Elysium

by Jennifer Marie Brissett

  “She’s right. It is cold outside,” Kim said. “What do you think that means about the air?”

  “Don’t know,” Adrian said. “It could mean anything. But I don’t think it means anything good.”

  The corners of Kim’s mouth curled down.

  “So how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” Adrian said, looking away.

  “Are you moving down into the city?”

  “The doctor still says I can’t move Netta.”

  “Doesn’t he understand the situation?”

  “The situation doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere until it’s safe to move her.”

  “Okay, okay. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Adrian nodded and wiped his face with the back of his arm. He took some moments to compose himself, and Kim gave him the space by looking away.

  The clock ticked in the quiet. Finally, Kim handed Adrian a memory card. “These are the updated plans. All the changes you suggested have been implemented.”

  “Including the redirection of the lower ventilation shaft?”

  “Yes.”

  Adrian inserted the memory card into his table computer and brought up the plans. The wide smooth glass of the table displayed the detailed line drawings of every inch of the city being built below ground. Adrian traced the lines with his finger, checking.

  “This looks good,” Adrian said. “I did a redesign of the second-level air pumps last night that should increase their efficiency another six percent.” He pulled up his new design and laid it over the table. Kim leaned in to see what he had done.

  “This just came to you in the night, huh?” Kim said.

  “I had a dream and then this came to me,” Adrian said, still staring at his plans. “It should work.”

  “Knowing you, it will more than just work,” Kim replied. “A security detail is downstairs waiting for you.”

  “Expecting any trouble?”

  “Word has gotten out about the city. Stragglers are showing up trying to get in. Nothing we can’t handle.”

  “I want security here.”

  “Already done. Don’t worry. She’s safe,” Kim said. “And I’m staying to make sure.”

  The closed bedroom door loomed large in the corner.

  Adrian said, “All I do is worry.”

  A faint smell of burnt ash drifted on the wind. It itched at Adrian’s skin. He removed his headwrap to readjust it to cover more of his face. Cold smoke rose out of his mouth as he rewrapped his head with the scarf. When he looked up he noticed a small gathering of men. They stood against a ragged skyline made hazy and faint by the mist. Some held large machine guns strapped over their shoulders. Others held them slack, pointing down. They all wore black headwraps and red bandanas that hid their faces. Adrian hadn’t been expecting this show of force. One of the men pulled down his face wrap and approached him.

  “Remember me?” he said.

  Adrian considered him from a distance. There was something familiar about the mole over his left eyebrow and the shape of his chin.

  “We didn’t exactly run with the same crowd. But I remember you. You were one of those smart-ass kids, always playing chess and what not.”

  Slowly Adrian remembered his name and reputation. He was called Jolly. His smile with that underlying hint of menace told of the kind of humor he had. Even when they were little he was a developing gangbanger. Adrian had stayed far away from kids like him in the old neighborhood. What the hell was he doing here?

  “Yeah, yeah. I can see you know me,” Jolly smiled. “All that old stuff is water under the bridge now. Me and my crew got your back, man. You and your ol’ lady upstairs.” He held his gun like he knew what he was doing. “My daughter’s in that city you’re building.”

  Adrian looked over at the men holding the guns and wondered if these were the same knuckleheads who used to spend all their afternoons on the street corner back home, doing god knows what. Strangely, it did make Adrian feel better to know that they were the ones protecting him and his wife. They were all survivors here; everyone was under the same threat of annihilation. Like Jolly said, that old stuff was water under the bridge. Circumstances change everything.

  They began their walk through the broken city. All was quiet but for the echoing sounds of their feet scraping against loose gravel and cracked pavement. The men walked behind, nervously scanning the areas around them and pointing their guns every which way. Adrian looked up at the tall building that was his home and sighed deep within his chest. The park where they were going was only a short distance away. That was one of the reasons why he and Netta had bought the condo. They’d had visions of walking with their someday-children to play on the grass on Saturday afternoons. They never envisioned this wasteland. Who could?

  As they approached, he could feel the digging machines working in the distant part of the park. The pounding of the earth beneath their feet shook the few remaining trees. A crowd was lined up near the left gate. Men with guns stood by keeping order. Adrian knew that trouble was coming. The underground city was designed for only a certain number of people. Eventually folks would be turned away.

  They went past the checkpoint into the center of the park and walked along a path that crossed over what used to be a baseball diamond. To their right a rustle of bushes and trees caused their guns to cock in unison.

  “Hold up, hold up,” Jolly said, and lifted his gun to his shoulder as an elk bounded off into the distance.

  “What the hell is that doing here?” one of the men said.

  “The zoo,” Jolly said. “Some of the animals got loose when the construction started. They won’t hurt anything.”

  The men went a little further down the path, over a walkbridge and down to a lower driveway to a well-hidden tunnel. Very few knew of this entrance. One of the men banged on the metal door three times, paused, then banged three more times. A catch released and the door opened. Hector, accompanied by more men, all with machine guns, greeted them.

  “Hey, Adrian,” Hector said and waved them inside. “Everyone is in the conference room already.”

  Down, down, down in the elevator open on one side, save for a waist-high gate. The smell of dirt and hot steel deepened as they descended. The gated door opened to loud construction. Where they stood would be black as pitch but for the radiance from bright spotlights shining further down in the construction pit. Adrian followed Hector through a construction safety corridor to a door restricted to official personnel only. Adrian pulled his identification card out of his pocket and swiped it through. His number appeared in red on the screen: one-seven-seven. They entered a hallway that became perfectly quiet once the large metal door shut behind them.

  In the conference room ten people sat around a large table. Four men wore suits and ties. Two women sat extremely close, deep in conversation. One had red hair and freckles and was rifling through some papers. One was Stephen, a really good engineer. One had gray eyes and never had much to say. One was the head of the group, Dionne Maiter, a no-nonsense woman in steel-rimmed glasses. Adrian and Hector were the last to take their seats.

  “Let’s get started,” Maiter said. “How is the construction coming?”

  One of the suits answered, “We are approximately thirty-four percent behind schedule, and the lower levels are still incomplete.”

  Maiter said, “We can’t afford to be this behind.”

  “It’s a water problem,” Stephen said and pushed his glasses back. “We’re building beneath the water table and are still developing the pumping system. It’s difficult for the crews to work on the city’s construction while constantly battling the water.”

  “And we have a communication problem as well. The routers are blocked, and the crews can’t work together when they can’t talk to each other. Perhaps we should begin using the satellites again,” Hector said.

  “The satellites won’t help us this far underground,” Stephen said. “What we need is to make sure all the signal ro
uters are in place, which they’re not.”

  “Why aren’t they?” Maiter asked.

  “It’s the pace of the construction. Every time we install the routers, the structures around them change.”

  “Maybe we can make mobile routing units,” Adrian said. “It’s foolish at this point to have them remain stationary.”

  Stephen nodded.

  “As for the water problem, I’ve redesigned some of the pumping systems in my latest drafts of the construction plans to divert the groundwater into internal cisterns until it can properly be piped out to the river. It will help a little, but we can only do so much.”

  “Okay, then,” Maiter said. “And, Stephen, I’ll put you and your team in charge of developing the mobile router units.”

  Stephen nodded again.

  “As for the satellites, I have to confess something,” Adrian said. “I have been using them to communicate with my counterparts in other cities for months now.”

  “Why would you do something like that?” Maiter slapped the table. “The satellites may be monitored. They may find out about the underground cities.”

  “I doubt they care what we do,” Adrian said. “They released the dust and haven’t been back since.”

  “It doesn’t mean they won’t come back,” Maiter said.

  “They don’t need to. They think we’re done for.”

  Silence.

  “Is that true?” Maiter asked.

  “Maybe,” Adrian answered.

  The word “maybe” rang in the air like a tinkling cymbal.

  “Eventually the dust will choke us all,” Adrian said.

  Stephen pushed back his glasses. “I think these aliens — these creatures who attacked us — knew exactly what they were doing. They’ve probably done this before to other unsuspecting planets like ours.”

  Adrian continued, “The cities are only temporary shelter from the inevitable.”

  “So then what do you propose?” Maiter leaned back, tossing her pen down on the table.

  “I propose we leave,” Adrian responded.

  “Leave? Leave where?” Maiter asked.

  “Leave Earth,” Adrian said. Maiter actually laughed, until Adrian put a memory card on the table. Its click on the polished wood echoed in the silence.

  “Myself and designers in other cities have been working on a prototype based on a downed invader’s craft.”

  “A prototype of what?”

  “A ship. A spaceship. We should build several.”

  He slid the card across the table toward Maiter, who picked it up and examined it as though the information it held was readable by the naked eye. She entered the card into the table computer, and a three-dimensional image appeared, floating in the center of the room. It was the schematic of a craft shaped slightly like an avocado.

  “You’re serious about this?”

  “Dead serious.”

  It was as if no one in the room wanted to breathe. Maiter stared at the floating figure for several long moments then said, “Say this even works. Where would we go?”

  “We found a terrestrial planet in a system that we believe we could reach,” Adrian said. “Though there are a few significant differences from Earth, for instance, it’s tidally locked with its sun, but we believe our people could survive there. Also there are some interesting properties in its atmosphere that we could take advantage of technologically.”

  “Oh, this is crazy talk!” Maiter said and slammed her hand down on the table.

  Adrian swallowed. “A year ago I would have agreed with you, but now we have no choice but to face the hard reality. The people of this world are dying. If we are to survive, we have to leave.”

  13.

  The image of the ship still hung in the air, spinning on its own axis. It was sliced at the center to show the design of its inner quarters. Its pear shape was awkward and squat. It would have been funny if only the situation weren’t so dire. The conference room was now empty except for Adrian and Hector. They remained in their chairs, not speaking. The silence broke when Hector stood and walked across the room.

  “Well, that was intense,” Hector said.

  Adrian continued to stare at his spinning design.

  Hector pulled out a chair and sat down next to Adrian. “Are you all right?” he said and touched Adrian’s hand.

  “Yeah.”

  “How is Annie?”

  It irked Adrian when he called her that. People called her “Antoinette” or “Netta,” but no one ever called her “Annie.”

  “She’s fine,” he lied and then corrected himself. “She’s the same.”

  “I’m so very sorry,” Hector said. “Adrian, I want you to know that if you need anything — and I mean anything — that I’m here for you.” They had been friends for as long as Adrian could remember. There were times when he wondered, had things been different, where their relationship would have gone. He looked into Hector’s sympathetic eyes and felt the warmth of his touch, then moved his hand away.

  Adrian said, “I know.”

  Stephen returned to the meeting room.

  “Good, Adrian, you’re still here,” he said. “I was hoping to catch you. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “I was about to head down to the lower levels.”

  “It won’t take long. It’s important.”

  The high-ceilinged hallways in the administrative part of the city were walled in cinderblock painted a yellowish off-white. The tiled floors echoed their steps as they made their way to Stephen’s office. At the end of the hall they passed a temporary observation window, constructed so that the new city being formed could be seen from a safe distance. Dots of light flickered in the open pit like stars in the night sky. Pillars of steel were being erected by construction crews and the sparks from their welding sprayed like tiny fireworks.

  Stephen’s office was cluttered with neat piles of papers, files, and books lying on every available flat surface. He pulled out a seat, lifted off a stack of papers, and searched around for another place to put them. After several seconds of fussing, he put them on another pile in the corner. The newly created pile leaned precariously but somehow remained upright. Stephen offered Adrian a seat and then cleared off space on his table computer, angling the surface towards them.

  “So what is it that you want to see me about?” Adrian asked.

  Stephen pushed back his glasses, sighed, then rubbed his hair in an attempt to make it flatten. His curls sprung back unchanged. “We’ve been examining the dust, trying to understand how to reverse its effects in the atmosphere.”

  Adrian nodded.

  “Well, we haven’t learned much about the dust. Actually, we don’t have the slightest idea how it works yet or how to get rid of it. It will probably take us years to understand, much less do anything about it.”

  Adrian nodded again somberly.

  “But we have figured out something.”

  Adrian leaned back. “Yes?”

  Stephen opened a window in his table screen and entered a few commands. A display of the spinning Earth appeared with a simulation of clouds floating like pulled cotton across its surface. Stephen entered a few more commands, and about twenty to twenty-five colored lines appeared crisscrossing the globe.

  “What’s this?” Adrian asked.

  “Atmospheric encoding.” Stephen rubbed his finger over the screen to maneuver the image and then zoomed in to show a closer view of the lines that divided the atmospheric layers of the earth.

  Stephen smiled. “It’s a method of etching a basic operating system into the earth’s atmosphere. It would be powered by the sun and invisible to the naked eye.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “There are a lot of ways we could go with this. We’re still experimenting. We were kinda hoping that you might have some ideas.” Stephen handed Adrian a memory card. “Here are the schematics for the system and our current methodology.”

  Adrian rubbed his developing beard. He had be
en forgetting to shave of late.

  “For now, we are only uploading a message that’s a warning to others about what these aliens have done to us. We set it to emit an intermittent signal so that if some intelligence comes along, they should be able to detect the program.”

  “Like the aliens who attacked us,” Adrian said.

  “Maybe — well, yes, they would be able to detect it. But like you said, I doubt they care.”

  Adrian stood and patted Stephen on the back. “It’s a good idea, Stephen. Keep at it. Maybe there is something more we can do with it.”

  “But there’s more … um … well, we are building a human interface program that will interact between the lower subsystems and the intelligence that may read the program. We want to use you as the template for the program.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, we all agreed that it should be you.”

  “Why me? Maiter is probably a better choice, she’s the head of development —”

  “A lot of people would be dead if it wasn’t for you. You’re the lead designer of this city. All of us on this project have agreed. I was voted to be the one to ask you personally if it was okay.” Stephen pushed back his glasses and rubbed his hair.

  Adrian leaned forward on the back of the chair, thinking.

  “What would I have to do?”

  “Just show up a couple of times in the lab for a few painless scans, and that’s it.”

  “Painless scans, huh?”

  “Guaranteed painless, like going for an MRI.”

  “Okay, fine. Just not right now. There are a few things that I have to do today.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Adrian opened the door to leave and said without turning around, “Thank you for thinking of me.”

  Down in the lower levels, surrounded by heavy construction equipment, dirt, and steel, Adrian and all the men and women who made up the building crews worked at digging further and further into the earth, inserting supporting beams, carving the foundation for the new world in which their children would live. Day or night — in the blackness of these man-made caves there was no difference. For them, the movement of the sun was happening on another world.