Chapter 3

Bentley, are the sheep ready to come over?” Julia radioed over to her friend in Installation 1, referencing the investors and tourists to see the experiment.
“Yeah Julia, they’re heading off in a tram right now.”
Bentley laughed into his radio. Julia confirmed they were ready to receive them and started walking down the cold hallway towards the tram station. She was nervous of course and the cold fluorescent lighting and grey walls didn’t do much to soothe her, but she was confident in the Heliogel and confident in her ability to operate the machinery with a brain scan. Julia walked down through a few corridors to the ground floor and finally used a small hand pad to open the large bay doors to the tram station. A black tram materialized out of the darkness and slowly stooped on the track next to the platform. Julia stood atop a flight of stairs and gazed at the people milling out of the tram. There were about fifty of them that she could easily separate into three groups by looking at their faces. One group of men and women in business attire stood away from the others and wore no smiles; those would be the investors. The tourists were all people that obviously had a lot of money and milled around aimlessly with dumb, excited looks. The group of people that would keep her sane, that she felt like she could actually talk to, were fellow international scientists like her that were genuinely curious to see the outcome of the experiment.

“Everybody please follow me, My name is Dr. Summers and I’ll be your guide into The Hole, our creatively named experiment site, and also the main conductor of the experiment using advanced brain scan technology.” She nervously lead the group through a few halls and down a few flights of stairs in order to get to the basement level used to descend into The Hole. The basement level had large windows in the exterior wall so that you could gaze across the entire pit and see the ring of 1A around it. Walkways like the one her and the group were in front of extended from the other 3 cardinal directions out to the central elevator leading into The Hole. They passed a rack of emergency climbing suits and tools and she rambled on about the basement, the suits, and all the safety precautions. As a speech filler and to appease the tourists she also explained how polar night was coming, a period of six month darkness that occurred in the south pole due to Earth’s tilt.
“Do you all really deal with half a year of night down here?” an old tourist in a coat and a baseball hat spoke up from the crowd.
“Yeah it can get pretty depressing sometimes, and today happens to be the sunset, but we tough it out. It’s just another part of the job after a while and six months of night means six months of day too.”
Julia was only slightly annoyed that were more questions about night and day then a dark node experiment. Julia walked over to the left and re-briefed her friend, Sarah, on the details of their trip into The Hole and gave her a few tips for using the brain scan technology to pilot the elevator for the group. Sarah nodded, seemingly confident, and Julia opened the door leading outside. The group donned light jackets once they stepped outside due to the dome over 1A keeping it livable, but near constantly cold. It was eery walking over this enormous dark pit, with the dome riddled with hexagons above and the setting on the arctic expanse. Julia and the group reached the elevator and after radioing Sarah they were ready, began their descent into The Hole.



- By Ashton