IN PERPETUITY
“Installing a bottomless pit in a modern building is a complicated engineering task, but also, a serious legal one. They’re not naturally occurring phenomena, after all. Given the general shape of the Earth, there’s only so much planet to dig through, and if you did fall through the whole thing, you’d just wind up on the other side.” I was beginning to realize that she was serious about this. “You have to call the right people, like ours, who can obtain the permits and licensure necessary to make the world underneath a building locally flat.”
“Locally flat? How would that even work?”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like. The right parties come to an agreement that the Earth is no longer spherical across a well-defined tract of land, and my firm submits the necessary paperwork on the client’s behalf. They agree to own infinite air rights in a column defined by the pit’s trajectory, and assume liability for any damages or injuries caused by its construction and presence in perpetuity. The rest of the bureaucracy takes over once we’ve properly filed, and a few months later, the digging crew takes over operations.”
“What kind of clients do you even have for that?”
“As you might expect, that’s confidential. The kind of people who need a bottomless pit installed on their property aren’t the kind of people who are going to tell you that they have one.”
I decided to play along. “Isn’t there supposed to be a turtle down there?”
“It’s a different turtle for every pit, and each time, we kill it to make room.”
“Oh.” A far sadder answer than I’d hoped.
“I’m kidding. There’s no need for a turtle. The pits are bottomless, remember? There is no underside to the world, because there is no bottom, so nothing to rest on its back. Maybe there are colossal turtles somewhere deep underground, but they aren’t load-bearing.”
“You said there’s a digging crew, though. How do they actually, you know, dig infinitely far down?”
“We only work on the approvals,” she grinned. “Nothing about that defines how long the job will actually take. Most of the workers knew, in life, that they’d done things to be condemned eternally, even if they refused to believe it. They just didn’t know what it would be like until they got handed their shovel.”