2nd Transmission

I think I could have done a better job with 1st Transmission. I think I was non committal in setting a tone, despite the source data being very clear with the feeling of its content.

The beginnings of a complex pattern seem like chaos if they can’t be presented to you all at once.

* The Author

==

Speculation city was built on shaky ground. Cracks, crags and crevices ran throughout its streets and in many important ways defined them.

If you were to build low, wide buildings in the right spot – as those first builders did – then you wouldn’t have too hard of a time doing what everyone does when they have to live with something long enough. They got on with their lives.

They learned just how close they could get to the violent rumblings in the ground beneath them while still being able to pretend like it was perfectly fine. They dug low and gained a sense for unspoken decisions. Speaking of problems gave them life, and were the very soil and rock and whatever else was down to there be given life, it would be given a name. That name was surely Doom.

If they fled, Doom would give chase.

To ask questions of Doom would garner but one response.

To wield it as a weapon was to invite but one opponent, though one with many names. Order. Life. Peace. Function. Existence.

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To ignore it was to give Doom the worst kind of attention of all. The attention that gives shape to the unseen and unforgiving things we ignore.

As part of the chaos, these people found their order. This is how they became one with the tremors. They did not thrive, but they continued. For quite some time.

By telling themselves no stories, no ending was necessary.

*

The people here before we showed up were unsuspecting to a fault. If they had any reservations about what we were doing, they didn’t show it. If they had any inkling that what we were doing was a bad idea, they didn’t share it. They showed no preference, gave no advice and demanded nothing.

I think it’s their fault, really.

We built quick buildings.

Quick in the sense that we built them quickly. The pit-houses the natives built were perfect foundations for the stackable units preferred by mobile research teams. I don’t think a night passed before most of us were comfortably sleeping in them. And we could stack them seven, maybe eight high.

Quick in the sense that they were directly above what we wanted to get to. Our entry point into the tremor sites were zippered all along the ground around us. On some sites, we could throw ropes from our windows and climb down to what felt like the bones of the planet itself.

And quick in the way they moved. The ground rumbled, and our buildings swayed. Whatever was down there was busy and churned our foundations like flotsam. Initially we had assistants out there with stilts, ready to prop up the upper stories of a stack if it were to lilt toward them. We have since devised a more clever solution and the matter practically takes care of itself with minimal casualties.

Unfortunately creatures horrifying to the extent that we cannot at this time obtain accurate descriptions of them have been slaughtering any researchers who make it any respectable and essential distance underground. This has caused considerable casualties.