Evening. I have been going back and forth on whether to call for about three years now. Finally decided tonight was the night. My wife thinks I should just let it go, but I cannot. Some things you cannot just let go. My name is Dilbert. I spent nineteen years as a Deep-Earth Excavation Specialist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Retired now. Medical discharge, technically, but we will get to that. I have worked on tunnels, bunkers, underground facilities all over this country. Places you have heard of and places that do not officially exist. What I am about to tell you, I'm telling you, it changed everything I thought I understood about the ground beneath our feet. About what this planet actually is. Because I do not think it is a planet at all.
Summer of 2019. I got assigned to a project in Utah. Middle of nowhere, about sixty miles southwest of nowhere else. High desert. Nothing but scrub brush and silence for miles in every direction. The cover story was geological survey work for a potential water treatment facility. But there is no water treatment facility out there. Never was going to be. We were drilling a classified deep bunker. Continuity of government type stuff. I had done maybe a dozen of these over my career, so I knew the drill. Pun intended. Strict compartmentalization. Nobody talks about what they see. You do your job, you go home, you forget. My daughter had just had her second kid that spring. I remember I was annoyed about missing the baptism because of this assignment. Forty-three years old and still getting shipped out to the desert like I was twenty-five. Anyway. We set up the site in late June. Eight-man crew, rotating shifts, twenty-four hour operation.
The target depth was classified, but I knew we were going deep. Deeper than most projects I had worked on. The first few hundred feet were standard. Sandstone, shale, the usual layers you hit in that part of Utah. We were making good progress. Boring work, really. You watch the monitors, you check the samples, you log everything. I was alone in the monitoring station that night. Everyone else was topside, running equipment checks or catching sleep. Just me and the readouts. The hum of the generators. I had a thermos of coffee that had gone cold hours ago. At 2,847 feet, we hit something different. The drill resistance dropped suddenly, then spiked hard. The torque readings went crazy. I'm telling you, I had never seen numbers like that. I thought we had hit a void, maybe an underground cavern. That happens sometimes. But when the core sample came up, I knew immediately something was very wrong.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]