[Publisher’s note: This story won Third Place in the inaugural Speck of Fancy themed flash fiction writing contest.]
Taking a courier package cross-sector? Dumb. Climbing an open comms tower in summer heat to shave an hour? Suicidal. But the bonus was 257 credits! That would pay my rent.
I swung my legs onto the first platform, about the height of a four-story squat block, and hauled myself up, hands slipping a little on the gritty rust. I took a minute to catch my breath and imagine a much better world existed below.
Below me, scab-rats working illegally between sectors jammed the checkpoints, as always. Would have chewed up an hour, at least. My boss, Link, only cared that we got the job done before the clock ate the company’s profits. I cared about bonuses and gaining top-tier status.
Above me, the same old pukey sky. Sick smog swallowed the sun, and the air smelled like an unholy alliance between a refinery and a morgue. A tower hawk perched on a cross beam above me. It squawked, shit on my pack, and flew away.
Well, I needed to get to it. From the maintenance floor, the next level up, I’d sidle over to the Sector 9 side and descend.
Clank!
Something rattled down from the dish array, careening off the tower’s cross members like a giant beer can in a trash chute. A comms dish slammed onto my platform, an arm’s length away. I dropped to the grating and covered my head with my pack.
Once I stopped trembling, I crawled to the dish. Military. Sky blue camo. Stenciled in white: “Atmospheric control station 918.” What the hell?
A breeze picked up, and the clouds around the tower wafted away. I yanked my breather down, expecting to see the sun, something we rarely got on the ground. But the sky darkened and the neighborhood sun spotlights flicked on—the ones they used when days of rain smothered a sector.
The back of the dish showed freshly broken wires. No sound of repair drones coming. And nobody climbed towers but courier rats like me, so no one would come to fix it.
“Move on, Riv. Not your crisis,” I mumbled, as if it would give the words power over my curiosity. If I didn’t get this drop, I wouldn’t get paid, and if I didn’t bust a move, I wouldn’t get a bonus. Doing the minimum bought a cot in a shelter. Survivors got gratuities. But—of course—I looked up again anyway.
I expected to see clouds forming. Instead, a thin haze rippled like curtains in the breeze, revealing dim stars in the waning light. One by one, they flickered into existence as the background darkened. I checked my sensory augments. No glitches.
Then two stars blinked out. According to my retinal timestamps, only twenty minutes had passed, not the whole afternoon. I had to know, even though it might cost me, which explained why I was always injured and broke.
Climbing five more cross members brought me to a ten-by-ten foothold underneath the dish array. The tower extended another hundred feet, with at least a thousand dishes clustered on it like barnacles.
Then I saw it through the center of the tower. Total darkness. Even to the sides of the array, it looked close to nightfall. It reminded me of the photos the ancient astronauts took of Earth from space, but no way was the tower that high.
I rifled through my pack for my scanner. It booted with a sad whine, and I pointed it to the dishes. It picked them up—and something beyond them.
Instead of clouds, the moon, the planets, and the stars, it showed a metal grid, woven together like a latticework. Above that, thick metallic layers, which made four gigantic oxygenated shells, nested like Russian dolls.
The blood rushed from my head. I clung to the crossbeam and sucked in a breath, then pulled out my mobile, and called the boss.
“Hey, girlie! What’s wrong? Bluejacks snag you?”
“Link,” I said, breathless. “You won’t believe this.”
“Better be good. Client meeting in five.”
“It is.” I told him everything.
Silence. Then a sigh, and, “Stay put. Do not move. I’ll call you right back.”
He clicked off his mobile. I had more to say!
Within a minute, I heard the sirens of the high-altitude police drones. That scrapfuck! I even slept with him twice, and that’s the loyalty I get?
I had to find a safe place to hide. Eventually, they would assume I’d fallen and give up. They wouldn’t even look for my body. Below me were enough hungry people to carry my pieces off for a reward. Always happy to help…
The scanner showed a large hatch above me. I scrambled up two more levels and yanked it open. Rusty metal shrieked over the sirens. Sticky, almost slimy air poured out of a vent, with a dark, earthy funk like ancient bones. I shoved my pack into it and crawled in, then slammed the hatch shut.
Helmet light on. Gag reflex in check.
“Gah!”
It doesn’t matter if anyone’s around to hear you yelp. You do it anyway when you see a pile of old, dead bodies, five skeletons in various poses of agony. All wore hip-length coats and name tags ending in “Supervisor”.
I scrambled fast down the chute, through an open grate, and into a hallway, stumbled over two more crumpled bodies, and ran into a room with computer consoles. Dark. Silent. Three displays still flickered with remnants of characters.
To my right, a window rose from the floor to the ceiling. Far below: My city, the edge of night scraping the light away, lights blinking on. “Sector 8 Observation Post” painted on the bottom in white letters.
My knees went soft. I staggered to a dark console and booted it. Lines scrolled, showing the last logs of whoever sat here. A destination planet called Astraea. An arrival year of 3,750. A warning about the supervisors’ mounting deaths. We’d missed our arrival window by generations. Earth was a fake, dying world in a hull, and the people who kept it running had perished.
Other monitors showed various milestone dates: passing various structures in space, a comet’s narrow miss, losing contact with the other ships, and more. So much more.
My stomach clenched. The squats, the checkpoints, the stink, the filthy alleys, and sordid lives, were just a biosphere suspended in a dead ship, not a planet in the solar system.
We’d been forgotten. I didn’t even know who had forgotten us.
My breathing quickened, shallow and panicked, like I’d downed too many NineVolts. Did anyone below know about this?
Trembling, I called Merzy, a co-worker. She could make Link listen. I had to get this information to the high-ups, and he was the only one I knew who could move through political barriers.
The connection crackled.
“Riv, where are you? Link has rescues out—”
“Oh, bitrot! He called the bluejacks. Look, shit’s bad. I’m going to send you a file if I can get it out of here.”
“Out of where?”
“Out of the ship that holds Earth inside it! Merzy, listen to me. You’ve got to—.”
She hung up.
I slammed the screen “off” button, heart hammering.
Exhausted, I tried to rest in the console room. My growling stomach kept me awake, so I dug into the delivery: a gourmet snack pack for the mayor of Sector 9. Risked my life for crackers and cheese. They were delicious.
I wandered onto an observation deck. The window stretched across the wall, showing the regions of my world as it rotated. A hole in the outer shell allowed light from a nearby star to hit a transparent inner shell, magnifying the bright spot. The Earth rotated diagonally to imitate the rising and setting sun on a late summer’s day. Another hole vented airborne impurities before recycling the air. It appeared partially clogged.
A thought hit me like an asteroid: I had never seen the damned sky. Just machinery. My side of the fishbowl.
A terrarium.
I hunted down rations and water first, then read about the generation ships on the few surviving monitors. The dish that had almost killed me was one of many thousands. They helped create the conditions for life in my world. What would happen when they all finally failed?
I whispered, “Not your crisis, Riv.” But it was. It also belonged to every soul on the fake Earth below, but until I figured out how to reach someone there, I owned it.
I gazed down at what had once been my home as a fake moon rose over my sector. The vent belched out greasy smog from the last of the street vendor cook fires, the off-gassing of life, and hundreds of other pollutants I couldn’t even imagine.
Then I sat at a monitor and opened a file called “Atmosphere Dish Repair.”
[End]
