C James - Dome Six

It was hard to believe 20 years had passed since the first time he came down here. All Daisuke Yamamura had to do was forget. Luther had even helped him do it. Instead, he returned and dragged his wife down with him, leaving two grown orphans and a cautionary tale with a narrative sprinkle of crazy.

It gave him no pleasure to shoot Daisuke with a neurobullet and send him out into the dark of the filling room, but the man forced his hand. Maybe they would’ve gotten out before the train. Maybe they would’ve found a way to survive. He’d been willing to give them that chance, slim as it was. But crippled by the neuro, Daisuke would’ve been slow even with the antidote. They’d actually gotten within a hundred meters of the automatic door that guarded the exit to the tunnel, but that was it. There wasn’t enough of them left to bother with.

What everyone thought was just the multimeal processor was really just the head of a much larger facility that went as deep underground as the Stores, probably deeper. Multimeal was, rather conveniently, the raw material from which the fully automated plant made Agar, a non-perishable syrup that Pacifica supposedly needed to survive.

Cytocorp hadn’t parted with that information easily.

He’d just become Director when Julia got pregnant and he went into the Vault to beg whomever might be listening for help. Anything that would save hers and the baby’s lives. That was when he heard the androgynous voice for the first time. It said there may be a way for him to get Julia out of the Dome if he was willing to do whatever they asked of him until the Fifth Epoch, when their precious dataset would be complete. Until then, he wouldn’t be reunited with his family.

He agreed without hesitation, and he’d do it again.

They said the Northern Cities had survived the Burn but were unable to grow their own food. Anticipating this, they’d built a facility into the Dome that could convert its staple food product into something less perishable. The Agar was shipped to Pacifica via a tanker train that no one even knew existed. Today, he would board it.

During the Fourth Epoch, while Keane was at the podium bloviating about what a precious flower the Dome was, he smuggled Julia down into the empty FPC. He followed their instructions for opening the panel on the side of the processor and the door just beyond. Only then did he realize the scale of the operation.

The processor itself was a boxy red machine almost 25 meters tall. But it was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. He couldn’t imagine how much multimeal was siphoned off, but it had to be at least as much as the Dome needed for itself. The volume of material that came out the other end of the processor was much, much smaller than what went in, but since multimeal was augered directly up for distribution, you couldn’t see that.

He very clearly remembered leading Julia down the same narrow stairs. She had so many questions, but he had few answers. She was scared, of course, and rightly so. It was a huge leap of faith, but he had little choice but to trust the Company. If it happened now, he might know another way to protect his child from being terminated, but he was desperate then. Cytocorp offered him a way out of their mess and he seized it.

Eight years passed, during which he never heard from Cytocorp at all. Every few months he’d go down into the Nexus and ask IDA to speak with them, but they never replied, not even to let him talk to Julia. He wondered if he’d made a terrible mistake. The anguish of knowing he’d sent Julia and their child off to some unknown fate tortured him. Elle was his only solace, at least until they contacted him again.

There was so much he wanted to say, but he just listened. Another man in the Dome named Stephen Welsh had been in a similar predicament with his own wife, Penny, who managed to get pregnant despite being denied the privilege. It was never clear whether it was her own doing or a failure of the contraceptives, but since she died during childbirth, it didn’t really matter. There were two people before the baby and two people after the baby. No harm, no foul — not as far as the Authority was concerned.

But that all happened four years before Cytocorp finally contacted him again and told him to spirit Stephen away and put him on the same train as Julia.

If they wanted him to make Owen Welsh an orphan, so be it. Questioning the Company’s motives wasn’t the best use of his scant leverage. Instead, he asked to speak to Julia and they let him.

She sounded safe and healthy, if not happy. She told him everything he needed to hear — that she missed him, that their baby was a healthy girl named Noviah, and that the only way to ever see her again was to continue doing what the Company asked of him.

That was all she had to say.

Just as he had with Daisuke, he lured Stephen into the FPC under the pretense of a repair. Once the train disappeared into the tunnel, that was it. Ever since, he’d been asked to do little things like damaging crawler harnesses and big things like shutting down the Exchangers. He didn’t understand why but he didn’t care.

Sometimes people got hurt, like the poor kid who swan-dived off a crawler into the school cafeteria or Hideki Yamamura, but mostly his actions did no specific harm. He only knew it had something to do with the data. History wouldn’t ever be able to judge him, because the Dome’s history was controlled, as everything else was, by the Company.

The tangle of pipes, vats, and valves looked exactly as it had 20 years ago. It was humid and hot, the air saturated and cloying. Whatever process turned multimeal into Agar was driven by heat that eventually bubbled up into the FPC. Down and down he went, until the stairs terminated in a rectangular floor, and at the opposite corner was a heavy door.

The door opened into the filling room, where Agar was pumped into the tanker train. He guessed its original purpose was for Cytocorp to access the facility in an emergency and, potentially, to get into the Dome. It was remarkable that it had remained in working order for so long without routine maintenance. Now that their precious data, he wondered whether they would continue to rely upon the Dome for Agar. If so, would they have to choose a new patsy?

He didn’t really care. His purpose fulfilled, he was ready to get on with his new life in Pacifica. With his family at his side, the Dome would become a distant memory. He cranked open the heavy latch that broke the door’s seal and swung it open.

He couldn’t know for certain when the train would come. The conditions on the track, which the Company said was cut through the dunes of the Burn, could impact the schedule. So, when he activated his headlamp and peered into the darkness to find the tracks empty, he wasn’t surprised. He could wait there in the delicious darkness for it or wait in the steam of the Agar facility with the door open, safe and snug. The choice was finally his.

He chose the darkness.

He left the door closed, put his back to the metal outer wall and sat, legs crossed and arms folded, in the unbroken blackness. On the screen of his mind unspooled an entire life under glass, never too far from another person. The incessant hum of the Exchangers and the rattle of conveyors in the Towers had fallen silent now, and he’d never have to hear them again.

Luther had never known silence. It hovered there with him in the dark like an unseen, but strangely welcome companion. He waited for it to touch him, to drink him in like a hungry amoeba. Somehow that would’ve been okay.

The silence let him be.

And so he waited there, enjoying its cold company. Without the darkness, there could be no light at the end of the tunnel. To be at either end was a win, therefore he’d already won.