Like oiled bronze statues-- Olympian heroes come to life-- the army that I'd been born into might live six-hundred years, perhaps much more.

Time Surfers

We are surfers, in a way. Having been born at just the right time to ride a wave of life expectancy into the unforeseeable future, we did age like everyone else, but as humans lived longer each generation, we who were born on the wave could see the future of that wave, infinitely.

(to see previous chapter of this story, go here: https://steemit.com/writing/@therealpaul/the-mortality-files-a-surface-dweller-s-tale for the first part of the story.)

Previously, I'd promised to write about my journey into the inner-Earth, and I will write about it, but getting into the Earth isn't so easy. While there are many entrances into the planet's innards, I had accidentally discovered another way to get there; the hat. I would find the hat to be a very valuable prize.

Where did you get that hat, Paul?

How I got the hat. I had an acquaintance, long ago, who decided to burglarize a police station out in some western town in the desert called Shiller's Rock. He claimed that the cops had stolen his car, and so he broke in to get his keys. He got his keys, and while he was in the station he also found a wristwatch, and the hat.

I never knew his real name, but I called him Sport for some reason. Anyway, I first met Sport while driving along a summer road, where his car was stalled on the shoulder. Not sure why I stopped, but Sport was a really big guy, and I supposed that people had been nice to him his whole life-- he looked friendly in that way.

I offered Sport a ride up to the next town, which was around 30 miles. It was in that 30 miles that Sport told me the story of an Australian man who had ended up in Shiller's Rock jail over some traffic nonsense, but according to the tale, when the cops went to let the prisoner go after an hour or two, he had vanished from the locked jail cell. The only thing left, according to the story, was a gold wristwatch and a hat, which were apparently the only possessions of the prisoner when he was thrown in jail.

The mystery of the vanishing prisoner was never explained, but Sport finished the tale for everyone when the Shiller's Rock police department stole his car, and when he then broke into their police station to get his keys, where he allegedly liberated the only evidence of the mysterious traveler's existence; the hat and the gold watch.

A new hose clamp and a gallon of water was enough to get Sport back on the road, but before we parted ways, he dug around in the back of his car for a second, and pulled out the hat, throwing it to me. " The mysterious vanishing man's hat, looks like it would fit you. Way too small for me!"

He flung it to me, and the first thing that I noticed was that it felt heavier than I expected it to be. It fit me well enough, and I bent to look in the car mirror to see what Sport was laughing about. "Dapper" was his word, and he was right-- it was a dapper hat.

I had no idea at the time, but the hat was beyond dapper. It would turn out to be much more than just an ordinary hat, while it still worked very well as an ordinary hat, especially in the rain. I decided to make it my traveling hat, to take with me on long journeys and vacations. I simply had no idea.

That 'Beeping' Sound

It was a few years later when I found myself traveling out west to help a small company move some statues-- when I discovered some curious things about the old hat; it randomly caused a faint beeping noise inside of my head as I drove along. At first, I was annoyed by it, then I became curious about it, and soon noticed the patterns.

Caves, Caverns, Tunnels and Shafts

I was 7000 feet above sea level in Flagstaff Arizona when the hat beeped in my left ear, with a series of short bursts. I had a bit of time to spare, so the first chance I got, I turned left. Now the beep seemed to be coming from my forehead, and as long as I was wearing the hat, the soft tones continued to move around in my head.

It was clumsy at first, but after numerous wrong turns, I eventually was led to Sedona, Arizona, a bright red collection of geological formations poking out of the evergreen landscape under a crisp blue sky. Following the beeps, I eventually stopped and locked up the car in a park and began to walk, but the hat quickly led me off of the main trails and into a rugged gorge. Hopping across the tops of a jumble of boulders, a stream appeared, and I followed it south for a few minutes until I could make my way up a thin ravine, according to the beeping from the curious hat.

The air in the ravine felt considerably cooler than the rest of the valley, and as a couple of brushy-tailed squirrels dashed ahead of me up the rocks, a distinct voice startled me-- coming from inside of my skull, but not my voice.

"Malcombish welcomes you!"

I stopped, frozen. Who the hell is Malcombish? A chime like a dense bell went off next to me, this time coming from a flattened wall of pink rock on the left side of the ravine, and I don't know why I put my hand on the rock, but when I did, everything went bright white for just a second, and I jerked my hand away from the stone to cover my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again a second later, the ravine was gone-- I was in a lush cavern with gigantic green vines and roots twisting in every direction, surrounding what looked like a small laboratory, and a very large man, sitting upon a stone throne. He was looking at me with a childish grin, and then the giant of a man stood up quickly. This was Malcombish.

He must have been 8 feet tall! his face was like a boy, round and pale, and the smile grew brighter on his face as I stood there among the roots.

"Nice hat, O Sundrop! A rare one, that. Here you are though, and Malcombish welcomes you!"

This was the same voice I'd heard in my head in the ravine, and as my eyes adjusted, he went on. "You're about 90 miles below that canyon now... straight down, nearly. This is the first level. Where is it that you would like to go now, Sun Man?"

Ancient Technology Inside the Hat

Apparently any man who lived on the surface of the planet was known as a "Sun Man" to Malcombish the giant. I still hadn't grasped the idea that I was deep inside of the Earth, but after a while, Malcombish, the huge, pale, boyish being, asked curiously; "You see those little gold trees inside that hat, in the liner?"

I hadn't noticed them before, but there they were, like he said, three little gold 'trees' that seemed to be inked into the fabric. Beneath the hat's liner was even more metallic material, and as I inspected it, Malcombish pointed out how the three trees were in contact with my forehead when the hat was on properly.

But Look at the Time

Adjusting to the idea that I had basically stumbled into the inner Earth, I had lots to learn. It appeared too, that the giant man called Malcombish would be my teacher and guide. At one point he showed me a real-time view of the surface above on a translucent sheet of quartz, and there was the nearby parking lot, where my car was apparently no longer parked. Malcombish tried to explain how it had been nearly three days on the surface since I had descended into the innards, and attempted to blame the time difference on "geology and geometry". I certainly had a lot to learn about the inner Earth.

Apparently the center of the Earth is a spectacularly bright display of color, spewing trillions of gallons of pure water in every direction, and according to Malcombish, the world is much like an onion, with worlds within worlds, layer upon layer of interconnected catacombs filling the planet's interior. I was struck by the realization that the surface of the planet was practically two-dimensional, while the interior was totally 3D, and unfathomably populated with humans and and animals that I'd forgotten to imagine, or had never imagined.

So it was that my first three days were spent inside of the Earth learning about the unique and amazing hat that I was wearing, from a boyish giant who had answered the door that I'd accidentally knocked on, that door being a doorway to the inside of the world.

As a surfer of time, I have a chance to tell this story properly, but I was in there for a long time, so there is a lot to tell. I'll talk about the vast distant hanging luminescent gardens on carved rafters of granite that I saw, and I may mention how giants drink lots of water, these thirsty beings growing tubes of 'water grass' in every nook and stone eddy throughout their underground realm. I'm getting thirsty just thinking about it, so I'll pause for now, and part 3 will resume the story, coming soon.

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photos above are mine, 2018, all characters above are fictional, or the names may have been changed to protect the innocent in some cases, or the whole thing is made-up. Thanks for reading my story!

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