The Theta Prophecy by Chris Dietzel Page B

place.
    Whenever he was cold or tired, whenever a new blister ripped open on his hands, he thought about these things—his wife and son and everyone he knew still under the reign of the Tyranny—and he got back to working again.
    Satisfied that the canoe would get him where he wanted to go, he rowed out into the bay and began looking for a suitable island. Two miles out, he found one he thought might work. It was still within sight of the Mi’kmaq village in case something happened and he needed help, but was far enough away that they wouldn’t hear him working or notice anything he did.
    But even once he was there with all of his equipment, the work was still excruciatingly slow. He had to build a shelter before he got started digging his hole because he didn’t want to be out in the open when it rained or snowed. By himself, with ineffective tools, the shelter took a month to build. It didn’t help that he went back to the mainland every three or four days to ask advice on how to address all the issues he was having building a home, asking which plants were safe to eat, and so on.
    On one trip back to the mainland, he even asked the woman who had given him that first bowl of soup how she made it. A funny thing had happened during his time with the Mi’kmaq: the soup that he had once thought of as dirty water had become his favorite meal. Either his taste buds had changed or he had learned to focus on what food tasted like and not its appearance. Now, whenever someone made it, he asked for seconds and treasured each sip.
    After the shelter was complete, he walked the perimeter of the island a couple times to find the best place to begin his task. When he found the spot he liked, the giant hole began as nothing more than a single shovel’s worth of dirt dug and thrown over his shoulder. Compared to making a canoe and building a shelter, digging the hole was easy because it was something he knew how to do. It would take time, much more than building the boat or a cabin, but it was not above his level of expertise.
    After an hour, he had the beginnings of a circular hole that was eight feet wide. Granted, it was only two inches deep, but it was the start of what would become a pit a hundred feet into the ground.
    The work was slow but steady. By the end of the next day, the hole was three feet deep and he started thinking about constructing the removable wood planks that would become the first “floor” of the hole, which could be lowered down to ten feet.
    By the end of the second week, the hole was five feet deep and he was in the middle of tying ropes around each set of conjoined wood planks so they could be raised and lowered with a block and tackle.
    Large chunks of time went by without him realizing it. He lost track of how long it took to finish the first set of wood planks, get them joined together, and run them with rope so he could start using it as he intended. Each day, he worked in a haze of memories of AeroCams and wars and checkpoints and surveillance, all of which kept him moving along. After a month, he wouldn’t be sure if a week had passed or a year.
    Six months of every year was devoted just to threading lengths of fiber strands together with the women from the village. Between the ropes used to raise and lower each floor—forty feet of rope for the first level, eighty feet for the second, and eventually, a very long time later, four hundred feet of rope for the final level—he needed an inordinate amount of rope.
    Usually, he did this when it was raining because the hole would fill up with water and it would take days or weeks for the water to empty and for the hole to be suitable to dig again. The makeshift cover he built to keep water away from the hole only showed marginal results. After a tropical storm passed through, the hole was filled with water for five months. By the time it was dry again, he had made a coil of rope that was two hundred feet long.
    Year after year went by. The progress