The Girl Who Found the Sun

by Matthew S. Cox

  She carefully wrapped the exposed copper with insulating tape, likely a pointless gesture considering the voltage that would flow down the line as soon as she hit the button. The thin black material might last a few days before melting off. Still, it made her feel better to do the job ‘right,’ the way Dad taught her, the way people did it however long ago before the Great Death.

  Her father’s voice spoke from her memory, bedtime stories he’d told her long ago about vast flooding, high temperatures, and Plutions killing off everything except the people who’d taken shelter in the Arc.

  “Hmm. Stories.” She squeezed the tape in place and leaned back, examining her work under the feeble glow of her crank light. The repair appeared solid. “Not all stories are true.”

  Raven sighed out her nose, then made her way back to the control panel. She put her finger on the switch for wire fourteen, made a wish that her father had been right about topside, and flicked it. The green lights all flickered as the system adjusted to the power flow. Hopefully, repairing that wire would ease the stress on the other wires and let them cool off a bit.

  Eager to escape the narrow confines of the conduit, Raven secured the flap on her satchel and crawled into the dark.

  She didn’t need a flashlight to go in a straight line.

  2

  Lesser Evils

  Vast fires ate the jungles, choking the sky with smoke. Whole cities drowned when all the world’s oceans swelled past coastlines. The people who survived that didn’t last too long either. – Ellis Wilder.

  Strong light in the engineering room hurt Raven’s eyes.

  Squinting, she crawled out of the conduit, kicked the hatch closed behind her, then stood, brushing dust from her poncho and pants. Eighteen wires—and eighteen dark trails where backup cables had been—ran along the wall to the right, connecting to the massive power transformer unit in the corner, a giant steel cabinet as tall as the ceiling and a quarter the size of her bedroom. It combined the incoming power lines into a single electrical source that fed the Arc’s active usage and diverted any excess power into the capacitors. The system tried to store any excess power generated to compensate for periods of little to no wind, but the charge meters always showed the batteries at twenty percent, plus or minus a little in either direction.

  Ben said that meant demand more or less equaled generation. Raven suspected the capacitors lost their ability to hold much. If they hit a lull devoid of wind for too long, the batteries would drain in hours, requiring the Arc go into emergency power management, shutting down everything except the ventilation system and the garden. That happened once already when she’d been fourteen. Using a crank light in the wire tunnel sucked, but she had little choice. Using them everywhere while the entire Arc sat in pitch darkness felt like living in a nightmare. She kept waiting for monsters or zombies to jump out at her.

  Lark, the other woman on the engineering team, sat in front of her workstation, tinkering at a small water pump. She, too, wore a poncho, but an older one, made from multiple swaths of material scavenged from old shirts and pants all stitched together. Raven got hers soon after turning twelve. The brownish-green fabric came from a fibrous plant the hydroponics team occasionally grew for use in making clothes or blankets. Apparently, that plant—which they called cotton-plus—had been a genetic creation from before the Great Death. It also sucked up a rather high concentration of nutrients, so the farmers didn’t raise a crop of it often due to the strain it put on food production.

  To conserve materials, most everyone in the Arc wore poncho-like garments in place of shirts and loose-fitting pants. Children received smaller ponchos, swaths of fabric wrapped around them like togas, or threadbare leftovers until they hit their tweens—at which point they got an adult-sized poncho. With resources so limited, no one made child-sized garments only to have them sit idle after the owner grew out of them.

  It didn’t bode well that an Arc of 183 people only contained five children under sixteen. Noah wanted people to have more babies, but they needed to be careful to avoid inbreeding. Also, their population had only about twenty-five women of an age suitable for motherhood, Lark being one of them at thirty-five. She and the man they’d matched her with—Gerald from the kitchen staff—had been trying, but no luck thus far.

  She eyed the other woman’s tread socks, also made of cotton-plus, and debated going back to her quarters to get hers. Since she already expected the trip into the wire conduit, she’d worn her boots instead. The old things had been patched and re-patched to the point they’d become about half duct tape. Supposedly, the Arc once had a storeroom filled with clothes and shoes for a population of 2,000 people, but she’d never seen anyone wearing a garment that didn’t have dozens of patches. Level six, the lowest floor, held manufacturing facilities that could, in theory, produce everything from nice clothes to computer circuitry… but no one knew how to operate them or make the materials required.

  Smooth concrete corridors didn’t require hard soles, so most people wore tread socks. Raven loved hers, much more comfortable than the old boots. Being so far underground kept the corridors and rooms perpetually chilly. According to books she’d read, topside had different periods called seasons where the temperatures varied. No one ever went there, so no one had any need of clothes suitable for cold temperatures or shoes thicker than socks. Some of the hallways in the Arc had been worn smooth in visible trails, the concrete eroded in a manner that reminded her of paths in the forest from her novels.

  “Hey,” said Lark, finally noticing her. “How’d it go?”

  “Fixed.” Raven pulled the satchel strap off her shoulder, setting the bag on the table as she sat in her chair. The cushion disintegrated before her birth, but a too-worn-to-wear poncho worked as a replacement. “Old patch failed. What an idiot.”

  “Idiot?” asked Lark.

  Raven fished the short length of cable out of her bag and held it up. “They cut the old splice to the exact length of the break and welded it in place with solder.”

  Lark whistled in disbelief. “What a dumbass.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” Raven tilted the scrap back and forth. “It’s possible the wires didn’t overheat back then. I don’t think they’re supposed to be so hot all the time.”

  “I kinda thought the same, but Ben says it’s nothing to worry about.” Lark cursed under her breath as her screwdriver slipped for the sixth time. “I hate working on these damn fan motors. Every single screw is in a hard to reach place and full of crud.”

  “Yeah, seriously. And that’s BS about the wires.” Raven rolled her eyes and grabbed the nearest object on the table in front of her, an electric hot plate someone had dropped off for repairs. “Ben’s only worried about keeping Noah from yelling at us.”

  “That, too. But a little heat on the lines is normal.”

  “Hot enough to melt solder?” Raven glanced left at her. “That makes me think there’s a short somewhere.”

  “Maybe.” Lark fidgeted. “But nothing blew up when you turned it back on. It’s an old repair. Maybe it partially separated, caused an arc, and that’s what melted it loose.”

  “Didn’t look like that much charring, but I guess. Or a spike in draw superheated the line.” Raven shrugged one shoulder and proceeded to test the hot plate. When it didn’t turn on, she unplugged it and grabbed a screwdriver.

  Even though she performed a vital function and helped to keep things operating here, long hours sitting at her worktable repairing everything from clocks to lamps to hot plates made her miss being younger. Not so long ago, she could spend most of a wake sitting in the library reading… at least when they could spare the electricity for a light. Used to be, people could take books out of there, read them in their quarters, and return them when done. No one who lived in the Arc now could even remember the point at which policy changed, but they didn’t let anyone remove the books anymore. If she wanted to read, she had to stay there, wearing special gloves to touch the pages. Even the best-prese
rved novels had swaths of faded text where she had to guess her way through a paragraph. Too-rough handling would destroy the precious paper.

  Eventually, she disassembled the hot plate enough to discover the brush contact on the rheostat had broken. Raven searched among her various drawers of scrap wire for a length suitable enough to repurpose into a brush contact. After repairing the hot plate and putting it back together, she lost focus and ended up staring at the plain grey ceiling, trying to imagine what topside really looked like.

  Dad told her stories about what he’d seen, but they all sounded so fantastical she had trouble believing him. Maybe the others were right and he’d simply found a spot on level five or six to hide, pretending to go outside. Topside should be full of swirling mists of corrosive vapors that could eat a person’s flesh off their bones in seconds. But her father wouldn’t make up wild stories about seeing topside, would he? He’d seemed so genuine in his unstoppable need to explore the outside world.

  She didn’t like to think he might have simply gone nuts and imagined it all.

  His description of the sky sounded a lot like what she’d read in novels. Many of the books spoke of the sun, a fiery spot far overhead that gave off light and heat. Could standing in sunlight feel like sitting near the now-working hot plate? How much warmth did it give off? It couldn’t be that much if frozen water could exist on the ground sometimes. Alas, her father probably read the same novels, so he could’ve gotten the description from there.

  How does the sun work? In summer it’s so hot people sweat, but in winter there’s ice.

  As a child in school, she learned a little bit about planets and orbits. She didn’t remember it too much, though. Back then, her head had always been in the clouds, or more accurately, on topside. She’d been nine the first time her father admitted to going outside. He might have been making up stories to amuse his daughter. The tales of how her mother used to get mad at him for being ‘reckless’ could also have been made up.

  Maybe Sienna would know how the sun changes temperature.

  She laughed in her mind. Sienna, eight months older than her, grew up alongside her. They’d lived a few rooms away in the same hall, sat next to each other at school, and spent most of their free time together. They still did, even if ‘free time’ had become an artifact of the past. Raven considered Sienna her sister, the only person in the entire Arc she trusted enough to confide anything to. For all she knew, they might have been cousins considering the small population.

  Patricia Reed, the former teacher, died somewhat unexpectedly two years ago. Sienna took over. With only five kids in the Arc, she served as the only teacher—as well as the caretaker/parent for four of them. Only Josh was a legitimate orphan. The other four ended up in her care as their biological parents had no interest in raising them. Being mom to four kids between the ages of nine and twelve consumed most of Sienna’s time.

  Thinking about topside got her fidgeting, distracting her from rebuilding a doorknob mechanism. Ben, for the most part, never seemed to care how many small items any of them repaired in a given work period. He’d prod them for sitting around doing nothing, but as long as she appeared to be engaged in productive activity, he kept quiet. Unless, of course, something major broke and needed to be fixed. The queue of appliances and other small components on their workstations never seemed to end, but it always came second to critical repairs of the Arc’s systems. Basically, the stack of junk on her station table amounted to busy work.

  What is it like up there? She flicked a gear back and forth in the housing, alternating between curious and frightened. Everyone believed topside held only death, a barren, empty wasteland of grey dust, windblown sand, and poison. Some even said the Plutions had taken over and would kill humans who ventured outside. No one knew where the aliens came from or why they decided to flood the Earth with toxin, but most people in the Arc knew about them. Mrs. Reed never taught the class about the alien invasion, which Dad blamed on people in charge still wanting to hide the existence of life on other planets. It bothered her that all the citizens knew about the aliens but still the official teacher didn’t mention them once. She wouldn’t even answer questions one way or the other about the Plutions, usually saying it didn’t matter anymore.

  Of course, Raven would never get permission to leave the Arc. She still had no idea how her father managed to get approval. He claimed to have gone out multiple times, though. If he’d broken the rules, they’d have put him in jail and not let him go out again. So, Noah had to be okay with it—assuming of course her father hadn’t been nuts.

  He’ll never let me go out there. She squirmed. Not sure I want to. Don’t wanna die.

  “Raven…”

  She twisted around in her seat, the ancient office chair giving off a labored creak.

  Benjamin Ruiz, his drab brown poncho bedecked with dozens of small tools and pouches, walked up to her. As long as she’d known him, he always wore his hair mostly shaved. The man claimed to be a few years away from turning forty, but didn’t look anywhere near that old.

  “Hey.” She set the knob down. “14B is good.”

  “Great. That’s what I wanted to ask… saw you out here, figured you either finished or couldn’t fix it. What happened?”

  She rested her elbows on the table behind her and explained the failed patch. “We could have another problem. The whole end of the conduit is damp. Water’s getting in from somewhere. A drip landed on my head in the L-bend, but I couldn’t see where it came from.”

  “Damn.” Ben kicked his toes at the floor, his tread-sock making a soft scuffing noise. Tools in the giant cargo pockets of his pants rattled. “Let’s hope it’s a crack allowing groundwater in.”

  “Hope.” She twirled a screwdriver over her fingers, shaking her head. “A groundwater seep wouldn’t stop. Water had been an inch or two deep not too long ago. That had to be from rain. The seal could be damaged. Or maybe it’s a crack near the top that let rain in.”

  Lark gasped. “That’s bad! We have to check that. Outside poison could get in and kill us.”

  “It’s not that bad out there.” If Dad wasn’t schizo. Raven stared at the tool in her hand, weaving it around her fingers. “Dad went topside all the time. Once, he stayed out there for three days. His skin didn’t melt off.”

  “Girl, your father got some incredible luck.” Lark’s eyes widened. “Ain’t no way I’d risk that.”

  Yeah… he’s got such great luck, he disappeared. Raven caught the screwdriver in an icepick grip, but stopped herself from jabbing it into her table. She’d searched everywhere in the Arc except for the forbidden uppermost floor. If her father had made up stories and only hid himself in an empty area, he wouldn’t still be missing. A pile of junk blocked off the stairwell to level one. It hadn’t appeared disturbed when she’d run around trying to find him in case he’d been making it all up… so he couldn’t have snuck past it to hide there.

  “That’s definitely something we should check.” Ben looked at her. “You up for going back down there?”

  “Yeah sure.” Raven plucked her crank light from her chest and lobbed it to him. “Got a better one? That one’s too weak to do a wall inspection.”

  He tossed it up and caught it. “Yeah, think so. I’ll go check—right after I turn the scrubbers back on.”

  Both Raven and Lark gasped simultaneously.

  “You turned them off?” Raven blinked.

  “Not all of them. Only three. Had to mitigate power consumption with line fourteen down.” He jogged to a control panel on the other end of the room.

  Raven followed, stopping beside him in the modest downdraft from a ventilation duct on the ceiling. The breeze had an unusually stale quality and a metallic taste. “Is it true or is it not true that the Arc was designed for a population of over a thousand?”

  “You know as well as I do that according to the documentation, our systems were designed to support approximately 2,000 people.” He pressed his thumb into a big,
rubberized button on a panel with eight such buttons—and corresponding plastic ‘off’ buttons.

  “Yeah, just putting that out there so you know where my reasoning is coming from. Okay, so, if eight CO2 scrubbers are supposed to be able to process enough air for that many people to breathe, don’t you think it’s kind of a problem that they’re struggling to keep the air good for less than 200?”

  He gave her a sideways look that said ‘don’t say that too loud.’ “It’s something to keep in mind, but there’s no reason to start worrying people.” Ben sighed and pushed the button again when the light failed to go green. Mechanical whining came from the adjacent room, pumps straining to move. “Come on, you bastards. Start up.”

  “Don’t call them names if you want them to behave.” She folded her arms. “Those machines are as old as this place. At least 300 years. Maybe older. The reason it’s taking eight of them to do the work that one should be able to handle is that they’re all close to breaking down. We can fix and patch and modify only so much.”

  “Yeah, yeah… I know. But there’s nothing else we can do. Not like we can head down to the quartermaster and requisition a new CO2 scrubber or a new batch of substrate.” Ben wiped a hand down his face, rearranging some grime. “I get what you’re implying. It’s on my mind, too. But… what else can we do?”

  “Please tell me you’re not just hoping that they last until you’re old and it’s the next guy’s problem?”

  His fidgeting replied to the affirmative.

  “That attitude is exactly why we’re down here.” Annoyed, Raven huffed at the vent overhead.

  “What?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She thrust her arm out at the console. “People seeing an obvious problem and not doing anything about it because it looks too hard to fix. Leaving it to the next guy. My dad always told me the people who lived before the Great Death knew it was coming and didn’t care because they’d get old and die before it mattered. No one did anything in time. Maybe if they did, we wouldn’t be stuck underground.”