Netwrck
The Year He Was There
The Wrekin Deep is a decommissioned stratiform lead-zinc mine on the A5 near Llantwitau, taken on lease in 2021 by a small consortium that runs one machine a thousand one hundred and twenty metres down.
- ~160 min (estimated)
- 35290 words
- 62 scenes
- 10 branch points
- 5 endings
34 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The machine is called the Cage. It does not take years out of the world. It takes them out of the operator, and the interval it takes is a product of the field rather than a setting, and nobody at that mine can aim it. On Monday 1 June 2026 Rhys Tarrant, thirty-eight, a refrigeration and air-conditioning engineer who has served the consortium's surface contract for eleven years, goes down to the ninth level for a routine recurrence check with a sandwich in his pocket. The cage comes up on the ninth of June at 05:41 carrying a man of thirty-eight who is forty-four years old on the tissue measures and who has no memory of the four years and one month and twenty-six days between the two dates. Every Tuesday in between belongs to somebody. Rhys has none of them. Four miles outside Oswestry, in a house called Cae'r Ysgol, his wife of four years is standing in a kitchen at ten past six with a
Content notice11 topics · tap to review
- Coercive control within a marriage
- Memory loss and the loss of a person's own history
- An industrial accident and its concealment
- A financial deception against a family that is still paying for it
- A non-consensual restraint, described in the past tense
- Explicit sexual content between spouses, stopping on a spoken word
- Self-harm ideation by a protagonist, stated and refused
- A legal signature that cannot be withdrawn
- Medical procedures described in a mine chamber and a surgery
- A hard moral set of choices with no option that does not cost something
- Death of named characters before and off the page
Cast
- R Rhys Tarrant Protagonist; refrigeration and air-conditioning engineer on the consortium's surface contract; the seventh man to come out of the Cage no portrait yet
- N Nia Tarrant (née Pryce) Wife; chartered accountant keeping the books for three tenant farms; the person who has lived the four years no portrait yet
- D Dr Priya Raman Chronometric physicist; holds the array at the ninth level and the only document anybody will give him no portrait yet
- G Gil Tunstall The fourth man to come out of the Cage; a night picker in Telford; the only person in Wales not afraid of him no portrait yet