Chapter Text
"… fixity; markedness; substantiality; orientations and direction; order, rhythm, and sequence… centre and boundaries; dimensions and shapes; parts and wholes; enclosure and openness; passage and penetration; views to and from; light and dark; time and movement… inhabitation by the one and the many; maintenance, care, and sacrifice; and use, retirement, and ruin."
- Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
The complex under the ice was guarded by several heavy metal doors (the rig drill made short work of them). It was dark. Jo held a cam as they walked, documenting everything. She hoped that this video wouldn’t end like the one they’d been sent from the other team.
Steven walked beside her, holding a flashlight. It looked strange in his hand. At the other sites they’d investigated, Steven had used genetically engineered glow bugs to light the way (they'd orbited him like a tiny, gently buzzing galaxy), but this northern site was too cold for them. He also held a radiation meter. It was, thankfully, silent.
Jo narrated as they went: “The long entrance tunnel may have been meant to keep this structure safe in the event of a natural or man-made impact disaster. The strange metal structure near the door may have originally had a ceremonial purpose, or could have signified the use of this complex. Given its latitude and remote location, I do not believe this place was residential. It may have been a place of pilgrimage – “
“There was a door here,” Steven said, directing Jo’s attention to a void in the wall.
They walked through it into a vast, underground space. Jo panned the cam so the boffins would be able to experience the scale of it. The space was filled with tall, metal cabinets and shelving units, most of which were tipped over. Carefully, Jo made her way forward. Her breath misted in the frosty air. The cabinets creaked as she tried to climb, one-handed, over the first toppled aisle. It was too dark to see much further. Jo looked over her shoulder at Steven.
“Any sign of radioactivity.”
“Nothing.” He shoved the radiation meter into a pocket and scrambled up beside her, flashing his light into the dark. The landscape of fallen cabinets stretched back into unseen darkness. “I don’t like this,” he said.
“It’s just that vid, getting you jumpy. Saints, it’s got me jumpy,” Jo said. She set wedged the cam under her arm and dug around in her pockets for the stationary scanner.
“Be careful,” Steven said, angling the light towards her.
“I should’ve remembered the headlamps,” Jo muttered. “Stupid. Stupid. Fuck” The pieces of the scanner weren’t fitting together properly. Jo tried to jam them and lost her grip on the cam. It skittered away into the dark. “Damn!”
“We should go back for more lights,” Steven said.
“No, I think I can get it.” Jo sat down and let herself slide along the frozen metal. The cam wasn’t that far ahead. She felt something shifting. There was an ominous creaking sound. “Steven, get back!”
The cabinet supporting the one Jo was sliding down dropped suddenly causing a domino effect of crashing metal. Jo rolled to the side as a different shelving unit fell towards her. A drawer popped open and pinned her against the floor. Jo let her head sink back to rest against the floor, breathing heavily. The cam was an arms-length away and pointed towards her.
“Not my finest hour,” she said to it, before shouting: “Steven, are you okay?”
“Fine, you?”
“A little pinned down, but everything’s working. Could you go back to the rig and get more lights and a couple of jacks. And a new scanner. This one’s borked.”
Jo heard shuffling. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I just don’t want to leave you alone.”
“The quicker you go. The quicker you’ll get back.”
“How scientific of you.”
“Ha ha ha,” Jo said. “Get a move on.” She heard Steven’s steps as he walked out of the room. The flashlight went with him, leaving Jo alone with nothing but the blinking lights of the cam and the crushed scanner. How many sites had she explored over her career? Saints, this was a sloppy, stupid mistake.
It would probably be her last, too. This complex wasn’t a pilgrimage site. It was probably a massive underground storage facility, but given the state of the cabinets, Jo wasn’t optimistic about what they’d find once she got unpinned and they had a chance to look through them. The open drawer pinning her to the floor seemed to be empty. Its contents were long-since rotted away, leaving nothing but musty dust, pebbles, and broken glass. Nothing to impress the Custodians, she was certain, though maybe the footage of her falling would earn H.A.E. a few new subscribers.
Jo blinked into the darkness. She wondered what would happen next. H.A.E. had sunk a lot of resources into Earth. It might fold without results. There were other outfits Jo could take up with, other places she could dig – she did like digging – but they wouldn’t be Earth, and she wouldn’t be working with Steven.
She liked him. Saints help her, she liked the pointy-nosed, cryptic-speaking, tech-hating Earth cultural attaché. She'd rubbed his back as he battled motion sickness on the flyer. He'd given her a few lessons on his native language (it traced its roots to ancient Scandinavian and Cantonese and, while Jo thought of herself as linguistically adept, she couldn't pronounce a single word.). She loved his ridiculous menagerie of genetically engineered pets. When they’d wrestled in the snow she’d wanted to take him back into the rig cabin, rip off his snow suit, fondle his breasts, and kiss him. She’d never wanted that with anyone before.
And now the other teams had all fucked up, and she’d fucked up, and the odds of anyone getting an Earth permit within her lifetime if H.A.E. flopped as a result were on the nil side of zero. And it was fucking cold down here. Had her suit climate control been damaged or something? Jo shivered.
“I hope this is entertaining,” she said to the camera. “Elk IV clone goes to Earth and gets stuck under a shelf. It’s comedy gold, right? Fuck. It is freezing.” If they didn't like the swearing they could press mute or edit it out.
Something creaked. Jo stopped moving. Were the cabinets settling again?
“You still okay down there?” Jo released her breath. It was just Steven.
“You took long enough,” she shouted. “The rig’s not that far away.”
Steven grunted. Jo could hear him scrambling up the side of the cabinets.
“Be careful!” she said. A light shone in her face. Jo squinted to see past it. Steven was balanced on a cabinet a bit down the aisle. He jumped down to the floor. He yelped on impact.
“Are you okay?” Jo asked.
“A bit of a sprained ankle. Nothing terrible,” Steven said, shoving the jacks into place. Jo winced as the weight of the shelf was pushed away. She crab-walked herself backwards to safety.
“You had better not be lying.” Steven didn’t respond. Jo grabbed his arm to get his attention.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I – look at this.” He shone his light on the floor. It was covered in shattered glass and tiny pebbles. Jo didn’t see anything spectacular about it.
“They’re seeds,” Steven said. Jo looked closer at the tiny pebbles. Saints in their labs, Steven was right. He was looking in other drawers, pulling out glass containers full of seeds. Thousands of seeds. Millions of seeds. “Do you know what this means?” he asked.
Jo picked up the cam and turned it around so the boffins would have a good view of her face. “It means this story has a happy ending.”
*
Seeds. Most of them viable. Many of them from species long thought extinct.
It was a result for H.A.E.
It was a result for the Elders.
Jo and Steven sat side by side as the council told them that H.A.E.’s permit had been extended indefinitely. It would be dangerous work. The Custodians' legend of the Spiders was partially true: people had done terrible things on Earth. They had drained it and filled its emptiness with poison. Then they had tried to escape.
But it was also wrong, because they tried to leave warnings for their misdeeds, and they also left gifts buried for the future, preserved beneath earth and ice for those with the wisdom to distinguish them. The people of the past were complex. As the people of the present were complex.
Jo laid her hand over Steven’s knee as the council droned on. She was never going to enjoying listening to people pontificating. She was a tool-pusher. She didn’t need any adoration for what she did. She liked digging for its own sake. Still, she did her best to smile when the cam was facing her direction. She knew that Steven would make fun of her for being too grumpy and serious later, and that thought helped make her smiles look almost genuine.
Fuck, she hated crowds, though. A thousand light years away, she knew, a bunch of conspiracy theorist loving boffins were probably arguing over whether or not her findings were real, and, if they were, how they fitted with their hypothesis that the Custodians' ancestors intentionally wrecked the Earth before trying to stop humanity's spread across the stars. Ignoring, always, that their ancestors and the Custodians' were the same people. The truth would always be mutable, whatever the evidence.
Steven put his hand over hers and squeezed. Jo thought that he was probably bored out of his skull too, though he was better at disguising it. They would have such good sex in his tree once this was over. If she was very lucky, they wouldn't be interrupted by a random trunk coming through the window. She adored the mammoth, but it could be bloody annoying.
The Elders continued talking. Steven moved their linked hands towards the inside of her thigh. He opened a book with his free hand so the cams and the Elders wouldn't see what was going on.
Cheer up, Jo, she thought to herself as she fake-grinned at the cams and real-grinned in her mind, you’re on Earth.