We move as one, burrowing through the veins and arteries of the world’s beating heart. We move shapelessly, scrambling over and around each other, unceasingly pushing toward our destination. Each of us is dressed alike, with earthy brown shawls covering shoulders of varied form and size, and ochre boots strapped to many and few legs. Our differently-seeing eyes are trained forward, some unable to parse the uniform blackness, others detecting the tiniest changes in the rock’s quality, signalling the gentle heat of our target.
None of us knows another through any means but our shared pursuit. We’ve crossed borders in space, language, species and time to unite in this greatest aim. Our communication is multimodal, translating light, scent, heat, motion and sound to guide our varied whole forward. My role in this network is to vocalise the precise photothermic signals of my comrades, disseminating a carefully judged approximation of their semantics to those without the attuned senses to interpret them otherwise. Our whole is a cacophony of data, recursively feeding into itself and blossoming beyond recognition. To break away from the mesh of information would be suicide, and all other possibilities were obliterated the moment we split this world’s surface.
In our journey, our sublimation to the whole, we are without individual belief or ambition. Contradictory visions of our quarry are held simultaneously - it is a weapon, a deity, the beginning and the end, a wish granter. These beliefs brought us here, but none of our number are still wedded to them. All we truly believe is that we must reach this device.
As we burrow further toward the warmth, our surroundings shift and transform. Silt to loam to clay to rock, glistening in a wider array of hues the deeper we burrow. Every two days or so, we carve out a small cave and share food, information, light. Claws and shards of certain rocks let us create fire, fed by scraps of foliage stashed by comrades from forests, swamps and open plains. Preparations crafted by hand or machine are all pooled together, we pass them between ourselves and attempt a kind of conversation. Abstract cave paintings convey stories, and we chirp and glimmer with excitement. Despite holding so little in common, we achieve a kind of kinship and community, information shared for pleasure instead of survival.
Once we finish eating, those of us who need to sleep do so, while the rest keep watch. Though this isn’t strictly necessary, given that we haven’t encountered anything but soil and rock throughout this entire journey, most of those keeping watch would have done so back home. The rest, in silence, keep them company. Our sleep has gradually synchronised, an almost preternatural process driven by necessity. In this way, we’ve become a more efficient organism, many bodies sharing a nervous system. When it comes time to progress, our guards wake the rest. Without sunlight, the enforced sleeping time is the only substitute for a circadian rhythm for those of us used to days and nights.
We press on, feeling the apparatus’ heat building ever more rapidly, though how much further there is to go remains unclear. Our kin from tundra and and ice caps begin to flag, so our shape folds around them to carry and insulate. Though they can no longer directly contribute to the dig, their communicative role remains vital - without each point in the network, our group would be split in two. Communication and information have overtaken digging as the priority - reaching our goal has become an inevitability, so long as we maintain the web.
Finally, we break through the rock into a great cavern. A colossal column, located exactly in the centre of the cave yet still appearing to be a natural formation, reaches downward. Below it, a roughly-circular plateau sits underneath small bodies. A group of children, glowing with starlight, something like a molecular cloud radiating from their heads in beautiful purples and greens. They’re what we came here for. Together, we carefully climb down from where our tunnel met the wall of the cavern, and approach the plateau. The children turn their heads to look at us, staying sat on the smooth ground. Each of us reaches out to one of them, and they reach back. Upon making contact, their bodies appear to change, becoming more like each of ours, but retaining their otherworldly quality. It’s clear to us why we were brought here, for this singularly crucial purpose. All comes from this place, and the cycle will begin again.
this, after Southfield and The sculptor, was my second submission for the goldsmiths class. it started life in a panicked freewrite at headingley caffè nero.
the photo of the butterfly was taken at rodley nature reserve a few months before i wrote the story.