rowyn

One of these decades, I'm gonna hold a job for more than a year or two.

Not that I really miss the muse factory, mind, and I'm sure glad to be out of the Emotional Tour Guide biz. But it'd be nice to have a bit of stability for a few years, yanno?

'Course, the Hole is pretty much the antithesis of 'stable'. Still, the work's kinda cool once you finally get out of training. I've been an actual Hole Monitor for a couple months now, and (don't tell the boss) I like it.

My official title is Extra-Dimensional Region Variance Examiner, but damn that's a mouthful and nobody uses it. Some of the other guys call us Ed-Re-Vees, but most people go with Hole Monitor. The Extra-Dimensional Region is the Hole, of course.

It's nowhere near as dangerous a job here in Kansas as it is, say, in Ukraine or Lhasa. Sealwarn-Cardinal has the Hole locked down pretty tight here; those Fey Signs have been doing a bang-up job keeping it pinned at Bunker 8. It hasn't changed relative position by more than a foot since the last octogram went down in '03. We're not like those poor bastards trying to track it across the landscape and issuing Hole warnings to evacuate the area.

Here at Bunker 8, we mostly do exploration, charting what passes for the interior of the Hole. The exterior of the Hole has already been well-documented. It's eleven feet tall, roughly cylindrical but tapering slightly at the bottom and widening slightly at the top, from about 5 feet wide at the top to 4.5 feet wide at the bottom.

You can't see it, or at least you can't see it now that we've excavated it fully. You used to be able to tell where it was by what wasn't there -- that big ol' hole in the ground. We've got tape all around it, in addition to the octograms and of course the big glass observation bubble that only qualified Hole Monitors are supposed to enter. Even we don't go into the Hole, most of the time. We send remotes in to take measurements and look around, and let me tell you, it is something else. We've dropped a remote almost two miles down inside that ten-foot-tall sucker, and the weather is --

-- Aaaand so much for lunch, alarm's going off, sounds like a live one in there. I'll finish this later.