SUBTERRANEAN SPECIES
In general, nocturnal of subterranean species have less interest in
the visual world, and depend on other sensory modalities. Visual
capacity is a continuum, with humans falling somewhere in the center.
There are gateways to the surface everywhere.
The traffic moves both ways. Things come up: things go down. One of
those gateways is the Holland Tunnel with the implication that Dante had
literally been describing Hell, having seen its subsurface chambers.
Soon the Army Corps of Engineers gets involved. "They were tasked to
reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build
elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even
paved parking lots three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways
were constructed through the mouths of caves.
It takes days at a time to get anywhere; organisms move between
underground base camps and vast instant cities further on, full of klieg
lights, ringed with landmines, thriving behind walls of sandbags,
Jersey and Texas concrete barriers and fortified machine gun nests.
There are outbreaks of tropical cave disease and claustrophobia and
there is something else down there, THAT ENEMY TWIN of the human race.
Everywhere the descending blind organisms find evidence of primitive
occupation at the deeper levels, down amidst overwhelming pressures
beneath continents and beneath the sea.
Of course surface dwellers want to explore; they want to see where
the tunnels lead, to go out to the edges of the earth by going into the
earth. Into Hell?, some characters innocently ask. NO, Not Hell: into an
upper lithospheric environment, we read. "An abyssal region riddled
with holes".
It's time to look inward!....remove the designer from the process!!