Unlight

by Chandra Shekhar

  For the energy problem, they agreed to institute some conservation measures. They would turn all the thermostats down by two degrees, shower on alternate days and for shorter durations, wash their clothes less frequently, and use fewer dishes every day. To adjust to the cooler temperatures, they would wear an extra layer of clothing.

  “Don’t say the H-word, Jessica,” said Larry in a mock-warning tone.

  “I’ll never mention hibernation again,” promised Jessica. Her hibernation references had become a running joke between them.

  “But you just mentioned it,” said Anna.

  “Mentioned what?” asked her sister innocently.

  “The H-word,” said Anna, refusing to be trapped.

  “You silly young things,” chided their grandmother affectionately. The tension ebbed as the girls dissolved into giggles. Of late, they were often seen sharing a private joke, something they had never done before. As teenagers, they’d had very little in common, but as young women they shared an unspoken complicité. Jessica occasionally excused herself from Air or Health to help her sister in the Eco dome; if she disliked handling soil or manure, she didn’t complain about it.

  “As long as we can laugh, there’s hope for us,” smiled Elizabeth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Chlorella

  The energy-use restrictions went into effect without causing too much inconvenience or discomfort. The chillier air made them a little lazy, but it also gave them an excuse to snuggle up even more than usual. The reduced showering schedule bothered the girls the most. After some discussion it was agreed to let them shower every day, while the others reduced their frequency to every third day to compensate. Elizabeth initially struggled to manage the kitchen on a lower energy budget. Soon, however, she figured out simple tricks to achieve her goal, such as cooking with closed containers or heating water in the oven while baking.

  “Energy’s overrated,” Jessica said.

  Nevertheless, the next three months were an anxious period. With the threat of air-purifier failure looming over them, they followed Anna’s chlorella work with anxious eyes. Early signs from this endeavor were unpromising. Anna’s initial set of six test panels, each with a different feeding mix, remained obstinately inert even after two weeks. She then experimented with different temperatures and humidity levels, but to no avail.

  “Why the hell isn’t it waking up?” Jessica asked, flicking one of the lifeless panels.

  “I’m not sure.” Anna rubbed her eyes, red from long hours of work. “I suspect chlorella might be, like, super-sensitive to growing conditions. You know, feeding mixture, temperature, humidity, light exposure—all those factors.”

  “Maybe you just need to find the right combo.”

  “Maybe. Obviously, I haven’t found it yet.” Anna groaned in frustration. “God! I want to take these goddamn panels and smash the crap out of them.” Then her voice changed. “I’m beginning to think I’m no good at this.” A teardrop emerged from her left eye and coursed down her cheek.

  “Don’t be an idiot.” Jessica spoke sharply but wiped her sister’s tears gently with a handkerchief. “Here’s an idea—what if we all pitched in?”

  Anna sniffed. “How? Aren’t you already doing everything you can?”

  “It could be more systematic. We can break the panels into smaller pieces. Each of us could work with a dozen pieces and vary a different factor across them.”

  While Anna was mulling over her sister’s idea, Larry jumped in. “That’s brilliant. It’s a much better way to sample the combinatorial space.”

  “Makes sense,” said Nicole. “Instead of making Anna do everything, we’ll all help.”

  Though skeptical, Anna put the plan into effect at once. She allocated to each of her assistants a different dimension to explore. Larry would try a different humidity level on each of his panels while keeping the other parameters fixed, while Jessica would vary only the feeding mixture, and so on. Anna’s skepticism seemed well-founded—four weeks later, her sister’s strategy had nothing to show for it. Not a single panel had come to life. By the middle of the third month, a pall of gloom fell over everyone. It’s hopeless, Larry thought. We’re going to die, and it’s entirely my fault.

  On the positive side, the air purifier continued to run perfectly, as if to make up for its earlier valve-wrecking tantrum. But, as Jessica reminded them, the purifier had worked perfectly in the past—until it failed. Unless the chlorella started growing, and fast, they were one valve away from breathing bottled air. As an emergency measure, Larry and Jessica moved some oxygen cylinders from Health to Central, ready to be opened at a moment’s notice. If the worst happened, the family would at least get a few extra hours of respiration.

  One morning toward the end of June in Year Six, as Larry and Jessica were morosely performing routine maintenance on the air system, Anna called them from Eco.

  “Hey guys, when you have a moment I want to show you something here,” she said. She spoke calmly, but the unnatural deliberation in her voice betrayed her excitement. Larry and Jessica rushed over to Eco, their hands still greasy, their gauges and pipes forgotten. They found the rest of the group peering at one of the panels. Anna was talking in an excited voice.

  “Oh, there you are, you two air-heads!” she sang out. “Come and take a look.”

  The Eco dome was now chock-full of panels, and they all looked uniformly gray. All except one. Near the center of this panel, amidst a drab expanse, was a greenish stain about two inches in diameter.

  “Guess what that is?” she asked.

  “Is that your famous chlorella?” Jessica asked, grabbing her sister’s arm in excitement, her customary pose of dour nonchalance forgotten.

  “Yes, ladies and Larry, we have live growth!” said Anna. “It doesn’t look like much, but give it another two weeks and we’ll see.”

  “How did you pull it off?”

  “I did something I should have tried long ago—I looked at all our failed panels under the microscope. It turned out that not all the failures were equal—some of them had come pretty close to success. So that told me what parameters to tweak. Using the best failures as a starting point, I tried like a hundred feeding mixes until I found one that worked.”

  “Bravo! So you found the right growing conditions?”

  “No, we did.”

  “Great work, Anna!” exclaimed Larry, hugging her.

  “You did it!” cried Nicole. Everyone beamed in delight. This was the first bit of good news they’d had in a while.

  Now that they knew the exact conditions under which the chlorella would grow, Anna and her assistants worked around the clock to replicate the conditions for their entire stock of panels. The alga grew painfully slowly at first, creeping across the panels. Adjusting the light frequency to the bluish side of the spectrum seemed to accelerate the growth slightly. Minor changes to the feeding mix also seemed to make things go faster, though not by much. Emotions in the family alternated between jubilation and despondency. Then, exactly on the 29th day after Anna’s initial success, some sort of positive feedback seemed to occur. The organism started growing faster and faster, and by the end of the sixth week it completely covered the panels. Carbon dioxide levels in the Shell fell below 300 ppm for the first time ever.

  On July 31st the family held a celebration in Anna’s honor. Jessica baked her a cake in the shape of a chlorella panel. Elizabeth and Nicole told anecdotes about how, even as a child, Anna could get the stubbornest seed to sprout and the frailest sapling to thrive. Larry proposed a toast to her as “the savior of our breath.” It was Anna’s proudest hour.

  Her achievement turned out to be timely. At 11.37 p.m. on August 6 of Year Six, an intake valve failed. Others followed in rapid succession. By 6:00 a.m. the following morning the purifier was dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Comfort

  Though it had been touch and go, a major calamity had been averted. The tremendous relief that followed ga
ve way to a few days of euphoria, and then life went back to what passed for normal in the Shell. The women soon forgot the air purifier debacle and returned to their routines.

  Larry, however, didn’t. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop blaming himself for the near-catastrophe. He was the one who had designed the Shell and chosen its efficient-but-complex air purification system. Something less fancy, he now realized, would have been more robust. And why hadn’t he ensured a bigger supply of valves, which cost almost nothing, or provided some means to manufacture them, such as a 3D printer? If he erred in this one regard, what other design flaws had he been guilty of? When would they start revealing themselves? Though the others—including his erstwhile critic, Jessica—strongly and emphatically rejected his self-criticism, he couldn’t let himself off the hook.

  Normally a sound sleeper who enjoyed pleasant dreams, he now started having nightmares of catastrophes happening in the Shell. The fuel store exploded. Giant rats ate up their food reserves. Black-masked intruders broke into Central and kidnapped his family. Though in the clear light of day he could see these dreams as absurd, they often caused him to wake up in the small hours, his chest thumping and his hands clammy. Soon his appetite diminished and he had trouble holding down food. Dark hollows appeared under his eyes. His voice grew hoarse.

  It was obvious that Larry wasn’t doing well. It was also clear what the problem was—his sense of responsibility for them and his fear of letting them down. What wasn’t obvious was the remedy. The others did all they could to cheer him up, but in vain. Anna’s teasing, Jessica’s scolding, the reassuring words of the older women—none of it made a difference. Even the valium that Nicole forced him to take didn’t help. Something direct and dramatic was needed to shake Larry out of his mood, they felt, but what?

  About three weeks after the failure of the air purifier and the closure of the Air dome, while Larry was busy elsewhere, the others held an emergency meeting in the clinic.

  “We have a problem,” said Nicole.

  “You bet,” said Jessica. “Larry.”

  “Our dear leader is in a funk,” Anna said. “And sinking deeper each day.”

  “Poor dear, he’s looking terrible,” agreed Elizabeth. “He’s lost so much weight, yet he barely touched his food today!”

  “And he hardly sleeps. At this rate he’s heading for a breakdown. And yet, there’s nothing physically wrong with him.”

  “The man’s an idiot!” Jessica exploded. “Still blaming himself for that stupid purifier.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I think it’s more than that. It’s as if … as if all the stress and responsibility of the past few years has suddenly caught up with him.”

  “We’ve tried consoling him, baiting him, even yelling at him,” said Anna. “Nothing works.”

  They sat around in worried silence. “Too bad you and he aren’t the pair of lovebirds you used to be,” Anna said to her mother finally. Until now, the end of Nicole’s romance with Larry had never been discussed.

  Jessica nodded. “A romantic interest would have diverted his mind from pointless self-blame.”

  “You may be right,” admitted Nicole. “Unfortunately, we aren’t lovers anymore. We are like brother and sister now.”

  Anna directed a searching gaze at her mother. “Can I ask why you guys, you know, broke up?”

  Nicole sighed. “Our relationship simply ran its course. We were attracted to each other when we first met, true, but I was never his type. I’m too brisk and practical. He’d have preferred someone gentle and caring.”

  “Like Grandma?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But weren’t you sad when your relationship ended?”

  “Yes.” Nicole gazed into space for a few seconds. “But to be honest, he isn’t my type either. He’s too sober and serious for me. All the men I saw before him, including your father, they were on the wild side. They had their faults, big ones, but my chemistry with them was much stronger.”

  Jessica stared at her. “Are you serious? You’re saying you and Larry were mismatched?”

  “Yes. That’s why our relationship was fun for a while but then ended naturally.”

  “That’s so sad to hear,” Anna said. “I used to think you were made for each other.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “It’s shocking how little we know about the people living under the same roof.”

  Glum silence prevailed for a few moments.

  “You’ve helped so many people, Grandma,” Anna said, wiping away a tear. “Couldn’t you do something for him?”

  “I’ve tried, dear. But he refuses to admit he has a problem. I can’t help him unless he opens up to me.”

  Another short silence ensued, then Jessica sprang up from her chair, a gleam in her eye. “I know how to make that happen, Grandma.”

  “Make what happen?”

  “Make Larry open up to you.”

  “Then tell us, dear.”

  Jessica’s eyes twinkled with mischief. “I’ll tell you what to do. But I’m not sure you’d be willing.”

  “Dearest, you know I’d do anything for him.”

  “Anything? You really mean it?”

  “Yes, of course. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  Jessica continued to hesitate and spoke only after being urged by the others. “Well, it’s a radical idea.”

  “We’ve exhausted all the non-radical ones,” Nicole said. “Tell us.”

  “It will shock you.”

  Nicole laughed without mirth. “Sweetheart, we’re living in a tiny bubble on a dead planet. We barely escaped freezing before we got here and have been flirting with death ever since. We’re much less shockable than you think.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Anna clicked her tongue. “Damn it, Jessica! Stop teasing. Tell us your bloody idea.”

  Jessica made a gesture of surrender. “Okay, but consider yourselves warned.” She paused to choose her words carefully. “Let’s go back in time to our very first day in the Shell. Do you remember everything about it?”

  “Yes, and how!” said Anna. “As if it happened this morning.”

  “The chopper ride, the race to the Shell, the shower, the tour, the food …” said Nicole.

  Anna nodded and turned to her sister. “And the meeting where you kept challenging Larry. How I wanted to pull your hair to make you stop.”

  Jessica giggled. “I was snippy, wasn’t I? That’s all water under the bridge. Larry and I are besties now. But coming back to the meeting, remember what he said at the end?”

  “Not every word, no, but I can paraphrase. Screw the old rules. To survive, we might have to do some crazy stuff.”

  “Bravo! And did you agree with what he said?”

  Anna paused to think. “I did. But it seemed to be more like a theoretical idea than, you know, something that we’d actually have to do. And so it has proved. I can’t think of a single occasion … okay, maybe the first shower that we all took together, that felt weird, but it was Grandma’s idea. And perhaps our sleeping arrangement is a bit unusual. But we’ve done nothing, really, you could call taboo.”

  “Larry said we’d need to do that only when our survival was at risk,” Nicole pointed out.

  Jessica nodded her head impatiently. “But isn’t our survival at risk now? Due to Larry’s health?”

  The others digested this thought for a few moments, moving uneasily in their chairs. Finally, Anna said: “Well, now that you point it out, Larry’s health does threaten his survival and ours too. If he died, I wouldn’t want to continue living.”

  Nicole and Elizabeth nodded assent.

  “Our own survival apart, we owe it to him,” Elizabeth said. “He saved our lives. We should be willing to do anything to save his.”

  “Anything, Grandma? Glad you said it, because you’ll have the starring role.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes grew wide. “Starring role? How, dear?”

  “Okay, let’s approach it this way. Would you
agree something drastic needs to happen to jolt our friend out of his crisis?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And what are the most drastic social weapons? The most primordial instincts? The most basic forces?”

  “The most basic forces?”

  Jessica clicked her tongue. “How dense you are! Okay, think of this. What is not allowed in movies for kids?”

  “Well … sex and violence, I guess.”

  “Exactly! Those are the basic forces. And that’s my plan.”

  Elizabeth looked at her in bewilderment. “Are you saying we should … use violence?”

  “No, not violence.”

  It took the women a second to catch her drift.

  “Sex?” exclaimed Anna. “Are you crazy?”

  “Yes, I mean sex. And no, I’m not crazy.”

  “It’s the craziest idea I’ve heard.”

  Jessica waved her arms impatiently. “Why is this so hard to grasp? I’m suggesting we use lovemaking to get Larry out of his funk.”

  Anna made a face. “This discussion is getting too icky for me.”

  Jessica sighed. “Look, this isn’t easy for me either. I’m not immune to the ick factor. But I can’t think of anything else that might work.”

  Nicole laughed incredulously. “You talk as if we could press a button and order a lovemaking session. You know he and I are not a couple anymore.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of you.”

  Nicole stared at Jessica. “Of all the crazy ideas … are you suggesting that you or Anna …?”

  “Close, but no cigar,” said Jessica. “We’d do anything for Larry, but I don’t think he fancies us that way, does he, Anna?”

  Anna had recovered from her initial shock at her sister’s idea. “Larry and one of us?” She laughed. “No dice. For a while, I used to wonder … but I figured out that’s not what he wants. He sees himself as a father figure.”