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Approximately one million sun cycles ago, my ancestors lived on this large island somewhere far to the north. They had built this big city that had a population of over five hundred thousand people. They had developed a technology that powered the city as well as most of the rest of the island. This technology was something that created energy that lit crystals to provide light at night so they could see in the dark and this energy also powered other things. But it was this technology that forced my ancestors to leave the island. When they had first discovered the technology they used it for the energy it produced, but they did not have the knowledge of how to properly maintain what they used to make the energy or what would occur if it was not maintained.
After 300 sun cycles they knew, it was like what they used to produce the energy had some kind of disease within it, and now that it had not been maintained the disease seemed to be leaking. This disease caused people to have a sickness with starting symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea and the person afflicted with the disease would always eventually die from it because there was no cure. So those of my ancestors who were still healthy and untouched by the disease that the bad technology was spreading got on their boats and ships and sailed south to a new land far away from the island and when they got to that new land they just kept going further and further south until the land ended and they settled there. But they knew that they would still not be completely safe from the disease, because while on the island before setting out for the new land they discovered the wind could carry the disease for long distances, maybe even farther than they traveled across the world and even farther than what it is possible to travel.
So they dug themselves a deep hole in the ground and dug until the hole was 100 forearms deep. They then built stairs leading to the bottom of the hole and then dug a giant cave about two hundred thousand forearms long by one hundred fifty thousand forearms wide by eight forearms in height. Then they all went into the cave and sealed the entrance behind them, they did not know if doing all this work would prevent the disease from eventually reaching them in time, but they decided that they would at least hope it would, even if all it would only allow them to do is survive, so that hopefully one day fifty generations and one million sun cycles later their far in the future offspring would be able to go outside to enjoy the ocean, animals, blue sky and sun. They and their later generations survived in the cave without nature by growing plants and raising domesticated animals for food, creating special light crystals so that they wouldn’t get depressed without the sun and to make the plants grow, genetically engineered some special moss so they could breathe the air of the underground, and built their houses from wood that they took from the surface before sealing the entrance. The only real difference from now and then is that now many of our technology has improved and we don’t have any more wood to build our houses because we cannot grow from the ground the tall plants our ancestors used to get the wood from so we build our houses with rocks, dirt, and clay instead.
But now, today, maybe things will change, because we are about to open the seal our ancestors placed to keep out the disease and we are going to venture out into surface above after waiting so many sun cycles to finally be able to do so, our ancestors said that at the decomposition rate the disease may still exist on the island but they are sure that the wind is no longer capable of spreading it.
My people attempt to open the seal to the surface but after so many thousands of sun cycles the mechanism will not work and the seal will not budge. So using some tools and machines we drill through the seal to the stairs going up only to see that the entrance has caved in. We now dig and drill our way through the dirt and rocks until we reach the surface and it is just as beautiful a wonder as our ancestors said it was with the green plants in the dirt swaying, the tall plants were green at the top and brown toward the bottom that our ancestors harvested the wood from, the bright blue sky and the stunningly bright sun. I and the others that were with me at the surface had never seen any of this before. We saw something in the sky far away that was making a continuous sound, I have no idea what it is because animals do not make continuous rhythmic sounds for long because they eventually run out of air in their body and animals also don’t leave white clouds behind them. Whatever it was in the sky making this sound wasn’t a danger to us though, was far away, wasn’t coming toward us, and didn’t even seem to notice us.
I went to the top of a nearby hill to see everything that I could that was nearby and everything looked the same except that there were some sort of structures far away to the east. Why is there anything over there that appears to have been made by other intelligent beings like ourselves, are there more people like us here on the surface, could it be that the disease was never carried by the wind off the island of my ancestors? A while later after the sun had made our shadows go from the center of our feet to the east of our bodies, about five hundred of us had come out of our underground shelter. At this time we saw a creature on another hill far away that was the same shape as us so we got scared and went back underground for a while until the next sun cycle and camouflaged the entrance before going back down. This other creature we did not know if it was peaceful or hostile and we did not want to find out just yet. But obviously the disease has not been on this land for awhile because it killed all land animals that lived and maybe all animals in water and plants too.
The next sun cycle we came out, but now everything is much different. Everything is entirely dark, like we needed our crystals to see anything, we could not see the small plants on the ground, the tall plants that provided wood, the blue sky or the sun. But we saw something that was just as wondrous, when we looked to where the sky was we saw little white dots in the blackness and something that was like a much bigger white thing about the size of the sun but was definitely not as bright. If our method of telling time was accurate back when our ancestors were alive it is definitely inaccurate now because the sun should be out and the sky should blue, I remember reading and being told that the surface did this kind of change with the sky, sun, and light.
I went to the top of a hill again and saw something far away on the top of another hill, it looked like a flickering fire in the distance many forearms away. About a hundred of us came out this time to the surface because not as much is written about the darkness as there is the time that we can see so many of us were afraid of not only the darkness that seemed kind of ominous but also because we could not see.
We all organized together to go towards what looks like the flickering flame I saw. When we get there we see people like us there gathered around the fire but they are all taller than us by at least a forearm. They are making noises to each other like my people do, are they speaking to each other like me and my people do? We see some kind of animal there with them that has a short snout and four legs, we have domesticated animals down in the underground with us that look somewhat like this animal that we bred and genetically engineered to be a guard for when we finally opened the seal, so that if something/someone foreign found the entrance to the cave and tried to enter our huge creatures that we used for protection would stop them by killing them in case they are hostile and mean harm.
We waited for the ‘people’ around the fire to go away which they eventually do, they extinguish the fire enter some kind of really small structure that doesn’t seem very stable because we see it wiggle and it seems to be made from some type of cloth. We go over towards the animal because we want it for food, it will be our first meal on the surface. We render it unconscious by hitting it in the head with a rock, but it is tied to one of the plants that is really tall that we can get wood from by something we can’t identify. So we cut the animals head off and put the animal’s body in a large crystal container that we brought along so we can cook it and then eat it.
While the animal is cooking we hear a woman in one of the flimsy structures scream “There’s something outside the tent!” but I can’t understand what she said and neither can anyone else, apparently we woke her up with all our commotion. We now see some kind of lights inside all the small flimsy structures like they have crystals that produce their own light like we do. We get scared and leave our cooking container behind and some of our crystals that make light as we run as fast as we can back to our underground shelter, we are chased by something that has something like two crystal things that make light and it sounds much like whatever it is I saw in the blue sky during the last sun cycle. We make it to the entrance of our shelter and we camouflage the entrance again to look like the ground before we go back down.
We go back to the surface again, we have now decided that whatever happens or whatever we see that we will not interact with it anymore for awhile, we will observe only. It is all black again, for some reason the white dots and the white circular thing that were there before where the blue sky should be are not visible. But now we see on the ground in the distance all around us something moving, like there are many of these ‘people’ with the crystals that make light and they are walking around. When only about five of us have gotten to the surface again, one of the ‘people’ shout something and then start running towards us. Of course we get scared again and run back down after quickly covering up the entrance again.
Half a sun cycle later me and a few others are positioned at the entrance with swords, spears, and crossbows to help our large beastly guards protect our homes should anyone come down. I hear up above something and then a ‘person’ is tumbling down the stairs coming toward us. If the man wasn’t dead already by the time he reaches our beasts then our beasts kill him. Two more men come running down the stairs towards us supposedly to help the one that fell, one is carrying some kind of an object that I can’t tell what it is but I assume it’s a weapon and the other is carrying a dimly lit crystal light. They see our terrifying beasts but not before its too late because their reaction is slower than their eyes, one of the beasts tears the one with a weapon apart and kills him instantly but not before hurting our beast. I heard the weapon the ‘person’ was carrying make a noise like someone hitting two gigantic rocks together only it was much louder, the other one carrying the dimly lit light barely escapes unharmed and runs back up the stairs screaming like a woman.
I was grasping my spear and run up the stairs in anger to protect my home from the ‘people’ of the surface, on the way to the surface I saw that the beast that had been hurt seemed okay, he was still standing and it seemed like just a flesh wound. I get to the top and skewered one of the ‘people’ through the shoulder with my spear, one of them manages to grab my spear so I can’t do anything more with it and then I hear two more loud sounds again like the one that hurt our beast, then I fall to the ground and can’t move my legs because I feel tremendous pain in my knees.
One ‘person’ then comes and puts my hands behind my back while I struggle against it but others help him and he then puts something shiny and circular on both my hands with something I can’t identify connecting them. They then put me in something else I can’t identify and take me away, I don’t know why but I couldn’t seem to stay awake…
When I wake up I am in something white with white cloths covering it and me, I slept in something similar when I was underground, and I am in a white room, the walls of the room seem to be some kind of very hard rock but there is something white covering them. I can’t move my hands because the same shiny circular things connected by that thing I can’t identify are now attached to whatever this thing is that I woke up in. I want to get out of here and escape from wherever this is so I just stay quiet and think since nobody is nearby so I will hopefully remain unnoticed that I am now awake. I struggle to quietly free myself from whatever these things are that are bonding me to this thing but whatever I do it is unsuccessful so I just lay there in the white thing still trying to think of a way out. Eventually though some ‘people’ walk in and are making noises to me like they are trying to talk to me like I talk to my people in the underground.
A couple weeks later, nobody else has dared to go down the stairs into the shelter. I manage to have made some kind of communication with the surface people. The tell me that these things we call sun cycles they call days, that thirty days make a month, twelve months make a year, and that my ancestors traveled so far and made the underground shelter approximately 1,000 B.C. and that this is the year 2009 A.D. They point on a map to me where our people are and they say it is Cape Horn, the southernmost place of South America, and I point to them on a map where my people told me that my ancestors came from, the surface people called that place Cuba but said the part of Cuba where the city was that my ancestors were from is now covered by the ocean.
We go back to my people's entrance to the hole and I lead them down the stairs of the entrance to our underground shelter, I yell to my people in my language that everything is fine and that I am coming down with some of the surface people. I’m not sure who was more surprised, the surface people seeing a not-so primitive culture that that lived and survived entirely underground for three thousand years with thousands of people, or my people seeing how amazing and beautiful the world above is.
Three months later, and we now have made much more communication progress. They tell us that the energy that we believe created the disease that killed our ancestors is in use today in some areas of the world, it is called nuclear energy. They also say that they believed the place that our ancestors came from the have heard of but they believed it was just a myth, a legend at best, but that our survival shows that its not just a legend but fact also. The place that my ancestors came from they call: Atlantis.
- Title: Far Below the Surface...
- Artist: Jeronus
- Description: About one hundred feet below the ground, a race of people come out of their shelter after hiding in a hole for 3,000 years.
- Date: 06/14/2009
- Tags: below surface
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Comments (2 Comments)
- Kyo_Hattress - 06/18/2009
- sun cycle....well, how can they see the sun?
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- Casca 7 - 06/17/2009
- This is a decent story. It reminds me a bit of City of Ember though. One thing I don't get is why you refer to the sun cycles. If they lived underground for 3000 years and haven't seen the sun, it's a little far-fetched for them to use that as a time reference. Also, when describing something that is new to a character, try to avoid using the word "thing". Sorry I'm a bit of a harsh critic, but I hope that helps. ^_^;;;
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