Into the Mine's Depths

I started to get the vibe that something was wrong when the drill stopped. I had been hauling a block of gabbro, sloshing it from bucket to bucket, when suddenly my hand slipped and a wave of rock-salt water splashed over me. At first, I thought the water was just dirty, but once I shook the water out of my face mask, I noticed that the light was different.

I blinked rapidly and stared around. The cavernous chamber we were mining looked the same as it had before. Farther back, I saw the glow of our campfire and heard the water sloshing in our buckets as the others worked. Everything seemed normal—except for me.

I was still holding onto the rope that had bound up my gabbro blocks and kept them from falling into the abyss below us. But now something felt off about it. It felt different; not in a physical way, but in a spiritual way. There was a strange presence on this rope, a formless power that somehow made me feel like a little kid who didn't know better than to pick up an ancient artifact without thinking about what could happen if I did so. For some inexplicable reason, I wanted to set down my buckets and turn back, but then I would have had to explain why to my boss—who wasn't too keen on explanations anyway—and so instead I ignored what made no sense and kept dragging my buckets along and dumping them into the ruck sacks that were waiting at our work site.

By noon it didn't matter anymore because we stopped working anyway to eat lunch. The boss let us take off our masks while we sat on logs around the fire; nobody else seemed to notice anything unusual about this particular gabbro deposit or even pay attention when I told them that the rope felt weird to me earlier and asked if they'd felt anything funny about it too. But then again, maybe they hadn't noticed because there really wasn't anything funny about this place; not even its name made any sense: Deep Rock Galactic—nowhere near as deep as space nor anywhere near as galactic as you might think from looking at their logo.

My co-workers took turns telling stories over lunch and joked with each other about how one of them shot themselves in the foot with their own gun last week during target practice at home—"If you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot," said one of my coworkers, "you might as well do it where your boss can't see you." That got a good laugh out of everyone except me and another man sitting beside me by the fire; he just looked away when he realized everybody else didn't understand why he was laughing so hard at that joke either. It wasn't until later on that evening when we were getting ready for bed that he finally told us why he found that joke so funny: his brother died after putting his service pistol against his knee joint to stop him from shaking so badly while taking aim at some "targets" during target practice last year between assignments with Deep Rock Galactic.

That's when everybody got quiet and left him alone except for me because he had been my friend for several years now, ever since Deep Rock Galactic had hired us both on contract for these two weeks straight (one week here on planet surface plus one week spent traveling between planets) without giving us much information besides what we needed to know: stay safe, don't die, bring back more ore than we left with. That's all any of us knew about this place or even where we were located; nobody knew anything more than what they needed to know because most people who signed up for these two-week contracts ended up dead or dying within five years due to an inexplicable phenomenon known only as "the Silence". Nobody knew why or how this happened—it just did—and so right now all anybody could do was keep going until they couldn't go anymore and then hope they lasted long enough to collect their paycheck before they weren't able to collect anything else anymore ... like air molecules or blood cells or brain cells or whatever else happens in your body once you die...

So after staying quiet for awhile, eventually somebody asked if we knew what time it was back home when those other guys went crazy—that's what they called it when somebody lost their mind up here: "going crazy"—and then shot their friends before killing themselves over there at home down below ground where none of us could see 'em doin' it no matter how hard we tried looking because no signals from home could make it here past all these layers of rock separating both places from each other ... which is why all those guys went crazy in the first place, so nobody would know about it down below unless somebody told them afterward ... which we never did except for one guy who came here with us earlier today ... but who probably doesn't know about any of this yet because he looks asleep now ...