One Pure Light In The Darkness

ONE PURE LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

By Robert More

The pavement was burning hot beneath his feet, so hot it felt like the soles of his boots were going to melt. Another emergency beep from his survival watch. He glanced at the screen, it was now flashing red. Less than ninety seconds left.

He increased his pace. Breathing was hard now, and he was beginning to feel lightheaded. Thirty more seconds and he would start to pass out. Great! Dying like a dog in the street in the noon day sun. How could he let this happen? Stupid! So stupid! The emergency beep again. This time, not stopping, the warning signal flashing. The apartment building! He could see it, next corner. Twenty- five seconds left. His eyes wanted to close. Without losing speed, he slapped his face hard and pushed his body to the limit. “Note to self - don’t ever bloody do this again!”.

Ten seconds left. The door was there. He punched in the code, staggered into the lobby, grabbed one of the emergency oxygen masks, held it over his mouth and nose with both hands, collapsed on the floor, and lay there on the cool floor gasping for air, pulling the oxygen in through his nose, refusing unconsciousness, forcing his eyes open wide, repeating his mantra over and over ... “Light, I will not have darkness, light only light … light only light …”

After a few seconds of drawing the cool, clean oxygen into his lungs, he felt his breathing slowing down, the trip-hammer of his heart no longer beating like it was going to rip through his chest. He pulled himself upright and forced himself to climb the stairs to his fifth floor Protective Unit. That’s what they called them now – Protective Units. Whatever happened to “apartment”?

As soon as he was back in his own space, the first thing he did was to plug in his Mobile Respirator to restore its oxygen to maximum. Then he checked the carbon monoxide levels in his unit to be sure they were not above the acceptable limit. These two actions were automatic. On a planet without trees and no breathable air left, if you wanted to live, you did this first, always, no exceptions.

His felt his mind relax as he began to respond to his private space. There were plants everywhere. The walls were a light ocean blue with gold stars delicately painted in at the top. This was a world of its own making, the source of his sanity, an affirmation for being alive, a symbol that there was a future that somehow could be different.

After taking in several more deep breaths, he began the daily ritual. He poured water into a glass pitcher, careful not to spill a drop, careful to measure the exact amount. Water was the precious commodity. Global wars had been fought over it for decades and millions had died.

First, touching the soil in the pots with his fingertips to test for dryness, then tracing the leaves to feel their cool freshness, taking time to notice every change in texture, every modulation of green, then breathing in the scent of the flowers, letting the petals touch his face.

He needed this to combat the broken reality of the world outside. It had all happened so much faster than predicted, and within a decade everything had spun completely out of control. The Arctic melt had gone too far, oceans rose and cities drowned. The ozone layer was too thin and skin burned.

It became a planet of refugees. Millions upon millions died trying to escape a thousand mile wide dust bowl that circled the middle of the planet. The fight for fresh water was vicious. Under this kind of pressure to survive, it’s amazing how efficient human beings are at killing each other. By 2087, out of eight billion people, only eight hundred million people survived.

The communion with his plants pulled his mind away from images of destruction. He had begun to relax and realized with a smile that he actually felt excited. When was the last time he experienced the unexpected? He cast his mind back but he could not think of an incident when surprise broke through the daily grind.

When he was ready he sat down and pulled a gold heart-shaped locket from his pocket. It was a mystery and mysteries were hard to come by these days.

He placed it carefully on the table in front of him and sat down to look at it. How could this be? How was it possible that an object such as this had come into his life? Why was it there? Buried in the sand at the beach? What did this mean? Stepping on it by accident. Did it mean anything? Is this a story of old? Of buried treasure? He laughed at the thought.

He picked the locket up, taking care to let his hands run over every part of its surface on the front. He felt the temperature of the metal, looked for any changes on the surface, a rough spot perhaps, an imperfection, but he found none. Soon he slipped into complete absorption with his inspection. He did this for many minutes. Then he closed his eyes and did it again. A distant memory formed in his mind.

His forehead felt hot and his mouth went dry. He turned the locket over and brushed off the sand encrusted there. There was an inscription:

“One Pure Light In The Darkness”.

He opened the locket. There was a picture of Laura.

Immediately, his hands started to shake, his heart-rate jacked into high gear, and his mind raced as he flashed back to the last time he saw her. It was thirty years ago. They were both fighters in the Great City Elite Brigade. The Mutant Hunters, thousands of them, had been pushing hard against the outside wall. Some of them had broken through and he and Laura found themselves trapped. They knew what their chances were of getting out of this alive, and being captured was not an option.

Before they made a run for it, Laura stood close to him and gently touched his face with her hands. Then she stepped back, turned, and ran ahead of him with both guns blazing. She sacrificed herself so that he could live. He never saw her again.

That was twenty-three years ago. He felt hot tears rolling down his cheeks as waves of memories swept over him, an endless string of images of her. Her smile, her fierce, brilliant eyes. She had been everything to him. When she died that day, a part of him had died with her. He thought he had lost her forever, but now, in a bizarre twist of fate she had come back to him.

His mind was spinning, grasping for answers he knew he would never find. Had Laura somehow made her way back to the inner beach? Did she drop the locket by mistake? Did she bury it there hoping that one day he would find it, knowing it was his go-to place when he wanted to get away from it all.

A knock at the door. They were checking on him. He knew they would. Running down a street at high noon was aberrant behaviour, and above all things, that was one thing The Eye would not tolerate.

He hid the locket behind one of the plants, calmed his breathing, placed a look of practiced innocence on his face, and opened the door. The grim face of a Protocol Keeper. Without asking, he stepped directly into my unit.

“Number 96434081?”

“Yes, sir”.

“You are being given a first warning for abnormal behaviour”.

“For letting my oxygen unit run out?

“Yes. Explain”

“It’s entirely my fault. I work at Research 10 in the Global Atmosphere Department. I was taking readings of the oxygen-carbon dioxide ratios in order to provide information for the Planet Saviour Environment Rehabilitation Project, and I stupidly lost track of time”.

“96434081, you are aware of the Primary Survival Directive?

“Yes sir, I am”.

“You understand that if you set foot outside of the Great City Environment Air Control, you have only “12 Minutes to Breathe?”

“Yes sir, I do”.

“And yet you went outside anyway”

“Yes, sir, I did”

“Hummph”. The grey-faced man made an entry into his electronic surveillance device. “Your aberrant action has been reported to Protocol Keepers Central. You will monitored by Security Alert for the next twenty-eight days.”

The Black Hat with the Pasty Face turned sharply and left the apartment. They were a practical lot, these Protocol Keepers, all business, he thought to himself, a real barrel of laughs.

Still, now that he had a secret, he would have to be careful. A distant memory of the fragment of a song began to form. What were they called? Musicals! “Sit down, sit down, sit down, Sit down you’re rockin the boat”. Sage advice then, but the only advice to follow now. Rock the boat and you could find yourself banished to the “Outside”, and then you’re a goner. If the inferno heat doesn’t get you, the oxygen deprivation will, or worse, you could fall into the hands of the Water Warlords. Their cruelty was legendary with an easy willingness to slit a child’s throat and drink its blood.

Forcing this image from his brain, he rolled back the edge of the carpet, removed a floorboard, and pulled out a tattered notebook filled with pages of writing in pen. On the top of a new page he wrote the words: “One Pure Light In The Darkness”.

He picked up the locket and looked at the picture of Laura for a moment, then placed the locket and the notebook carefully beneath the floorboard, which now for him was a sacred space.

As he lay in bed that night, he made a decision. It was a dangerous one. Writing of a personal nature was forbidden unless it was registered with and monitored by The Eye. Any deviation from this procedure and punishment was swift and harsh.

In the darkness he heard the giant guns pushing back the nightly attacks, and he knew that when he awoke the next morning, the world would not have changed. It would be the same broken place as it had been the day before, and tomorrow would be exactly the same as yesterday, and exactly the same the next day and the next until he died.

And yet, he felt strangely at ease.

“Tomorrow I’ll start a story”, he thought to himself. “It will be Laura’s story. A story of courage and a heart-shaped locket found on a sandy beach. And as I write, I will honour this woman, and capture in the testament of words her heart, her spirit, the very pulse of her existence. This is my purpose now”.

His breathing was getting slower and deeper. He felt himself slipping into a sweet peacefulness that he had not known in a very long time. His eyes closed and he saw a fine, pure light shining into the vast darkness. As the light came closer, he realized it was the gold heart-shaped locket. Laura had found her way back into his life, and he knew her light could never be taken from him again.