The lift inside the maintenance corridor was rusted and damp, the gray-painted metal shining with the damp sheen of condensation between the warm almost tropical environment outside and the cool, dark, isolated tunnel. The mechanism that transported the lift up and down it’s roughly 30% grade was specifically designed to thrive in this wet environment, taking advantage of the moisture to efficiently dissipate heat generated by it’s entirely sealed gearbox into the collection troughs below. The gears and mounts were magnetically attached, the final drive being a grouped series of large toothed gears that generally remained silent, waiting for the command to begin their careful trek up to the promising portal of light above.
“Keep it close!” the foreman shouted, adjusting his hardhat while beckoning the group of trainees forward. They were a young lot, fresh out of the academy from what he saw, eager and laughing for the most part, though one or two in the middle of the pack of ten were preoccupied with the digitized manual in their data assistants. That, or they were eagerly avoiding looking down through the grated metal at the nearly 200 foot drop down to the collection troughs. “No pushing, no pushing – HEY!” she shouted, leveling her teacher’s staff at a young boy with freckled cheeks who had just elbowed his partner into the guard rail, and the pack halted dead. “Do that again and you’ll be cleaning the troughs for a month.”
“Yes ma’am,” he squeaked, pushing stray bits of hair back into his hat.
The foreman flicked the staff back to standby and pulled open the gate to the lift with a loud and echoing screech of metal – on – metal bearings. The trainees filed in, hesitating a little here and there when the lift creaked and groaned under the load as they clambered into the center. A few daring souls attended to the edge, carefully leaning on the guardrail and looking down until the pitch black depths. Once the last was on, the foreman slammed the gate shut and operated the simple plastic push-button controls, activated by her master key. With a clang and heart-stopping shudder the safety mounts disengaged and the lift cogs shuddered to life, beginning to move the lift over and up the incline.
The maintenance shaft itself was grossly over-sized, being nearly 500 feet across (horozontally), and was pretty much empty – except for the single heavily reinforced maintenance rail and a few jutted scaffold projections from the ceiling, on which were mounted flood lamps and other loosely hanging wires in between the various rooted and viney flora that had found purchase in the little nooks and joints of the scaffold trusses. The one wall varied between completely bare – showing only the concrete, stone, and mortar construction – and completely overrun with vines. A tree had even found purchase in a crack in the concrete, having grown up and into the light flooding in from the other wall. Random birds that had flown into the always open portal above had nested into the vines and other rooted plants, interjecting their calls and song over the constant drone of the gears moving the lift. In the distance, though with the echos it could have been very nearby for as well as any of the trainees knew, there was a constant trickle of water flowing in from somewhere. In wall opposite this intermittent greenery were large parallel openings, each angularly fifty feet across by sixty feet high, fitted with slightly angled transparent aluminum fittings that had been painstakingly manufactured and assembled to this building’s exact specifications. The term building was a bit of a misnomer though; it was more of a plant – an enormous construct of an age long past, designed with lofty goals and dreams, and left to rot just as easily as the prior evening’s dreams faded with the rising of the new sun. But despite the loss of it’s architects and the sciences behind its construction, so easy were the controls and so rugged were the individual parts of its build that today’s generations – and perhaps with proper guiding, the foreman thought as she rebuked another young man – the next generation, would still be able to benefit from its use.
The journey took ten minutes, the trainees having settled into a lull six minutes up, possibly due to the slightly hypnotic effect of the extremely regular vibrations and humming of the gearbox and gear assemblies beneath their feet. When they reached the landing they were all jarred suddenly out of their stupor by the safety catches engaging and jerking the lift slightly upward. From here, nearly forty minutes into their tour of the maintenance area for the plant, they were able to disembark onto a rounded concave and relatively thin concrete walkway that jutted straight down the side of the flattened top of the plant. Water had collected into the bottom of the walkway, only barely, as it kept flowing down into the plant maintenance shaft just behind the newcomers as they shuffled forward. Once out in the open air, with the sun beating down on them and no shade for the remainder of their trek to the lip of the plant, the trainees immediately yearned to turn back and hide in the cool shade of the massive opening into the deep maintenance tunnels, but the foreman and her staff clearly told them that was not an option. Still, there was an intermittent breeze at this height, and once the eyes adjusted their progress slowed as they took in the enormity of the plant itself.
They were roughly six thousand feet above the ground, though the ground itself was easily another four thousand above sea level – whatever level that was, as the sea was very far from where this plant, and its nearby sisters, were situated. Below them the ground as readily visible as the plant jutted itself suddenly up and out of the landscape like an alien wedge, stiffly and precisely angled so as to make no mistake that it was manufactured and not a natural butte or abrupt plateau. The base did bulge a little, but it was largely lost among the trees and other green things that had found purchase in its various imperfections until the jungles all around swallowed whatever adjacent buildings may have been built beside it. At its ‘front’ base there was a canyon, carved by the river that flowed mighty in its center centuries before, that only helped to add to the vertigo experienced when peering over the edge.
From this perspective one could not fully appreciate the majesty of the plant; one could only wonder at the dizzying heights and immensely solid construction all around them. In the near distance, perhaps twenty miles away, another structure loomed massive beside this one, a mirrored mirage it seemed, with wisps of clouds teasing at its upper lip where the trainees knew there to be a walkway identical to this one. And again, even further down, so the size of the structure seemed to reduce to an almost toy-like stature, was another identical plant, perched on the opposite wall of the canyon. If one used an ocular enhancement, a fourth could be seen in near ruin further down the river, having succumb to a collapse in the canyon wall ages and ages ago.
And on each one, just shy of 90 feet from the top lip of each plant, was a perfectly semi-spherical slice in the canyon-facing edge of the main structure of the plant, as if someone had taken a scoop and simply removed a rounded portion of the wall. The edges of the slice were lined with a strange hybrid of aluminum metal that had baffled this generation’s best scientists as well as at least four prior generations, when the structures were first discovered. The inside surface of the cuts were the same rock and concrete construction that was seen in the rest of the plant, and also seemed nearly impervious to weathering, until one got to the center – there a small slit opened into the heart of the plant itself, lined with an as-of-yet unidentified alloy that was dull gray during the high hours of the sun, but shined like the purest gold both in the dawning and waning hours of the morning and evening respectively.
“Ma’am!” on of the trainees called from the middle of the group, “do you believe the rumors? On what these things were built for?”
“You will need to be more specific, there’s a baker’s dozen rumors for each plant we’ve found, and times that by ten for each new one we find.”
“I heard they were mooring points for enormous moon-sized spaceships that used to transport the elder kind,” another voice pipped in.
“No way, these are OBVIOUSLY tuning structures for a massive defense laser that the government is hiding.”
The trainees laughed.
“Bladeless wind generators!” another offered.
“Tide buoys!”
More laughter.
“What if they’re just here?”
This last comment, from one near the front of the pack that had stopped to wait for the rest of the group to catch up, seemed to silence most of the others.
“Wait, what?”
The youth flushed in the full gaze of his peers and nervously tugged at the straps on his utility belt. “What – what if they are just here? Just built to be here, no … no need for power or … weapons… just built because they could?”
“Are you an idiot?”
The group quickly dismissed such an insane idea, and the foreman knew enough why. To the layman these structures were a life boat – they pulled in the acidic rain the often fell and produced clean neutralized water. There were hookups on the outside that produced nearly boundless supplies of electric. Their very presence altered the weather patterns, causing the most destructive storms and tempests to expend their energy away from the main pockets of civilization that had sprouted up around these massive plants. But this was just surface knowledge. The truth, only the edges of which the foreman was aware of, was far more mysterious.
The group filed around the singular youth, some poking or jabbing at him as they went by, while he remained rooted to the spot he had stopped at. The foreman paused, regarding the angry and pained expression for a moment before pressing a clean towel to his chest.
“Who knows,” she said, a simple smile on her face. Behind the smile, the small truths of what she had seen and heard were chaotically twirling around her mind. The electric was produced deep and low within the plant by geothermic and hydro-electric taps, all told of which took up less than 5% of the interior space, and even with the massive drain and connections used to power the towns and cities beyond, the total power output of the plants at least a thousand times greater – and was tied to the center of the structure for reasons yet unknown. The water purification was a handy by-product of portions of the interior structure itself which had yet to be properly identified – all the current engineers and maintenance staff knew was to keep certain sectors of the plant cleared of debris, and the water would keep flowing – seemingly from nowhere – down into collection basins at the base. Again, barely 2% of the structure was used for this. Even more perplexing was that portions of the structure seemed to force the water into flowing upward – against gravity – into the signature waterfalls at the top lip of each of these plants. From there the water just spilled over the edge, down past the semi-circular cuts, and faded into the distance dissipating into rain or in some cases retraining enough of its volume to actually hit the rock at the bases of the structure, resulting in by far the tallest artificial waterfalls ever seen.
So what was the other 90% of the structure being used for?
Such were the thoughts behind the simple smile of the foreman as she egged the dissenter on to join the pack in their journey to the front of the plant. Most of them would not bother to question the plant; they would simply go about their duties, maintaining the superstructure and interior spaces, doing the odd fix-it jobs that were needed every once in a while, settle into their routine happy to be of use.
But some, she thought, removing her had temporarily to wipe swab up some of the gathered trails of sweat working down her jawline, some would not accept the day-to-day. Some would want to dig deeper.
And those were the most precious.
MidoriMakigekawa 