excerpt from the second novel of the series "The Omniconstants - Hollow Earth"

 






Chapter One





Cube 03





Underground time 28:35





A few
minutes before Borsch Serfatti and his daughter met in cube 85, four men were
having a light discussion, occupying their hands with shears trimming plants
and hoses watering giant pots with trees and bushes.





They are in
a garden cube, large, just like a miniature Paradise should be. With birds and
butterflies flying over their heads and among the branches, frogs jumping from
pot to pot, and cats running around and playing.





It is amazing
how scientists have managed to create and preserve such a rich, generous
greenhouse with artificial illumination and selective oxygenation. Truth is,
though, that the Cube City of the Omniconstants that spreads under Athens all
the way deeper and deeper beneath the Aegean Archipelagos Basin, covering the
triangle created among Santorin, Crete and Athens, has more than fifty such
small Paradises. They are the lungs of this great system of cubes, sustaining
life and providing oxygen, as this world has always been secret, and could not
have had many advances to the surface - neither by extracted tubes, nor by
obvious entrances and exits. This world is in isolation of and in distance from
the earthen surface world. Its inhabitants have always been aware of a certain
disparity in time and customs from the ‘upper world’ and have been taught
‘discipline in natural curiosity’ at any cost.





Dr Jacomo
has been one the greatest teachers of this motto. He knows exactly how to evoke
discipline to the Cube City small populations and induce solidarity without the
negative consequences of isolation to the psyche.





His
lifetime assistant, Julius Serfatti suddenly stops watering and drops the hose
down.





“What
if...”





“What if
what?” asks Dr Jacomo looking at him with deep curiosity. Julius Serfatti has not
had him used to this kind of sudden outbursts of supposition.





“I say,
what if what we are doing is wrong?” Serfatti completes.





Dr Jacomo
keeps staring at him with a mild drop of his jaw in anticipation and
disapproval. 





“I know you
are not following, I mean when we keep growing this city with a new cube every
year, new ideas, new technology, when the world up on the surface is at such
great stake of extinction with their...”





“Drop it!”
Dr. Jacomo tries to interrupt him, yet in vain.





Serfatti
continues by reintroducing his last two words, “...with their stupid fighting
over sources and water, contaminating everything, bringing every spot of
self-sustaining nature to a expurgation and death.”





“What are
you saying, Julius?” Dr. Jacomo asks, again trying to break the monologue. 





“We could
help them...”





“They don’t
know of our existence!” Dr. Jacomo asserts.





“Are you
sure about this? All these rumours all these years...”





“Well,
those who do know, or suspect, are not our friends, anyway, why should we help
them? Give me one good reason!”





“It’s our
planet, for Heaven’s sake! Our home! If we don’t help...,” cries Serfatti.





“Don’t
bring Heaven around and about your exclamations, dear friend, ‘cause we are in Heaven! We invented it! We
nourish and expand it! It was their choice to destroy theirs!”





“You are
not being fair, Jacomo, not fair at all! Remember, we lived half our life up
there, almost a century!” Julius Serfatti protests.





“Well,
indeed we did, and we saw the plunge that would inevitably lead to permanent
decadence, we saw how Italy went down, how they fought each other, how
everything was money money money! Here it is different, can’t you see?”





“No! I
can’t see! Because we still influence the world above, Dabolmort still have
contact, some of them come down and meet us. Why? What for? To make sure we are
part of this total catastrophe? Haven’t we had enough revenge?” Julius Serfatti
leans on a pot almost his height.





“Revenge?
Do you think this is about revenge? Come on! There are billions of miserable
people up there who have dug their graves themselves! I’m not saying that we
should push them inside their holes, nor that we should dig the graves deeper!
We are going to watch and when they all die, we’ll just cover them with the
contaminated soil in honour and in sorrow...”





“You are
cruel! We gave them the shovels in the first place!”





“Not we!
Our ancestors! And, no, let me disagree with you...they gave them the metal,
not the design, or the idea! People have always had the choice of how to deal
with matter. Fortunately, our ancestors kept pure down here. The second level
caves in the earth cavity provided ample shelter for them to employ their
ingenuity to development, away from the eyes of the wild ones, the Neanderthals
that ruled the world. When the other race came, the Homo Sapiens, we had to
stay below, we were too few.”





“You talk
of that ancient race of human beings like it’s us. We are Homo Sapiens, Jacomo!
We come from above! Those people who stayed in the Second Caves came from
another branch of the primate tree, the smallest branch. They are not mentioned
in any books, they never existed! Nobody found evidence of their existence!”





“We did,
down here!” Dr. Jacomo exclaims. “Can’t you see these are two totally different
worlds? The last people of that tribe were dying, so they used to capture young
infants from the surface, before they gained consciousness or memory, just
after birth and killed all the tribe in the first cave to eliminate any danger
of revelation of their existence.”





“What?” Serfatti
chuckles.





“Yes. For a
whole century, when the disease came, they decided they should leave legacy, or
everything they had invented would perish in deep eternity. So, whenever they
would hear the cry of a newborn in a cave above their own, they would go up in
early hours, when everybody was asleep, still the child, seal the cave entrance
with rocks and kill them all with poisonous gas that they had invented so that
they would leave no traces of violence. Then they would burn them inside their
skin blankets. If and when the other tribes found them, they knew only one
motive. Rocks falling and fire.”





“That was
so cruel! What was the disease?”







(to be continued)