knowledge, a subway station was constructed there.” I imagined I felt some distant vibration, and wondered at the source.

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^{Stay tuned for Part 3!}