Thread by @owillis

The Crack - Prologue

Night. The ground was still. The desert was quiet.

It began. It started.

The rumbling was too soft to be noticed, but finally the slumber had ended. It was alive. Hundreds of miles below the unbroken surface, the crack had begun to form.

It couldn't see.
Yet.
It couldn't hear.
Yet.
It was aware.
Up. Up. Up.
It had a plan. It would consume.
The crack had begun.
Up.
Tunneling, up. Through the dirt and rock and sand.
Up.
It hungered.

-End Prologue-

The Crack - Chapter One

Timmy, 9, followed the rules. His family's Kansas farm was smaller than many others in the county, but it was large enough to be dangerous. He didn't stray too far away from the main building as he explored the territory.

His main companion was his imagination. An only child, Timmy spent hours in a dream world of his own making. Always within shouting distance of his parents, the boy was also millions of miles away.

Yet following the rules would ultimately not matter. The danger would find Timmy. The obedient little boy could not be protected.

Timmy ran across the grass, in his mind dashing across a Martian landscape to defeat the evil Robot Emperor. His mom encouraged these flights of fancy, while his father had a harder time seeing the point of make-believe.

He didn't notice the rumbling. Nobody did. Not at first. It didn't register on any equipment. Most of the animals didn't even respond to it. It was there though, just below everything. Practically imperceptible.

But it was growing stronger.

Timmy tripped over a medium-sized rock, his knee slamming into the ground. "Ouch," he yelled as he fell to the ground. His fantasy broke and he was back on Earth, groaning in pain.

That was when he became the first person to feel the earth rumbling. He was far from the last.

The shaking went from nothing to intense within seconds. Soon, Timmy's entire body was vibrating. So was his family's land. And the entire state of Kansas.

He forgot about the pain in his knee.

He stood up.
The rumbling grew louder.
He heard stones tumbling in the distance.

He yelled for his parents, but by then the rumbling had become a deafening roar that crushed every other noise.

Then he heard it.

It sounded like bones being popped, but at a thundering volume. The child thought, "earthquake?" But the shuddering of the ground was different from standard tectonic activity.

Pop. Pop. Crunch.

Then he saw it. Right across his family's property, the ground itself pulled apart.

Thunderous echoes followed, as hundreds of thousands of pounds of earth fell into the newly formed opening in the earth's surface. In the far off distance, plumes of ash belched forth, while hills and mountains collapsed inside.

Timmy began to slide. The ground he stood on buckled and tilted. What had been flat just seconds before was now askew, at an angle.

The Crack was open. And Timmy was sliding in.

He grabbed at the ground. He could feel the dirt rub against his fingertips. He couldn't get a grip. He felt heat emanating from the Crack, which was still widening.

A tuft of grass. Timmy put his hand on it. Held on.

But he could feel the tug of gravity, pulling him.

The ground shuddered again. The shaking was more violent, more intense.

Timmy's teeth slammed against each other.

He closed his eyes.

Mom.

Dad.

Home.

The grass began to pull away from the earth. He was a small boy, but the weight was too much.

The heat grew more intense. Timmy fell. There was nothing to hold on to. There was only the Crack. The world above disappeared from his field of vision, replaced by walls of rock and sediment.

He was only a kid, but he could feel it in his gut. This was it. It would be over.

He closed his eyes, accepting his fate.

His body fell.

Then there was a chill. It licked against his skin, then went down to his bones.

He heard a sound. Not the cracking. Not the rumbling. Something else.

It sounded like a digital tone. As if someone pressed a phone number.

The tone rose.
More cracking.
It filled his ears.
A jagged rock.

Timmy's parents posted his photo on a corkboard, next to the hundreds of others. The pictures fluttered in the breeze. The people were "missing."

They were not found.

The Crack - Chapter Two

Brody Lake was extremely nervous. The lab assistant had twice in the previous week caused expensive delays in Dr. Waterloo's project. He was certain that one more screwup would get him fired.

The blonde 26 year old exhaled as he moved the test tube.

That’s when the flashing alarm light came on, bathing the lab in it’s bright red tones.

That had never happened before. So naturally, Brody panicked. The tube slipped out of his hand and seemed headed for certain doom as a million pieces on the floor. He leapt into action.

He moved so awkwardly. Limbs flying out wildly, his bony arms shooting toward the floor.

The ongoing alarm produced an awkward backdrop. Everything seemed to slow down.

It felt like a desperate last minute gamble.

Then he caught it. He found he was still holding his breath.

Dr Cordelia Waterloo walked in and looked down at her assistant lying in a heap, legs askew in separate directions.

“What the hell are you doing, Cody?”

A million thoughts rushed to his head as he looked up at his superior. He felt like an idiot and looked like one too.

The doctor made him nervous. He held a candle for her, but he also knew she was doing serious research. She worked for NASAs Purple Project, an offshoot of the space agency with a nebulous mandate and a generous private-public budget.

The Purple Project picked promising scientists from academia and the private sector and let them effectively go wild.

Dr. Waterloo was the only black doctor involved and one of only four women out of a core group of twenty. His mistakes amplified her scrutiny.

His continued employment was a pity move. Cody was average at best, and he knew the other lab assistants insisted he was merely eye candy. A couple even said he was a "himbo."

On the other hand, Dr. Waterloo was a prodigy. She was modest, but she was the cream of the crop.

She worked on artificial intelligence, but insisted that simply replicating human-level intellect on a soulless computer was a waste. She believed that there should be an organic component.

Build a computer brain? Great. Grow one? Even better.

"Sorry, doc," he replied.
She shook her head, noticing how close the test tube was to the floor and shattering.
"Never mind. We have bigger concerns."
This alarm had never gone off before.
Cody pulled himself off the floor and gingerly put the tube on a secure stand.

He followed Dr. Waterloo into the larger workspace and they both watched as the large video screen came to life.

Waterloo's office was in suburban Maryland, not far from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the town of Greenbelt.

The feed was a video stream from Washington. But it may as well have been a world away. Several men and women sat around a conference table with severe expressions on their faces.

At the head of the table sat the vice president. The cabinet had been assembled.

The vice president was in his early 70s. He had wrinkles at the corner of his eyes and usually he wore a thousand-watt grin, his permanent expression after years of politicking.

Today he was grim.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for connecting. There's been an event."

The Crack - Chapter Three

Usually the Vice President was sociable. Dr. Waterloo had been invited to several video conferences with him as part of his oversight of NASA. Often the first ten minutes was consumed with glad-handing, and the like.

Not today.