The Core Sample
Summary:
Eli and his crew begin a routine permafrost drill at dawn. The temperature plummets unnaturally. As they break through a layer of ancient ice, the sensors register heat — impossible for that depth. The sound that follows isn't pressure or machinery, but something rhythmic, almost like breathing.
---
The generator stuttered once before catching. Its cough echoed off the ice wall behind me, a ragged, human-sounding thing swallowed by wind. You don't notice how empty the north is until something mechanical makes a noise and nothing answers back.
I checked the pressure gauge, tapped it with my glove, then leaned over the drilling rig's console. Everything read normal—rotation speed steady, torque rising slow, like it should. We were two hours into the first core of the week, chasing a sample contract for a company I'd never heard of before last month.
"Depth?" I asked.
"Seventy-two meters," came Brett's voice through the headset. "Bit's cutting clean. Ice density's off the chart, though. Like concrete."
I grunted. "Shear it slower. Don't burn the teeth."
The sky hadn't decided if it was dawn or dusk. Up here, it didn't matter. The light was colorless, the air so dry it scraped your throat. Our breath came out as smoke even inside the heated masks. The only color was the red flash of the rig's warning light spinning slow in the mist.
I remember the moment the sound changed. Not a big shift—just something under the usual mechanical whine, a sort of low flutter. Like when a bearing's about to go, only deeper. I leaned closer, frowning.
"You hear that?" I asked.
Brett laughed. "Hear what? All I hear is this damn drill eating through Canada's last ice cube."
"No, underneath it. Like—" I paused, because the flutter had turned into a pattern. Two beats. Pause. Two beats again. Slow, deliberate.
"Cut rotation," I said.
The rig wound down, moaning as it slowed. The air went still. For a second, there was nothing but the wind, brushing fine ice dust against my coat. Then the sound came again—quiet, but unmistakable.
Beat.
Beat.
Pause.
Brett stepped out from behind the equipment shack, squinting. "You playing music on that thing?"
I shook my head. "Pressure's off. Power's steady. It's coming from below."
We both crouched near the drill pipe. I pressed a gloved hand against the metal. The vibration was faint but rhythmic, a pulse traveling up from the deep. It wasn't random movement. It felt… measured.
"Seismic?" Brett asked.
"Not that slow," I said.
The wind picked up, carrying a note—almost a tone. For a moment, I thought it was feedback in my headset, but when I pulled it off, the sound was clearer. Not loud. Not human. Just a hum you could feel behind your teeth.
The rig sensors began to flicker. Temperature readouts spiked: –34°C to +12°C in seconds. The heat shouldn't have been possible.
Brett swore and backed away. "We hit a vent? Methane pocket?"
"Too cold for gas pressure," I muttered. "Kill the power."
He hesitated, but he did it. The generator died, and the world went suddenly silent. The only movement was the steam coming from our mouths.
Then the ground exhaled.
No other word fits. A slow, hot draft rolled up from the drill hole, smelling of metal and something faintly sweet, like wet stone after lightning. I crouched again, listening. The hum deepened.
I wanted to call it mechanical resonance, but machines don't breathe.
I told Brett to grab the core sample casing. My voice sounded thin, half-stolen by the wind. We rigged the extractor and pulled up the first few meters of ice cylinder. The top half looked normal—white-blue, clean fractures. The lower section was darker, cloudy. When I brushed the frost off, the ice beneath was translucent, full of strange streaks. Veins, almost.
I tilted it toward the light. Something shimmered inside.
Brett said quietly, "That's not mineral, is it?"
I didn't answer. The shimmer pulsed once, faintly, in time with the vibration I still felt through the pipe.
He took a step back. "Eli… you seeing that move?"
I was. The ice looked like it was breathing.
The next beat from below was louder, enough to shake frost from the nearby scaffolding. I felt it in my knees, then in my chest. Two slow pulses. Pause. Then again.
Brett whispered, "What's down there?"
I didn't know. But I knew the pattern. It was a heartbeat.
I leaned closer to the drill hole, the warmth brushing my face. My reflection wavered in the sheen of meltwater around the rim—then, for an instant, it wasn't my face at all.
---
The Hollow Earth
For a heartbeat I thought the reflection had moved because of the heat shimmer, a trick of light. But when I blinked, it blinked half a second late. Its mouth opened before mine did. The face under the water wasn't copying me—it was remembering me, as if it had seen me before and was trying to replay the gesture.
"Brett," I said, not looking up. "Get the auxiliary lamp."
He handed it over without speaking. The beam sliced through the mist and down the narrow shaft. Steam rolled upward, thick as breath. The light didn't travel far—it bent, as if the air itself were warped.
"Bit's jammed about ten meters down," Brett said. "Want the rig raised?"
"No. I'm going in."
He laughed, quick and nervous. "You're kidding."
I pulled the harness from the hook. "You ever seen ice bleed heat? We can't leave it like that."
By the time the words left my mouth, I was already lowering myself into the shaft. The rope hissed against the pulley, flakes of frost raining on my helmet. The deeper I went, the louder the pulse became—not in my ears but in my ribs.
The walls weren't white anymore. They glowed faint amber, as though the ice itself held trapped sunlight. I brushed one glove against it. The surface flexed slightly beneath my touch, softer than ice should ever be. A shiver ran through me that wasn't cold.
"Eli, you still reading?" Brett's voice crackled in my headset.
"I'm here," I said. "Getting interference. Feels like—"
A burst of static cut me off. Then came a whisper layered beneath the static, like someone repeating my words out of sync. Feels like… feels like… The echo twisted, syllables rearranging into something older, consonants I didn't know how to form.
I froze, breath fogging inside the visor.
"Brett?"
Nothing. Just the whisper, breathing with me.
The amber light pulsed again, slow and patient. The radio on my belt vibrated against my hip, humming the same two-beat rhythm.
Below me, the bit hung crooked, half-buried in a section of ice that looked more like tissue than crystal—fibrous, almost translucent. Threads of darker material ran through it, glinting as they shifted.
When I reached it, the heat rolled up my arms even through the insulated suit. I unlatched my gloves and pressed my bare hand against the wall. The surface was slick and warm. For a moment it seemed to push back, like the slow give of skin.
That's when I felt the first exhale—an unmistakable flow of air from deep inside the earth, warm enough to fog my visor from the outside.
The hum rose in pitch, no longer a tone but a phrase, vowels without shape.
I whispered before I could stop myself, "What are you?"
The wall shivered. The sound that answered came not through the air but directly through my chest, vibrating the bones behind my heart.
Remember.
The word wasn't spoken—it happened.
The radio screamed, then went dead. Above me, I heard Brett shouting something, the line jerking as the pulley creaked. The light flickered once, twice.
I looked down. The glow was spreading, following the fibers beneath the ice, racing deeper, forming a pattern—lines converging into what looked like an enormous handprint pressed upward from the dark.
The ice shifted under my boots.
I grabbed the rope and yelled, "Pull me up!"
It tightened, rising half a meter before catching fast. Something below had hooked it.
The pulse quickened, doubling time. The amber light turned white, searing bright, and for a second I saw the shape beneath the ice move—a curve like a rib cage rising, falling, enormous.
And then a voice came through the radio again, not Brett's: a layered murmur, hundreds of tones speaking at once, echoing my name as though testing how it fit in its mouth.
Eli… Eli… Eli…
---
The Voice Beneath
The light didn't fill the shaft the way a flashlight does. It bled through the ice, leaking along the seams, crawling upward in slow waves, as though the glacier itself had started to glow. I couldn't see its source—only a white that had weight to it, like fog pressed between glass.
The rope jerked again. I heard Brett shouting, but his voice stretched thin, half an octave lower, words bending out of shape. Then it wasn't English anymore. It was syllables I almost recognized—something like Grant turned inside out.
My ears popped. The pressure was wrong; it wasn't coming from the surface but from below, as if the entire earth was drawing in breath. I could feel it through my ribs, the same two beats, faster now, matching my pulse.
I tried to yell that I was fine, but when I opened my mouth, the sound that came out wasn't mine. It was lower, layered, a second voice folded beneath my own, repeating each word a half-second late.
"I'm… I'm fine."
I'm… fine… fine…
The echo came from the ice, not the radio.
I looked down. The fibers under the frozen surface had arranged themselves into patterns—circles intersecting, repeating, tightening into something that looked deliberate. Each pulse of light redrew the symbols as if the glacier were thinking.
I lifted the recorder from my chest harness and thumbed it on. The instant the red light blinked, the static began—deep, rhythmic, mechanical at first, then almost melodic.
The recorder vibrated in my hand. My fingertips tingled. The ice around my boots responded to the tone, bulging slightly upward in perfect sync.
And then the voice spoke again. Not through the air, not in any language, but in pressure and rhythm, directly into my bones.
Do you remember me.
Not a question. A statement.
I pressed my back to the wall. "What are you?"
The answer came in sensation: a low wave through my spine, warmth spilling into my chest, the taste of metal in my mouth. Images flickered behind my eyelids—shapes that might have been veins or riverbeds or something much larger, older.
The voice pulsed again. You are mine.
The radio on my belt clicked alive, Brett's voice breaking through for a second—"Eli, the ground's moving!"—before dissolving back into static. The sound of it folded seamlessly into the rhythm, like it belonged there.
The light intensified until it wasn't light anymore but texture—something you could feel against your skin. The air shimmered with it.
I realized the pattern in the ice wasn't random geometry. It was a map—no, not a map, something more like a memory, repeating itself through every fracture.
The hum rose higher, unbearably loud now, but not in my ears. My teeth ached. My heartbeat wasn't my own anymore.
It slowed, steadied. Two beats. Pause. Two beats again.
Exactly in time.
I whispered, "What do you want?"
The vibration stilled for a moment. Then, softly, through the recorder and the rope and the ice beneath my feet, came an answer:
To wake.
The shaft walls flexed outward, a slow living motion, and the light erupted upward toward the surface, carrying the sound with it—out into the world.