The Tunnel.

I.

There was once an old man I knew, an engineer by trade, who had a lifelong fascination with the idea of drilling a hole all the way through the center of the earth. It was really all about getting a tough enough drill bit, he reasoned to me, and naturally in having a consistent and reliable method to move all the rubble back up to the surface. But it could be done, and he reckoned that anything is possible to an engineer, with enough time and budget.

This man - his name was Michel Enfois - had neither time nor money on his side. He had grown old and had already lived a respectable life and career as an electrical, and later a civil engineer. But to know Michel Enfois was to accept that engineering was not just a profession. I would honestly say that Michel lived and breathed inventing. There were days when he spoke of nothing else. Even now looking back to that time, I assumed that he never married because he simply viewed it as a distraction to his many projects and experiments.

By the time I knew him, he had very little strength in his bones left to work with, but his mind - as active and articulate as a genius at work - still gave him limitless options. He became focused on building a prototype for what he considered his masterpiece: a solar-powered, self-driving boring machine that would drill a tunnel through the world. Every evening he worked from his living room, devising his plans. Eventually he settled on a design which was controlled by an artificially intelligent processing unit, and was completely self-powered. It would charge itself by opening wide, collapsible solar plates containing millions of photovoltaic cells. The borer would be supported by six nubby little tires which gripped all types of soil, and would make it look a bit like a flatbed truck, which it actually was; scurrying dirt and rocks all the way back up to the surface, little load by little load. Each load, once transported back to the surface, would need to be surgically dumped at a decent distance away; to reduce the risk of an accidental collapse. Yes, it would be inconceivably slow, but a centimeter at a time became a meter at a time and then a kilometer. And being completely self-powered, M. Enfois wouldn’t have to lift a finger, and could quietly watch its work, and the growing pile of dirt, outside his window.

* * *

As I mentioned, Michel Enfois never married. He also had no friends and barely any acquaintances. I was one of the few people who had the courtesy - now in retrospect it appears to be excellent fortune - of meeting him. When initially I took sight of him - when anyone for that matter met Michel Enfois - he struck them as an extremely mediocre character; perhaps even obnoxious in his aloofness - for he had no obvious style to his clothing or his mannerisms or his speech. Nothing about him gave even the slightest impression that he was any sort of noble mind, and certainly nothing to indicate that the man might go down in history in the same breath as Da Vinci, Einstein or Michelangelo. No, to the outside world he was just an ordinary man.

But as I said, I had the luck of meeting him one day at the local fisherman’s market, because as it turned out both of us enjoy a good mackerel once in a while, and everyone who loves mackerel knows that the best ones are straight from the smoker, and the best smoker is right there out on the harbor, at the fisherman’s market, the one the fisherman themselves use when they feel like smoking a fish. Mackerel lovers aren't a dime a dozen, and he was a true blood.

We became friends, since I, a lifelong bachelor, could connect with him in a way I don’t think he reached from others. I, for one, know what it's like to live alone, not just alone but alone for a long time. We would meet back at the docks every second Thursday, sitting at a wooden bench overlooking the emptying wharf. I could see all the way past the bays to the jagged little outcroppings of sand and stones along the waterfront. As each minute passed the bay became emptier; the fishing boats had mostly left, and the catch came in at five-thirty in the evening and Seal Harbor was slowing down to a quiet little splash of an anchor or an unsettled sloop washing past our little bench. The big trawlers had emptied and all were tied up and locked, and the big tuna rigs had already been back at two-thirty, having left at three in the morning to get an early start on the day. Only a few fishermen were left, and they remained by their rigs, standing with large ice boxes waiting for the restaurants to open.

When we ate our mackerel, and sometimes went back to buy a second portion, he confided that he often searched for meaning in his life. Perhaps that is why he created this self-running machine; to give himself a sense of permanence, something that would be bigger than himself, something that would keep going long after he was gone. And through this machine, through the engineering and development, through the testing and the improvements in the design, he somehow found purpose in his life, or maybe just a task distracting enough to pull his ego away from the idle chatter of the human mind.

* * *

The final digging device that Monsieur Enfois ultimately designed and built, looked like an armoured pickup truck, in one-fourth size. Instead of little front seats, there stood a large fixed drill and rubbish chute, that was embedded and welded right into the middle of the vehicle. It took many months to find the right drill size, and even then the choice of material remained challenging. Heat-proof and pressure-proof, these were easy. But the physics of magma, the behaviour of tectonic plates as one moves closer and closer to the core - this was where Monsieur Enfois showed his real brilliance. For while you and I were sleeping, or perhaps enjoying a glass of wine with friends, he was there at his table working, calculating, and deciphering the earth’s most hidden and complex geological algorithms. Far under the earth, there was the weight of the entire planet hanging on your shoulders, and he was an exacting inventor, needing to predict and emulate rock and ore, pressurized from tens of thousands of kilograms of constant weight.

The size of the inner storage unit, which determined the amount of debris that could be safely held while digging, was a constant negotiation. He went back and forth with decisions, testing different weights and shapes for the container. Ultimately he chose a smaller debris hold, which meant more frequent trips to the surface but a lighter load and less energy use. Everything was a compromise, and the more frequent trips made the entire task exponentially slower. But it worked.

M. Enfois invited me over for a glass of brandy and to introduce his strange digging device and show off the first dig. The first dig was successful but unimpressive, to a soft depth of just a tenth of a meter. But the little device brought its load to the top and dumped it on the ground purposefully. Then it checked its battery life, moved to a hidden parking area behind the pile of dirt, opened its solar panels to the sun and went to sleep, just like it was supposed to do.

* * *

When the little drilling machine was complete, he painted it red. In those bright autumn afternoons, he would step outside to the covered wooden porch that was affixed to his bedroom, the one built from old maple planks, looking out on the wide meadow. He’d sit out there and he’d watch the machine run, sometimes walking over to it and replacing a chip or a circuit board if he felt like it, with something new he’d been testing.

He did most of the test runs a bit further out, away from his house and towards the middle of the large, sloped property, where the dry auburn grasses fell onto the horizon under the weight of the melting sun. It was there that he could experiment with different drilling and boring techniques, which he executed by running little sets of software. The brilliant little thing was able to drill through rock, fill itself with dirt, and then carefully back itself up, all the way to the surface, where it would dump, park itself and recharge. It followed this pattern automatically every day and every night, rain or shine. It was amazing to watch it work.

Indeed, that was all M. Enfois did during his later years. After he turned seventy-one, there were no more real changes to the software; only an improvement in elegance perhaps, a refactoring of the source code here or there, that sort of thing. During those days we didn’t meet so often, he wasn’t in the best of health and I myself was recovering from a hiking accident. But we would always take a moment to keep ourselves up to date, and I could count on him for that.

So at least the old man's work was done, and I could tell that he was satisfied with his invention, and what would be the last real work he would produce. He would stand out on the porch to watch it, all morning sometimes, and when he was older he would sit in a little rocking chair holding a remote camera monitor he later installed, so he could check a video signal as it ascended to the surface, unloaded its contents, and dipped back below. As time went on, and the tunnel gradually grew deeper, the little truck spent less time at the surface and more time traversing the tunnel. But that was to be expected, and often Monsieur Enfois would look out quietly at the empty meadow, or at nothing at all.

Knowing Monsieur Enfois as I did, I felt that these were his happiest times; his life’s calling completed; and every day sitting in the sunshine being entertained by his own amazing creation. I would come over infrequently those days. These were the tail end of his life, the last days that I am describing to you. After this the old man died peacefully, as we all must, and the house and the barn and all the land, up to and including the meadow and the forests behind it, were auctioned off in one piece and sold. At the time of his death, I would imagine that the tunnel was barely two hundred meters deep. The land was then sold to an acquisition company, and later to large soy farm. When the new owners came and did the inspection, they rode over the land by helicopter. With the sun slicing its yolk through the sky and the high summer reeds in the air, the tunnel was practically invisible. Of course, even if they had noticed it, it happened to be at a time when the little digger was dozens of meters below the surface. Never, nowhere, was there ever a hint of anything unusual. During the years, the meadow had grown unabated and the grasses pointed high into the air, and the hole became further and further obscured from sight.

The soy farm that owned the property, and by unintentional consequence the little drilling machine, held onto the land until it was sold to private owners, who then turned the large meadow into farmlands and grazing pasture for cows, sheep, and goats. Over many more generations the land was passed down, or sold, but it was never really developed or surveyed, so the tunnel, and the busy little truck, were never discovered. The tunnel was now very deep. But no one noticed all the work, for it went on, the vast majority of the time, far below the surface.

One detail which I want to clarify for the reader - not to digress too far from our dialogue - is that in the effort of pure simplicity, M. Enfois had designed the truck only to operate in one direction. Trying to program any other solution, for example: two devices meeting halfway; seemed comparatively far more prone to problems. It was easier and simpler to have a single set of instructions, because then the entire program could be a loop in the source code. It would be a single, straight tunnel, drilled like a bullet hole through the middle of the world. In any case, by the time anything of significance had finished, Michel Enfois and everyone else would be dead. When it hit the other end of the earth, the program would, for the first time in a thousand years, simply finish executing and just pull over and stop.

And so it went. Years passed, men and women led lives of honor and respectability, their children became politicians and lawyers and drug addicts and poets, and the digging continued. Decades passed, first ten, then twenty, then a hundred. Through peacetime, wars, unhappy marriages, lucky throws, recessions, plagues.

When it was finally over, there were no crowds, or flags or parades. When M. Enfois’s invention had completed its mission, when it emerged there into the bright sunlight on the other side of the world, it had already been completely forgotten. No one knew about the tunnel that had just been dug through the center of the earth.

And so the tunnel remained there, laying at the center of everything, and undiscovered by everyone. Which we both know isn’t that unusual considering that by and large, everyone is always too busy to notice much of anything else. And so, even then - even after it was completed, the tunnel lay undiscovered another one hundred and fifty-three years, until a summer day when it was stumbled upon completely by accident by a family having a picnic. When they spotted the wide, gaping hole in the ground that seemed to go on forever, they all knew immediately they had found something extremely unusual.

Once discovered, there was no way to miss it a second time, for it lay humbly in the shadow of a mountain of sand that towered over everything else. It was a perfectly formidable hole: several meters wide, with a slight slope and then just straight down. As if the ground had opened a mouth, and its throat slid down into forever.

A few more people arrived, and someone notified the local authorities. An exploratory team was formed, geologists were flown in, each with a supervisor and their required environmental witness. At first, no one was quite sure what to make of it. Michel Enfois’s little boring machine was parked six thousand kilometers away, on the other end of the tunnel, and so the only thing that gave any clue to the hole's purpose was the enormous pile of dirt and the little tire tracks that led back and forth in and out of it.

The team of geologists had only made a superficial examination of the tunnel and the surrounding terrain, before they were informed of an arriving military presence. A few days later, a clean shaven officer reported that he had never seen a tunnel built with such depth and uniformity. He then sent an official request for a long list of equipment and personnel, which included cranes, diggers and so forth. Over the next weeks, along with noise, exhaust and dust, men and machinery arrived and filled up the field. Families who lived nearby walked through the meadow, and gathered by the worn grass around the tunnel entrance with blankets, coolers and grills.

Despite the enormous interest in the tunnel, multiple attempts to lower a camera failed. First the wire was too short, then the connection to the large public viewing screen failed twice. The crowd’s enthusiasm was unabated, however. And this gave the officer-in-charge a miraculous idea, which not only solved his problem of determining just what the tunnel was, but also gave everyone something to be tremendously excited about. He began to select several trained volunteers from the crowd, in order to explore the tunnel themselves and report back to live television.

The idea of using volunteers, all fitted with the necessary training, seemed to solve all of their concerns. If only the extreme depth had not made wireless transmissions impossible, the cameras would have worked and there might be some other choice. Each potential team member was carefully reviewed; naturally some military training was preferred but inexperience was often overlooked. After two days of interviews, twelve young volunteers were chosen: five women and seven men. All of them ranked between the ages of twenty and twenty-five; two were military reservists and the rest were a relatively experienced group of surveyors, geologists and engineers. One of the two military officers, Senior Officer Harris Morgan, was chosen as captain. The other, Officer Maria Calvani, took the formal assisting position of navigational engineer.

A bespoke elevator lift was then drawn, designed and welded from enormous squares of refined metal that were brought in by the truckload. It was incredible and inspiring to watch the flurry of men and activity which were brought together by my old friend’s work. And it wasn’t limited to the daytime. All night the activity buzzed, and trucks moved in and out of the field. Various types of custom tools and machinery were brought and arranged at the entrance of the tunnel. Spread out for nearly a kilometer in every direction were military vehicles, temporary parking areas, food trucks, rows of portable toilets, a large crane and forty people, most of them journalists, who had come from everywhere and nowhere to document the event.

A crowd of well wishers stood out there with the parents of the young volunteers. A few television cameras scanned the crowds, the journalists and rows and rows of senators. The twelve volunteers waved back to the crowds under the brilliant lights and flags of the nation, since it was a clear and windy day, and the sky was blinding blue and the wind flapped the flags and also the hair into their eyes. They waved to the cameras. And then they stepped together into their little round clear elevator, which was a little capsule, so tight they had to push their chests against each other and hold their shoulders straight. To avoid any kind of shock to their bodies, the little capsule took off slowly; it shook and descended, and it continued descending for about fifteen minutes until it stopped at its furthest point, where the tracks had ended, and the doors opened and they could get out and continue on their own into the blackness.

* * *

The captain held a large lantern that flooded the tunnel path ahead with sharp, clear light. The first engineer followed, and then came the second in charge, barely visible from the shadows; and then following her were the nine other team members. They carried their supplies in identical little sacks that they now swung from strings between their shoulder blades. In these packs were everything the soldiers would need for their mission: spare clothes, medicine, flashlights, batteries, nutritional spores. The tunnel went straight ahead, as far as forever. They did not speak, following established protocol. The second in command walked directly behind Capt. Morgan, and she posted their location with a single thumb press on a button every seven minutes. At some point on the first day, the signal was lost and she put the device away. Walking quietly, they covered fourteen kilometers the first day and nearly thirty-five more on their second day underground. Straight and narrow, single file, like walking the path of an arrow.

The night fell just like the days rose; in deep darkness. But it wasn’t quiet. Sounds were always present: a hiss or a squeak like gas escaping, the drip of water; tapping echoes to their steps. Then there were body lanterns that were carried with them while they were washing or walking. These were strong and bright little things, badges that they wore on their chests and powered from their body’s own movements, and they shone a cloud of clarity around them while they walked.

A startling discovery was made late in the morning of the third day. The group had stopped to mark their location - by this time they had walked fifty kilometers in a straight line - when they saw something spectacular that no one expected.

The tunnel began to bend. And curve. And wrap around itself.

What no one had realized, and what I myself only realized later upon looking back on the whole situation, is that my friend Monsieur Enfois had made an innocent programming error, a little bug in the source code. It was very minor - a forgotten semicolon actually - which caused a miscalculation in his program, at precisely the important part which instructed the boring machine on where to dig. And due to this, after a certain distance the tunnel began to loop and bend and twist instead of plummeting straight down like a well. It turned over and over in an almost random fashion, like a wiggly, topsy-turvy worm that passed through all sorts of fluorescent and metalliferous earth on its circuitous route through the underlayers of the earth’s crust.

At first, it could barely be noticed, because the bend was hidden in the dark. But there it was: a slope; a sharp angle, and another turn, and then a round spiral which led slowly down and which twisted into smaller and smaller tubes. It was intensely unnerving and convoluted; the walls of the tunnels remained smooth and even, but the direction changed every few minutes.

Officer Calvani tried her best to maintain her maps, but the oblique complexity left her drawings a twisted mess. Despite this, all twelve of them remained ardently committed to navigating their way through what was clearly transforming into a labyrinth. They couldn’t be completely sure which direction they were facing, nor could they deny that their exploration had become far behind schedule.

This was their life for months, and then it turned into years. The monotony of those days, the frequent darkness and the enclosed spaces gradually wore down on the group. The distance they walked stretched out like a hallway to forever in both directions, and the inside of the passageways looked the same from every angle. Slowly, like a tinkling bell, the worry that was deepest in each of their minds tiptoed timidly to the forefront: that they were hopelessly lost. It was a constant, unspoken fear. The deepest rocks through which the tunnel bored, the sort of the most impenetrable kind, completely blocked every transmissible bit and signal from their communication device. And so the poor captain and the eleven other explorers wandered, trying to reach a reception point, meticulously marking the paths which had already been explored.

* * *

Walking became the entirety of their day. They walked because it was the only thing to do. It was the one certain part of their lives, and it had a sense of allure that gave them a purpose but also gave them time in which they could think or not think, daydream, chant, whatever their pleasure was. They were all perfectly suited to the endlessly repeating shuffle of the group’s footsteps.

The twelve of them had long since begun to talk with each other, and telling stories became an adored way of passing the time. They made up adventures, songs, and poems while they walked. Many of these stories were based in the recollections of their own memories and experiences as children in their old homes on the surface. So much time had passed since they left, and all of them had lost everyone in their lives. Telling tales were their own personal way of reminiscing together, but also of detaching themselves in the process. It re-cast their memories as entertainment and that gave them a relaxed, lighthearted freedom to retell and extend them. As the onerous years passed, there were certain stories that became their favorites, and they wrote these down on the walls of the tunnel. Some of the stories were fantastical adventures about their descendants, who were able to find their way out through extinct volcanoes or lava tubes. Most of them ended with a dramatic depiction of their rescue. From time to time someone might even draw a picture of something, or a song, or some notes that one of them had written out to record a beautiful melody. Then some days they spent a whole afternoon drawing detailed scenes on the sides of the tunnel. What else could they do? Their lives were slowly passing with each day, with each drip, with each step.

When they weren't walking, when they sat for any length of time - the team of surveyors grew restless and irritable. This was expected, for the tunnel was too narrow to gather comfortably for a meeting, or even to sit properly. During Officer Calvani’s transmission checks, everyone stood beside each other or kneeled on the ground, drawing circles on the floor with their fingers.

* * *

I would think often to myself: what if I were to die now? What would it feel like to die? Would there be some relief, or would I run like a coward in fear? Honestly, I don’t think I could do it. I’m not prepared - I mean, of course no one is - but I’m especially unprepared. I haven’t even lived yet, and I’m twenty-four years old. This mission - this curse - has taken my life and hidden it away. It’s put it on the top shelf and I can’t reach. All I see is this rotten thing; I don’t see who I am, I don’t see my dreams, my hopes, my desires, my destiny - they are all lost, because I stand here in darkness far beneath the earth. And then - to die after this - I spit the word out - after experiencing nothing - like salt in the wound, how would it even feel? For to die mustn’t one first have lived? Be settled and content with the person they are and have become? They must surely be ready to let go only because they have known and tasted the beauty and the tragedy of life; they have felt its treasures and it’s tears, and left the room exhausted and sweaty with the experience of it.

That is the very nature of isolation - believe it or not. This is the ultimate cruelty. It allows one to live but not truly live - it allows one to hope but takes away the courage to truly dream. For while I breathe, while my heart beats and my eyes blink - I know deep in my soul that at any moment, my heart could stop beating, my brain could falter, the electricity in my body could turn off like a light bulb and I would fall down, face on the floor, to be found by the next person that walks by. I have already stolen so many good years from its clutches. It’s a sword that hangs above my head, hanging by a thread. Tell me, who could live their life this way?

One might think that it’s far easier to let go of this earth and all its worldly desires when one has really experienced all it has to offer. That is to say, when one has lived a fulfilling, satisfying, satiated life. How easy it must be for those who have had a career, loves, children, success! How simple it would be to say: “goodbye world, I have taken all I can from you, I am saturated and seek no more of my worldly desires” than to walk away having experienced nothing… having only such tired legs and a longing for what one can never have. How difficult it must be when one has achieved absolutely nothing. How the echo of failure and a destiny of obscurity make dying such a difficult and painful process!

* * *

When the Captain slept, he would vividly dream. They were dreams that were made from the daily reality of his old life; the little stops he made along the way to work or the things he did while waiting for the bus. They were the most beautiful memories that he contained, and the dreams allowed him to leap back into each experience again. This was his own personal happiness, brewed from the fruits of the life he had built. And that juice that dripped out wasn’t just himself or the love that was created from their lives. It was the energy of his youth, and it was a kind of passion and creativity that had finally found a way to flow out.

The dreams took place in grocery stores or the inside of a vehicle, but they were made from the most precious things, because they were the clearest and the closest connection he still had to the surface. And these dreams, these moments when he could walk in the forests or feel the wind on his cheek or smell the pasture near his father’s house - these were the moments that were nothing less than miracles. All he wanted was to lose himself in them. For the more beautiful the miracle, the more we want it to last. And of course we ourselves are the greatest miracle, and so the greatest tragedy of all is our own passing. That which causes the entire universe to cease.