Chapter 1

Being insane makes it hard to keep track of the time.

How many days had it been? How far had he crawled? How close was he now to the surface of the world? How much water was left and how much air?

Only as an afterthought did he realize that the gnawing had stopped below his feet. The alien rock eaters were no longer chewing. This explained why the madness had left him; the insane chewing of the alien rock eaters had gone away at last.

His mind turned to his own rock eaters. Were they still eating? Well, of course they were. He could see, couldn’t he? The yellow glow of their light was the only light he had seen in weeks. He wriggled until his face was close to the viscous trickle of yellow matter, and inspected it. Were the machines still fully functional?

He couldn’t tell without a microscope. The fact that the carrier fluid still glowed was a good sign. The nanotech machines wouldn’t glow if they weren’t also digging. He had programmed them that way.

Once, a lifetime ago, he produced the machines from a nanotechnological experiment that he never thought would succeed—but it did. He created functioning devices the size of gnats, and he programmed them to perform a few simple functions. He encapsulated the tiny machines in a tiny vial of silver and had the vial placed on his person, where it would always be with him. The dentist had balked at taking out a perfectly healthy molar to replace it with the silver vial, but a brick of twenty-dollar bills convinced him to do the deed.

The vial was intended to remain with him even after an intense search by law enforcement, and the nanotech machines were intended to be used to free him from a prison cell. Now his prison cell was the earth itself, and the nanotech machines had been put to work to perform a function for which they were not designed.

They chewed away the blockage in fragments smaller than the footprint of an ant, whether the blockage was steel security plates, reinforced concrete walls or solid limestone. Each machine transported its tiny fragment of material to the farthest possible point away from the excavation, and then traveled to the front of the excavation to chew off another fragment. For energy, they fermented small grains of whatever organic matter was provided for them to serve and, when they had energy enough, they provided a phosphorescent output. This was the sum total of their functionality.

The young man could control the direction and size of their excavation by manipulating the pool of excavating machines—this boiled down to smearing the creatures on the rocks that they should excavate. The smaller the cavity they formed, the faster they worked. In the interest of speed, he kept the cavity narrow. It was just six feet long, a foot high and not two feet in diameter. A coffin provided more elbow room. It was made even tighter by the extra equipment: the air tanks, the small compressor and the canteen.

He had been in this enclosed space for at least forty days. No wonder he was starting to lose his marbles.

He pulled out his pocket notebook and squinted as he read. Depending on how many days he had lost to madness, he ought to be nearing another air chamber. His oxygen tanks were almost depleted.

Still, he was more afraid of what would be waiting for him in the cavern than of suffocation.

He must have slept, because he regained consciousness with cold, fresh air filling his lungs painfully. The nanotech machines had chewed through the wall of the air chamber. The young man scooted forward and pushed his eyes close to the tiny opening.

His angle of ascent had been precise. He was just outside the cavern at exactly the right place—within a few feet of the trickle of the water.

Fifteen minutes later, the opening was large enough for him to wiggle through, but first he scooped up the goo that contained the nanotech machines and applied it to the walls in a new place, redirecting the angle of ascent. A mile above them at an eighty-one-degree angle was another cavern and their next scheduled pit stop.

The young man stifled the pain. Touching the goo provided the machines with organic matter, which they chewed right off of his fingers. Leave them on too long and the machines would remove his skin as effectively as dipping them in a caustic acid.

He listened, but not for long. He was so used to the silence of the earth that the trickle of the water was loud to him. Every once in a while he heard a spatter, which startled him until he was sure it was just the stream.

When he emerged from the rock, his legs wouldn’t hold him upright, so he crawled to the trickle and filled his canteens. He groped in the pool and found his emergency pack, stowed there many months ago.

Water splashed on his neck and he almost cried out. What was dripping on him?

Then he heard the sound of water splashing against stone far above, and he remembered the layout of the cavern. Some sort of intersecting vein of hard stone formed a wall alongside the tall shaft where the trickle had eaten away the limestone. It was like a bent and arthritic finger the way it distended up into the earth. He was scheduled to intersect the apex of the shaft again in thirty-six hours.

Only after crawling back into his rock cell, and only after the detritus of the excavation began to rebury the opening into the cavern did he dare to turn on the tiny compressor.

The sound was like the muted whir of a table saw, but it filled the tiny cell in the rock and sang through the earth.

Maybe he was too far away for them to hear it this time. Maybe they never came this close to the surface …

Then he heard the answering trumpet, which shook the limestone walls. Soon there was the scratching of giant claws against the rock, coming closer. They were using the tunnels he had made himself, when he first dug in to the cavern in his earth drill. They would be here in no time. With his teeth grinding from the tension, he ran the compressor until it filled the air tanks, and seconds later the nanotech machines covered the opening into the cavern with their detritus. Still he could hear the creatures that were coming up from the deep earth to find him.

They weren’t albinos. The albinos were weak and stupid and contemptible. These things had never even shown themselves, but he heard them and he knew they were less human than the albinos.

They were getting closer. The loose pile of rock at the rear of his coffin was getting thicker, but slowly. The young man decided to increase the speed of the excavation. He wiped at the liquid smear at the front of the rock, collecting it into a smaller area, and the excavation continued in the tightest possible space. The young man slithered ahead at almost a foot a minute, dragging the air tanks along between his legs on the leather belt while the limestone walls squeezed him so close he couldn’t take a deep breath.

He started laughing when he felt the digging below him. They had come to his cavern and found the loose earth of his little tunneling operation. Whatever they were—and his mind conjured wild visions—they were far too large to use his tunnels, no matter how loose the packed stone powder fill was that he left behind him. They had to dig up to him.

They were closer than last time. They would dig, and they just might reach him. He listened to the sound of the scraping claws.

He began to shiver, despite the hundred-degree heat. He estimated the progress of his pursuers and his own speed and calculated his odds of escape.

The odds weren’t good.

He calculated the odds of suffocating himself before they reached him. Again, not good. His air wouldn’t run out in time. His mind spun out of control as he thought of some other way of ending his life before they reached him; anything was better than letting them reach him. The nanotech robots were of no use. They would feed for only a short time on his flesh before their fermentation tanks were full of organic material. It wouldn’t be enough to kill him. Was there a way to use the compressor to inject himself with high-pressure air and cause a reasonably quick death? No way he could think of with the tools he had on hand.

His only option was to make a run for it. He wriggled onto his stomach, slithered to the front and wiped together the nanotech goo into an even smaller area. The tunnel grew faster but the young man could barely move forward, the rock compressing his rib cage. His arms cried out in pain. He was forced to keep them distended ahead of him to elongate his torso and to keep from disturbing the tiny, glowing line of fluid. It contained swimming nanotech machines transporting excavated stone to the rear of the hot, bullet-shaped hollow.

The grinding from below grew more intense. Those creatures were scratching out their own tunnel as fast as they could, and closing in.

The young man knew he wouldn’t make it. There was no way he could outrun them. The air became hotter when his tube passed into a granite layer, which crumbled less. The increased hardness of the rock made no difference to the nanotech machines, but the unforgiving texture of the granite was too much for the young man. He began to feel claustrophobic again, for the first time in weeks. The madness of his situation danced wickedly in his unstable mind. He chuckled at his own helplessness, feeling both horror and relief.

Those things would finally get him. His ordeal would soon end. He would be devoured, surely. Just as the albinos chomped up the blind cavefish. That was funny. He laughed some more, then choked because he didn’t have enough room for the deep breaths that laughing required.

When he stopped laughing, the scratching of stone below him had stopped. He was no longer being pursued.

Then it hit him. The granite strata was the answer. It was nothing to the self-sharpening teeth of the nanotech machines, but maybe it had foiled the creatures that were after him.

Hours later, his route of excavation closed in on the apex of the chamber. Here he was supposed to break through again and refill the air tanks. He had to do it, or he would suffocate. The next pit stop was a long way off.

Regardless of the danger, he was too intrigued to not take the opportunity to see what had chased him for as long as he could remember.

When the machines broke through the stone, he allowed them to create a hole in the rock too small for his thumb to fit through. That was enough to let in the air of the chamber, and it was enough for him to look through.

He saw only darkness.

He smelled something animal.

The disappointment was too much to bear. He must know what these things were.

“Hello down there!”

Talking to himself had kept his voice in good shape. It was answered with a distant screech. The creatures had given up on him and were already miles away. It didn’t take them long to return to the cavern, snarling as they swarmed in from the tunnel.

They carried wadded-up balls of glowing matter. It was enough to reveal them for what they were.

What they were was unlike anything that the young man had seen before.

The things flung their glowing balls and spattered the cavern walls with the glowing entrails of cave salamanders. It illuminated the eight-hundred-foot shaft all the way to the top, where the young man looked out through his tiny peephole and laughed at them.

They screeched more. They dug their great talons into the living rock and climbed up, up—but the limestone ran out. The granite was too hard for their claws to find purchase. They tumbled and slipped, breaking bony arms, cracking open their exoskeletal faceplates. One of them climbed to within a hundred feet of the young man, then plummeted, cracking its face open during the fall so that its skull split like a coconut, right along the ridge of its nose.

They screeched at the young man until the progress of his excavating machine forced him to move on. They were screeching until long after the tiny hole was covered with detritus.

The young man was chuckling. He was truly insane, and he knew it, but insanity felt good.

The world was in a nasty mood.

This was nothing new. The world was made up of nations controlled by people who had no business being in control.

Once, it had been survival of the fittest, and the most brutal caveman in the valley got to boss around all the other cave people. Then brains got bigger and people began working cooperatively to oust the brutes and give control to better leaders. Three million years later, the valleys were ruled by a new form of brute.

A politician was a human being who wanted power, and this by definition was exactly the wrong kind of person to be handed the reins of power. In some nations these brutes became dictators through their cunning, charisma and duplicity, always masked behind doctrine, always dependent on the whims of fate. Fate almost never allowed honest men to become dictators.

In other nations, they became prime ministers or presidents—through cunning, charisma and duplicity. They projected a false doctrine. They used public perception to distract the people from their evident lies. The people singled out one confident man or another to control their government because they had no real choices, and because they convinced themselves that the manufactured image of sincerity was genuine sincerity. The system was designed to bring charlatans to power. Fate almost never allowed honest men to be elected to high office.

Even the world’s biggest democracy was not a democracy, but a democratic republic, where the culture of mass media and easy answers made a mockery of the democratic process. Yet it was still the best system of national government that could be found.

Which meant the other systems were flawed in the extreme.

When the leaders chosen under all these systems became agitated by forces beyond their understanding, they lashed out at whatever target was convenient. It felt good to do so.

The world became a despicable place.