Dopecentury XXXIII --- Borehole
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The superstructure pokes its head up above the endless small hills of this tundra; a tower fifty meters high, surrounded by hunched low outbuildings and great stacks of greasy black piping; a network of gravel paths connects the buildings; but everything centers on the tower, that is where the hole is being drilled.
Has been drilled, for the last two decades; it’s a project that requires slow, sure actions, attention to detail, patience; A small bite of the geological time that put the things in the ground that are being drilled out of the hole, for sure, but still akin to that kind of slow, long-period time expanse regardless.
In the first years of drilling, there were few surprises (and thus some question about the expense required); From the first day — with the ceremonial ribbon-cutting, and the throwing of the lever that sunk the spinning drill-head into the soft upper layers of tundra soil, followed by the cracking bite at the drill went through the permafrost — from those first couple of hundred meters, the drill brought up mostly mud and rock; material that the geologists found fascinating, but few others.
It was in the fourth year, when they broke through, that they discovered all the mud, earth, and rock was just a cap that sealed in a midden of lost bits of human culture. The first surprise was when a vacuum tube — or at least pieces of one — came up from 762 meters; The lead scientists were stunned; initially they suspected a prank; but other experts (respected, but mostly consigned to the fringes of fields like social anthropology, economics, and library science) suggested that finding strange things at deep depths should be expected, that the borehole wasn’t drilling through earth and rock, it was in fact drilling through time; Others expanded on this idea with the suggestion that powerful elements of human culture didn’t simply just vanish into landfills or people’ attics, but were carried under the earth by powerful forces of archival tectonics; to be stored as a kind of record that could be referenced if necessary, as long as one had the correct deep-bore drilling equipment.
Lead scientists thought this was preposterous; but the following decades of drilling certainly confirmed that something mysteriously archival seemed to be happening; The first vacuum tube was just the first bits of a whole 20-meter-thick layer of vacuum tubes; “You have no idea how important these things were in electronics for many years!” observed one of the economic historians formerly accused of quackery, “without these things, there would have been no television!”
Under the vacuum tubes came thin layers of polyester clothing, still colorful and vivid, with paisley patterns; Below that, thick-soled shoes, and below that came corduroy; Further down the drill head burst a gas bubble, and out poured phrases from by-gone era: ‘groovy!’, ‘far out, man’, ‘what a square’, ‘golly gee’.
Lead scientists were still doubtful: “How does it come to be all mixed up? If it’s a buried cultural archive, why isn’t it in reverse chronological order?” To which the former quacks responded, “it all gets crushed together under the weight of the earth above, some materials get pushed farther down more quickly, though we suspect that it will still contain some kind of order” “That ridiculous!” the respected scientists said, but the stuff kept coming up out of the hole.
Beyond the car tailfins and whitewall tires, the drill reached a layer rubber, sugar, and walnut shells. “Stuff that was collected for the war effort,” pointed out the quacks; this was just above a layer of broken radio parts, and after drilling through that there was horse shoes, and tack, and other horse-related matter; mixed in at this layer is huge coils of electric wire, switches and broken bulbs of glass with hair-thin filaments.
The drill kept going, passing through antiquated diseases: ague and consumption and vapours; and then old concepts of science: vitalism, heliocentrism, emitter theory, the open polar sea, and neptunism.
These days, the drill is passing through a huge layer of the industrial revolution, full of wooden cogs and belts of leather, water wheels and triphammers, saw mills and conveyors.
“How much further do you think we have to go?” the respectable scientists ask.
“Only 2 million more years of human history” say the quacks.
“But surely there isn’t much culture beyond a few thousands of years ago?”
“Just because we don’t have any cultural memory of it, doesn’t mean there wasn’t human culture before history; the people then were essentially the same as they are now”
“We will be drilling forever!”
“At some point we will break through the mantle, and hit molten rock though; somewhere down there all human culture and history, all that is important and meaningful to us melts into the burning center of the Earth. It may take decades more, but when we get that deep, there will be no more archive of human culture left; it will all have melted away.”