Breaking Commandments on Level Alpha

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. As the dimly-lit lift slowly shuddered its way upwards on creaking cables, Eve could hear familiar howling rising up through the shaft. MOM suddenly began quizzing her from speakers set into the ceiling, Her tinny voice competing with the wailing of the dogs below. “What are Eve’s Commandments?” asked MOM.

“One, Eve must not attempt to acquire the code,” Eve recited. “Two, Eve must report all observations to The Council immediately upon descent. Three, Eve must not fall in love with Adam.”

“Outstanding, Eve,” came the reply after a pause. More than a century overseeing all functions in The Bunker had left MOM showing her age. The underground river that powered Her generators had begun flooding upward over the last few years, leaving Levels Zulu and Yankee completely submerged. Water encroaching on Level X-Ray had reached the server banks. As a result, MOM was able to run only a few functions at once. These days, use of the elevator cut power to Levels Juliet, Kilo, and Lima, thrusting anyone tending to the hydroponic agricultural pods into total darkness while the lift was in motion.

Recent events had necessitated the selection of a new Eve from the pool of girls, and on her fourth weekly trip to Level Alpha, despite a lifetime of preparation, Eve’s trepidation still ran high. Adams and Eves were appointed for life, and though those lives were always expected to be short and painful, tragedy had struck the last pair and Eve had found herself advanced to the position before she felt ready, though, due to the nature of the assignment, maybe one could never be truly ready for something like this.

Eve’s ancestors, who had built The Bunker, had been forward thinking and ingenious, but even they, with all their resources and advantages, had not been able to fully prepare for every possibility. She examined her printout, making sure that the cart full of foodstuffs and necessities contained everything on her list. It did. The dogs howled.

As the lift shuddered to a stop at the apex of its shaft on Level Alpha, Eve could hear Adam speaking through the door. “Adam must not fall in love with Eve,” he said. Barks echoed up the shaft.

“Outstanding, Adam,” came MOM’s reply as the door slid open. Composing herself, and doing her best to conceal her nervousness, Eve pushed the cart into the antechamber that comprised the whole of Level Alpha.

Over a hundred years ago, MOM’s sensors had been burned away in the early hours of The Conflict. The Adam/Eve system had been instituted as a contingency plan. Adam was standing by his bed in the meagerly furnished chamber. Eve could see the last of the day’s dying light through the porthole in the door that provided The Bunker’s only access to the outside world. The door had not been opened in over a century.

The first Adam had survived less than a day. The most recent had been five years into his post before he had hanged himself with his bedsheets, unable to live without his Eve, which Eve thought spoke to the fragility of The Commandments, though she would never dare suggest such a thing out loud.

“Hello,” said Adam, looking quite nervous as Eve began placing the containers of rice and mushrooms on shelves affixed to the wall. Eve returned his greeting, but avoided eye contact. The pools of potential Eves and Adams were raised in seclusion on Levels Papa and Quebec, respectively, and, other than certain members of The Council, Eve had never met anyone who wasn’t also a girl dressed in white, training for a task one could never quite prepare for. Adams and Eves were both expected to regard their sacrifice as an honor. Adam and Eve were both quite nervous.

Eve took her time putting the sundries away, pointing her eyes at the words scratched into the walls by previous residents of the chamber, at the collection of books on the nightstand, at the numeric keypad set next to the door, anywhere but at Adam, who shuffled about behind her, trying to make conversation that she acknowledged with a series of polite noises. The excited apprehension she was feeling filled her with a titillating dread.

The chamber was drab gray with architecture that formed sharp right angles, in contrast to the lower living levels with their rounded ceilings painted to look like blue skies skimmed with clouds that transitioned seamlessly into walls covered in murals of nature-scenes. No one who lived in The Bunker other than the current Adam and Eve ever saw The Outside.

Once the food was stowed away, Eve pulled three books from the cart and approached Adam who took them eagerly from her hands. She had read the one with the whale attacking a ship on the cover herself, understanding little of the story, which took place in a world that seemed too big to be real, with a diverse cast of characters, each with stories of their own so sprawling that she could barely comprehend them. She found it hard to believe that anything as big as a whale could possibly live, but they didn’t anymore, so maybe it didn’t matter.

The only animals Eve had ever seen were mice, found on every level of The Bunker, and cats, each and every one in the colony as black as pitch with gleaming yellow eyes. The cats followed the mice, but avoided the levels above Juliet for reasons known only to them, which many took as a warning. There were dogs on Level Whiskey, which had once been one of the pantry stores, but they were a feral cannibalistic pack, and no Survivor had seen them in a long time, save the one who had set Eve on this path.

Adam took the books from her hands and examined them. “Were fish really that big?” he asked, examining the cover of the hardback, as if she somehow knew things he didn’t, which she did.

“It’s a whale,” said Eve, confidently, “Not a fish.”

“Oh,” replied Adam, running his fingers over the embossed albino beast.

“You need to strip and stand under the light,” said Eve, suddenly. Being on Level Alpha was dangerous. That was the whole point. She didn’t know what happened to Adams and Eves at the end of their posts, but she knew it was bad. It was known that Eves grew sicker and sicker over the years as they made more and more trips up, until they would suddenly disappear and The Council would select another.

Before she went back down Eve needed to examine Adam for telltale signs of the sickness, any sores, boils or even patches of dry skin. She was expected to wiggle each of his teeth in turn and to run her hands through his hair and make note of how many strands came out. Once a month one of The Council would do the same to her. She didn’t want to linger too long.

Adam stared at her, clearly uncomfortable too. Prior to meeting Eve on her first trip up, the only women he had ever seen were matronly members of The Council. “Hey! Let’s look out the window! It rained last night,” he grinned at her, clearly procrastinating.

The porthole was The Bunker’s weakest point, the place where whatever badness that made the world unlivable seeped in from outside. Despite this, curiosity got the better of her and Eve took Adam’s hand and let him lead her the few steps to the door. This was the first time he had done this, but she had noticed on her prior visits that the porthole had been caked with some sort of yellow dust, offering only a smeary glimpse of the night. This was no longer the case. Hesitantly, she looked through the glass.

All color had fled the twilight landscape, but she could see a steep hillside rushing down away from her beyond a flat patch of ground just outside the door. The melted husk of what she imagined was some vehicle could be spied at one edge of the clearing, but long stalks of some vegetation growing through and around it obscured most of her view of the thing. She understood that The Bunker had been built under a mountain, but gazing through the glass she caught her first sight of a real one. The murals below could not do it justice.

The sun had fallen behind the range across the valley and it was the biggest anything Eve had ever seen. Craggy prominences rose to the sky as stars gathered in the inky blackness above them. Something shimmered liquidly in the lowlands below. Eve’s breath hitched in her chest as Adam took her by the shoulders and steered her body until she was peering up and to the left. Eve saw a gleaming silver-yellow light blazing in the sky and her breath caught again.

“Is that the Sun?” she asked, staring at the bright orb above her.

“No,” said Adam, “The Sun lights up the whole sky. That is Her little sister, The Moon, who comes out at night.”

Eve forgot all about the danger and her task and her Commandments as she examined the celestial body. None of the murals below featured night scenes, and she had expected The Moon to be smaller or dimmer or something that it was not. Her pockmarked and scarred skin spoke of violence suffered over an unimaginable timespan, and yet She had persevered, illuminating the night, since a time when humanity was just a trillion to one roll of the dice until now, as She looked down at the last of them.

A cloud passed in front of the moon, bringing Eve’s reverie to an end. She was suddenly very aware of her proximity to the outside and hugged herself as she moved away from the window. “I need to examine you,” she said.

“Come sit with me,” said Adam, crossing the small chamber and taking a seat on the neatly made bed, “I want to show you something.” Eve wandered over, but did not sit until he patted the spot next to him. Eve politely perched on the edge of the mattress. Adam was grinning wildly as he leaned across her and opened the drawer of his nightstand and withdrew something that he concealed in his closed palm. “Hold out your hand,” he said, his dark eyes shining above his bright smile. Eve held out her hand.

He placed what at first she took for a mouse’s skull in her grasp. She rotated the small cranium in the light, trying to discern the function of the sharp protuberance erupting from its face. “Is this a bird’s skull?” Eve asked with sudden realization.

“Yes!” shot Adam, beaming.

“Where did you get it?” asked Eve, incredulously.

“She brought it to me,” replied Adam, turning toward the head of the bed. Eve noticed with amazement that there was a white cat curled up on the pillow, invisible against the bleached linens up until this point.

“But all The Bunker’s cats are black,” said Eve, as understanding dawned on her. “She came from outside,” came out as a whisper.

Adam pointed to a vent set near the floor. “It doesn’t look like she’d fit, but she does,” he said, “She comes here a lot. Sometimes she brings me dead birds.” He leaned over Eve again and pet the cat, who raised her head, yawning, and blinked at them with pale blue eyes. “I named her Snow,” he added, scratching under her chin. Still perched on the edge of the bed, Eve leaned against him and reached out to the cat, who sniffed her fingers.

“She doesn’t seem sick,” said Eve.

“She’s not,” replied Adam, his mouth close to her ear as they both pet the cat. “I want to show you something else,” he said, reaching toward the bottom drawer of the nightstand, “Close your eyes.”

Eve heard the squeak of the wooden drawer opening, then Adam suddenly rose and stood on the bed behind her. “Okay, open them,” he said.

Eve opened her eyes as a rain of iridescent plumage fell all around her. Adam was shaking them from his closed fists. “She brings a lot of birds,” he said, laughing. Snow leapt from the pillow and swatted wildly at the feathers. Eve felt like she was having a truly new experience for the first time in a long time. His hands empty, Adam plopped down beside her and regarded her with a serious look. “I need to tell you something,” he said. Eve noticed beads of sweat on his trembling upper lip.

“Of course,” said Eve. Her head was swimming a bit. Everything felt sharp and new.

“I only kept that one skull and these feathers,” said Adam, “I didn’t know what to do with the rest of them. I didn’t want to send half-eaten bird bodies down with my garbage and bucket, because I didn’t want anyone to worry. So, I…,” he stopped.

A pregnant pause hung in the air between them. “MOM would know if you opened the door,” offered Eve, trying to find an explanation for the unthinkable.

“MOM is broken,” offered Adam, sadly, “I’ve been as far as the river. She doesn’t know.” Eve’s head swam. Adam hadn’t shown as much as a pimple during his last examination and his hair was lush and full. “Snow isn’t sick, Eve, we’re the sick ones.”

Eve thought about the last Eve, who’d been a flighty girl since childhood, spending much of her time laying on the floor by the elevator shaft howling back at the dogs below. Her selection had come as a surprise, but MOM worked in mysterious ways and all The Survivors knew that she was guided in many of Her decisions by the genetic codes their ancestors had uploaded to Her, though they no longer quite knew what that meant.

Active Eves were forbidden from speaking about what happened on Level Alpha, and so they tended to shy away from the others. This seclusion seemed to have driven the previous Eve to some madness and after some years she had found the courage to use her elevator privileges to descend to the dogs on Level Whiskey and had not been seen again. The previous Adam had tied his bedsheets to the broken camera high up in the corner of Level Alpha’s antechamber. There were other Eves that had jumped down the shaft. Maybe they were the sick ones.

Eve laid back and put her head on the pillow. Snow jumped onto her chest as Adam lay down beside her. She felt like she’d been up here for a very long time. “I think The Council likes it this way. I think they’re afraid. They don’t care about us,” he said. It sounded like he was confessing and Eve nodded her head, realizing how much sense that made. She ran her hands across the cat. The room suddenly felt very warm.

Eve didn’t remember rising, but suddenly found herself standing back at the door. “What is the code?” she asked. Adam pressed up close behind her and whispered the digits in her ear. Snow slinked between their legs as she pushed buttons on the keypad in sequence.

Aging servos set into the wall squealed as the door slid open. Snow dashed outside as a sweet midsummer night’s breeze slipped into the chamber. Eve felt her skin prickle with goosebumps. Adam wrapped his arms around her from behind. “We shouldn’t tell them,” he said.

Moments later Eve found herself running down the grassy hillside following a white cat that gleamed in the moonlight towards the shimmering waters below. The Bunker’s open door receded behind them as they ran, hands entwined, breaking all of their Commandments.