Sunday, February 22, 2015

The buried city in the stars

Follow this link and read the lavishly-illustrated account from a band of Barcelona track-runners who went all Forsake-the-Sky and spent their weekends exploring deeper and deeper into the underground warren.

Expeditions into the older, deeper cavities of a city's foundations never end well. There are ancient buried horrors which should remain buried, while the claustrophobic darkness is not good for the psyche. There are documentaries about it.

Anyway our tunnel-rats rapelled down 80-metre ventilation shafts and hiked in darkness for kilometers and hid from jigger-riding guards, and at the end of it, they found an abandoned Tunnel Boring Machine, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY. I am not making this up.
If this were a horror movie or a Laundry novel, they would spend the second act reactivating the power supply and bring the control system out of hibernation... then the TBM would complete its final programmed excavation,
extending the topological complexity of the Barcelona metro to a level where it becomes the functional equivalent of the Gödel-Mandelbrot Algorithm, and OPENING THE GATEWAY. Then the final act would become a desperate struggle for survival against the cannibalistic mutants.

IRL, however, I can only say WOW.

5 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

He had coffee and a snail, and then went to Whyte's office.

A sentence never before have I seen.
~

Smut Clyde said...

We forget the weird gastropodal food-fads of the 1950s.

H. Rumbold, Master Barber said...

The gastropods are not amused.

"According to Nature magazine, we have another weapon in the eternal battle against slugs and snails: the double espresso. Slugs and snails hate caffeine, researchers have discovered. The chemical could become an environmentally acceptable pesticide."

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

P.S. Thinking of Riddled.
~

rhwombat said...

ittdgy: Hair raising. On the other hand, the effect of microgravity AND caffeine on orbital gastropods are disturbing enough.