The Day of Return

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. His name had been Oleg, a man from a different time and a different place with his name preserved on a gilded scrap of paper calling him a Bachelor of Arts, evidently something to be vaunted in the old world. He had lived in this place once upon a time, though that time was long past.

So many things were long past.

She remembered when she had been younger, a lifetime younger and yet in some ways as though it were yesterday, roaming through the forbidden sections of the Facility. There were many and they seemed to multiply like the mutated mushrooms they grew for food in the deep caverns. The digging down there was never-ending, always expanding, going ever further down.

Oleg’s room was a rare find, an unclaimed space and one full of potential at that. Completely hers and no one else’s. A place where she had been, and a place where she continued to be, free.

With a smile of somber remembrance, she ran one thin, wizened finger over the letters the young girl she could just remember being, had carved into the wall. “Mana Youssef. 12 years old.” Each year, on the anniversary of her first discovering Oleg’s room, she would mark her height on the wall here until she stopped growing.

It was so important to her, back then, to keep track of the passage of years with those marks. It mattered because she had already made the last mark, the last inscription that would ever adorn this place, save only her age. “Mana Youssef. ___ years old. Leaving,” because she had always planned on leaving. The Governors were always confident that someday soon they would leave the confines of the Facility and reclaim the outside world.

"Reclaim, reconquer, repopulate," as each governor died and was replaced through general election- when they weren't forced out of the position — they would talk about the outside world in those same terms. There was always going to be a re-something. The Facility was not going to be where they spent the rest of eternity, it was not possible. Yet each successive Governor gave way for the next, and the rhetoric never changed. Nor did the work on expansion.

For whom exactly they were making room was always a mystery. When Mana had been young, the Facility had always been full of people, of music, laughter, and fighting. It had been alive. But that was a long time ago now, a long time and many deaths.

Perhaps the numbers of people were unchanged, perhaps they were even increasing and that was the cause of the never-ending construction. But she thought that unlikely. The playmates of her youth were all grown old now — unless they were dead — and their children rarely had enough children even to replace themselves when their turn in the recyclers came.

The expansion was never-ending, and the population ever decreasing as far as she could tell. Even the children who were born, each one celebrated as a gift from above, were sickly and frail. Their lungs were weak and their bones were soft; all of them needed constant injections to ensure proper growth and as adults, their medical needs were hardly less than as children.

Some people would whisper, though Mana always shut her ears to it, that they were all slowly dying. That there was nothing left for them anymore, that one day, fertility would simply end. There was no hope. But Mana knew that hope continued, even as the prospect of walking through the wasteland grew beyond her capacity in time with the lengthening of her years.

Once, a former lover of hers, a man named Frederick, had shown her the Generation Vault. Tens of thousands of perfectly preserved, fertilized human embryos from the old world. Tall, strong, healthy people who were to have the best possible starts in life once the doors to the Facility opened. He was dead though, they said he had died in a mining accident not long after showing her that forbidden place.

He had gone into one of the shafts, following his instructions and the requirements of a lead engineer, to correct some issue or other. He never came back out. Routine, they insisted when she questioned them, strictly routine. A terrible accident. Mana suspected the lie.

She never went looking for the Generation Vault again and had placed a thin black line through his name in her heart. Dead and gone almost certainly as a result of discovering secrets that he should not have known. She could not run the risk of following after him, not when her own purpose could still have been fulfilled in those days, and only thought of him when one of her melancholies took over. Or when she stood in Oleg’s room and looked through his window — clearly forgotten by whoever had sealed the facility generations before — and saw the wasteland that the embryos would one day populate.

Over the years the wasteland had changed. New green grew, and seasons would shift from warm to bitterly cold and back again. Sometimes animals crossed before the window, busily walking from somewhere to somewhere else. They were not as Mana had envisioned them, those animals, but they were certainly there. Exactly as the Governor swore they would not be.

Drifting over to the window, Mana remembered the first time she had been brave enough to stick her head through and breathe outland air. It should not have been different from the air from inside the room itself, it should not have made a greater impact than that first unfiltered lungful as she passed through the door. But it had. The sweet air of the outlands that no one since her grandfather’s time had tasted.

It had been glorious.

She stuck her head out and breathed deeply. The taste of the air had faded, almost to a memory of a memory now, and the burning intensity of the sun now only dimly perceived on her neck. In the dark, down below, there were people who spent their whole lives chasing the first feeling of a drug or love or fear. They chased that desire, the sensation of something wholly new until their chasing days were done. For Mana, her chase was that first taste of out land air.

She had never found anything like it and remembered with relish the first taste every time she entered the room or poked her head outside. There was nothing in the world like that sense of freedom which came on a natural breeze. Even if, that time she tried to smell it, taste it, the flavour of the wind she saw blowing through the vibrant plants outside far below felt muted.

She could not remember the last time she had climbed up to Oleg’s room. The curse of age perhaps, is that even that which is loved is done a disservice by familiarity and time. Breathing the unfiltered air was likely unwise. The Governor always said, supported by the scientists, that the outlands were uninhabitable. They said that the very air was poison.

Yet here she was. Having breathed it on and off for years, one of the oldest people in the facility. It should have meant something, but she was old now. That world, the world outside, was not for her. Though she still remembered the dreams that she had spent so much of her youth in this room dreaming.

It had been her sacred space, the one that she always kept the most careful of secrets. In her youth, she had used the room to play pretend. She had been Mana the Great Explorer, from the base camp of her imagination she had voyaged into the wasteland and done battle against the ghouls and goblins that surely inhabited the outlands. As she grew, the room’s purpose shifted to other fantasies. More personal, mature, physical entertainments that required privacy to properly enjoy.

Now as she stood again in the stone box that was Oleg’s room. She recalled all of those memories, colouring slightly at some of them like she was watching a different person’s life take place. Strangely removed, as though she had not been that child who came here to dream after her graduation from standard education and the speech of then Governor Smith.

“Yours is to be the greatest generation,” Smith had said to the gathered students. Back then the graduations had been real events, with all the trappings of a party and the numbers of people that such things demanded. Unlike her own children’s lacklustre graduations. “It will be your noble task to, when the time is right, go out into and reclaim the wasteland for its rightful masters! Nothing will stand against you, and as you continue your training, in between your necessary contributions to the facility, know that soon you will leave humanity’s first footprints on the topsoil of its inheritance.”

Of course, the Day of Return never arrived. Of course, she was still underground, looking through a window and guessing at what the outside world could be like. It was right there, but the fall could kill her and she was no longer the energetic, imaginative girl who could have braved the climb. Even if she could bring enough rope.

No. Hers was not the destiny that would reclaim the outlands. But perhaps she could bring her sons up here, show this window to her grandchildren — few as they were — and pass on her dreams. How long had it been since anyone she knew even mentioned recapturing humanity’s homeland? Or surfacing to take their ancestors’ legacy?

Yes. That was something she could do, even if…

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound she had secretly feared for the totality of her time in Oleg’s room. The all too familiar tromp of boots in the hall, just beyond the empty rectangular arch that must once have held the door. Did the Governor know she was here?

In the end, she did not have to wait long.

By the sound of it, there was more than one pair of boots out there, rapidly approaching her private hideaway. She held no illusions about what would happen to her when the Governor’s enforcers arrived in Oleg’s room. She would be recycled and this last window sealed shut. Perhaps someday, if humanity survived so long, a different girl would discover the room and call it Mana’s room, seeing her name on the wall there and the space left for her age on the departing message.

The acoustics of the hall made the interval of waiting a torturous experience. Echoing footfalls made it sound like dozens of boots now, people by the score coming to Oleg’s room. All she could do was wait for them to arrive.

Now, at the end of it all, she thought how silly she had been to never bring a chair or box to serve as such into that room. Just because she had never expected to be in the room so old, with a back so sore, that was no excuse to have been so careless. Someone else might have needed or wanted to sit. Briefly, it occurred to her to be amused by her rambling thoughts about chairs. The idle thoughts of a mind that was waiting to die.

Voices could be heard now, whispered almost furtive conversation. What were the guards doing, whispering like that? Mana almost wanted to shout at them, to command that they cease this childish teasing and arrest her like professionals. She wanted to laugh again, imagine lecturing the people who were coming to execute her. Just like they had done to Frederick.

“There it is,” said a voice that lacked the firm authority indicative of the guards. Perhaps they were scared of the window; after all, everyone was taught from their earliest days that breathing outland air would cause a fate worse than death. “I told you it was here; can’t you smell it?”

“Don’t be absurd,” said another voice haughtily. Was that the Governor? “There’s nothing there. And that smell is just your mind playing tricks on you. Think about how far up we’ve come and those stairs you saw going further. We’re nowhere near the surface.”

“Shut up,” growled a familiar-sounding voice.

This was not right, Mana frowned at the door and tried to grasp why. Something in the back of her memory told her that this was not right, it was not as it was supposed to happen. The voices in the corridor beyond the door were supposed to be harsh, and angered, the stomp of the boots supposed to be firm and in lockstep.

Drifting towards the door, half wanting to shout at the guards to do their job properly, she stopped. Hovering, she wanted nothing more than for the interval of waiting to cease. The anticipation of her forthcoming end was nearly maddening.

“You don’t get to talk now,” it was that same familiar-sounding voice. Familiar though wrong somehow, as though too old for itself. Low and gravelly, it was exactly the kind of voice that Mana thought should accompany the tromp of boots that spelled her own death. Why was that? What about that voice stuck so clearly in her memory?

“Not after everything you’ve done,” again the voice, did it sound almost remorseful? How strange. It was not a voice built for such things. She felt as though she should know the voice, know its speaker. She knew everyone in the facility, there weren’t enough people left for any to not at least be a face in her memory. But the owner of that voice was floating just out of reach, not even on the tip of her tongue.

As she opened her mouth, finally determined to give these guards a piece of her mind, to reprimand them like the children she saw them as a sudden gust found its way through a crack in the metal that covered the window. Mana snapped her head around and stared at the metal. Had that always been there? No. No, it couldn’t have been. She had just put her head outside… hadn’t she? The metal sheets across the frame seemed to phase in and out of her vision but the air still found its way through.

It smelled wonderful, of sweet growing things for which she had no name. It was familiar, if not quite comforting, almost like some piece of her remembered what it had been like to be truly outside. Odd, since she had never truly left the facility.

There was a silence as the wind fluttered past her and through the door. It must have blown by the guards and the Governor. They must have smelled it. Of course, the Governor would already know about that place, she would already be keenly aware that Oleg’s room and the forbidden window existed, but the guards might just now have learned about the reason for the day’s activity. There was a way out.

“What do you call that then,” the familiar voice was almost mocking now. “Because I call it outland air.”

“Don’t be absurd,” the Governor’s voice was much closer to the door now. She sounded nervous, as though things were rapidly slipping away from her. “That’s just an errant gust, you know how the air units malfunction up here. If you ask me, something died in the vents and-”

With a strangled gasp, the Governor was pushed through the door and fell to the ground at Mana’s feet. The other woman looked up, eyes locked on the window, and said nothing. She stared straight through Mana, as though she were invisible, staring at the metal sheets. “See,” she said, an edge to her voice as the tiny breeze lifted strands of her hair. “There’s nothing there. Your little coup is all for naught.”

Clothing fluttering in the now constant breeze through the window that was somehow both open to the wasteland and sealed shut, Mana waited for something to happen. Something to explain why the most powerful person on the planet was sprawled at her feet instead of looming over her. Why the Governor was staring at the window instead of at the criminal that Mana’s presence there made her? When the Governor had gotten those lines around her eyes. Why…

The first guard appeared in the doorway and walked around Mana and the Governor. He strode to the window and breathed deeply. In one hand he had a crowbar, in the other a large hammer. Placing the latter on the ground, he raised the crowbar over his head and smashed its hook into the very edge of the metal covering on the window. Clearly feeling the strike bite deep, he took up his hammer and knocked on the crowbar, securing its hold. Then he pulled.

His heaving on the metal, the screech of the covering as it was slowly pulled away from its housing brought a pathetic whine from the Governor. A whine that petered out into a kind of desperate sobbing as the metal sheet fell away and warm, golden light filled the room. A stronger wind blew through the new hole in the wall, making Mana shudder like a candle flame.

Again there was silence, then other faces appeared in the door. Pale or ashen faces in accordance with how their complexion blended with the absence of natural light, all of them sniffing and breathing deeply. Some held impossibly long ropes made of old uniforms and blankets. They were all sniffing the air, tasting that first addictive hint of the outside world.

“You and yours,” said the guard whose name Mana now remembered was Albert. Had his hair always been that grey? “Have been keeping quite the secret from the rest of us Underlanders, haven’t you?”

“No,” the Governor's voice was so high pitched it was almost above hearing. A sob that was heart-wrenching and pathetic as the she gently thumped her head on the rough ground of Oleg’s room. “No. There’s nothing for us out there. The reels… the instructions… the directives from corporate… there’s nothing but death out there!”

“Steph,” said Albert. “Bring up the reader, we need to know what we’re dealing with here.”

“You’ll get us all killed,” the Governor wailed, looking up with naked pleading in her eyes. “Even being here is poison! We can’t… we can’t…” her voice broke as Stephanie stepped gently around her, narrowly missing Mana who had taken a step back.

“The air won’t kill us,” said Stephanie watching as words and numbers spooled across the screen of her ancient atmosphere device. “We should take some rad pills though, just to make sure. Looks like extended exposure to sunlight — that big thing in the sky if you don’t remember your standard ed science courses — is going to do us some pretty serious damage though. Best to cover up and be careful.”

“Anything else,” Albert’s voice was hoarse with anticipation. “Mana came up here for god knows how long and lived… well, she lived a damned long time.”

“Won’t know until we get an expedition out there,” Stephanie was the lead scientist for the whole facility. Mana could not understand what any of them were doing here, nor why nothing was playing out according to her expectations. Though she felt a deep hatred mixed with pity for the Governor who, for some unknowable reason, she kept picturing with a gas mask and rubber gloves.

Mana wanted to say something, wanted to shout at the people around her, demand answers for why they were behaving this way. But she didn’t. She closed her mouth and watched the drama unfold. They would talk to her, eventually. They had to.

“Get the portable sampler,” said Albert and Tommy stepped forward with the thing already tied to a rope. “Took us a little while to figure out how to use this one, eh Governor?” Albert’s tone was mocking. “Pulling all sorts of interesting things out of the tech vault and this is the one thing that the Secretary tried to hide? Honestly, you lot are pathetic.” Mana’s own sentiments in a nutshell.

She watched as the portable sampler on its rope was carefully lowered out the window. Several minutes of tense silence followed before Stephanie told the people holding the rope to haul it back up. Again, there was silence as the machine was slowly winched back in, followed by anxious mutterings as Stephanie interfaced her hand console with the sampler and read through the generated reports.

“It’s liveable,” she said. “Also… we found her.”

“No,” Albert’s voice was thick now, as though the gravel had gotten covered in wet mud. “No, we didn’t find her.” With more anger that Mana understood. “I already knew she was down there, it’s why I started this whole thing.”

A memory surfaced then, Albert’s stunned face poking around the door to Oleg’s room as a woman who could only be the Governor in gasmask and gloves pushed hard on Mana’s chest. The Governor looked younger in the memory, and she was not alone, other guards stood in a circle and watched as Mana tipped backwards and into the open air. She could taste the outside world, she could feel the wind in her hair and the burning sun on her skin. She was completely and totally aware of the sensation of falling and a sudden, shattering stop.

“This one is for Mana,” said Albert pulling a fresh blue jumpsuit on after discarding his more tattered grey one. “Today… today we remember the stories they told us about our destiny of going out there. Today we follow through on Mana’s dream and take the first steps that she always thought would be hers. Toni, we’re going to bring her back. Today… today we bring her back for a proper burial.”

The woman who had handed Albert the jumpsuit stepped back. Stepped through Mana who was still reeling from the memory of falling. From the memory of the sudden stop at the bottom. From the shock of being passed through. They did not speak to her, did not look at her, and did not know she was there because she was not. Toni, Mana’s granddaughter — when had she grown so tall? — wiped a tear from her eye and heaved a deep, shuddering breath.

“…We reclaim the outlands today,” Albert continued. Was he the new Governor? What had happened? “And we honour the first among us to leave the facility. Mana Youssef, the first woman on Earth.”