Sink: Old Man's Tale by Perrin Briar Read Free Book Online Page A

you.”
    “You’re welcome,” Jeremiah said.
    Leader caught Graham peering at the tunnels around the town.
    “You are not prisoners here,” Leader said. “You are free to come and go as you please. But bear in mind that right now there is no way out. If there was, none of us would be here. But you are free to walk around as much as you want. You’ll have to get used to the stares.”
    The young children – so small they looked like dolls – waved and stared at them, eyes wide.
    “They’ve never seen surface people before,” Leader said.
    Jeremiah cracked a rare smile and waved at the kids. Their eyes grew wider still.
    “I don’t understand how you could have been down here so long and not found a way out,” Graham said.
    “The route to the surface is not an easy one,” Leader said. “It is not straight, and must go around many obstacles. Sometimes there are more obstacles than earth. And we dig by hand.”
    “Hand?” Graham said. “Why don’t you build a machine to dig?”
    “We have tried,” Leader said. “But every attempt ends in failure.”
    “Why?” Jeremiah said. “You have a large population down here. I would have thought you could have trained some bright people to engineer a digger for you.”
    “The digger is not the problem,” Leader said. “It is the power source. No matter how hard we try we cannot make one that works.”
    “And yet you thrive down here,” Jeremiah said.
    “We are human,” Leader said. “We do what we must to survive. Come, I will show you what we know of your world.”

Chapter Fifteen
     
     
    Leader led them to a large building. The wall was sheer, rising up and up, bending back upon itself until it made a round dome-like shape overhead.
    Arranged on plinths were a series of objects they recognized immediately: garbage from the surface, arranged as if it were beautiful art. Tin cans stood in a pyramid. Pet accessories suspended from wires, giving the illusion of invisible animals. There were genuine artefacts from the ancient world too, but they were mixed with the new, placed on an equal footing with the junk.
    “These are all the artefacts we have from the surface,” Leader said.
    “You kept it all?” Graham said.
    “Every scrap we’ve found,” Leader said.
    “Why?” Jeremiah said.
    “The reasons are two-fold,” Leader said. “First, we like to remind ourselves of what our goal is. Faced with dirt walls all day can get to you. But if there’s hope, a sign of something more out there that you’re trying to achieve, then it’s worth keeping those items on show for everyone to see at any time.”
    “What’s the second reason?” Jeremiah said.
    “So we can backward engineer what we’ve found,” Leader said. “Often, the technology is beyond us and there’s nothing we can learn. But at other times we can learn a great deal.”
    On a flat plinth behind a piece of sheet glass was a map of the Earth, with all its continents and countries clearly labelled. It was a little old and dated.
    “One of our greatest finds,” Leader said. “Tell me, is it accurate?”
    “It is,” Jeremiah said. “Though some of the countries no longer exist.”
    “Perhaps you can update it for us,” Leader said.
    Something caught Jeremiah’s eye.
    “This must be one of the diggers you were telling us about,” Jeremiah said. “It’s a lot bigger than I imagined.”
    It was about the size of an SUV. On the front were a series of large drill bits, all turned and facing inwards, like a monster’s jutting teeth.
    “That’s right,” Leader said. “It’s one of the only machines we have down here. We’ve tried everything we can think of to get it to work, but nothing works. We backward engineered it as best we can, but the technology is so advanced it’s difficult to make much progress. It’s like having half the instructions, and having to figure the rest out yourself but without really being able to understand the first half in the first