by Andrew Gates
“If you’d all follow me inside, please,” Randal said to the group as the students entered slowly.
As she continued forward down the long hall, Iris began to notice a strange heaviness to the air. She felt warm but not hot. She felt sticky but not sweaty.
“What is going on with the air?” she asked.
“It’s humidity,” Dan replied before their guide could even answer. “High moisture in the air, isn’t it?”
Randal smiled and looked back towards Dan.
“That’s right! You’re a smart man, aren’t you? Yeah, that’s humidity. Some plants like humid air, you know? So that’s why we put some water into it, make it thicker. The whole sector isn’t like this, you see. Just the parts with the plants that like humid air,” he explained.
“Interesting,” Dan replied.
“You ever seen a plant before?” he asked.
Dan nodded.
“Well I’ve eaten lettuce, beans, organic foods,” Dan said.
Randal laughed to himself and shook his head.
“Dead plants,” he replied. “I’m asking about real plants. You haven’t seen these real ones growing, have you? You ever seen a bush? Anything with a stem?”
“I only just now saw mud for the first time,” Iris added. She instinctively glanced down as she said this and found puddles of mud here and there under her feet.
Randal smiled. As they reached the end of the tunnel, they stopped and waited before another narrow door.
“Well you’re in for a treat,” he said. As soon as everyone had made it into the hall, a man back on the office side of the door followed behind them and closed it shut. “Don’t worry!” Randal shouted towards the back. “He’s just closing us in. Don’t want to mix the high moisture air with the regular stuff. Not good, you know? So it’s okay. Now if you’ll just follow me, you’ll see some plants!”
As soon as the door opened, Iris felt as if she had stepped right into one of her history books. Large green paper-like leaves cascaded all around them, dangling from thick rough brown poles. For half a second she forgot these were trees. These are leaves, like lettuce, she reminded herself. The poles are the trunks and branches. It reminded her of a jungle from the surface, like the Amazon or Congo. She half expected a four-legged beast to jump out at them as they walked through. What were those called? Tigers? Iris quickly put that thought out of her mind. It was not important right now.
The group moved forward, passing through the humid air beneath a thick canopy of green. As she walked closer, she noticed that each leaf was different. Some were large, some were small and some had different shapes. Some were not even green at all. Thick ropes dangled from longer branches on certain trees, sometimes coiling around other ropes or trunks. Vines, she told herself.
“Who here can tell me what these are?” the guide asked loudly. Iris was so distracted she had almost forgotten he was there.
A few hands went up into the air and the bearded man picked the first one he saw. It was little Margery who spoke.
“These are trees,” she said. “They come from the ground and they grow in dirt. That’s why the floor is all dirty.”
Iris looked down towards the floor. Margery was right. They were actually standing on real ground. The teacher enjoyed the softness of it beneath her shoes.
“You’re right! These are all different types of trees. The long brown parts, these are called the branches and then these other ones, well they’re like something you’ve probably seen.” He waited for some students to respond, but when he encountered only silence, he decided to answer on his own. “They’re leaves! That’s where oxygen comes from, well not anymore. Now we convert water to oxygen and a bunch of other things, but in the old days, this is where we’d get it. Right here from these leaves.”
Randal walked up to one particular tree and stood under it.
“Anyone here eat bananas?” he asked. Almost everyone’s hand went up into the air. “This here’s a banana tree,” he said as he pointed up towards the one above his head. Iris studied it closely, looking for any bananas, but she could not find any. “Only thing is we plucked all the bananas off this one earlier this week so you’ll not be able to find them here, you see. But I’ll show you some more later on.”
“Will we get to eat any bananas?” a voice asked. Iris could not tell who asked it.
“Eat some? Well maybe, I don’t know. I’ve never had that question before. You should know that fresh food is very different from the food you get at home. When it leaves the agricultural sector, almost everything we produce gets mixed with chemicals first. It’s made sweeter, thicker, fuller. We don’t really eat much natural food anymore without some sort of chemicals added to it. A banana you taste on a tree is not like the banana you’re used to.”
“I’d like to try it anyway,” the kid said. This time Iris could tell it was Jallah. He smiled towards Margery as he said this, as if trying to impress her.
“How long did these trees take to grow?” Dan asked.“Years,” the guide replied. “And they’ve always been like this as long as I’ve been here.”
They must’ve found a way to accelerate plant growth, Iris thought. These trees are huge.
“But this is just the beginning, guys. We’re going to keep going. There’s much more I want to show you,” Randal said excitedly. He waved the group on and they followed behind him.
As they walked through the forest, Iris sometimes found it difficult to traverse across the uneven ground. Rounded tree roots stuck up from the soil, like extra branches that had gone missing. Sometimes the dirt was piled up into thick rocky hills. Other times the dirt was lightly packed and her foot would press right down like she was stepping onto a bed.
“What kind of light do you use for these plants?” Dan asked as they pressed through the jungle.
Iris looked up. She had not even considered light until this point. The light above her head was bright white, so bright that she could hardly look up for more than a few seconds without shielding her eyes.
“We call them grow lights. It’s really a mix of lights, but most of what you see up there is high-pressure sodium bulbs. We’ve also got some ceramic metal halide lamps and some smaller types as well. The robots put them up back when this place was running autonomously. Well, I guess a lot of it still is autonomous these days too, but you know what I mean, back when we were asleep and it was just the machines running things. I don’t know a whole lot about the lighting, you know? That’s the engineers’ job. But I know they put out the right spectrum to simulate sunlight. We need the right kind of light for photosynthesis, you see. Photosynthesis is real interesting. I’ll talk to the kids about this later on when we get to another section, but yeah that’s the gist of it.”
Dan seemed eager to learn more about the lights, but Iris was utterly lost from the start.
The group passed further and further through the forest. As they continued on, Iris noticed large wheeled transport machines moving back and forth along a path separating the forest from monstrous grey walls. Each machine had two thick claws in the front, which carried bulky plastic crates of produce. That must be how they transport the food.
“Are those machines completely autonomous as well?” Iris asked, pointing to the mechanisms driving past them along the tree line.
“Most of the time, yes. Sometimes one malfunctions and we have to get a driver in there, but most of the time those guys run on their own. The computer tells them when certain crops are ready and the machines go out and pick it. It’s really quite impressive. Of course, I don’t know how it works, but I’ve driven them around several times when there’s something wrong with the computer system. Lot of fun. Spilled a whole load of beans first time I did it, but I’ve gotten better. That’s why we have the machines do it though. Don’t make mistakes like us, you know?” He laughed at that last comment.
“Let me guess, these were running while we were still asleep?” Iris asked.
“Of course they we
re! Everything was. By the time we were up and awake, these guys were already in full operation. Everything was ready for us, it really was. We call these guys proloads, just a fun way to say produce loader. Only back then, I’m not sure who was around to fix them if they broke down. I guess maybe the system had its own way to do that. They break down lately more than they used to. I guess they’re just getting old. Mechanical district is supposed to give us three new models next month, but the design is going to be very different, I’m told.”
Randal sure did love to talk.
“Hey, ‘that guy’!” a kid yelled from behind Iris.
She and Randal both turned around to face the voice. It was Palmer.
“Are we going to see any animals here?” he asked, almost shouting. He had to speak up. He was very far away from the front of the group.
Randal stopped and waited for the back of the group to catch up to the front. After a few moments, he answered the question.
“Not here, no. Here’s just the high humidity plants. We keep the animals somewhere else. I was going to bring you there at the end of the trip,” responded the talkative farmer.
Palmer looked disappointed by this news.
“Oh, I wanted to see them now,” he replied.
Iris knew she should keep quiet, but deep down she agreed with Palmer. All she really wanted to do was see the animals. Just get to the cows.
“Is it possible to change the order up?” Dan asked, apparently agreeing as well. To Iris’s surprise, Randal simply shrugged.
“Sure, I guess. Why not?”
That was all it took. Just a simple suggestion and suddenly they were off to see the cows. I should have asked from the start, she thought.
“We’ll have to take a different route, but you might actually like this one. I was going to take you through to the cornfields next, but tell you what, I can tell you’re all eager for the animals, so let’s just go to see the animals next and we can finish everything else up in reverse order after that,” he suggested.
The students cheered happily. I guess I wasn’t alone.
Randal led them on to the end of the forest area. Iris glanced back a few times, making sure Jorge, Hope and Jacella brought up the rear with the slower students. When they reached the end, the guide stopped and waited, making sure no proloads were using the road along the outer edge. When it was all clear, the group crossed the road, made of a different, more compact kind of dirt with small hard objects sticking out of it like the buried roots. Ahead of them loomed a pasty grey wall with a small door in the center, similar to the one they passed through earlier.
“Gather round. We’ll all go through this door like before,” Randal said as he stood waiting for the slower students to catch up. He then turned around and opened the door. Iris, Dan and Mark followed him through. As she stepped inside, Iris immediately noticed a drop in humidity. These doors were very good at separating the air. She wondered what they were made out of.
The inside of the hall was exactly like the one they passed through the first time. Even the smell of the paint was the same. Or maybe that’s not paint. Maybe it’s something else. Iris did not know.
“What’s that smell?” Kaleb finally asked, apparently thinking the same thought. Kaleb was a red haired student who liked to crack jokes in class. Iris did not even realize he was standing right behind her.
“Fertilizer is stored directly above these hallways,” the guide answered. “The smell tends to seep through the walls. We try to make them thick, you know, but it doesn’t always work. Not sure whose idea it was to put these hallways right through the fertilizer storage. Doesn’t seem very practical to me. Must’ve been a decision made long after we woke up. I doubt the machines would have designed it like that.”
Once again, Iris wondered if the students even knew what fertilizer meant.
“The vast majority of our fertilizer is synthetic. Maybe 90 percent or so. I’m not sure of the number. Some of our fertilizer comes from cows, but we also get a lot from people here in the station. If the guys out in the sewage are able to separate it from the other garbage that runs through the pipes, we get first dibs down here in the agricultural sector. We always like using human waste over synthetic fertilizer if we can.”
Iris doubted Kaleb knew what Randal was talking about, but knowing his tendency to make dirty jokes, she was in no rush to help explain. Quite frankly, she was not sure some of the other adults understood either.
When the entire group finally entered the long hallway, Randal rushed back to close the door behind them and then rushed back to the front of the group again.
“Alright, so this next room we’re going to pass through is very special,” he said as he pressed his hand against the white door.
“Is this the animal room?” Mark asked.
Randal shook his head.
“Not quite. We have to pass through this room first before we can see the animals.”
He turned the door handle and pressed it forward. Iris followed him through, expecting to behold another gorgeous canopy of green and brown. But it was just a large black empty room. The trees were gone, the ceiling was low, the lights were dim and the soil had been replaced with large shiny black tiles. On the left side of the room was a long reflective wall. On the right was a similar wall, only not so reflective. For some reason, this room felt very cold.
“What is it?” Iris asked as she stepped inside.
“Ah, that is for you to tell me. There is something very special about this room. The first person to tell me what makes this so special will win a free candy bar on me,” the guide answered.
A couple of students gave their theories. One student thought it was an empty storage room. Another thought it used to be an old office. Kaleb, being the jokester, suggested that it was Randal’s home. All answers were incorrect. The old man simply shook his head and smiled.
“Nope, wrong again!” he said. It was as if these wrong answers made him happy. “Well, come on now. I’ll give you guys time to think. We’ll come back to this room again after the animals, and if you still can’t get it, I’ll tell you the answer.”
Randal started to walk off and the group of students and teachers followed closely behind him. Iris glanced over to her left as they walked along. She could see her own reflection in the black mirror. In that moment, an idea sprung into her head. Suddenly she stopped and stood still as the rest of the group continued to move past her. It’s not the room that’s special, just this wall.
She slowly walked towards it and pressed her hand against the surface. It felt cold. Iris turned around, wondering if anyone was watching her. To her surprise the last part of the group had already made it to the other side of the room and the students were already making their way through the next doorway.
“This is no wall,” she said aloud to nobody but herself. “It’s a window.”
Iris held her pale palms against the cold glass. She could feel it humming, beating like a heart. It was as if the glass had its own soul, its own mind. Together, with her hand pressed against it, it was as if they had formed a symbiosis. She was one with the station and the station was one with her.
All her life Iris felt safe here in the station. She welcomed the darkness as a form of comfort. But now, seeing her white hand against the black surface of the real world, she began to question the authenticity of humanity’s new existence. Suddenly everything felt artificial. The pressurized air flowed through her nostrils and the humming of generators rang in her ears. Life, nature, the planet as it once was, had all been eradicated, wiped out by those who depended on it most. This was where humankind’s own choices had led them. This was not where humanity belonged; this was where humanity ended up.
Beyond this transparent wall was nothing but a seemingly endless void of darkness. That’s all there had been anymore. Darkness. Earth’s gift to humanity may have been life, consciousness, mere existence. But humanity’s gift to the Earth was black as the ocean floor. This simple sheet
of glass was the barrier that separated it all; the border between Earth’s gift to humanity and humanity’s gift to Earth.
This was the Atlantic Station.
“Hey Ms. Vitneskja!” called Jacella, happy as usual, “the group’s moved on through!”
Iris did not appreciate the interruption, but she knew Jacella was right. She needed to keep moving with the rest of the tour. As she walked away from the reflection, Iris noticed how blonde her hair had become. The darkness was quickly fading away. Soon there would be none left.
Let’s get to the cows.
THE COLD AIR FLOWED FROM the fan as the boy rubbed his itchy right eye. For some reason Jallah found it very easy to breathe in this room. The oxygen levels must have been set higher than normal here. Sometimes he heard that old people would set their oxygen levels too high and cause their homes to explode, but Jallah did not know many old people, and had never known someone who died in an explosion.
“Are you done?” he asked as Louis studied the canned drinks on the shelf.
His friend turned with two cans in his hand, studying them both.
“I don’t know what I want. Red or orange?”
Jallah put his hands in the air.
“I don’t care, just pick one. We’re gonna be late,” Jallah responded.
Louis studied the cans for a few more seconds and then placed the red one back on the shelf.
“Orange,” he decided.