Sue looked to the sky above her. From where she sat, at the tallest point at the edge of everything, the bright blue of the cloudless sky seemed close enough to touch. In class, she had been taught that out there in the big world; the sky was so far above everything that the entire sea reflected its colour. But here, thousands of feet under the sea, all they had was the image of what the sky may have looked like. She had always hated being the one to teach the younger children that. Hated being the one to tell them the truth about their home, the one to tell them that out there somewhere, there may be something more beautiful than this that they would never get to see.
Here, on this platform that she wasn’t supposed to know about, she pressed her back into the solid wall of the false sky and touched the layers and layers of metal and glass that protected them from horrors at the bottom of the sea. The wall was warm, though by all standards it wasn’t supposed to be. It was built to ensure they would be safe in the depths, built to survive millennia, if it had to. A commune. Now a mass grave.
The hands holding onto Sue’s arms were shaking, and she began to remember that there was someone with her. Sue turned to look at May. Her lips were moving and she was speaking, but all Sue could hear was muffled static, as if she was underwater- ha.
She looked at her best friend, really looked at her. At the nose piercing she got on a dare when they were fourteen, at the dark skin that never, ever broke out, which had made Sue hate her a little when they were fifteen, the mole by her left eye, the blue braids she put in when they were six and learned about the sea they lived in. Blue for unity, because when they looked up at the blue of this false sky, someone above was looking at a blue sea, if there was anyone left above. Even when they were older and learned that the sea around them was not just one shade of blue, she refused to take the braids out, only removing them to clean her hair and then putting them right back.
“We need to tell somebody,” Sue cut into whatever May was saying. “We need to tell everybody.”
“Sue, we can’t,” Her head was shaking even before May finished speaking, “Listen to me, please.”
May let go of her arm to toy with her braids, and Sue tracked the movement. The beads at the bottom of the braids clinked together.
The sound was as familiar as everything she knew, but she’d never known anything, had she?
“We can’t. We really, really can’t.” Her hands came around Sue’s shoulders again. But this time, they felt stifling, like a cage, like their home, their prison.
“Why can’t we tell anyone? People are going to die! You’re our leader, you’re in charge of everyone here including the council, if you say that people need to know, then they need to know.” Sue implored her friend, the woman who she and others like her trusted to speak for them on the council.
“That’s the point, Sue. People are going to die, one way or another. No one can leave, and no one can come to get us. You know there may not be anyone left above. There is nothing that can be done! Everyone who can check has checked.” May went quiet for a minute, loosening her hold on Sue’s arms.
“It’s kinder if people don’t know.”
Sue retorted, “Kinder how? Kinder to who? And how do you know nothing can be done? There has to be a way to fix this. People have been living here for 350 years. You can’t tell me no one has thought to fix whatever is wrong. Maybe if everyone knew, we could find a solution.”
“They tried Sue! The first signs that something was wrong happened nearly a century ago and even now, no one knows what’s wrong with the air! They tried to figure it out, they tried to fix it, then they decided someone smarter would come around to save us and they hid everything and they built this fucking platform so they could wash the sky of evidence of the bad air!”
“Then they should have tried harder!” Sue yelled.
“I know Sue!” May yelled right back, pressing down on Sue’s arms before letting go to run her hands through her hair. She pointed down to the council building, the great gray spire visible even from up on the walkway they sat on.
“I spent six hours stuck in that room hearing every single excuse they could come up with of why they didn’t tell people.” May let out a bitter laugh, shoulders slumping.
“Do you know what it all boiled down to? They didn’t want to cause unrest. Because if the council told the people, that would mean what happened above would happen here all over again. There’ll be unrest. People will die, and their deaths will accomplish nothing.” She let out another bitter laugh, then ran her hands through her braids.
“They ran down here and now we have nowhere left to run. There’s nowhere to go, and there’s nothing to do.” May’s voice cracked and tears started coming down her face, but she continued speaking.
“It has been 350 years, and it has been a hundred since they figured out we were on a clock too. There hasn’t been anyone who could fix it in all that time. And yes, they should have said so earlier. Everyone should have known earlier and maybe then we would have found something. But right now, there’s nothing.”
Sue could barely see May through her tears.
“But if we all gave it our time, someone would be able to figure… no, stop looking at me like that. People deserve to know. They deserve a chance to try.”
The beads in May’s braids clunked together as she shook her head. She was still crying.
“There’s nothing, Sue. I don’t think it’s anything anyone can fix. I’m sorry. There is no time, there is no future for any of us to try and save. The youngest all have problems with their breathing because there isn’t enough clean oxygen. It’s not normal for every child to spend their first month isolated on Oxygen. There won’t be enough good oxygen for any children under two in the next three months, or adults in the next six. We’ll all die within twelve months.”
“There has to be a way,” May was shaking her head even before Sue finished speaking.
“The only other way they found… was killing 75% of the population.”
“What?” Sue’s voice cracked at the thought, “May, you cannot…”
“They can’t. They won’t.” May said, “The entire council voted against it. But that’s mostly because it creates more problems than it solves. The air will still be bad. The cremators we have can only handle maybe fifteen bodies a day. We can’t handle over 5,000. And at least half of the population is needed to keep this place running.”
“Is that supposed to make it better?” Sue sneered.
“Nothing makes it better. But that is the truth of the situation. Now you see why we’re not telling people. You see what good the truth does, how much comfort it brings!”
“So you want to kill us all?” Sue asked and started to stand. May’s hand held her legs in place.
“I don’t WANT to kill anybody!”
Sue finally looked straight into May’s familiar eyes. In them, she could see frustration and, even worse, resignation.
“This isn’t my choice, or my fault, or my decision.” May said, voice flat. “Everyone else, the rest of the council, still thinks this place, our whole lives, has been some great experiment and they want us all to die for science. I don’t. But there’s nothing I can do. I checked, Sue.”
Sue tried to look away, but May didn’t let her. She held Sue’s face between her hands and spoke, voice still flat.
“The powers that be decided everyone will die at once, then maybe everything we are will be preserved in its natural state, instead of whatever the panic will turn us into. There’s nothing I can do or say that will change that. The council thinks that’s the best option. I don’t think it is, but the kindest option that’s left is to give everyone peace as they go. They’ll simply fall asleep and not wake up. I’m sorry.”
Sue held on to the hands on her face. May’s face was blurry through her tears, but it was still there. It was still May, the May who she knew and the May who she loved. And that voice, she thought she knew and understood helplessness, but what she heard in May’s voice was the real thing. The realization calmed the feeling that had been growing in Sue’s chest. Was it rage? Was it helplessness? Whatever it was that was growing within her left all at once.
May sat down beside her, back against the dome that was the only world they had ever known. Two days ago, was it only two days ago? They had been here debating adding rails to the walkway. May said it beat the point of having a camouflaged walkway if the rails disturbed the illusion of a horizon built into it. Sue said safety needed to come first.
The tears were still coming, but they sat quietly beside each other.
They were meant to be an experiment, weren’t they? But they grew and loved, generations were born and buried here. They had thrived. The research Sue and May had found years ago in the great library had surmised that their society wouldn’t even live long enough to endure a catastrophic failure. But they had.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” May said from beside her, “but it’s… how could I not say goodbye? It was selfish, but I needed to. I needed someone to know that there was nothing I could do.” May wrapped her arms around her knees, tucking them in close to her.
Sue grabbed May’s hand. She looked down at the view, at the life and civilization that was built for them, and that they had built. It stretched and stretched as far as the eyes could see. When they had run out of space to build, they started to build high, with designs of old civilizations that had died long before this place was even the seed of an idea in people’s minds.
It was with love that they had grown. May had assured her that the problem wasn’t because of their population growing, but even if it was, Sue didn’t think she would mind that fact. Life is meant to make more life, to grow. And it was kinder, wasn’t it? To fall asleep and not wake up rather than know everything they had built was always going to be destroyed.
She looked until she could not stand it when the night sky took over from the day sky. Somewhere above, above even the billions of tonnes of water that kept them from the rest of the world, the real sun was setting. The literature said it set at different times above, but here, the sun set at the same time year around, and everyone was home when it happened. It was a tenet set in stone here, once the sun set, you went home to your loved ones.
“May?”
“Yeah?”
“Tell me a story.”
All around, a quiet ringing started up. The signal something was wrong, and everyone should go inside and barricade their houses. Sue’s hand gripped May’s tighter. She hadn’t thought it would happen so soon.
May squeezed the hand, and though her breath was shaky, she spoke.
“About what?”
“The story you used to tell me. The happy one about the world.”
May laughed and squeezed Sue’s hand tighter. They were both crying, but May took a breath and began.
“Once upon a time, there was a great nothingness. But in that nothingness, in the dark, a tiny spark dared to live.”
Sue closed her eyes, though she knew she probably shouldn’t. And she listened to May tell her the story of how the earth, the real earth, began.
