The first thing Maxwell noticed was the sound. Even before the slide had terminated in a pitch-black closet, he could hear a thunder of machinery that threatened to further erode his tinnitus-afflicted ears. It sounded like fireworks, the volley of cannons, and some ancient beast crying out all at the same time.
Maxwell came to a stop on thick mat so dusty that he fell into a coughing fit. He was still coughing when Marigold came shooting down the slide and crashed into him.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
“What?” Maxwell said. He could not hear her above the din of the machinery.
“I said sorry,” Marigold shouted.
“Oh.” Maxwell paused and collected himself. “It’s dark in here. I can’t see anything.”
“What?” Marigold said.
“I said, it’s dark.”
“Oh.”
Marigold pulled out a small flashlight and shone it around the small closet that Maxwell could now see was definitely a small utility closet. After letting the light linger over various shelves of tools, she found the door.
“Alright, I don’t know if anyone will be down here, but just act normal. Pretend we’re meant to be here. Got it?” Marigold shouted.
“What are you both saying, I can’t hear anything,” IT shouted from the bag.
They opened the door and entered a room bathed in crimson light. They emerged on a grated walkway suspended over a bottomless pit. On all sides, pistons the size of trees were hammering up and down, creating the deafening sound. Above the piston on metal walkways above them, rows of piercing yellow eyes stood out in the dark and looked down at them. They sat in the middle of cylindrical bodies, that were little more than buckets with arms and eyes. Maxwell couldn’t tell if these were living creatures, robots, or simply part of the machine. Either way, their arms rested on levers that moved back and forth with the rhythm of the machine. Everywhere a kind of sludge pervaded, dripping from the ceiling, oozing out of the machines, and covering the walkway with a moist sheen.
Maxwell wanted to ask where they were and what this machine did, but he knew that he wouldn’t be heard. Nobody tried to stop them on their journey through this factory. They walked the length of the path and then made their way down a set of stairs that coiled downwards for some time. Nobody was guarding this place, and other than the yellow-eyed lever-pullers, nobody else seemed to occupy it.
Though they descended for several minutes, the sound did not diminish. It wasn’t until they reached the end of the stairs and put a very thick metal door between them and the sound, that Maxwell could hear anything other than the hellish cacophony. Once they were away from it, his ears had the fuzzy feeling of heading home from a very loud concert at two in the morning. He tried yawning several times, but his hearing was not quick to return.
At least the new corridor was well lit. Rooms of computers and charts sprung up on either side of the hall. All of it was empty and had been left in a state of general disarray. Someone had scrawled “Temporal Optimization Numbers” on a whiteboard, but no numbers had been included below it. The whole place seemed to have been abandoned recently. After trekking down miles of beige, fluorescent-lit corridors, they finally spotted another living being. It spotted them too.
It was too distinct from anything Maxwell had seen before to hazard a guess what it was. It stood on three spindly legs that did not look sturdy enough to support his bulbous upper segment. The creature’s perfectly round head sat on a perfectly round stomach, with no neck or chest in between. It had no ears and no nose, and its arms and fingers were a series of connected orbs of decreasing size. A bright orange uniform hung down over the creature’s frame like a poncho. It looked relieved to see them and gracefully tapped its way over.
“Are you the relief?” he asked.
Maxwell looked over at Marigold.
“I’m afraid not,” she said.
“That’s a shame. I was supposed to be relieved this morning, but then everyone started panicking and ran back home. I don’t mind telling you how tired I am. Wait, are you a Caretaker?”
“I am,” Marigold replied.
“What reason would a Caretaker have to be all the way down here?”
“We're going down, all the way down.”
Maxwell wondered why Marigold was telling the guard all of this. Shouldn’t they be keeping their plans secret?
The guard wrinkled his face. “You know that’s not allowed, surely.”
“If we don’t do it, you’ll likely have nothing left to guard. Things are breaking down.”
“Breaking down?” The creature thought to himself for a moment. “So that’s why everyone was running around so frantically. Nobody tells me anything. What’s going on exactly?”
Marigold explained the situation in detail, though Maxwell noticed she gracefully elided the parts that mentioned him directly.
“Oh my,” the creature said when Marigold had finished.
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“So, you see why it’s important for us to keep going.”
“Indeed, indeed. If you think getting down can solve things, of course, you can go, but how were you planning on getting into the Archive? And do you have a way of getting down to the ground?”
“We’ll figure something out.”
“Well, even if I let you pass, which I’m very much not supposed to do, I have no way of opening the lock on the gate. It’s some fancy electronic number. I’m afraid they don’t give me the password, so this might be a bit of a dead end for you.”
“Could we look anyway?” Marigold asked.
“If you think it would do you any good.”
The guard resumed his half-hearted vigil as Marigold walked over to the door with Maxwell close behind.
“That was easy,” Maxwell said. “He’s not much of a security guard.”
“He’s a halgrey. They’re assigned guard positions because it's impossible to lie to them. If one of them asks you a question, you’re compelled to tell the truth. He’s letting us through because he knows with certainty I’m not lying, though obviously I’m omitting some things, so let's hope he doesn’t ask about you.”
“What would happen if I lied to him?”
“You couldn’t.”
“But what if I tried?”
“Don’t. It’s not possible. Now come and check out the gate.”
Two yellow iron bolts barred the stone doors. A keypad joined them in the center.
“What do you think?” Maxwell asked.
Marigold shook her head. “I don't do electronics.”
“Let me see,” IT called out.
Marigold opened her bag and pulled out IT. Its sensors scanned the lock for a moment and then instructed Marigold to connect the cable on top of its head to the port on the side of the lock. A second later, the two beams retracted, and the mechanism fell to the ground with a thud. Marigold pulled the doors open and another darkened metal staircase leading down.
The guard looked back to see what had caused the commotion. “How’d you do that?”
“A simple brute-force method. There were only four digits,” IT replied.
“A robot,” the halgrey said. He walked over to examine the vacuum cleaner in Marigold’s hands.
“Very perceptive of you, yes, I’m IT. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too. I’m Gorall.” He looked over at the door. “Well, I guess you’re headed down there then, huh?
“That’s the plan,” Marigold said.
“You know, the way you’re thinking of going, it used to be part of the Pilgrimage back when things were whole.”
“Yes, we know,” IT said. “A bureaucratic demon told us.”
The creature thought about this for a moment. “Was his name Walter?”
“How did you know?” Marigold asked.
“He’s a friend of mine, and as far as I know, the only one working at the Bureau who’s been around long enough to remember the Pilgrimage. We used to have lunch together, back before the move to the Junction.” Gorall bit his lower lip with his round grey teeth. “So, this is a proper emergency, huh?”
“It is,” Marigold said.
“And you think heading down is going to fix things?”
“I think it’s worth a try.”
He nodded. “Alright, I guess you can go, but one last question before you do. Why can’t you just take a train down? A train could get you down to the Hollows, at least.”
“Well, like I said, the System is down,” Marigold said.
“Sure, but not all trains are connected. If it’s a genuine emergency, you could go to the Ægency and get on one of the emergency shuttles.”
Maxwell looked over at Marigold. Neither of them said anything.
“Why not just do that? Surely a Caretaker like you would have access,” Gorall said at last.
Marigold appeared to be struggling to keep her mouth closed, while slowly sliding IT back into her bag. Gorall looked over at Maxwell.
“Come to think of it, your friend has said nothing this whole time. Why is that?”
Maxwell tried to come up with a lie, but nothing came to mind. The words, I’m human, were the only thing he could think of. When his mind reached out for other thoughts, he found the effort tortuous.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Maxwell shouted, clutching his head.
“You were about to lie to me.” Gorall frowned. “What’s this all about?”
Maxwell needed to tell this creature he was human. He wanted to do it more than he had wanted to do anything in his life. It didn’t matter if it jeopardized everything. Marigold spoke before he got the chance. Her words came out in a torrent, rushing out in a jumble that sounded like a single word:
“He’sahumanandwe’rebeingpursuedbytheauhtoritiestheywanttokillhimbutwecan’tlethathappenoreverythingisoverMaxwellrunnow.”
Maxwell wasn’t sure if he heard the last part correctly, but she repeated herself, this time slowly.
“Maxwell run, now.”
And he did. With Marigold close behind, they ran through the door and leapt down the metal stairs two or three at a time. They did not look back to see if Gorall was pursuing them. They did not stop sprinting until they reached the bottom of the stairs and exited out into the endless sands of the Wailing Plains.
*
Back at the gate, Gorall was not sure exactly what had happened. He had been having such a pleasant conversation with the Caretaker and the mysterious figure in the novelty t-shirt. Even their robot seemed amiable. Then the Caretaker mumbled something about a human and ran off down the stairs. Honesty may be the best policy, but it's a terrible way to make new friends.
Gorall walked over to the crude guard booth beside the newly opened gate. He stared at the emergency phone and pondered if what he had just witnessed was truly an emergency or not. Part of the problem with being a species that could not be lied to was the inability to lie to oneself. This meant careful deliberation about even routine decisions. On the one hand, most folks would certainly describe a human running around the Backend as an emergency, but what about Gorall himself? He was not sure. If there was a catastrophe that only a human could help solve, then so be it. Let the fleshy primates run rampant. Gorall was a halgrey of principal, and though he might not like the unnerving way human hair sprouted up in scattered awkward tufts from random parts of their body, he had always thought it deceitful to keep half the universe a secret from the other half. Honesty was, after all, not a moral choice for his species so much as an inescapable reality. It was why there had never been a halgrey lawyer, politician, or customer service agent, and why so many of his kind failed to break into show business. (The famous exception on this front was Wranx Batell, whose one-creature show Just the Facts was described by critics as “brutally honest,” “unflinchingly sincere,” and “the longest eight hours of my life.”)
No, Gorall was not sure this was an emergency that warranted a call to his boss, not yet. He would need to make another call first. Fortunately, even with the outage, he could connect to the private administrative network up in the Junction. He dialed the number for Temporal Accounting.
“Hello,” a voice said. Gorall did not recognize it. The Bureau of Temporal Accounting seemed to change secretaries more frequently than Gorall changed toothbrushes.
“Hello, my name is Gorall and I’m a guard down in temporal refinery sector. How are you?”
“Miserable. My partner left me, and I’m afraid I’m wasting my life.”
“I see. I’m sorry to hear that.” Gorall did not mind being told the truth all the time, but he wished people didn’t feel the need to give him so much of it all at once.
“Could you put me through to Walter?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to wait. I have someone more important on the other line.”
Gorall sat back in his chair and hummed along to the hold music. Why was he humming though? Did he actually like the music? He thought about this for a moment.
No. No, he did not.