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Casper thought two minutes was a very long time to fall. Even lowered in his harness by the Hammond auto-descender at fifteen feet per second, the eighteen hundred feet from the top of the Zig's first blocky step to the bottom of the Central Shaft, seemed interminable. The shaft stretched twenty-four hundred feet, from the very top of the Zig's highest step all the way down to its lowest sub-level. Casper was surrounded on all sides by the innumerable, glowing, pulsating, two-inch thick vines. He thought they looked like noodles – two inch thick, luminous, rice noodles. He stuck out his leg and kicked one as he fell, and the tiny push he gave it made it sway, bumping other vines that bumped other vines until the waving, glowing, pulsing walls became disorienting, and he wished he hadn't touched anything.

He knew they were going to something called the Sanctum. Casper had no idea what that was, but just looking around at the bajillion noodles, all glowing and pulsing like arteries, lining every wall three feet deep, he was sure that the shaft led to Something Important.

Everything was pulsing with the bluish-white glow from inside the noodles, and traveling at fifteen feet per second, it looked like luminous water rippling in streams flowing up the walls. The light pulses were actually modulated data traveling mostly downwards, but Casper couldn't really tell, and he preferred to think that whatever was glowing inside the two inch thick rice noodles traveled upwards. Years ago he'd sat next to Otis in front of a vid screen in a vapor bar, too stoned to move, and watched a documentary about pyramids. They weren't as blocky as the Zig but they had shafts too. They were tiny, narrow shafts, but shafts, nonetheless. The narrator's voice had told him that the shafts pointed at the sky and to certain spots in the sky for a reason. They were like escape shafts for souls – escaping mummy souls. That's what these lights are like, he thought. They're like escaping souls, mummy souls all flying up the shaft, inside the noodles. They were flying off, he was sure, to somewhere, somewhere in the sky. Escaping mummy souls, baby. Yeah.

Casper saw something below him coming up fast. It looked like a twisted pile of noodles like the ones lining the shaft, but without the pulsing light inside. He remembered that the noodles Otis had cut to make their entry hole into the shaft had fallen, and here they were, coming up at him at fifteen feet per second. The bottom. They didn't look like a good thing to land in, and Casper wished he'd found the stop button on the Hammond auto-descender before he needed to stop so badly. He looked at the descender in front of him. It had a Big Red Button on the side that was larger than all the rest, and it was marked 'EMERGENCY STOP' in glowing AniLux letters. Shit, that was easy, he thought. The next thing he thought was, Famous Last Words.

The Hammond auto-descender's emergency stop button demonstrated for Casper exactly why the unread user manual declared that it was only meant for use in emergencies and why the user agreement absolved the Hammond Company of any liability should the user hit the Big Red Button while not properly balanced. The violent abruptness with which it arrested the descent of the improperly balanced, backwards leaning Casper flipped him upside down. He ended up staring at the Hammond between his legs, inverted, unable to right himself, and in a great deal of pain where the twin nylon straps that attached his personal harness to the Hammond had been swung, taut and unforgiving, into his nuts. He groaned and stared up at the large red button on the auto-descender that no longer displayed the words, 'EMERGENCY STOP', but now blinked Hammond's world famous slogan, 'Hang In There', which took a second longer to read, hanging upside down with your nuts mashed.

Casper hung there, unable to right himself while he stared at the blinking slogan and considered the email he would send to the Hammond Company of Spokane, Washington, thanking them for the efficiency of their emergency stop feature that had prevented a nasty impact with the bottom of the shaft, but had, in the process, significantly impacted both his nuts and his dignity.

Otis appeared from above, slowed gently next to Casper, grabbed his feet on the way past, and righted him. Casper was grateful, but still had a pair of aching nuts. Otis hung next to Casper like a spider, spinning slowly and grinning. Casper saw Carlos slow to a controlled stop behind and above Otis.

Casper asked, “Otis... dude. Why the frickity-fuck did you let me go first?”

“Why the frickity-fuck do you think?” Otis said, laughing unashamedly. “Because everybody does what you did their first time, and when it happens below you, then it's a lot easier to see it and laugh your ass off.” Carlos hung and spun like a spider behind Otis and he was laughing too. Otis decided to change the subject. He asked, “Casper, man, did you get this big, weird trip about mummy souls on the way down like I did?”

“Dude, yeah, I got that too,” was all Casper could manage to say before he was distracted by Caine's fluttering golden robe. Caine passed them, clearly unconscious and hanging forward in his harness. The Hammond auto-descender sensed the mass of tangled, darkened, severed rice noodle vines and its auto-brake kicked-in in time to slow Caine to a stop, slumped forward, bobbing inches above the spaghetti pile. He was out cold. The fluttering sound started again from above, and Casper saw Donnie Caine descending rapidly in the same unconscious state but with his weight back in the harness and his arms hanging limp. He passed Casper, Otis, and Carlos, and he was almost at the same level as the preceding Caine when the Hammond's sensor, confused until that moment by the cut vines piled at the bottom of the shaft, finally registered the noodle-like malformation beneath it as The Ground. Without time for gentle auto-braking, the Hammond Auto-Descender engaged the full emergency stop feature, with which Casper had recently become familiar. The initial jerk of emergency deceleration brought him to wide-eyed consciousness, just in time to flip backwards, upside down and take a pair of taut harness straps across the yabos, exclaiming, “Ow! My junk...” A second later he added, “Grasshopper...” Casper and Otis both got to laugh at Donnie's pain together, and Casper's own nuts suddenly hurt less.

Carlos wasn't laughing. He was looking up because Alvin had begun his descent right after Carlos and before either Caine. Carlos didn't see Alvin fluttering down in an orange sheet. Otis suddenly remembered the order in which they were supposed to drop, and he was looking up too, but he wasn't laughing anymore. Casper looked up and he realized the shaft looked clearer than it should. Alvin and Bonnie were nowhere to be seen. Where the fuck are they? All Casper could see above him was a bajillion luminous, pulsing, rice noodles lining the sides of the shaft. Almost a half-mile away, there was a tiny point of light, but in between him and that light there were supposed to be two people. Casper thought, Where the fuck are they? Where the fuck is Bonnie?

As he stared up the shaft's length, Casper wasn't just worried. He had an awful, hollow feeling in his gut, like he'd been ditched.