by Matt Brennan
Outside?
I tried to imagine what the world would be like on the other side of that door. You know, the actual outside. No biosuit. No worries about sickness. No fear of death. But I just couldn’t get my mind around it.
I thought about the tastes and the smells my mother used to describe to me.
And the way she said it felt.
My heart was beating faster than I was comfortable with. My hands felt like swamps attached to the ends of my arms. My stomach was tying itself into Gordian knots. And if I wiped any more sweat from my brow, I swear, I was going to have to wring out my shirt.
The truth was I’d never been more terrified in my life.
Not even when I tore the suit. Sure I was panicked, but it had actually helped me build up a heavy dose of denial.
As I stood there, I didn’t know if I could go through with it.
I reached down without thinking and punched in the code to open the airlock door. It opened and I stepped past the threshold and into in the airlock. My knees were shaking uncontrollably, and my hands were so damp. I started to worry about touching the security pad. Who knew, maybe the moisture would short it out. In fact, I was amazed I didn’t short out the release.
I walked up to the exit and peered out through the glass.
My breathing was so shallow and so fast that I was afraid I was going to pass out.
I knew I shouldn’t have been doing what I was about to do. That I should go back downstairs and tell them that if they don’t let everyone back on the satellite network, I’d just slit my wrists or something. Because obviously there was no way I was even going to make it out my airlock door, forget about me walking all the way to Vancouver.
But I reached down with a shaky hand and punched in the code to open the airlock door. My finger hovered over the “Enter” key. My hand was trembling so hard that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hit the right button. I pulled my hand back, turned around and walked back to the airlock chamber door and closed it, which pressurized the room.
Then I walked back and stared at the keypad. There was a message blinking that read, “Press Enter to Continue.”
I sighed and moved my finger over to the “Cancel” button.
But then I thought of Ellie and Zack. They were cut off from everyone they had ever cared about and sealed up in biological specimen jars. Totally alone. Forever. My mom only lasted a year without my dad and she had me.
But none of that eased the terror in my chest, because I was just a coward at heart. It was what had been keeping me alive all these years. No matter what happened in my shiny tomb in the ground, it was far less scary than being dead.
I knew I needed to hit “Cancel”, go back downstairs and figure something else out. They couldn’t be so psychotic that they’d actually permanently cut off humanity from one another? Our whole species would be gone in a year. No one was that crazy. So that’s all there is to it, I can’t do this.
But instead I hit “Enter”.
The door instantly swung in and I felt the whoosh of extremely cold, but fresh, air.
I’d never experienced that before. My mother told me there was a difference, but honestly, I thought she was delusional. How could air be fresher? It didn’t make sense, after all the molecules were all exactly the same. But after breathing it for myself, I had to give it to her, she was right.
I took a moment and breathed in a deep lung full of fresh air through my nose. It felt so good that I nearly fell over. It was like there were some minerals dissolved in the atmosphere that my body had desperately needed my entire life, but they had been filtered out by the bio-filters and CO2 scrubbers in the biosphere. And the sudden rush of them into my bloodstream left me a little light headed.
I waited for a moment, hoping the dizziness would fade. All those new sensations, the cold air directly upon my skin and the fresh air in my lungs, were a lot to take in. Plus, there was a dampness to the air that I wasn’t used to, and it made the air seem colder somehow.
I stood there, frozen, staring at the open door in disbelief. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing was actually happening.
But the damage was done. I pulled the door open the rest of the way and stepped out into the mine. The air was cool and refreshing, but there was a funny smell I hadn’t noticed before and I didn’t much like it. I could see the entrance to the mine in the distance and the light coming from it was just about the most appealing thing I’d ever seen. For the first time, I actually began to feel a bit giddy inside.
I was about to feel the sun directly on my skin for the first time in my life!
No plastic shield. No pane of glass, just the sun and its warm embrace. My heartbeat instantly stepped it up a few notches and my breathing quickened to keep up.
I chuckled to myself as I thought I wouldn’t need my vitamin D supplement. I couldn’t stand the taste of that crap.
Of course, the chuckle was short lived when I remembered that the last time I was out here, a tiny bit of my suit was torn and I nearly died. I tried to swallow the non-existent saliva in my mouth, and started walking towards the light.
My legs felt like I had two of the fifty-pound lead weights fastened tightly to my ankles and I could barely muster the strength necessary to lift them high enough to clear each of the railroad ties. I must have looked like a zombie. If I had walked into that mine right then, and saw me coming my way, I’m pretty sure I’d have screamed my head off and bolted for the exit.
It didn’t take very long to reach the entrance—just an eternity of dread.
I hit the entrance like it was a brick wall. The line in the sand, where the shadow met the light, formed an impassable barrier that my subconscious self just couldn’t seem to find a way around. Instead of stepping over the line, like anyone would have, I dropped to the ground, crossed my legs in front of me and sat.
I had gone as far as I could go for that moment.
All I could do was stare at the ground. It didn’t make much sense, but the closeness of the ground somehow made it feel a bit more real to me. At least, more real than everything else that was around me. If I needed to, I could have reached down and touched it. That made it safer somehow, even reassuring. The whole way down the tunnel I was afraid to look around too much. I was afraid I’d be paralyzed by the diseases I would see everywhere I went. But finally the fact that I was actually sitting on the ground got through the panic and it did seem a bit silly not to at least take a look around.
I took a deep breath and slowly lifted my gaze from the pebbles and dirt on the ground, taking a good long look around me.
The out buildings around the mine entrance weren’t anything to look at really. Mostly just metal shacks that were in various states of disrepair and rust. The tree that was laying over the fenced-in area that used to hold my satellite dish, (that’s right, I said tree) was obviously still there. But in the immediate area, there really wasn’t much else to take in and look at. In fact, it was so bleak if I really looked at it all, it most definitely would have made me feel even more isolated and alone.
But honestly, I didn’t see any of it. Because my attention was totally transfixed on what was beyond all that crap, on what can only be described as the most breathtaking spectacle I had ever seen to that date.
Now, I have been outside more times than I care to remember, whether it was clearing the dish of snow, ice, and other debris or some other vital task. But every single time I went out, I was so terrified of being there, that I had to completely immerse myself into a task-oriented mindset. Otherwise I could never have managed to even walk out the door. I was so petrified that if I allowed myself to really think about where I was and what I was doing, I would have sent myself spiraling into a full-fledged panic attack.
But that was before. When a single bacterium could have killed me.
Things were different at that moment. I got to look at the world with freer eyes and while I expected not wearing my helmet would give everything a bit more luster, I w
as wholly unprepared for the sheer volume of its brilliance.
I can honestly tell you, that I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but I can tell you I wasn’t expecting to find myself way up in a mountain range, with an absolutely spectacular view of a majestic valley below.
I could tell you that I had no idea that the mine’s entrance sat near the peak of a mountain, that belonged to a range that stretched out for as far as the eye could see, but I’d doubt you’d believe me. But it was the truth. Mom and Dad never really talked about where we were, I think they were afraid I might get curious to see the world for myself. But I wasn’t crazy.
I was wholly unprepared for the vastness of the world that spread out all around me. It gave me a glimpse of just how insignificant I was and that knowledge forced a tear to begin to trickle down my cheek. The hills and the valleys and the other mountains in the distance were so beautiful, that soon that initial trickle quickly turned into a steady stream. I could see the valley below had a beautiful lake, which instantly became the single largest body of water I had ever seen. Not much of a contest though, because the tiny frog pond in my oxygen garden was the biggest before it.
And the trees! Oh my god, the trees!
They were absolutely everywhere! Pine trees and oak trees and conifers and black cherry. Every kind of tree imaginable.
The sheer volume of leaves boggled my mind.
Now, I had trees in my oxygen garden in the biosphere—one hundred and forty-three to be exact. Trees are nothing new to me. I’ve been composting their leaves for soil and using the heat from their decomposition for hot water my whole life. But it just never occurred to me that there could be that many trees anywhere.
It was like the whole world was nothing but trees
We were so high up, that even from my seat on the ground I could see the city of Vancouver in the distance. At least, I assumed it had to have been Vancouver, because it was so gigantic that it looked like it took up the whole horizon. And if the world was made up of small “towns” the size of that place, there’d be no room for anything or anyone else. I swear I could even make out the bay just beyond the city, but it could have just been the horizon playing tricks on my eyes.
I felt myself getting a little dizzy, it might have been the thin air or the fact that I was hyperventilating, so I decided to let myself fall backwards, before I fell over. I closed my eyes for a minute, just so I could wait until the universe stopped spinning around in my brain. When I finally opened my eyes and I looked straight up at the sky, I literally gasped.
I would never in my wildest of imaginations have ever thought anything could have been as beautiful as that crystal-blue sky over my head. The brilliance of the sky’s sparking blue color and the bright sunlight bouncing off the billowy white, gold and red clouds were quite simply the most beautiful things I had ever seen. In the biosphere, I’ve had glimpsed millions of pictures of the sky, but to actually see the late afternoon sky with my own eyes...
I was completely speechless.
I wish I were a poet. A poet could tell you what they were seeing and feeling at the same time. But sadly, I’m no poet, but I could tell you with authority, that absolutely no one had ever felt the way I did at that moment.
Not. Ever.
I heard birds chirping in the small trees that surrounded the mine and I saw some larger birds soaring through the sky above. I think they were seagulls, but they could just as easily have been pterodactyls for all I know. I’d never actually seen any birds fly before, but they were white, and as they soared their wings formed the rounded shape of two lowercase letter “u”'s. Something I’d always associated with gulls.
It’s hard to describe the emotions that flooded through me when I saw all of those things. I guess, in a way, I felt like a blind person who was suddenly able to see for the first time. How I managed to avoid seeing all this before, was beyond me. I know I was wearing the biosuit, and that I was scared, but I still had eyes? I still had ears?
Tears were flowing down my cheeks now and I couldn’t stop them. I thought of my mother and I wished she were here so I could hold her again and tell her I was sorry, that she was right, the outside world was an amazing place. How could I go back to living in the ground like a mole again? How did she manage do it for so long?
I climbed to my feet and stumbled out into the sun; the warmth was unbelievable. I hadn’t even noticed how cold the ground was until I felt the warmth of the sun’s heavenly embrace on my face. I started to walk down the hill in front of the mine’s entrance, towards the compound, but after only a couple of steps it turned into a slow clumsy run. By the time I was at the bottom of the hill, I was bolting as fast as I could go. I raced past the fenced-in area where the dish used to be that was covered up by the fallen tree, and past the shed where I moved it to, and then climbed up a little rise just beyond. I skidded to a stop, as my toes were dangling over the edge of a series of cliff faces that dropped at least a hundred feet or so below me. Only I couldn’t quite see the bottom, because for every twenty feet it dropped, it shot out ten or fifteen.
From there, I could clearly see that the mining compound was at the very end of a horseshoe-shaped valley, with the lake at its center. If you were superman flying above the valley floor, staring down at it with the opening of the valley at your feet, the mine would be on the lower-left end of the horseshoe. I could also see a winding road that snaked along the shore of the lake, all the way up to somewhere just below where I was standing, past a world below our little slice of heaven. I couldn’t quite see where the road passed because the cliff faces below were obscuring my view.
I was panting, as much from the exercise as I was from exhilaration. I reached down and grabbed a rock at my feet, throwing it as far as I could over the side. As I watched, the rock fell, and I saw it bounce off of several ledges below. I noticed a structure that looked like it was built directly into the side of the cliff below me. I spun around and looked at the shed directly behind me. It seemed to be situated in the exact opposite direction as the structure, but perfectly lined up with it.
I jogged over to the other side of the shed and threw open the doors. I was greeted by what looked like an elevator shaft. I’ve seen a bunch of movies on mining, well, to be honest, a heck of a lot of movies in general, who hasn’t. Mining movies in particular were always a charmer. I don’t know, I guess I just really identified with miners. You know, seeing as they spent so much of their lives underground, just like me. Anyway, this shed looked just like the kind of elevator a modern mine would have had, totally industrial and powerful enough to lift almost anything.
I slid the gate up and gazed down the shaft to see what I could see. It was dry and sturdy looking and totally made from metal. The whole contraption looked like it ran on electricity. I peered down the shaft again but I just couldn’t see more than a few dozen feet or so. I reached over and tested the control buttons but there didn’t seem to be any power.
My dad must have hoped that one day there’d be a cure and we could leave, so he’d have wanted this thing to work again. I walked around to the back of the shed and I saw a great big door. Inside was this big generator. I saw a door on the right side that had “Control” written on it, so I opened it. On the back of the door there was a startup procedure for the generator printed by hand:
Check oil, by pulling dipstick, marked dipstick. (If low, get oil from cave and fill, there is a case of oil just past the airlock. It is hidden under a green tarp.)
Pull out the choke.
Prime the system, by pushing and holding primer for five seconds and then release.
Turn key to start.
When engine starts, release key and shut off choke.
Love, Dad
My heart sank.
He left me a note.
He knew that if he or my mom weren’t here, I’d have to know how to turn on the generator. I wanted to rip the instructions off and hold them, but I figured I’d need them later and didn’t want
to lose them. So instead I just ripped off the part that said, “Love Dad” on it. I brought the slip of paper close to my teary eyes and kissed it. I put it into my pocket after I made a solemn promise to make something worthy of preserving that paper when I went back inside.
The instructions seemed simple enough. The oil was low, but there was a case of oil next to the generator, so I filled it. I then primed the system and turned the key. It revved to life after turning over a couple heart-wrenching moments of not starting, and thick black smoke belched out of the exhaust. The engine sputtered for a few seconds and then evened out. I shut off the choke and stepped back so I could properly admire an engine that was so well made that it could sit for fifteen to twenty years and still run.
They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Well, they don’t make anything I guess.
I closed the control panel and walked back around to the front of the shed. I hit the “Up” button and the elevator came to life. I could see a big heavy chain start cranking and I heard something coming closer in the dimness of the shaft below me. I peeked my head over and I could just make out a passenger car, slowly climbing. It wasn’t setting any speed records, but it was moving, so I wasn’t about to start complaining. In a few minutes, I’d actually be walking around down on the valley floor.
That’s when I thought of Ellie and Zack. And more tears started come.
They’d never be able to do what I was doing. Never be able to leave the coffins they were living in. I knew I could never go back to living like I had been. Not in a million years. So that meant that I’d never be able to share this with the people I loved. Which meant that I’d lost them all over again. The certainty of that epiphany was stunning. I felt more alone now than I ever had before, like I was the last man standing. Even if the satellite coverage came back up, no matter what, I just might be alone forever.