Going Underground: A short story

I sat there in the shade of a Juniper, pondering the sky above me.  My mind drifted away and I closed my eyes.  Moments passed before I found my consciousness had traveled over to a familiar hillside I had visited many times before.  It was grassy, sunny, and dry—just as I had last remembered it.  Eagles were soaring above—not one, not two—but maybe a dozen.  I was surprised to picture them there—how could there be so many?  

“What are you doing there?”  I asked the eagles, which I saw clearly in my mind.   

“We are looking for food, like we always do.”  They responded.

“But why are there are so many of you here?”  I wondered.

“It’s been a good year.”  They told me.  “Lots of chipmunks were born here this year.  So we all arrived.”  

I thought of the chipmunks running around in the grasses from a bird eye’s view, uncertain whether the image I conjured up was my own or lifted from the great birds above me.  And before I knew it, my consciousness was being pulled up from the earth and joined the eagles.  I was quite surprised at this turn of events; the birds were not.  They continued to soar, as if my presence was perfectly natural.  I could feel their wings nearby in the form of great waves of air pressure as they soared past me.  Watching them dance at my level, I felt safe and secure despite their intimidating size.  

Just as I was getting used to this new circumstance, I began floating even higher, and found myself watching them from above.  Then I climbed even higher and higher, realizing that I was leaving the earth.  Great winds jolted me abruptly, fueled by solar rays and atmospheric forces I could barely wrap my head around.  Before I could come up with the worst-case scenario of what would happen to me, the winds stopped and I knew I had moved very far away from the planet.  I tried focusing my attention on the vastness of outer space, but got nothing.  Instead, I was distracted by the sensation of being pulled through something — or maybe stretched through something —  like saltwater taffy.

In no time I arrived somewhere vastly different.  My consciousness became aware that I was on another planet.  I knew I was indoors but it felt more like a cave than a room.  A man was there.  Not a human, but a man, nevertheless.   

“What do you want?”  He asked in a weary and suspicious tone.

“I’m here from another planet.” I stated blandly.  “But I don’t know why I am here.”  It was all I could muster.

A silence passed between us.  “You must be trying to learn something.”  He concluded, grudgingly accepting my situation.

“Are we below ground?” I asked, sensing this.  My vision there felt quite blurry, so I could not report any details about the place where I found myself, nor even the person in front of me.

“Yes.  We all live below ground now.”   He paused, as if thinking about what he wanted to tell me.  “Maybe this will be useful to you….” He then said, heading toward an exit.  “Follow me.”

I had no idea how following someone on another planet with the sheer presence of my consciousness would look like.  Nevertheless, I maintained an open mind and we quickly succeeded in getting out of the caves onto the surface of the planet.  It was a vast landscape of yellow-beige sand in every direction.  

“We used to live here on the surface.  But then we exhausted everything—all the resources.  It became inhospitable to live here and so we retreated underground.”  He said, looking around at the vastness.

“That’s sort of where we are heading too, as a species.  We are exhausting our resources.” I said thoughtfully.  Both of us were now thinking that this is probably what I came to learn about  from him.  

“You must have been forced to build a whole lot of infrastructure below ground to make things work for you.”  I was remembering some high-tech underground gardens I had seen advertised on the internet and imagining that something similar must have been built here.  

“No,” he said.  “We did not have to build any infrastructure.  These underground caves were already there.  We just sort of retreated into them.”  He then went on to address not what I had asked about verbally, but what I had thought about in my mind only: the high-tech underground gardens.  “It is not like that..not what you think,” he said.  “We are not growing anything.  We are simply living off of what is already there.”

I suspected at this point that there was really no distinction between my thoughts and my words to him—we were communicating with our consciousness alone.  

“Did you lose a lot of people before you retreated below ground?  We suspect that this may happen to us.” I thought; or I thought I asked.   

“We did not lose any people while above ground.  We lost people below ground, as we tried to adjust to our new environment.  Many people could not survive the transition.”  

We stood in silence contemplating this.  “How did you adjust to your new environment?” I finally asked.

“We had to modify our food source so that we would get the nutrients we were no longer getting because of lack of access to the sun.  And we had to learn to get sufficient minerals from the earth—not directly, but though our food source.”  His consciousness was sending me images of some dark mossy-like substances growing in the caves.  I wanted to ask him more—to have him clarify their technologies and food source, but a part of me didn’t want to comprehend the answer.  Or maybe it was him who did not feel like exerting himself to give me a thorough explanation.  The fact that I couldn’t tell the difference made me realize that the more we talked, the more difficult it was for me to distinguish my consciousness from his own.

It then occurred to me that we had been on the surface of the planet for some time.  Besides being barren, it did not seem very inhospitable.  The sky was blue.  The sun was shining.  “Have you considered repopulating the surface?” I asked.

“We have intentionally chosen not to.  We think it is for the best that we live underground, where our population will naturally be constrained.  If we were to repopulate the surface, we would go back to our old ways and repeat history all over again.”  

I thought about this for a moment within the context of earth, imagining a small population of humans roaming the planet at some point in the future.  I wondered how we would choose to organize ourselves.  My train of thought soon ran out of steam and I noticed I was feeling a bit done for.  “Is there anything else you can think of that you think I should know?” I asked, not wanting to miss anything.

In response, he showed me a knife.  It was hard for me to make it out fully with my blurred vision in this state, but I saw the metal gleaming in the sunlight.  “This is one of our relics from the past.” He explained to me.  “We used to extract this metal from the earth and make objects out of it.  In nature, metal is spread out throughout the soil and it is the substance of life.  In extracting the metal, we took it away from its purpose on this planet.  By leaving it in the ground, we allowed it to serve its purpose—to support all life.  These metals are precious and are found in every living thing on this planet.  We didn’t appreciate the gravity of that truth until now.  Now we understand how critical this metal is to life in trace quantities and so we leave it in the ground undisturbed.”  

I stood there looking at the knife, trying to wrap my head around what he had said to me.  Extracting the metal undermined its purpose as a life-sustaining mineral.  Leaving it in the ground allowed it to make its way into every living creature as an essential trace element.  My companion was silent as I thought about this, so I understood that I had picked up on his explanation accurately enough.  

I was suddenly curious about his people.  “How are you all getting along in the caves?  Do you generally like each other’s company?” 

A frown formed across his face—a face which I could barely see, and yet his frown came through clearly, like a change in the weather.  “We generally don’t like each other, but we tolerate one another and cooperate so that we can survive well.”  

“You don’t like each other?  But you must have some good times?  You must be having sex, for example?”  I tried to search him out as an individual now.

He leaned his head back and laughed.  “Of course we have sex.  We do those things.  But we don’t really connect—we keep our distance from each other because we just don’t get along well personally.  Everyone is so different, you know, and all we can do is tolerate each other and do what we need to do in order to live a peaceful life down there.”

Before any ideas could form in my head about his response, I instinctively extended my finger toward him and asked him to hold on to me.  Without hesitating, he took my hand.  I found myself feeling deeply into my being until the emotion of love flooded my heart—first for myself, and then for him.  His people must not have a sense of empathy, I thought.  Maybe they have lost their range of emotion and cannot connect with each other anymore.

The next thing I knew, he was in bliss.  A deep bliss that he had obviously never experienced.  I felt it rise out of him, almost like a gasp.  He leaned his head back.  “I feel euphoric….” is all that he could say as emotion overtook him.  I wasn’t expecting any of this, and yet it gave me a deep sense of satisfaction.

Before I knew it, I was being pulled again through taffy and back down into our earth’s atmosphere.  The eagles were dancing below me.  The next time I looked they were above me as my consciousness came back to the ground.  A moment later I had left the grassy hillside and was back by the Juniper tree within my body.   Reflecting upon my journey, I wasn’t sure which was the purpose: learning what I had learned from the stranger, catalyzing the emotions that had I seeded within him, or both.