We’re Fucked, Pt. 126 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial

Ramsés swings the door open, revealing a concrete staircase that descends into darkness. He reaches to flick a switch. With a faint buzz, a bulb sputters to life in a rusty cage, casting a sickly yellow hue tainted by grime and dust. A lattice of pipes, ductwork, and wire mesh panels snakes across the ceiling in an organized fashion, save for a few rogue wires hanging loose. The pipes’ smoothness contrasts with the concrete’s pitted and scuffed surfaces. Deeper within, a chaotic collection of debris, including cardboard boxes, construction material, and old electronics, lies in haphazard heaps like rats’ nests.

My boss steps aside and sweeps his hand, motioning for me to enter.

“After you.”

As I stand at the threshold, dizziness engulfs my senses in a sudden wave. I clutch my notebook and pen as if they could anchor me.

“Have you lost your mind? This isn’t a conference room!”

“I never suggested we were heading to a conference room,” he replies in an untroubled voice.

“Do you intend to hold a meeting in a dungeon?”

Ramsés sighs. He aims his pointing finger at a doorless metal cabinet standing close to the base of the stairs, juxtaposed against a bundle of ribbed conduits. The cabinet houses network switches mounted on racks. Arrays of LED indicators blink yellow within an entangled mass of black cables resembling the veins of a cybernetic organism.

“You’re a programmer,” Ramsés says, “not a computer technician, but you should know what I’m pointing at.”

“That’s a network rack. I think.”

“Correct. Would a dungeon have a network rack?”

Ramsés’ belittling tone irks me.

“It would, if its owner required an internet connection.”

“Leire, I’ve just brought you to the basement level. Not a place for guests, but Jacqueline accompanied me here. Jordi as well. Afterwards, they both continued with their lives, and in the case of your woman, she even decided to quit on her own accord. So please, let’s proceed further. In the end you’ll be glad that you agreed to follow me.”

“Whatever. I warn you, though: if I see any cockroaches scuttling about, I’m out of here.”

“I don’t recall ever spotting a cockroach in the building, but just in case, don’t stare at the floor.”

I step onto the topmost stair, and then the one beneath it. Ramsés follows me in. As his keyring jingles, the door thumps behind me, followed by a click as it locks.

Down the concrete stairs I slog, while my boss plods after me. Our footsteps echo off the walls in a chorus of hollow thuds. I’m inhaling warm air heavy with the scent of neglect: the mustiness of decaying cardboard and the acrid tang of deteriorating electronic parts.

After I step off the final stair, I lumber toward the closest heap of junk, past the network rack and its array of blinking LEDs, as chunks of white styrofoam crunch and shift underfoot. Dust cloaks an overturned air conditioning unit, its casing cracked and its internal components exposed. Two dead flies and a paper cup rest nearby as if someone had nudged debris aside instead of cleaning up. What atrocity has Ramsés lured me into?

As my boss strides past me, the refuse warps the echoes of his footfalls.

“After me.”

We navigate along the perimeter of a junk pile made out of disassembled cabinetry and discarded light fixtures. My foot catches on a random brick, causing me to stumble.

A shimmer of movement on the wall to my left jerks my attention upwards. Near the ceiling, tubes and pipes running parallel, along with a tangle of electrical wires, delve into the pitch-black void of a gaping hole. Perched on its threshold, a blob of cosmic matter pulses with twinkling stars and nebulae, the purples, blues, and oranges ebbing and flowing like a living fragment of the night sky. As the amorphous form shimmies, the edges of the hole warp around this creature, bending inward.

My neck muscles tense up. I whip my gaze from the cosmic critter to my boss’ broad back.

We maneuver through a channel between two heaps of scrap that loom over me. I pick my way gingerly, hoping to dodge any sharp edges that could scrape my legs. My eyes itch from the particles floating in the stagnant air, and the soles of my sneakers stick to the grimy concrete. The ocher light casts jagged shadows through the masses of junk, but ahead, beyond the range of the bulb, only murky darkness awaits. My mind escapes to picturesque havens: a café overlooking a glittering lake, a gazebo in a lush garden surrounded by hedgerows, a rustic cabin with a crackling hearth.

“I can’t stress enough,” I rasp, “how much I’d rather hold this meeting of yours in a proper venue.”

“Noted. Just down this corridor.”

A sour, moist stench, like the aftermath of a urinary tract infection, seeps into my nasal passages and lingers on my tongue. My stomach roils. With each step, the stench grows stronger. I’m about to complain when I notice that the corridor ends in a plank, from a bookshelf or a storage cupboard, leaning against the wall like a makeshift barrier.

I narrow my eyes, and my words escape in a hiss.

“Hey, am I not supposed to notice that you’ve led me to a dead end?”

My boss’ silhouette, which takes up much of the cramped space, marches ahead undaunted.

“It looks like a dead end. That’s the point.”

Either he’s oblivious to my rising dread, or he’s feeding off it like a vampire.

“Sir, I demand to know what we’re doing here. What sane reason could you have for bringing me into this hellhole? Did you intend to take me down? Tell me why, then go ahead and make your move!”

Ramsés glances back, his face a shadowed outline.

“Leire, you’re getting on my nerves.” He grips the sides of his plank. “Give me a hand with this.”

I cross my arms.

“Sure, as soon as I build some muscle.”

Ramsés shakes his head.

“Well, aren’t you the comedian. Anyway, you’re right: you wouldn’t be of much help.”

With a grunt, he heaves the plank aside, and tilts it so it rests against a junk pile. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I glimpse a door. Its layer of paint has peeled and flaked off in patches, revealing the metal beneath.

The stench comes from behind that door, as if an ammoniac marsh were seeping from the crevices. What new horrors lurk in this mausoleum of rubbish and ruin?

I envision my boss as the leader of a cult, one that orchestrates human sacrifices in a chamber that gleams with tools for torture: knives, cattle prods, bone saws, nipple clamps. Robed worshippers, their garbs adorned with profane runes and eldritch symbols, chant in tongues while they chain me to an altar. Flickering torches cast a golden hue over their twisted faces, revealing patchwork scars and soulless eyes. As the acolytes’ chant crescendos, one by one they lunge at me. Their fingernails, curved into talons, rip through my clothing, tearing into my muscles and viscera. They gnaw on my flesh like ghouls. Ramsés, the high priest of this unholy congregation, emerges from the shadows and approaches with a whirring drill in hand, about to offer my brain as tribute to the Outer Gods.

My boss reaches into a pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a keycard. He swipes it across the door’s handle, and a beep sounds as two green LEDs blink in sync. The lock clicks.

Within me, a primal force screams in warning: we have reached the threshold of Hades. I’m tempted to turn tail, bolt down the corridor of junk, and scramble up the concrete stairs. Instead, risking the loss of dignity and self-respect, I reach out and grab my boss’ shoulder.

“I can feel it…” I whisper, my throat closing up, “something evil behind that door, staring at us.”

Ramsés snaps his head back, then faces me in the gloom.

“Interesting. You may be hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields. Don’t worry: nothing awaits us inside, other than a miracle.”

The door’s hinges groan as Ramsés swings it open, unleashing a fetid reek that singes the membranes of my nostrils, that crawls into the deepest recesses of my lungs, that brings to mind a mound of rat corpses teeming with millions of mucky maggots. Apart from a novel hint of burned dust that could belong to an overheated computer, I inhaled this cocktail of putrefaction before, whenever Spike visited; when professor Bunnyman intruded on my peace through the toilet where I was peeing; when Alberto, transformed into a slimy blob studded with eyeballs, came to warn me about the forthcoming collapse of the universe. Although I’ve covered my nose and mouth with the crook of my elbow, a wave of nausea ripples through my gut.

Ramsés ushers me into his underground realm. The hairs on my nape bristle. When the door shuts behind us with a resonant thump, the blackness wraps around me like a shroud of primordial night.

Author’s note: today’s song is “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel. I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout the novel so far. A total of two hundred and nine videos. Check them out.

Fun fact: the depicted setting is based on a network “closet” located under the psychiatric ward of the hospital where I work. Anyway, check out the audiochapter.

The novel is going on hiatus for about a week or so; my subconscious has spent the last week weaving a short narrative that I’m eager to render into a free verse poem. Since I started this novel in October of 2021, it will be the first break I take to work on a different story.