Read The Decommission mission statement here
The following text was discovered in the journals of a deceased prisoner of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Martin Ainscough was born in 1912 and died in 1976, having spent the final seven years of his life in incarceration for repeated evasion of tax. Little is known of his life before his arrest, though knowing what we now do, we can extrapolate from his disclosures that he was an agent of the MII (The Ministry for the Investigation of Irregularities).
In this first issue of The Decommission, we present unaltered the final entry of his journals, in which he reflects on a discovery that haunted him until his last days. Ainscough’s journals are erratic; sometimes straightforwardly diaristic, often philosophical, frequently interspersed with what appear to be dialogues from an ongoing play that he was writing. In itself it is a fascinating text penned by a clearly well-practised hand. But upon reading its final pages we were struck by their similarity to the recently discovered reports of the Chinese miner Fang Xi, who lived from 1905 to 1966. The close correspondence between the discoveries of the two otherwise very different men lends credence to both of their accounts.
7/22/1976
It’s not quite what I expected; being close to death. It’s as though I’ve reached the bottom of a dry well and can see each and every stone. My thinking is as clear as it has ever been, even if the hand that must now carry my torch into the dark is heavy. What does seem inevitable about all of this is that at the brink of death, my thoughts should turn to life. And there is something I have carried with me which now seems to be the kernel of my time here.
Most of what I was called upon to observe in my career drew my attention to the skies, and I can say with confidence that whatever it was that Shakespeare said about more things on heaven and earth he was right. There are things that happen above us, and not too far, that I would not elect myself to describe. But what I saw beneath Utah I cannot stay silent about. I hope that these pages find their way into the hands of someone for whom they hold meaning, but for myself if nothing else, I worry that if I don’t expel the memory I will die with it still haunting me.
We were flown out to the mines on the Tuesday. We were given hard-hats and high visibility vests. Though the site was abandoned, we were as ever obliged to maintain the deceit of normality in all that we did. As if, were we to encounter some long-lost miner in the tunnel network, we should appear to them as one of their own. I think often of my colleagues who joined me on the expedition. There were three others besides myself. I wonder about how they have carried the secret. I have shared with them a responsibility that is hard to quantify.
After a slow descent we came to a set of cordoned-off tunnels. We were taken beyond the barrier and soon arrived at a fissure in the rock just wide enough for us to sidle through. We emerged onto a lip of basalt. The beams of our headlamps dwindled quickly into the darkness, but I could tell the space we had entered into was vast. We switched on our halogen torches and followed our guide carefully down a long, uneven slope.
As we reached the bed of the chasm I felt a churchly stillness come over me. Our torches lit up, the way cathedrals might be illumined from below, enormous buildings of unhewn slate. Unhewn yet not windowless, not without doorways. Rudimentary and malformed by protrusions of rock, as if they had risen from a troubling birth in the ground; unbuilt, natural, but buildings nonetheless. It was impossible to consider them any other way. I remember one of my colleagues making the sign of the cross, and I bowed my head.
We were standing in what could be described as a geological analogue of a main street, if only for the fact that the buildings were arranged almost as linearly as in a city above ground. There were trees too, underground trees. But they had grown in a way that can best be compared to telephone poles; straight and narrow trunks with branches that emerged only at their very tops and which were thin and rangy as wires. Some of the branches were in fact shared unbrokenly between two trees.
Close investigation shattered any doubt that these structures could have been man-made. Three days we spent down in that chasm, and I climbed stairwells, crossed rooms, passed through doorways – none of which had known the presence of man before. I felt as though I were a ghost, and the impression was even stronger when I caught sight of one of my colleagues passing across the window of another building or standing out in the street, holding their torch. We spent most of our time there alone, carrying out our own investigations. A force of habit, but there was something about the place that demanded it of us too. Occasionally one of us would call the others over and we would stand looking at whatever they had found, saying very little.
In some of the rooms the rock had grown into struggling imitations of furniture; angular chairs of slate, beds like some vision of torture from a fable. In the corner of one room I found what at first appeared only to be a small, oddly shaped growth of overlapping slate, but which on closer inspection was a stack of books. Not real books, of course; they could not be read, or even lifted, but marked on their spines was a script of sorts, though unidentifiable, and even amateurish, as if written by the unpractised hand of a child. Chipping away at the walls of the buildings, we discovered beneath the outer layer an inner stratum resembling pipes. Though they were not hollow, they were of a slightly higher porosity which allowed them – albeit very slowly – to carry water from a source below the chasm. One of us did go searching for the water, but we never found it.
Outside of the buildings my attention was drawn to the rock that constituted the outer wall of the chasm itself. A beautiful vault of basalt it was, not unlike some of the cliffs you might see in Iceland. Its upper reaches escaped the torchlight, but just around the height of my knee a different stratum had formed, clearly separated from the basalt above and below. I took out my hammer and chisel and found my disbelieving eyes vindicated – it was concrete! A thin layer, cracked and crushed between the basalt. A failed stratum.
An inescapable impression, full-bodied, came to me complete in that moment: this chasm below the earth was somehow aware – I wrestle with the word conscious – of the man-made milieu that existed above the crust. I am no stratigrapher, and, at least up until that point, no mystic either. I never shared my impression with my colleagues down there for fear of being thought a fool on both accounts. I know that this is not how rock behaves. But concrete? Surely normality was out of the question already. And what of the buildings too? They had emerged as if from nothing. My mind got the better of me and I experienced a kind of dream, there beneath the basalt wall, veined with that trauma of shattered concrete. It was my holy moment; it was this that has done the haunting. I will try to put into words what came to me then in images.
In some way the earth had intuited the presence of cities upon itself, and these rocks were preparing to rise to the surface – though it would of course take millions of years – in shapes, and possibly materials, that we would recognise as our own. For what? Something akin to the camouflage of a hunted animal? Is the evolution of the earth just as Darwinian as the evolution of its fauna? Fearing for its own resources, is it trying to imitate the compounds that we have broken it apart in order to create? Are the mountains of the distant future to resemble the office towers of today?
I softened after I left those mines and set foot again on the crust. I pitied the earth. I was convinced that we had forced it into a kind of submission until it decided, for its own sake, that it was better to alter the forms of nature to suit our designs. I felt – and I know how this must sound – that I had come face to face with God, and that he had appeared in slipshod human costume, debased in a plea to be one of us.
Whatever force I mean when I use the word God, I was disappointed most of all in its lack of foresight. By the time the rocks in the chasm reach the surface – and I know that that is their intention – will there be anything left for them to resemble? We will either be gone or changed beyond recognition, and surely our architecture will have changed to match our newer selves. I have thought about those distant descendants of ours – will they be human at all? – pondering the providence of the risen monuments of our time. Ruins in reverse.
And yet who’s to say that this has not always been the case? Are the mountains, the forests, the dunes that we know mere imitations of structures designed by the hands of long forgotten ancestors – off in those reaches of the past beyond the probes of science? Creatures so far gone as to be alien to us, bringing to life in their workshops oaks, maples, ashes – playing with shapes – designating the flow of rivers and the steepness of hills, as we do the straightness of our roads and the inclines of our bridges. Is the earth a tragically laggard paradise built to purpose, a natural utopia doomed only to arise once the architects of its design have passed, leaving only those blind to the significance of its forms? What might trees have been, built anew by hand? What colours might have died and not returned? What might this life have revealed to us had we eyes with which to see?