Regina Burton, a chemical company corporate officer discovers repeating days and a tunnel under the city of Tylerton that leads out of town, into the unknown, where creatures lurk that play god with people and technology.

SYNOPSIS:

Regina wakes from a nightmare twice and finds herself living the same day over and over usually without memory, until she falls asleep in the basement. She again wakes but this time is different. The daily newspaper depicts the date as June 15, the same as the previous day! Confused, she goes on to work, only to find evidence of the day’s June 15 date even at work. Confused, growing more irritated by the minute, she agrees to meet with Gloria Swanson, who she barely knows, once Gloria realizes that Regina remembers the date if nothing else. As they get together for lunch, Regina spots a man she met the previous day. Aaron Horne, whom she knew as the representative of Feckle Freezer, is in a different roll, candy vendor at the local diner. She calls out to him but he flees from her. At Gloria’s insistence that ‘they’ are onto them and will arrive shortly, the two women leave the restaurant, make their way through a nearly empty bar, and into a movie theater. Beyond the lounge, the movie room, the lobby, they go through the manager’s office into a tunnel, and then to a small room with screens, chairs and table, and no one around.

Regina, determined to find out exactly what was happening to them, to the town, sets out to discover the truth at the end of the tunnel. The first direction leads to a dead end. Before they can explore int the second direction, two people find them. They are robots, amazingly human replicas, but robots just the same. Regina shoots one, admittedly by mistake, but in self-defense. Gloria is more and more terrified by the second but follows Regina this time as they head in the opposite direction. The second direction ends at a closed and locked door. Another robot, this one shiny metal and looking like a robot, traps them at the door. However instead of harming the two women, the robot, Mr. Dorchin in another life, gives Regina exactly what she is looking for: answers.

The robot opens the door and steps back. Regina stumbles through the doorway, across the ground which soon fades into a hard, smooth surface. At the edge of that surface is a yawning, dark cauldron of nothing: no ground, an infinite chasm at the foot of the mountain beside her. When the mountain moves and then speaks in a loud vibrating rumble, Regina has to fight the urge to flee. Dreading it, she nevertheless demanded to know the truth: Were the people of Tylerton human–or not, as suggested by the dying robot back in the tunnel room. If so, what happened to them all? And why?

The mountain, a full-grown man bigger than the entire world, the real Mr. Dorchin, towered over her. The air rumbled when he spoke.

He willingly spoke the truth that Regina didn’t want to hear but she asked for it. The world was indeed flat, at least Regina’s world. The entire town of Tylerton sat on a table- top in a technology research lab, the inhabitants, all of them, were robots imprinted by the human mind patterns and memories of the original townspeople, all of whom perished when the Contra Chemical plant exploded! It was not a nightmare, it was a memory of the very last night she was alive. Every day was June 15 because that was the last normal day before disaster struck. The robot computers are reset every night at midnight so no one remembers what day it’s supposed to be. The robot inhabitants of Tylerton live the same day over and over, forever. Why did Mr. Barth use technology this way, rebuilding and repopulating with robots an entire town stored on a table in the lab?

TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD