I.
The old man shuffles to his seat, a rickety wooden chair on a round dais. A tall steel lamp is next to the chair, its bulb uncovered but dim, sometimes flickering like a candle. Everyone who will come to listen has already gathered. Children sit up front, their legs crossed Indian-style, already enraptured by the old man and he hasn’t even opened his mouth. Adults stand by the back, watching their children. Some smoke fragrant herbs from their pipes or rolled into thin cigarettes. They have all heard the old man’s story before. As he walks, he pokes the ground with a cane, his blindness further evidence that he is from aboveground, that he has eyes that were made for the sun. The adults too have trouble seeing, but not as badly as the old man; the children’s eyes have adapted to the dimness and their descendents will see perfectly, their eyes letting in more and more light. It was one of the great ironies, the old man says, that just as humanity began to adapt to the filtered, too-bright sunlight that burned outside the Habitats, they were forced below. The children do not understand just what he means by this, but they feel what his deep sighs signify.
As he has done for years, so regularly that it has become something of a ritual for the People of Below, the old man sits in the rickety wooden chair, rests his cane across his knees, and begins his story.
The forty-third floor of Levi’s Habitat actually took up three stories. Squat trees pressed against the ceiling, vines curling up their trunks. Once there had been paths through the forest, but it had been allowed to go to seed; so long as the flora and fauna stayed on the forty-third, the Board was content to let the floor be wild. Back when the designers planned for the Habitats they had speculated that some form of wildness would be necessary. Without some connection to the natural world, the people would likely become alienated, they claimed. So, while most floors were strictly monitored—rows of corn and wheat on the crop-floors, rows of apartments on the residence-floors, and so on—the forty-third was a tangled mess of green and brown, sporadic red berries or tiny yellow-and-blue flowers sprouting before dropping to the ground or withering on the vine. There was no wind, of course, but Levi heard a constant rustle caused by the feral cats and small rodents that roamed the undergrowth. In the branches above, birds twittered happily. He could see chickadees hopping and heard a raven caw and flap its wings, but couldn’t see it. When he and Supna were dating they used to walk through here, occasionally sneaking between the trees to do things they couldn’t do at home. Now he had come to the forest-floor for a different reason—though it was still something he couldn’t do at home.
Ruslan was waiting for him half a mile in from the east entrance, leaning against a birch. If he was picking his teeth, Levi thought he could have been auditioning to play a tough loner onstage. Instead, he broke into a jovial grin—too jovial for the situation, in Levi’s opinion—and stood up straight.
“You made it,” he said casually. His grin faded. “You weren’t followed?”
Levi shook his head. “Of course not.”
Ruslan looked around anyway, peering into the foliage even though it was too dense for him to see anything. But apparently he was satisfied; the grin returned and he turned away, motioning for Levi to follow.
Shortly, they came to a small clearing with two wide stumps in the center. The rest of the people were there, some crowded on the stumps, others standing. There were fifteen in all, the core of the movement.
Supna was there, of course, and Levi smiled politely, but didn’t move any closer. She was sitting next to Richard, which didn’t necessarily mean anything, Levi reminded himself. After scanning the remaining faces, he decided that he had been the last to arrive. Ruslan didn’t waste any time nor did he need to hush anyone before he could begin talking.
“I’m glad you all made it,” he began, “That you all feel this is as imperative—important—as it is. I think we’ve all known for some time how hard it can be to see the big picture from in here.” His sweeping arm encompassed not just the forest, but the whole Habitat. Levi looked up at the ceiling some twenty-five feet above, reminded that though he was in a forest, it was artificial, enclosed. A squirrel shot across his field of view, leaping from one quaking branch to another and scampering into the thick leaves closer to the trunk. Levi had read that other Habitats had different animals; ones in the area that used to be known as Africa supposedly had cats the size of people and even huge plant-eaters with horns and teeth sticking out of their faces. When he was a boy, Levi had often accompanied his uncle to one of the herd-floors—or the slaughter-floors, as they were more colloquially known—where he worked, but even those cows were supposedly pygmies compared to what used to roam outside.
Ruslan wasn’t one to waste time with formalities and so he forged right ahead. “We’ve been waiting for years, trying to get our voices heard, to get our people on the Board, and we’ve been ignored. Brushed aside like pestering children.” As he talked, his hands swooped and stabbed in the air. “We’ve waited long enough.”
Levi knew it was coming, inevitable really, but hearing Ruslan lay out the plan still shocked him. Generations had lived in the Habitats peacefully, raising crops and herds, maintaining the technology they understood less every day, trying to remember what things used to be like. What Ruslan was proposing—what they had already agreed to—could only be called one of two things: mutiny or revolution.
From the first days of the Habitats—not many years before the outside was deemed completely uninhabitable, the sun’s rays too hot for life—there were the Boards. Each Habitat—already populated with the elite thinkers and doers of the Earth—elected its best for the positions. Originally, only seven, but rising as the populations inside the Habitats ballooned.
The Habitats dotted the globe like so many glass and metal pimples. Each was nearly a square mile and stretched upwards for one hundred stories. At the time, there had been arguments to use the resources for interstellar ships, capable of maintaining small civilizations while they searched for a habitable planet. But no one knew if they would find a habitable planet or how long it would take, and the people spoke: Better the devil you know.
Levi wondered whether that was worth it. Supposedly, the desert he stared out on had once been a forest like the one behind him. He couldn’t picture it; nothing could have lived out there. The only thing other than dirt and rocks were the fields of solar panels that powered the underground storerooms. Hardly an inspiring sight.
Everyone else had gone, dispersing to the various exits in ones and twos, but Levi had lingered by the southwestern exit. There, he watched the last sliver of sun sink behind the wasteland, squinting despite the heavily tinted glass. Along the edges, the forest was sparse. When Levi looked up, he could see the ceiling, painted a color that was called sky blue for some reason. Outside, the sky was a malarial yellow, not much different from the dead and sizzling soil. Just another anachronism, he thought.
As the darkness spread, Levi left the forest-floor and began his descent. There were elevators, but he didn’t see the need when his apartment was only a dozen floors down. Besides, he liked the tightness in his legs as he walked the stairs, the feeling that they were getting stronger with every step.
On the thirtieth floor, he exited the stairwell and headed along the twisting hallways toward his room. For his generation the halls were second nature—not to mention that each style of floor was set out according to the same plan—but Levi could imagine how difficult it must have been for the first inhabitants. He could imagine them wandering the hallways for hours, trying keycards in the wrong doors, collapsing in frustration. His generation could get lost in their thoughts, glancing up just in time to see their front door. Which is what Levi was doing, alternating between thinking about the coup and dinner. It was an even-numbered Tuesday, which meant that he could cook for himself, a privilege he had applied for multiple times before it was finally granted just over a year earlier. For a time, he and Supna would eat together—she piggy-backing on his pass—usually with Levi cooking. His skills grew and he even felt that he became something of an experimental chef when he began incorporating Supna’s bold and spicy Indian flavors into his more pedestrian recipes. Since the break-up though, his cooking had suffered. For two months, he hadn’t even bothered with it, just going to his dining hall with the rest of the people in his segment. Even then, he had mostly just pushed his food around his plate.
He was lost in this reverie, following his feet, when Supna came around the corner.
Both were startled—Supna lived a floor below—and stammered their hellos.
“What are you doing here?” Levi finally managed to ask, though the question came out more confrontational than he intended.
“Taking the long way back,” she answered. “To be safe.”
Levi immediately began cataloging all of the single men in the area, wondering who she could be visiting. There was more than one possibility, but he told himself to stop thinking about such things and take Supna at her word.
“Bet you didn’t expect the cloak and daggers,” he remarked.
She shrugged, “Well, everything’s different now.”
“Everything has been different for a while.”
“Very angsty,” she drawled. “Are you going to write a poem?”
Levi snorted. “Fair enough.” Her sarcasm was one of the qualities that first drew him to Supna. He couldn’t come up with barbs like she could, but admired it. He motioned toward his room. “Do you want to make your walk even longer?”
“Sure,” she said, falling in step. “Did you stay up there to watch the sunset?”
Levi nodded. “Figured I was there. Why not?”
Supna nodded back. “One of these days. When we get out of here.”
“It won’t be the same though. It won’t be the sun.”
“At least it’s a sun. And it’ll be outside.”
They had reached his door. No one else stood in the hallway; most likely, they were in the one of the dining halls.
“Hey,” Levi blurted, “Do you want to come in for dinner? I’m allowed to cook tonight. Bell peppers’ve come in.”
“Levi…”
“It’s just dinner,” he protested.
“You know it’s not.”
“Fair enough.” Levi reached for the keycard hanging around his neck. “I’ll see you later.”
Supna turned away as he did. “One of these days,” she said.
After chopping the bell peppers—both green and red—Levi used the knife to slide them off the cutting-board and into the oil he was heating in his wok. As they cooked, he cubed the chicken breast that had been in the waiting dinner package along with the peppers. The spices and hempseed oil Levi had in his kitchen already.
It wasn’t much of an apartment, really. The whole thing was one room, a combination bedroom/living room with a kitchen nook. Every twenty apartments shared a dormitory-style bathroom. He had a bed that doubled as a couch, a small, boxy television on an equally boxy stand, a coffee table and one wooden chair. Three of the walls were blank, sparse white, but the far wall was covered with old photographs of nature scenes, stolen from the Habitat’s archives, their labels faint and peeling. The foam and spray from a churning Niagara Falls splashed onto a canopy shot from the Amazonian rain forest. Mules that were little more than specks traversed the Grand Canyon. One shot was of a lonely tree standing in the middle of a vast, snowy field. Levi didn’t know where that had been taken; after a couple generations things like upkeep had been abandoned and the archives went to seed. Levi had been lucky to find as many labeled pictures as he had and he knew it. People still poked around in there and some even believed there was hidden—or lost—knowledge in the information junkyard, but nothing of any real value had been produced since well before Levi’s birth. Until Ruslan, he corrected himself.
Still, despite the archives’ degeneration, the Habitat did run smoothly; he had to admit that. It had fallen into a lazy sort of existence, everyone going about their business, whether that business was raising chickens, or breaking down the hemp stalks for rope or clothing, or delivering cooking packets. Just like walking through the halls, it could all be done as if asleep.
In fact, Levi had gotten lost again, stir-frying the chicken and vegetables on autopilot. He flipped on the TV as a distraction. There were two closed-circuit channels, one for news and one for entertainment. On the latter there were mostly old films and sitcoms salvaged from the archives. When they inevitably corroded, that was that. As a child, Levi had cried for what seemed like a full day when his parents told him Dumbo was gone forever.
The news channel often also showed entertainment, despite its supposed mission. We live in a box, Ruslan had once sullenly remarked, how much news could there be?
Dinnertime always had a rundown of the day’s events though, no matter how mundane. While he tossed his stir-fry, Levi listened to the anchor drone from behind his desk. A group of three had attempted to leave through one of the airlocks. Each Habitat had two in case it needed outdoor repairs, but the Habitats were so well made no one had used one for decades. Until some people began getting cabin fever. Over the course of one week almost two years earlier, six people had left. Their bodies were found just feet from the hatch, scorched and bloated beyond recognition. After that, guards had been posted at each airlock. Levi had thought that multiple guards were unnecessary, but as he listened to the news that night he changed his mind. Not only had the would-be escapees convinced one guard to go with them, the second guard actually had to taser two of them before they would be subdued.
He poured the stir-fry into a bowl and pulled his set of cow-bone chopsticks from a drawer. The news anchor continued droning, on some other subject now, and Levi watched while his mind wandered back to the forest, to the meeting with Ruslan and the others. Clearly, they weren’t the only ones who wanted out.
The next morning, as he did every weekday, Levi woke at just before six. He put on his robe and shuffled down the hall to shower and make himself presentable. After dressing, he had just enough time to grab a couple slices of toast from the miniscule cafeteria in the twenty-seventh floor’s school where he taught the five-year-olds. It was a group effort, a fact for which Levi had thanked god countless times. When he put in for the apprenticeship he had thought it would be easy. Of course, by then he was twenty and hardly remembered his own early schooling. He had assumed it would be all playing with blocks, finger-painting and the occasional story about the importance of sharing. In the four years since he had begun, Levi had spent far more time cleaning up vomit and telling stories about the importance of not biting.
His co-teacher, a sympathizer of about his own age named Elyse, handed him a tiny cup of strong coffee. Each morning the first teacher to arrive would scoop a small amount of the powder into a carafe, pour boiling water over it and wait until the other teachers arrived so that they could all share. Apparently coffee had been made from beans of some sort, but no one really remembered. All they knew was that the people who had stocked the vast floors of storerooms beneath the Habitat had made sure there would be enough of the instant pick-me-up for centuries. An entire floor of the sub-basements had been devoted to its storage.
“So how was your night?” Elyse asked him after he had thanked her and they had taken appreciative sips.
Though Levi knew she agreed with the conspirators, he was uncomfortable. If any word got back to the Board, everyone at the previous night’s meeting would be thrown in the brig. Being holed up there, underground, would be even worse than living in the Habitat. At least aboveground he could look outside and imagine.
“It was fine,” he said noncommittally, “Smooth sailing.”
“Did you go for a walk in the woods?”
Levi nodded. “It was… invigorating.”
“So things are motion?” she bubbled.
Again, trying to be noncommittal, he nodded.
Before Elyse could ask any more questions, they were interrupted by the arrival of two-dozen squealing five-year-olds. Levi slurped down the rest of his coffee, put the cup in the sink and a smile on his face, and began his day.
It wasn’t even lunchtime before a breathless young man—probably apprenticing in the administrative office—burst into the classroom. In between pants, he gave Levi and Elyse the news, spotty though it was: the Board’s daily meeting had been stormed by hundreds of young protestors, demanding a say and brandishing homemade weapons. The protestors—who were calling themselves Escapists—had locked the Board members in their chambers and the Escapist leader, a man named Ruslan Henke, was demanding their immediate removal. Within the week, he vowed, elections would be held and a new Board would take over.
As the young man repeated this, Levi watched his face carefully, sometimes sneaking glances at Elyse. They were afraid—as was he, truthfully—but Levi could also tell that when the time came, Ruslan would be elected Chairman in a landslide.
II.
The view was the same, but everything else around Levi was different. Not only had the forty-third floor forest been felled, but the windows and walls had been knocked out as well. Not to mention all the demolished floors above it. All in preparation for the colony ship launch.
Workers streamed around him, carrying sheets of titanium and massive copper coils. In their outside-suits, with the bulging, tinted faceplates, Levi thought they looked like giant bugs.
He and Ruslan strolled the work area, presumably surveying the work, though Levi knew nothing about spacecraft himself. Ruslan carried the rolled-up blueprint from the archives in a dark plastic tube under his left arm. He couldn’t take it out or it would burn, but he had said it would be good for morale. Every day was one closer to launch and people were beginning to get anxious.
Still, the crew seemed to be in high spirits and they worked quickly. The airlock the two men walked through to enter the fetal spaceship hissed open and shut efficiently, modeled after the airlocks that kept the Habitat safe in the first place. Once they were inside, they could unsnap their helmets and breath fresh air, which Levi did greedily. How stale would the colony ship air get? he wondered. Would he finally reach another world only to have lost his mind along the way? It was an irony he didn’t much enjoy considering.
“It’s inspiring isn’t it?” Ruslan asked, mistaking his thoughts.
“It is.”
Ruslan ran his hand through his shoulder-length blonde hair. “You know, Lev, it’s almost time. There’s, what? Two months left? Look how quickly we did this. Barely more than a year. It’s goddamn treasonous that they built Habitats instead of these.”
“They were hedging their bets. It was stupid, but I doubt they were trying to hurt anyone.”
Ruslan scoffed so emphatically he loosened a glob of phlegm, which rattled in his throat. “Yeah, well, you know what they say about the road to hell.”
Neither said anything and finally Ruslan turned away, heading deeper into the ship, toward the propulsion drive. Levi followed him.
“Is it really going to work, Rus?” he asked. “We’re really going to get out of here?”
Over his shoulder, Ruslan smiled. “Goddamn right.”
The mix of excitement and fear was so palpable that Levi assumed a riot had broken out every time he heard a loud noise. In fact, a small riot had broken out a few weeks earlier, after the rocket failed to ignite during its preliminary test, but Ruslan’s newly reconstituted Peacekeepers knocked everyone back in line quickly. Levi had vaguely remembered the Peacekeepers from stories of the first days, when things were still settling. In one of the many early-days documents that Ruslan had managed to dig up, he had found the protocol for establishing them. It was among those documents that he found the blueprints. For all his denunciations of the first Habitants, Ruslan would have no case for escape without their knowledge. Once the Escapists were gone, those left behind would inevitably pour into the archives, their curiosity piqued, their intellects re-fired. At least, that’s what Levi would be doing if he were unlucky enough to be left behind.
Of course, that wouldn’t be happening. After the preliminary test failed, Ruslan took complete control over the project and subsequent tests all reported success. But not everyone was as trusting as Levi, and that was why he had been sent to speak with Supna.
“It’s not going to matter,” he had told Ruslan. “She’s going to do what she wants.”
“She cares about what you think.”
Levi had laughed out loud. “She didn’t care what I thought when we were dating. She’s more likely to do the opposite of what I ask.”
Ruslan put his hand on Levi’s shoulder. Since the coup, he had taken on mannerisms that Levi guessed he thought showed leadership. The hand on the shoulder was one, two-handed handshakes was another. “Then ask her to stay.”
So there Levi was, sitting in Supna’s apartment for the first time in almost a year, wasting two days’ worth of coffee rations on a cause he already knew was lost.
“He’s changed, Levi,” Supna said, “You have to have noticed.”
“So he’s let power go to his head a little bit. The plan is the same.”
“Can you even say that anymore? Do you even know?” She blew on her mug and sipped the coffee. Reaching past Levi, she grabbed the creamer and shook some of the powder into her cup. She stirred it with a pen that was on the table and licked the tan droplets off it.
“Supna, for christ’s sake, why wouldn’t he want to get out of here? Rus has been more dedicated than any of us.” Levi remembered those first heady days, when Ruslan laid out the plan. Secretly, he had been planning for months, maybe years. It was Ruslan who convinced everyone else that the coup would succeed, that the blueprint from the archives really would lead to a colony ship. All he wanted was to get off their ruined planet; that wouldn’t change.
“I’m sure he wants to get out,” Supna said, “I’m just not sure he can.”
“The tests were successful. We’ll be launching in three days. We’ll be in deep space within a week.”
“So he says.”
Her skepticism didn’t surprise him. She had wanted to be a scientist, after all, even though the closest job the Habitat had was animal husbandry.
“Is there anything I can say to convince you?” he asked.
“Is there anything I can say to convince you?”
He didn’t answer and Supna just nodded. “Good luck, Levi.”
As the hum of the engines built, Levi wished he were more superstitious, that he had some sort of good luck charm to finger nervously. Then again, the build was so slow—nearly two hours—that he would have worn his fingers to the bone with his worrying.
Since he had nothing else to occupy him, Levi decided to check on Ruslan and the preparations. He found him on the bridge, which was curiously empty.
“Levi,” Ruslan smiled when he saw him, “It’s really happening.” If his grin got much bigger, Levi thought, his lips would meet at the back of his head.
As Levi approached, Ruslan rolled up a long, blue sheet of paper and stuffed it into a similarly long tube.
“Are those the plans?”
He nodded. “Not that anything can be changed now. The wheels are in motion, as they say.”
“Can I see them?”
“The plans? Why?”
For a few moments, Levi paused, collecting his thoughts. “Just, I’ve spent so much time in the archives, you know? And I never—I found lots of old stuff, but nothing like plans for a colony ship. No one has.”
“What? You think I’m lying?” Ruslan blurted.
“Why would I? No.”
“You think I made this up?” He brandished the tube like a club, waving it in Levi’s face.
“Rus, no. It’s… I was talking to Supna—”
“Supna.” He said the name like a curse. “You want to stay for her, Levi? You think she’ll care?”
“It’s not that. She… Look, she wants to escape as much as anyone, but she wants proof. If I can see the plans, maybe she’ll let me…”
“We’re already full,” Ruslan snapped. “You want to give up your spot? You don’t trust me? Fine. Fuck you, Levi.”
For what seemed like an hour, but was probably less than a minute, neither said anything. Levi couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with the fuming Ruslan. Finally, he lifted his head a bit and stated, “I’ll come.”
“What?”
“I’ll come. I believe you.” When Ruslan remained silent, he continued, the words pouring out just before they registered in his brain. “They’re real plans. Of course they are. I mean, why would you—? If it doesn’t work you’re just as screwed as…”
While Levi stammered, the smile returned to Ruslan’s face, but there was no blood in it. He reached out and grasped Levi’s shoulder. “I’m glad, Lev. No matter what, we are getting out of here.”
Though he probably could have stayed on the bridge, Levi didn’t much want to. He ambled to what they were calling the launch room, strapped himself into one of the many rows of people, and waited for the launch.
He wasn’t sure exactly how long he waited, but finally a voice crackled through the speakers above them. “One minute to launch.”
That was it. Ruslan had apparently decided not to have a countdown. It seemed like such an obvious omission to Levi, but he was sure there was a reason. Resources maybe. After all, they wanted the people staying behind—more than half the Habitants residents—to be able to live afterward, though everyone knew it would be difficult. Solar panels had been painstakingly moved from the roofs to new desert installations and they were already converting some of the storerooms into apartments.
He tried to count down in his head, and heard people similarly murmuring all around him. It was impressive how many people you could fit in a small space, he mused.
Just as his internal clock got to fifteen, the engines below him kicked on. The rumble grew until his teeth were chattering and he heard the metal around him creak. People were starting to shout and the man next to Levi burst into tears.
There was a massive explosion from below and Levi’s body jolted in the harness so hard he assumed it would snap. But it held, despite the shaking, and moments later Levi was flying and he was free.
“Of course,” the old man finishes, “We all know what happened.”
Children and parents alike nod sagely. Though none of the adults had even been born, they all know the stories, passed down from their own parents and others like the old man. How the engines demolished all that was left of the Habitat. How no one had been aboveground since.
Luckily, only the oldest of them remember the truly hard years, when hundreds died of starvation. There was only so much food in the storerooms after all, and so little light. If it wasn’t for mushrooms and other fungi, they know their society would have been doomed.
The old man never says whether he believed the ship worked or not. Many think not. The explosion, they claim, was the ship itself, not a side effect of the engines. Living in such harsh conditions does not breed optimism.
Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts Timothy Mudie now lives outside of Boston. His stories have been featured in The Fifth Di…, Farmhouse Magazine, and apt.