“Look at this chicken. It’s ridiculously perfect. No one can go home and recreate this. If I was a food critic I’d end up writing the dullest article ever after coming to this place.”
Dr. Caldwell was taken aback. “So you’re saying you want Octal here to burn your food? And you think I’m strange? Our studies show customers want predictable food despite what they might tell you.”
“Let’s try this. Have you ever picked up a piece of driftwood from a beach?”
“Sure. To burn in a fire.”
“In my field, a piece of driftwood can be the basis of a work of art. I could put a piece of driftwood out in that perfect fish tank of yours in the lobby and it would instantly become ten times more interesting.”
Dr. Caldwell ate a piece of immaculately cut steak. “But your field is changing, Mr. Beam. If you don’t wake up it will be automated overnight right in front of your eyes.”
“Nonsense.”
“Mr. Beam, I don’t want to see you become obsolete. I’m trying to save you from yourself.”
“But this place…it’s an illusion. Anybody can see that. It falls short. What do they call it? The uncanny valley? Why did you call me here?”
“To help us climb up the other side of that valley.”
After Octal cleaned the grill, it bowed in a gesture of respect and departed the table to return to the kitchen. The robotic companion cart soon followed.
Both men continued on with their meals in silence until Francis finished. He withdrew his wallet to pay but since there was no wait staff he was confused as to how to make payment.
“No need for that. I already paid. Besides, I own the place,” Dr. Caldwell said as he dismissed Francis’ wallet with a wave of his hand.
“How could you have paid for it already? You didn’t even know what I was I going to order.”
“It’s pre-calculated based on my past history here. The algorithm is quite accurate. Even with guests.”
Francis shook his head and the two men departed the restaurant without an agreement. A driverless autonomous taxi pulled up to the curb a minute later, but Francis decided to go his own way on foot.
“Suit yourself,” Dr. Caldwell said. “I’ll be in touch if I need your services again.” He stepped into the electric auto-taxi and it departed the parking lot without a sound.
The thought of taking an auto-taxi made Francis cringe, as the newest systems relied on a travelling-salesman route optimization algorithm in order to pick up customers. That usually meant that a rider’s trip could be interrupted multiple times, much like a bus route, except the routes always changed and often changed on the fly. On the back of the auto-taxi he read the phrase: “Caldwell Taxi Service.” What didn’t this guy own? He thought.
He put his hands in his pockets and wandered along the mall’s sidewalk. It was only a half-mile walk back to his apartment and this autumn night the air was still warm. As he walked along he noticed a patch of wild flowers growing on the edge of the mall property. Not normally one to pick flowers he decided tonight to reach down and snap one off.
It looked like a daisy and smelled like a daisy. On the stem of the plant he noticed the tiny letters that read, “Patent pending. No. 17658217984. Caldwell Industries.”
He winced and threw it to the side. Further along the sidewalk he found a lone dandelion. He picked it, examined it, but noticed nothing unusual about it. Sure it’s a weed, he thought, but how long before it becomes obsolete, too? He dropped the dandelion into the front pocket of his suit.
At that he wandered down to the beach front. The tide had yet to roll in and as he walked through the beach sand he smiled at the sight of a burnt-out campfire with broken hollowed-out crab shells around it. In the distance a couple held hands and strolled barefoot at the water’s edge.
Near a rock outcropping he spotted a piece of driftwood as long as his forearm. He scooped it up and admired its faded knots and the random cracks along its sides. Out of concern he also checked it for patent numbers. Finding none, he held it up to the setting sun to admire its silhouette. Satisfied with his find, he returned to his apartment to sculpt the driftwood into something beautiful.
Surfacing
The first one to notice the crack in the sky was Kansas, a file clerk out on her daily lunch break stroll through the city. The jagged line was clear despite the piped-in sunlight that radiated from a network of discs high above. She took several pictures of the fracture with her cell phone and forwarded copies of them to the authorities. After all, any breach in the domed sky would deepen with time and could send an ocean full of glass shards raining in on the city. Worse, if the airlocks between the domes failed a torrent of water and glass would rush into the adjacent domes with little warning.
She pocketed her phone and returned through the revolving door entry at Snathen Industries, a company that scanned, stored, and managed documents for lawyers and the government. As she ascended the glass stairs that led to the second floor, her mind raced with thoughts of impending doom. Upon arriving at her desk, she caught sight of her supervisor out of the corner of her eye. She sat down and withdrew the top sheet from a stack of legal documents pertaining to a lawsuit against Mason’s Wharf, a surface-level seafood restaurant.
As she fed the first document into the cylindrical document scanner, a stack of papers hit her desk, startling her. She looked up to see her supervisor, Dennis, delivering an icy stare.
“You’re two minutes late,” he said in a monotone voice, but loud enough for others in the nearby cubicles to hear.
“Sorry. I took some pictures of the sky,” she said as she pressed a wrinkle out of her white blouse.
“Pictures of the sky. If you wanted to be a photographer, you should have joined the Petropolis Globe. Isn’t that right, Jolene?”
Jolene, a co-worker who sat next to Kansas, looked up. She was a brunette with wavy hair, a mouse-like demeanor, and thick black-framed glasses. “I…uh…I don’t know. I didn’t know they were hiring.”
“You should know. I see you looking at their classified ads every day.” Dennis stuck his index finger into the middle of the papers on Kansas’ desk. Her chaotic desk stood in sharp contrast to his, which was highly organized. At times it looked as if he wanted to sweep all the paperwork off her desk and into the garbage. “Stop whatever you’re working on. I need these rescanned. The client says the scans are too blurry starting on page four.”
“Do you want me to start on page four or…” Kansas said.
“I said I need these rescanned. That means the whole stack.” He spun around on his heels and stalked away.
Jolene leaned over and whispered, “Why were you taking pictures of the sky? Something wrong with it?”
“There’s a crack in it. Look,” Kansas reached into her pocket and withdrew her cell phone. She brought up the pictures of the fracture in the dome and showed them to Jolene.
Jolene’s eyes widened. She leaned back in her chair and stared out one of the windows to her left. “I don’t see anything from here.”
“I don’t either,” Dennis said from behind his desk. His gaze unnerved Kansas until she looked away. “I’m not paying you for your overactive imagination, Kansas. Get to work.”
Kansas put her phone away and started to scan through the stack of documents from Dennis. She adjusted the resolution settings on the scanner and fed the pages in one by one. The crinkle of paper and buzzing motors bored her to no end.
Jolene leaned over to whisper to Kansas again. “What do you think did that? Was it leaking when you saw it?”
Kansas shook her head no.
“Did you report it?”
Kansas nodded. If the fracture was deep enough, water would drip like a leaky faucet at first before it exploded like an aquatic firework. Maybe if there is a leak, they’ll close the dome and evacuate our building, she thought. We could all use a vacation right about now.
“I wonder if they’ll send out the hunters,” Jolene said excitedly.
<
br /> “The hunters?”
“Didn’t you hear about the kill last week? They said it attacked two different shuttles. Looked like a giant octopus. They brought it to the surface, and said it weighed over a thousand pounds.”
Kansas put a hand over her mouth and whispered, “So you think one of those hit the dome?”
“I think they were here before we built all of this. Everyone says they come from far away, but I think they live in the canyons. If I ever scrape enough money together I want to go there someday.” Jolene reached into her desk and showed Kansas a laminated map of the ocean floor surrounding the city’s domes. To the northeast a snaking line of underwater canyons ran up to the corner of the map and toward the Washington coast. The canyons were named after their resemblance to Petra in Jordan.
Kansas memorized the map as she continued to feed the documents into the scanner. When the machine was done, she glanced back toward the window. Even though the building was studded with diamond-shaped windows the view from here was pathetic. Still, she hoped to catch at least a glimpse of a passing shadow.
* * *
The following day Kansas left two minutes early for her lunch break. She knew Dennis would make an example of her again, but she figured she would return four minutes earlier to make up for both days. As she strolled down Harmony Street, she felt a rumble in her shoes as if there was a thunderstorm overhead. In the sterility of the dome it never rained although a few violent storms passed overhead over the years. Some storms stirred up sediment from the bottom of the ocean but offered little thunder that could be heard at this depth.
She stared in the direction of the sky fracture and watched as several city workers dressed in bright yellow vests scrambled down from the scaffolding that reached the top of the dome. One of the workers panicked and jumped off the scaffolding while he was still several feet off the ground.
She ran over to the work site and sidled up next to the foreman, hoping to find out the latest information. “Is it bad?”
The foreman, a man with piston-like forearms and a square jaw, turned to her in disgust. “Didn’t you hear lady?” He walked over to help the last worker off the scaffolding before coming back to talk.
“I sit in an office all day and…”
“This is the second time in two days we’ve been hit.”
“Hit by what?”
He turned his head and swore. The foreman ambled away and got into an animated discussion with the worker who jumped off the scaffolding. Backed by a booming voice, his hands flew up in the air as Kansas turned away.
She took the long way back past several shops and a billboard which televised the latest news from the city and the rest of the world. Headlines about the damage scrolled along the bottom of the screen. One of them read: “Petropolis dome hit again. Mayor Hines vows retaliation.”
On one of the lampposts near her office building, a hand-drawn poster displayed a picture of a bright-red octopus with angry yellow eyes and writhing tentacles. The caption beneath the drawing read, “Hunt Ashaugs, Bounty Given” with an asterisk next to the last word. Beneath the caption it showed a telephone number and a contact name. She tore the poster off the lamppost and stared at it closer. Something about it disturbed her but she stuffed it into her pants pocket anyway.
“Aw, why did you take my poster down?” A man said from behind her.
She spun around to see a man in his early twenties with his hands stuffed into his jeans pockets. His black hair was a tangle of curls and he wore a black tee shirt. On the shirt a yellow submarine was wrapped in the red tentacles of an angry squid. Below the submarine a phrase read, “Dell’s Deep Dives”.
“The poster’s a joke, I hope you know,” he said.
“It doesn’t look like one.”
“Sure it is. Look me up. I have to do something to drum up business once in a while. Those Ashaugs have been the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.”
“You’ve seen one?”
“I tracked the one they killed last week.”
“Were you trying to kill it?”
“No, and I don’t know why they didn’t leave it alone. It only attacked because some cowboy with a sonic cannon spooked it.”
“So what hit the dome?”
“I don’t know. Maybe its mate is looking for revenge. Ever seen this place from above? It looks like a giant glass octopus.”
Kansas looked at her watch and turned away. She knew she was running late now and counted the seconds off in her mind. She wanted to hear more but she dreaded facing another one of Dennis’ humiliating rants.
The man called out again to her. “If you ever want a tour, call me up. Name’s Dell. Dell’s Deep Dives.” He pointed at his shirt.
She let the words echo in her mind until she reached the second floor of her workplace. By the time she made it back to her desk, she was five minutes late. Like the day before, Dennis homed in on the fault like an overzealous math teacher. Seven minutes plus two minutes equaled…
“Did you get the shots you were looking for? Because you took an extra ten minutes off the clock the past two days,” he snapped. He put his hands on his hips.
“Nine. And no, I didn’t take any pictures today,” Kansas said.
“Great. Then you can make up the eight from today at the end of your shift, along with the two you missed yesterday, and the other three you missed last Tuesday.”
* * *
That evening, Kansas sat on the edge of her bed in her apartment. There were only four apartment buildings in the entire nine-dome complex of the city and hers held the smallest units. She only had a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a small entry area to call her own but to her it was enough.
She pressed a button on a remote control and the silver-gray coating on her window dissolved to reveal a city asleep. The piped-in sunlight from the surface gave way to moonlight that cast soft shadows around the neighborhood at disorientating angles. She pulled the tour poster out of her pocket, unfolded it, and set it next to an ever-changing digital picture frame on her dresser.
The picture frame cycled through a series of ten photographs, mostly of friends and family from her days of living on the Washington coast. One of the photos seized her attention tonight and she pressed a thin silver button on the front of the frame to freeze it on the screen. It was a picture of her brother Louis as he stood next to a metal crab trap on the beach. Inside the trap a half-dozen Dungeness crabs battled the walls of the cage and each other in an attempt to escape.
Kansas remembered her brother’s trip as well as his tales of the octopus that tried to enter the cage to steal the crabs. Behind her brother was his fishing boat along with a dark figure of a man whose back was turned to the camera. It was then she recalled the man’s identity—Jonas. Jonas was a friend at first, but as she got to know him better, the friendship blossomed into a relationship.
She pushed a button on top of the frame to delete the photo before restarting the picture cycle again. Although it pained her to remove the last photo of her brother, she knew it was for the best.
She stood up and headed over to the steel filing cabinet in the corner. She pulled out the top drawer and stared at the pine-green folders hanging inside. She withdrew the “Research” folder and leafed through numerous electrical and mechanical diagrams of a research submarine inside. Buried amongst the diagrams were her notes, sketches, and algorithms for a device that would surpass the best known civilian-use sonar out there. The device, which she called EchoSee, never made it out of the laboratory because she found a similarly-designed device one day in Jonas’ office. When she confronted him about it he denied any connection to her work and the relationship ended days later.
The thought of it all made her throat muscles tighten up. The walls of the room inched inward and she knew she had to get out. She closed the folder and slammed the bedroom door shut behind her.
Out on the street, the rigidity of the world she called home struck her full force. Dow
n every street, strips of pale green grass left no room for weeds. Only genetically-modified dwarf maples and aspens were allowed to grow here, watered by an irrigation system buried underneath the pavement. The leaves on the trees were not the rich, dark, green leaves of her childhood—instead they were pale sunlight-starved cousins of the surface forests above. Despite extreme efforts to wipe out any offending noises, odors, and factory pollution here, pea-green moss still grew on the tree trunks in silent defiance.
She strolled to the central dome and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. As she snapped more photos of the sky fracture a school of curious Pacific sardines swarmed into view. The swarm scattered as an oblong shadow swept over the top of the dome. She frantically snapped more pictures but her shaking hands made the results blurry at best.
The shadow lingered only to dive downward toward the base of the dome. Kansas scampered to the outer wall but before she could get another picture, the shadow was gone.
* * *
It was another wasted day of document scanning when Dennis toured the office with a brown paper bag full of objects. He first stopped by Jolene’s desk, deposited a ceramic snowman statue on it, and then stopped by Kansas’ desk. He set a miniature snow globe on top of a stack of legal documents she was scanning.
“What’s this for?” Kansas said with a measure of suspicion in her voice. She moved the globe to the side but did not look up from scanning documents.
Dennis let out a laugh. “I figured since we don’t have real snow down here, I’d give you all a reminder of the world above. Merry Christmas. Don’t say I never give you anything.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she mumbled to herself.
Dennis moved on to the next employee’s desk without looking back. After Kansas finished the batch of documents, she picked up the snow globe. The globe had a cherry-red plastic base with the words “Merry Christmas” in blue lettering on the side. Inside, a miniature version of the buildings in the central dome of Petropolis stood waiting for their first snowfall. She shook the globe and studied the white and silver plastic flakes as they showered down.
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