The Hutkeeper
So it starts with a friend of a friend, who the hero doesn’t really know but pretends to know better than he does, telling him over beers about a documentary on the local gold mines. The mines — there’s a bunch of them, abandoned for decades — are all impassable, the friend of a friend says, emphatically, like he’s delivering ancient wisdom. He lists off attempts, failed explorations, even ten different entry points, all blocked, crumbled in, gone. The guy’s voice is full of this practiced certainty, like he’s giving a TED talk on places he’s never actually been.
The hero — who’s half-listening, half-resenting that he didn’t know any of this local mine history himself — decides, on some irrational impulse, to go anyway. Not to prove the guy wrong, because that would be too simple. No, he goes because there’s a knot of ignorance in him that needs covering up, something small and anxious that makes him want to counteract it with an act of reckless, almost defiant, bravery.
He drives out to the mouth of the nearest mine, the sun low and bruising the sky in reds and purples. The mine looks like any other hole in the ground, crumbling and unimpressive, but it beckons him forward. He enters fearlessly, or at least he pretends to be fearless. He doesn’t think much, just walks deeper, the flashlight in his hand casting nervous shadows. It’s not long before there’s a rumble from above, a shudder in the earth, and suddenly big rocks and soil crash down behind him, sealing off the exit with a cold, dead finality.
He’s trapped.
Complete darkness. Silence, so thick it becomes a kind of pressure. He tries to move the rocks, but they’re immovable. He yells, but the sound barely bounces off the walls. Time, for him, stops existing in any meaningful way. He doesn’t know if it’s been hours or days. There’s just this sinking feeling — what now?
But he has hope, at least at first. He convinces himself he can still get out, that someone will come, that the ground will shift again and clear a path. He thinks about life in the abstract, about this moment and what it means — whether it’s fate or stupidity or just plain bad luck.
Days pass. He doesn’t know it’s days, but it is. His stomach knots with hunger. He licks at the moisture on the rocks. His hope thins, but it never completely leaves him, like an ember that refuses to go out. It’s not even rational hope anymore. He’s just holding onto it because it’s something to hold onto.
His mind starts to unravel in the dark. He hallucinates, envisions reading some article, a snippet from a random place he can’t remember, about AI. It says, “Even the best AI today can’t think in the way we understand it. Models don’t reason; they replicate patterns.” This thought sticks with him, circles around in his head, loops in on itself. But isn’t the brain just a model, too? he wonders. Maybe that’s all he’s doing here — replicating patterns. Thinking, sure, but thinking as a kind of mechanical output, a last desperate attempt to make sense of a world that stopped making sense the moment he stepped into this mine.
And then, because the mind needs company even in madness, he creates this figure: Viktor Beranek. Viktor’s not real, or maybe he is — he’s heard the name somewhere before, a local hutkeeper up in the mountains. Viktor becomes a kind of mascot for survival, this imaginary person who works hard and keeps things going, like some stoic figure carved out of the rock. The hero gives Viktor a role, a purpose: the artificial hard-work center of his mind, something to keep him moving, even when there’s nowhere to go.
It becomes absurdly comforting, this delusion. Viktor the hutkeeper, who might not even exist, becomes his anchor, his reminder to keep trying. He doesn’t have any real hope left, but there’s still this strange optimism, an idea that hard work — this meaningless, repetitive struggle — will somehow save him.
He thinks, maybe it already has.
