The Worldshift Chronicles: Monday

Chapter 12

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Chapter 12                   

Thursday

Um, let’s see. Okay. My first memory is flying dragons, soaring across my bedroom, a live action holo utilized by my nanny. A red wyvern of medieval origin, a black hydra of Atlantean legend, a green Japanese cockatrice, a tawny djinn-lizard from Arabic folklore, a rainbow-splattered Quetzalcoatl, all dive-bombing and issuing blasts of dragon fire at one another. It was wonderful, a rare display of color and imaginarium, in an otherwise sterile dormitory.

A lot of my time was spent in classrooms, a parade of academics and droning teachers and whitewashed schoolbooks. My instructors ran on auto pilot, putting in their years to try and get someone from High Dome to notice their workload. They insisted on a repetitive cycle of reading and writing, dictating line after line of monotonous penmanship, insisting we had to be better than the ‘savages’ outside. Almost all the assigned literature was written post-worldshift. The second age works which survived the exodus from the coast to the desert were meted out sparingly, and only to those who’d achieved higher classified clearances.

You could say, while I hadn’t yet been assigned a vocation before getting scooped up by Lieutenant Crackers, it wouldn’t have been a far stretch to deem me a burglar of sorts. I learned how to move about unnoticed, and developed a sleight-of-hand. I crafted sewn pockets within my jumpsuits for my ill-gotten goods. There was no keeping what I’d pocketed, of course. Inspections and shakedowns for illicit contraband are routine in the dome. It took me a couple of years to learn enough skill to pick locks and bypass electronic key codes.

I remember when I first realized I had arcana. I was terrified. I was only seven years old. I was in my bedroom and Penelope – my nanny – served me a lunch tray of grilled cheese and tomato soup. I was thinking the cheese hadn’t melted quite enough, and it was only lukewarm, and she should’ve let it sit on the burner a little longer. I grew frustrated, ready to tantrum, about to grab the sandwich and toss it across the room. Then suddenly the bread burst into flame. I cried out, but I had enough sense to pat the flames out before Penelope returned. I realized my anger had fired up something within me.

It wasn’t long after that I managed my first true ignis charm, a simple conjuration of smolder between my fingertips. It was thrilling, yet as young as I was, I knew I couldn’t tell a soul. I’d seen braggart kids merely mention arcana in class, only to be punished with bread and water for a week. Repeat offenses resulted in confinement. Those few who had the audacity to suggest they might hold any magical proclivity were taken away, never to return.

The mandates in New Angeles are absolute, regarding arcana. The only sanctioned people who can discuss magicks in open session are teachers who drill youth about its dangers, how it ruined the world, and how it can never be condoned by any New Angeles citizens hoping to maintain their residency.

The hydroponic fields are pretty, yes. It’s said our vivarium is the only source of tropic greens left on the planet. It’s a long tram ride to that side of the ark…uh, that’s what our central rotunda is called. You probably only dealt with the merchant commissary. That’s not far from where I live, about three clicks from High Dome’s central district. Penelope took me to the farms for field trips on occasion. Flowering vines and latticed vegetable gardens, orchards of fruit trees stretching as far as the eye can see, cut through with irrigation canals and streams of bright blue waters. The overhead alum-steel glass, several feet thick, treated to screen out intensified ultraviolet light, faintly mirrors the surface of the city, so the whole interior habitat is cast in prisms of green reflections from the gardens. The air is moist, rich with saturated oxygen and fresh livestock fertilizer. It smells like life, there in the farms. That’s opposed to the rest of the city, marble and concrete and steel, sterilized in de-con scrub and ammonia, everything constructed in geometric precision, painted in white or blue.

One time when I was very young, Penelope took me to the eastern side of the ark, beyond the gardens and the living domiciles of the agricultural force, straight up to the wall so we could look past the horizons of the Red Desert into the distant stretches of the Famine Lands. It frightened me. I had only imagined it, but the immensity of the emptiness, knowing there was nothing out there but massive scree herds…it was hard to comprehend. A single, ancient road littered with wrecks of second age vehicles split the landscape, heading into what might as well have been forever, or the past, or both.

On the western end of the ark, near High Dome and the dormitories where I live, the irradiated glow of the glass lands permeates the westernmost wall. It casts everything on that side in a green hue…but you know that, you’ve been to the trade hub. It’s all aseptic bunkers, granite towers, everything bleached and UV’d and radio-scrubbed top to bottom, and High Dome’s spire shadowing all beneath it.

There’s no joy. All people talk of the world outside our borders is how death waits for anyone who dares leave the dome. Every child is raised to aspire in joining House Gammon’s elite, to make a post, but there’s no formal way to apply, and any new members are decreed by powers nobody ever sees. People basically accept their lives will be spent under glass until they die. And they’re good with it. As long as they don’t have to go outside.

Many men join the federal troops to experience a taste of the outlands, if only for one service tour. A lot of those guys tend their boredom with blood lust. Sometimes they shoot dissidents on site. I can’t tell you how many citizens I’ve seen stunned and shipped off to the Ditch. That’s the biggest fear of all, for New Angeles nationalists. Nobody wants to be exiled to a radiated prison colony full of gravitational anomalies and feral scree. They’d rather die under the glass.

I blended in. Went along to get along, as they say. House Gammon citizenry have few options in that regard. Head down, mouth shut. Other kids go home to their families after school. Scheduled recreation and sports are assigned to interested parties. Social gatherings in the commons are limited to adults only. Children are a necessity in New Angeles, not a gift, a utility promoting threaded genetic lines.

Everyone is so frightened of everything. Magicks. History. The outside world. Mutations. Each other. Failing to excel. Exile. Betrayal, love, death. Most of all, change. House Gammon citizens are always waiting for another shoe to drop. Everyone’s in the same uniform, eating the same stuff, doing the same activities, working the same jobs, day after day, year after year. The ultimate goal is an offer from High Dome to join House Gammon’s upper echelons with furthered tenure benefits. So many thousands upon thousands of souls, castaways too fearful to venture outward, more concerned with security than freedoms, unquestioning about whether there’s more to be had in life if it risks losing food on their plates and guards at their doors, or whether their children are learning true histories or false ones.

If I’d known anyone, anyone at all, in any of the other cities, I’d have made a break for it, and if I perished gruesome in the outlands, it didn’t matter. But I wanted someone or something to discover, and I had no direction to take, nor person to look up. I often curse whomever left me on the doorstep to New Angeles. Why couldn’t they have dropped me virtually anywhere else?

What really chaps my hide?

My gutlessness.

Why I didn’t just leave to destinations unknown, come what may?

I was afraid, Monday.

For many…for me…dread of the unknown is a constant companion.

Security is a wet blanket of damnation.

How many times did I stare out the glass, at the rad-soak of the Red Desert, wishing there was a place to go, something better than choosing between gulag or death? On rare occasions, the sunset in the west or the sunrise in the east lit up the dome curvature like a field of fireflies, and I could almost imagine living in a place of peace, a world without glass walls.

Then I’d remember only the elites of the second era enjoyed such luxury, not unlike my caste superiors in High Dome. Being one of only a few orphans taken in by New Angeles, I realized too late, as I imagine many New Angeles folk do in the privacy of their chambers, that I was a pawn in the schemes of those who still hunger for rank and more resources than they need. And still I wonder, whether I have a role to play, whether my small life weighs on the scales of greater matters. Now that I’ve met you, and realized I’m not alone, I’ve come to understand I may yet offer some trifling balance.

I hope so, anyway.

Penelope was paid as my caregiver. She was obligated to be there. She cooked me fine meals, she saw to my physician appointments, she read me stories at bedtime with the passionless tones of someone employed for presence. By the time the standardized optics test at twelve years of age was administered to me, I’d acquired fair skill in masking the subatomic light behind my eyes. It’s kind of a mix between force of will and muscle memory.

Why I wasn’t thrown to the Red Desert’s wolves, upon my discovery at the front gate airlock with a pinned note on my bassinet stating my name and nothing else, I honestly don’t know. I was endowed with a standard credit account, enough to see me through my schooling and continued residency in the lower city, until I’d chosen a proper vocation. In all the ways that matter, I was a dumpster baby outlander, deserted by this weird stranger of ours, who left me at the house where an orphan would most likely be euthanized, the last place on earth where a kid might find true happiness.

I’ve got a bone to pick with that guy, or that gal, should we ever discover their identity. It’s only dumb luck that some paper-pushing adjunct in the federals’ civil service department took pity on an abandoned infant saddled with the rather ridiculous name of Joop Thursday.

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