C James - Dome Six

But the Authority vastly underestimated the hunger for his products. Any respite from the dullness and repetition of Dome life was an object of fanatical desire. His friend, Wade, took his spot in the lab and picked up where Hideki left off. Meanwhile, Hideki took on the role of distributor. He’d drift near the lab and make sure he was seen, then meet Wade in the bathroom to get a pocketful of Macros. He’d hide the vials in his ration bottle and extract them at home.

There was only so much to trade in the Dome, so after he had all the water, food, and sex he could handle, he looked at it more as a personal mission. If it helped people cope with Dome life — especially him — then it was his duty to facilitate it. If it pissed off the Authority, so much the better.

After running his wide broom up and down the Stores’ main corridors, he moved on to the stacks. Only three of the original 20 automatic pickers still worked properly but he had to be careful around them because their prox sensors never got cleaned. If he wasn’t paying attention, he could get whacked by a picker traveling at high speed. A few years back, he got distracted for a moment and was blindsided by an empty picker. He suffered a pair of broken ribs on his left side that never quite healed.

When he was done, he returned the giant broom to the storage closet off the main corridor and sauntered past Bioprinting, noting that Wade wasn’t there. He then took a slow lap before ducking into the bathroom. He rapped at the door of the only stall.

“Took your sweet time,” said Wade. “I was about to leave.”

Wade unlocked the stall door and pulled Hideki in with him. He was nearly as skinny as Hideki, with an extra inch of height and a perpetually scraggly red goatee.

“So,” Hideki said, “whaddya got for me?”

Wade dug into his pocket and withdrew eight vials. Hideki held them up to the light and smiled. Four green psychedelics, two blue painkillers, and two orange pleasure Macs. The ladies liked those.

“You never have this many,” Hideki said, taking a seat on the edge of the toilet. “Business must be slow.”

“Actually,” Wade said, “I’m clearing out the inventory. I’m done.”

“What?” Hideki said, alarmed. “Why?”

“We’re running super low on matrix. The Authority’s watching every gram,” he explained.

“How can you be running low? There used to be enough matrix to last a century.”

“Yeah, well, that century’s about up, isn’t it?” Wade said, referring to the upcoming Fifth Epoch. “I don’t think they factored in our little secondary market.”

Hideki was shocked. A kilo of Cytomatrix bioprinting gel was enough to produce several thousand Macros. They were only making a few dozen extra per week. Otherwise he’d never heard of anyone getting more than a replacement fingertip or maybe an ear. Could they really be almost out?

The door to the bathroom opened and the man stopped. They froze. Whoever it was got down low enough to see two pairs of feet from under the door, facing each other. He guffawed.

“Very nice, guys. Guess I’ll go shit somewhere else.”

Hideki stifled a laugh as the man left and the door slowly closed behind him. At least they all wore the exact same shoes.

“Ha! He thinks I was blowing you,” Hideki laughed.

“Whatever,” Wade said. “We’re done here. Don’t come by anymore.”

“Wait — what do you mean, ‘done’?” Hideki asked after him.

“There’s too much heat right now,” Wade said. “It was one thing when we had shelves full of matrix, but we don’t anymore. The last thing I want is to tell some kid who needs a kidney that we can’t make him one because we used it all on illegal Macros.”

“Okay, fine,” Hideki said. “We’ll cut way back. Cool the market down until this situation passes.”

“You’re not getting it,” Wade said. “As soon as we use up the matrix that’s already in the lab, our little enterprise is done. No offense, but I’m not gonna wind up like you.”

That stung a little. Hideki considered Wade to be one of his best friends, but maybe he saw him the same way everyone else did — a burned-out junkie. If Wade regretted saying it, Hideki didn’t get to see it on his face because he turned around and left without another word.

Dome weather was always perfect. There was no wind, just the gentle movement of air by the Exchangers overhead. The UV shield throttled the sunlight coming through, giving it a diffuse quality that cast few shadows. Its climate-control systems maintained a pleasant daytime temperature of 19–21°C. At night, simulated moonlight bathed the city in cool blue hues. Actual moonlight was too weak to penetrate the shield, though you could occasionally discern the hazy outline of a full moon.

Channels on the underside of the Dome gathered condensation and funneled it into a trough above the concrete foundation for recycling. Sometimes there was too much moisture for surface tension to handle and fat droplets would fall as warm rain.

Tosh thought often of the Originals, the first citizens to choose this life. How terrifying must it have been to watch farmland turn to desert, or for coastal towns to become seabed. Legions of people left everything behind to migrate to the Northern Cities as the Burn advanced like an invading army.

Then came the end of antibiotics and the panic that followed. In 2044, they were officially declared ineffective. In ’44, antibiotics no more , went the saying. She didn’t know the circumstances that led up to this because it wasn’t part of the curriculum.

Under these conditions, the Dome Project would’ve seemed like a godsend. Generations would learn hydroponic farming and strictly manage their resources. They would do away with money and form a society of equals. No one would be all-powerful or inconsequential, rich or poor. Algorithms, not fallible and ego-driven humans, would make the decisions critical to survival. Armed with the lessons of their evolved society, they would bide their time until it was finally safe to emerge and reclaim what was left of the world.

It was a beautiful vision and she was a part of it, even now. Why, then, did she still feel like the object of some cruel joke?

“Where’d you go just now?” asked Art, Tosh’s oldest and most trusted friend.

The question startled her. She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t even realize they’d arrived at the Agora, the parklike open space at the center of the Dome.

“Sorry,” she said. “Guess I’m a little preoccupied.”

Art smiled and kept walking, but Tosh felt guilty. How dare she make this about her? All he wanted from her was time, which for him was in short supply. In a few weeks he would turn 75 and he’d be put in the Box. That was the maximum age in the Dome. After that, you were deemed too old to contribute more than you required.

Their Charter was based on the same cold logic behind the Dome Project itself — protect, reclaim, rebuild. Fairness was a clunky relic of the Time Before. The only way to avoid the Box was to take your own life, and plenty did. The only meaning in death was that someone could be approved to conceive, but it was better than no meaning at all. In a closed system, equilibrium was everything.

Art was the closest thing she had to a father figure since her losing her own more than 20 years ago. He worked on the Dome’s network systems for 45 years and mentored her during her internship and beyond. When she was just 21, not long before she adopted Owen, a power surge knocked out IDA’s kernel for several hours. The two of them had to go into the Nexus, a vault deep below the Authority, to get it up and running again. They bonded over that.