The Root

The Underbelly smells like cold metal and old time.

I don't know how else to describe it. In every dig I've ever worked — Cusco, Tikal, Göbekli Tepe — the deep layers have a smell. Not rot, not earth exactly. Something older. The compressed exhale of centuries. The Underbelly has that, but sharper. Colder. Like the Architects sealed their breath in the walls when they left.

Soll walks beside me, their filaments providing the only light in the deeper corridors. Above, the Architect infrastructure has been colonized — species built on top of it, carved their own spaces into it, draped it in wiring and organic growth and the accumulated detritus of ten thousand years of habitation.

Down here, nobody lives. Down here, the Architects' work is untouched.

I love it. I know I shouldn't — I know I should be focused on getting home, on helping Maya, on being a good husband and a responsible adult. But the archaeologist in me is drunk. Every corridor is a revelation. Every chamber is a puzzle. The glyphs on the walls shift in complexity the deeper we go — simpler near the surface, where they interface with the gates, and increasingly dense below, where (I'm starting to think) the real operating system lives.

"You are smiling again," Soll says.

"Sorry."

"Do not be sorry. It is nice that someone finds this place beautiful instead of frightening."

"You find it frightening?"

Soll's filaments flicker blue-green — thought mixed with unease. "My people do not go underground. We are creatures of vibration and open air. Stone dampens everything. Down here, I feel..." They search for the word. "Muffled. Like wearing a heavy coat over my whole body."

"Then why do you keep coming with me?"