( R E ) C Y C L E

(display: 'Menu') <img src="./img/title_16-9_red_2.png"> a remake of <a href="https://dominoclub.itch.io/cycle">( C Y C L E )</a> in Twine (text-style:"expand")[[{< start >}->Intro]] "vires acquirit eundo"

(display: 'Menu') ## `/` My grandfather was a coal miner. <img src="img/mine-2.png"> He would occasionally tell stories about the mines, but I was too young to really understand what he meant when he described the low hum of the earth, the suffocating presence of several thousands of metric tons of rock above and below you, the shivering warmth of your fellow men, cooped up by dozens in an elevator as you descend deeper and [[deeper into the dark->Contract]]. One of the few things I vividly remember about my grandfather's stories is how he’d exclusively refer to the tunnels as [entrails.]<entrails| How oddly it struck me. [Does he mean the mineral (link-reveal:"*oozes?*")[ Didn't *people* make these tunnels?]](entrails1| (click: ?entrails)[ (show: ?entrails1) ] <img src="img/mine-4.png"> He retired in the eighties when they closed the (link-reveal:"last mine")[ a few years after a coal dust explosion that killed twenty (link-reveal:"workers")[, most of them young men brought in as part of a state incentive to re-open coal mines to boost the economy after the petrol crises in the (link-reveal:"seventies")[. It was the worst disaster in the history of coal mining in the region]]]. <img src="img/mine-5.png"> After two centuries of extraction, the veins had dried up. My grandfather said that after generations of blood, sweat and piss as offerings, the entrails were finally satiated. [[Continue >->Archeology]]

(display: 'Menu') ## `//` Every large city has an equally large underground system. Sewers, service tunnels. Air raid shelters and bunkers. Most of those are ones most people will never see. Then there’s the other ones. Car parks. Underground railways and their underground stations. Your basement, if your building has one. I have a (link-reveal:"friend--")[well, she's more a friend of a friend--]who tells me about work. <img src="img/archeology.jpg"> She’s an archeologist, and she works with the city, with the company that’s building the new big railway tunnel. The new big railway tunnel will make the trains run even more on time. The new big railway tunnel will swallow up even more people every day from one of its many mouths, and regurgitate them elsewhere in the city. My friend works with the city to make sure they don’t destroy anything of value while they dig the tunnel. She laughs and says, the city’s heritage becomes “of value” only once someone bothers to dig it up, apparently. I laugh as well. I think about my grandfather, the mines, the coal. I think about the (link-reveal:"entrails.")[ The warm (link-reveal:"tunnels.")[ The low hum of the (link-reveal:"earth.")[ The becoming darkness pierced only by head lamps.]]] <img src="img/mapcrop.jpg"> I neck the rest of my beer and ask her, do you ever find some fucked up shit? Human remains? Worse? My friend tells me no, they don’t, and even if they did, she wouldn’t tell me about it. So I say, come on, what’s the most fucked up shit you found? *No, she says. Sorry, I can’t tell you.* *But I can tell you this--* [[Continue >->Rumours]]

(display: 'Menu') ## `///` Every large city has its fair share of rumours and urban legends. Every city has its ghost stories, like the one at F...S... station. I hear (link-reveal:"S")[, another friend of a friend,] saw him once. The story goes like this: S is in the city for a night out and he's (link-reveal:"stumbling")[ (of course he'd been drinking; you know how these stories go)] down onto platform eight. He's hazily waiting for his train home, when he sees a figure across the station, beyond the rails, on platform ten. This man, wearing beige overalls and a hard hat, doesn't look that out of place in a station that's often got construction going on, except for the fact he's soaking wet. His clothes, his hair, everything, as if he had fallen into the river behind the fence. There is something haggard about the way he stands. The man is turning his back to S, and S doesn't know why he thinks this, but he absently, drunkenly thinks: ha, this guy doesn't have a face. Then, the train arrives and S gets on, still staring at the man through the windows as it departs the station a few minutes later. The train curves slightly, giving S the perfect angle to catch a glance of the man's face... but then the man turns his head the other way. <img src="img/tunnel3.jpg"> There are other stories. there are always other stories. In my early teens I went to a school in the inner city, and there too rumours ran wild, about classmates and people from other schools, of course, but also the school building itself and its many (link-reveal:"underground levels.")[ (Why would a school need so many underground levels?)] One day some of my classmates went to explore those levels. They said that they followed the dim corridors to eventually reach their goal, a heavy metal door that led directly into the underground railway tunnels, although to their disappointment the door was locked shut. The door was locked shut because a few years prior another group of kids went into those tunnels, and one of them got caught trying to go back on his own a few days after their risky but unnoticed first escapade. He wanted to go back on his own because of the tunnel exit, he said, he had to know. This tunnel exit went downwards, deeper underground instead of upwards to the surface like a tunnel exit is supposed to do. He had to know. [[Continue >->Construction]]

(display: 'Menu') ## `////` <img src="img/1929.jpg"> This city’s underground railway system was built in the seventies. It cost a lot of time and money. It cost (link-reveal:"a few lives too")[, looking into the public archives will tell you as much], but people tend to care more about the time and the money. It had been a long time in the making, the first underground railway plans dating back from the late nineteen-twenties, but it'd be forty years until they actually decide on plans and start building it. Add twelve years of digging, hollowing out, burrowing, building... and eventually, in (link-replace:"1985")[late May of 1985, after completing the last station which had given the workers most trouble], the biggest construction project in the history of the city at the time is complete. <img src="img/construction1.png"> It's easy to think of a giant buried structure as something that has always been there. In the dark you don't see the cracks in the concrete, only the perfect curved shape of the tunnel overhead. It's easy to forget [people]<people| made it. [ (link-reveal:"blood.")[ (link-reveal:"sweat.")[ (link-reveal:"piss.")[ the entrails, the human touch.]]]](people1| (click:?people)[(show:?people1)] <img src="img/construction2.png"> <img src="img/construction3.jpg"> <img src="img/construction4.jpg"> 900,000 cubic metres of earth excavated. 300,000 cubic metres of concrete poured in. Seems like no one really knows exactly how many people in total worked under the city to dig and connect all these tunnels together. Being a contractor will do that to you. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, you just have to get it done. Lot of hard work for little acknowledgement. All you can do is tell stories of when you worked under the city to dig and connect all these tunnels together. You've heard this one [[before->Contract]]. *You're contracted to go underground...* <img src="img/tunnel1.png"> [[Continue >->Incident]]

(display: 'Menu') ## `/////` On the afternoon of February 17, 1972, 75mm of rain poured over the city in about twenty minutes, flooding the central arteries almost immediately. The downpour caught everyone by surprise, including the team of workers working in the tunnels underneath the city. The floodwaters, with nowhere else to go, engulfed the site. Everyone miraculously survived with just small injuries. Everyone except one, who, according to multiple (link-reveal:"eyewitnesses")[ (including a friend's uncle)], got swept away by the heavy current, a desperate yell faintly heard among the loud rumble of the water against the tunnel's walls. After a head count, it turned out that everyone in the team was accounted for, clearly spelling out in everyone's mind the question of who the man in the water could have been. <img src="img/station.jpg"> They never found the body, instead finding a large, vertical hole in a cavity off to the side of the tunnel, presumably where all that (link-reveal:"water")[ and, presumably, the body,] went. When a rock was dropped into the hole to see just how deep it went, it took an uncomfortably long time for the splash to make itself heard, the sound reverberating against the perfect curves of the cavity. [[Continue >->Waiting]]

<img src="img/eye.jpg" width="100%"> [[Continue >->Obsession]]

(display: 'Menu') ## `//////` According to my friend's uncle, another team came and did works on that hole, for some reason adding some type of stair or ladder on its walls in a [futile attempt]<futile| to reach its bottom. [That's what he thought was going on anyway.](futile1| (click:?futile)[(show:?futile1)] <img src="img/chamber.jpg"> What he and his team were (link-reveal:"asked to do")[ without much explanation as to *why*,] was to build a tunnel exit that led to the strange chamber the floodwaters had carved out. This exit was to be unmarked. The unmarked exit is said to be in the tunnel between M... station and (link-reveal:"P... Station")[, you probably guessed it, not too far away from my old school]. It's not hidden, either. An emergency exit is meant to be seen in the dark. It glows in the tunnel, and when you're on the train heading clockwise and stand on the right side of the carriage, looking out, you may catch a glimpse of it for a split second. I see it every day. <img src="img/exit.jpg"> The path for the new (link-reveal:"big railway tunnel...")[(link-reveal:"the big build...")[the new big railway tunnel that will make the trains run even more on (link-reveal:"time...")[the new big tunnel that will swallow us up all...]]] intersects perfectly with where this abyss is said to be. The line and its tunnel are set to open in 2025. <img src="img/tunnel4.jpg"> [[>->Outro]]

(hide:?Sidebar) # `⟳` I'm in the train heading clockwise. I lean onto the window of the right side of the carriage and stare at the glowing maw. The city hums low. <img src="img/outro.jpg"> [END]<END|(click:"END")[(restart:)]

You’re contracted to go underground, to extract something precious from underground, and you leave something else--equally precious--underground.

(replace:?sidebar)[ (icon-undo:"") (icon-redo:"")  ]

You wait with your fellow men, cooped up by dozens at the edge of the abyss as the rock falls deeper and deeper into the dark. It must just be the low light, the water and tiredness, but you swear you can see the tunnel walls pulsating. The splash never comes. [[Continue >->Eye]]