Nov. 13, 2024: "Imagine a city that exists in secret, tucked away where few ever venture—a place scaled entirely for small people, hidden beneath the ordinary world. An unknowing, full-sized visitor stumbles upon it by accident, perhaps seeking shelter or lost in a dreamlike state, unsure of what they’re seeing."
Kam began to feel the minty-cool frost of panic spread throughout his chest. He hadn’t intended to be away from his workstation for so long, and now he was pretty sure he was absolutely not supposed to be on this level of the sub-basement. Yet the bathrooms weren’t where his coworker said they were, and sure, he should’ve been suspicious about the door in the stairwell propped open with a 1965 Webster’s dictionary, but his bladder was bursting and his forensic capacity went out the window. Or down the drain, he thought ruefully. Either way, this was a terrible start at his new job.
Thank goodness for small blessings: at least the cold, clinical corridor was completely devoid of anyone else. No one to yell “hey, what’re you doing here?” or demanding to record his badge. On the other hand, it might’ve been helpful to bump into someone who could guide him back to the Collections arena. He knew, oh, he just knew when they told him about how aggressively they track associates’ calls to delinquent customers, something was going to do some damage to his numbers.
His brand-new office shoes, hard leather and hard soles, cramped his feet as he clopped down the corridor. Nothing he tried could make him walk any quieter, so maybe the clapping heel-falls would prevent him from startling anyone. The hard fluorescent lights stabbed at his eyes, casting every crevice and seam in the tiled floor in crisp relief. Far from feeling secure in a hallway of bright lights and clean walls, he felt incredibly vulnerable, open to any hidden cameras or an attacker …
No, that was his old country, he told himself. That wouldn’t happen here, in this American city, in this powerful corporate office building.
There were doors about ten yards apart from each other, and as the corridor stretched and bent into an incredibly huge circle, most of the doors led into spaces in the interior core. The doors on the outside of the ring were spaced much farther apart and only led back to stairwells, which were all guarded by card readers, none of which would accept his level of security. After 20 minutes of searching the corridor, he couldn’t backtrack his way to the stairs by which he’d come: someone had removed the dictionary. He did, however, locate a restroom, so at least that was off his mind.
The doors on the interior curve, however, were very strange. They were written in an alphabet that he didn’t recognize, somewhere between English and Cyrillic, but with strange aberrations he’d never seen before, and he’d majored in American English with a minor in Russian. The letters looked sloppy, sometimes, and the only thing he’d seen close to this print was when an AI engine attempted to write a T-shirt or a sign in a picture.
After passing several of these, trying their doorknobs, knocking gently and apologizing, he finally found one that was unlocked. Kam looked up and down the corridor, finding neither cameras, alarms, nor another living soul. “Hello, I’m very sorry, but I’m coming in,” he said, his voice shaking as he pushed the door open. “I’m very sorry to intrude, but I’m very badly lost. It’s my first week here and I don’t know the area.”
It wasn’t a standard office room, on the inside. It was dark until the door was open some distance and he’d stepped inside: likely a motion-sensor. The lights in here were a softer, warmer amber and his pupils eagerly drank this soothing vibration in. There were no desks, no calendars or clocks, no phone or chairs in this room. Instead, there were geometric piles of some kind of mineral that stood low in the center and rose as they spread out toward the walls, like a bowl-shape formed out of basalt columns. Like the Giant’s Causeway but smaller and finer, and rectangular rather than hexagonal. And at the lowest point of the bowl-shape was a large white circle, a torus, with a glassy lens in the middle.
“What the heck?” he whispered, then jumped when the door closed behind him. Startled, he turned and jerked at the doorknob: it didn’t lock. He could leave any time, this wasn’t another corporate trap. He released a huge breath and knelt to look closer at the white-encircled lens. There was a clear path leading to it, from the doorway to where the lens was mounted on a chrome fixture. He knelt before it, held his head close, and looked through.
That was when he realized the gray mineral structures were something else entirely. He yelped and looked around at them, rising around him, twinkling with little white lights. Through the lens, they were clearly buildings, small storefronts and residences in the center, spreading out to imperious skyscrapers mounted into the walls. Skyscrapers, relatively speaking. What was this? Some kind of model ecosystem? A think-tank project, 3D statistical modeling?
The lens told a different story, for not only could he see the details of the little buildings, he could see little people walking down little streets between the little buildings. They wore little outfits, drove little cars, rode little bikes. He couldn’t hear any of them, they were too small (and therefore too relatively far away), but it looked like a fantastically detailed miniature set.
A young woman in a white niqab walked by, looked up at him, and ran over to another lens in a white plastic frame, shrunken to her size. But when she stepped behind it, it magnified her face. A little red button blinked on the bottom of the rim in front of Kam’s face, with the icon of a phone receiver. He touched it, and suddenly he could hear the sounds of the city all around him. He jerked back in alarm and it went silent again, though the red button was now pulsing green. Slowly he leaned toward the lens once more, and the cars and conversations all returned. He picked out tiny arcs of dots around the white lens frame, probably a set of directional speakers that he could only hear when he was close enough.
“Hello, can you hear me?” A woman’s voice came out of the speakers. He looked back at the tiny Muslim woman on the street, standing behind her own white circle, and now she was waving at him. “My name’s Sumayyah. Can you hear me?”
Kam blinked repeatedly but slowly nodded. “What is this? Some kind of VR or IR setup?”
She laughed and shook her head. “I take it you’re not one of the developers, then. What are you doing in this room? And please be careful as you move around in here, don’t touch our city at all.”