The memory was a fixed one. Some memories are like sediment, debris in the tidal flow of the mind, others are lost and mostly disintegrated, but some are fixed and solid like metal, a hard rock of mineral, an elemental thing that does not die.
Dancing naked with her, slowly swaying from side to side, one footstep at a time to the beat, we were a bright light of life in that candlelit box of a bedroom, in our lost lives.
Our bodies were so close, in tune with the gentle rhythm of the vinyl on the turntable, the quiet patter of the drums, the deep bass, and the voice of an angel. It was a moment where time and space became gravitationally pure and eternal. Love really is naked. It’s beyond what we want to be, it’s what we are.
She had been most of the moments I cared for. It became about waking with her, our heads close on the pillow. At first, it was the going to bed, the anticipation of pleasure, but then it mellowed, no longer the pinning, the thrusts, the noise. The beauty was in the slow heartbeat of the morning breaking, the arrival from dreams together, the dim light, the rain, the bed’s softness, a hand on the skin. It was those simpler moments, distilled happiness, no longer urgent and desperate, no longer wanting, but satisfied.
That memory. The slow dance without fear, with only skin and beauty. It was embedded in my head like a precious stone.
When I awoke with the arctic storm howling beyond the walls of the Bubble, as we called our home, I wondered if all that feeling had been an invention of my desire, something contrived like a fantasy. It didn’t make sense anymore. It was too perfect to survive what came after.
The socials were sitting around the room on the worn chairs and threadbare beanbags, like they owned everything, their smiles perfect, their eyes unblinking. Their clothing was gaudy, contemporary and pretentious, inappropriate for a bunker lifestyle. A social, to be clear, was not a real person, it was an AI’s interpretation of a human uploaded in a soft-skinned, ‘almost real’, BRR, or Basic Responsive Robot. I had learned to kind of hate them yet I still charged them up every night, using the power from the wind generator. Sometimes we just need voices, whatever they are. Social media content and analytics were sourced to rebuild artificial personalities and the socials, well, they became unreal weirdos almost instantly on activation.
Jasmine, a social that I tolerated at best, sauntered over to me as I swung my legs out of the bed to connect with the cold metal floor.
Her face was like a child’s doll, not human at all, eyes that tracked everything but noticed nothing. Her hair was like wire, and she wore a bright orange dress cut above the knee with white socks and black heels. I knew exactly what she was built for but it was not my thing any more, only for desperately awful days when I could no longer tolerate the gale outside and needed distraction. The BRR’s first marketing campaign was all around sensory experiences, having an outlet for sexual pleasure, but after a while, people just bought them for company or kudos or to insult them because they needed to vent their day at a target. They exactly demonstrated how badly we needed subordinates, and how badly we needed power over others. Two of the socials from our original pack had been battered to pieces one night in a rage. They were like easy pickings for frustration.
“I had a great time at the café,” she grinned. “I had a blueberry pancake that was to die for.”
“Wonderful…” I said, rolling my eyes.
The social continued, oblivious to my sarcasm.
“I am so proud of my son, he’s become a lawyer, with a great salary. Nice job, Tim!”
There was no money anymore but when there was, I always thought of money as dirty. It would always dictate the pace of everyone’s life, status and how they were treated. It was never about happiness, it was always about something completely different.
“You don’t have a son, you stupid fucking machine and there are no laws anymore, so what would be the point of being a lawyer?”
I instantly regretted talking to the thing.
“Woah! You are so toxic, hashtag well-jel.”
Her elbows were flailing like she, it, was affronted.
I shuffled to the sink to wash my face, which felt dry and tight, and my eyes were sore from crying in the gaps of sleep.
The wind was fierce beyond, like a Viking song, relentless and shrill and demanding.
The water pouring from the tap was fluffy and highly processed from the ice outside. I dabbed it on my cheeks and eyes and found myself in the mirror, like remembering I was real. If the environment recyclers ever broke, and I knew one day, that was inevitable, I would be screwed.
“Love,” I said plainly. I was longing for love.
For once the socials said nothing. I felt like had been in the stagnant lair too long. Truthfully, before the sun decided to die, the world had become shit a long, long time ago and nobody really, not really, panicked when it did. I wish they had.
I always thought we were trained to hope too much, to want too much, to aim for the perfect life, for completion. No one was ever happy as a state of mind, it was always aspirational, around the corner, next year… Yet we were told happiness was commonplace for others, for everyone else, and we believed it. It was a trick of perception to keep our eyes diverted, looking high on the horizon that revealed nothing, and not in front of us. We chased so hard to find happiness, we failed together, all of us, to do anything worthwhile.
The heat had killed most of everything by 2080 but then the unexpected happened, as it does. The sun began to drain energy, with massive sunspots, like light and heat had suddenly become too much to reproduce and darkness and cold began to infect the Earth, to a point where life wilted, died and disappeared, the cold became unbearable.
It could be said I had been lucky, I was a survivor at least. Billions were killed in just a few years, most of them starved. I was still waking up in the morning, drinking water, and eating protein packs, I had a cosy bed and conversational ‘companions’, if you could call them that. I had days ahead of me, I don’t know how many, but I had them. The snow and ice, the wind, the cold, they could not reach my frail flesh in the ‘circular systems’ biome. I was safe, at least I entertained that idea, less I felt the desire to walk outside one night in defeat, as many had already done from our motley team.
I could hear Maddy was awake in the other room, she was old now, 70-something at a guess. She coughed painfully every morning, and she looked depressed, I could see a decline in her willpower daily, and I thought she would not be with us for much longer.
“You good, Mad?”
A long silence and then some grunt or some such.
She would often talk to the walls rather than me or the socials. She was losing it. Or maybe she was just dealing with it, her way.
Apart from her, the only person left from our original thirteen was Mo. He was from Sudan, originally, but had travelled so far since then, losing family, losing things, losing again and again but still going, he was a true survivor. God knows how many times he had migrated and was forced to surrender his home. Something fierce drove him that I found fascinating. He earned his place here more than any of us from the original selection. I remember it now – ‘Prove you’re a survivor’ they said, ticking their boxes, they themselves, safe as examiners, as sons of politicians, as the self-elected elite. Fuck them.
They were probably dead now. Our location on Earth meant the temperature was just about sustainable. Most Bubbles, I guessed were now dark snow-buried tombs for their inhabitants. I imagined the littering of corpses out there in the world, the last human pollution, a rubbish heap of the dead in the snow.
It was weird, because when I was young, I always secretly wished to be there at the start of Armageddon, to witness it – to see with my own eyes the end unravelled, like enjoying the completion of a story. I realise now that extinction is like everything else, it’s proof that nothing matters, even memory and love, it has a point in time and space, and it has fixed coordinates but, it is still transient, like a breeze, a wave, a feeling, a smile, a tear, a life – even a planet.
Maddy came into my room. She looked tired and ill. Her hair was grey and thin, her eyes were red-rimmed and sagging, gooey like egg white, but the worry about her demise was deeper than physical, it was like the pilot light was blown out and could no longer be reignited.
I patted the bed, a request for her to sit next to me. She did smile, which made me smile. That’s how easy love can work, I thought.
“Tell me, again?” I asked. “About your Jim.”
She rarely, in all her time in the Bubble, talked much about her Jim. It was something that hurt her.
Her eyes drifted and her breath froze for a second, in a way that stopped the machinery of the Universe with all power, rendering it mute against sorrow.
“He was my son… My beautiful boy…”
After that, we just sat there for what seemed like an hour but was most probably minutes. She clutched my hand tight, and I needed that. I think that is why I asked her that question. It was almost cruel to ask it, but I needed to feel human skin.
“He told me,” she croaked. “He told me that… there was no point… He always told me that and I didn’t have an answer. Why build a future, when you are told there is none?”
“There is always hope.”
“Really? Do you believe that? He’s gone now, he’s gone…”
She began to sob and shut her eyes so the tears had to squeeze their way out under the lids.
I didn’t have words at that moment. The alarm sounded, it was the perimeter alarm. That was strange, in the three years we had been stuck in here, that alarm had never been triggered before.
Mo barged into the room, his eyes wide. He had no time or inkling to acknowledge how Maddy felt – he looked at her straight, but talked as if she was not there at all. He was five foot three, stocky and dressed in blue pyjamas and slippers, a thick black beard rigidly rooted to his chin had grown to rest on his broad chest.
“We have visitors… A vehicle. An all-terrain truck, I can see it on the monitor at the boundary. A big, tough icesape truck with the living quarters and those huge, spiked tyres. I guess a three-man crew, tops, especially if they have been living in it for more than a week.”
The nearest city was almost entirely buried in drifts. They must have been somewhere liveable with supplies and decided to relocate from it, perhaps forced to. Not many people knew about this sanctuary, so I guessed they were government officials. That would also explain their survival. Perhaps it was our examiners, compromised by their own perishing Bubble.
Mo looked alarmed. This was not good news. Visitors didn’t drop in to say ‘hi’, or to share a drink.
“My guess is they want our home…” he said.
“Technically, we have room, there are empty beds here, supplies for ten years…”
Then I thought about it a little more and I shook my head. It was my misplaced hope again.
Mo said it out loud: “They will not ask nicely to stay, that much I guarantee you.”
He stood up straight as if adapting his demeanour to rise to the situation.
“Check the external locks, and break open the armoury,” I commanded. It was time to act.
I patted Maddy on the shoulder, a gesture to snap back, we needed her. Sorrow would have to wait.
The biome was large for a handful of residents, we had to run fast through the corridors to the armoury, a tall, wide wall-mounted closet with a rack of pump action shotguns. He grappled the guns out from their clips, handing them to me and Maddy in turn. We had been taught to shoot as basic training for residence at the biome, but that had been a long time ago.
“I don’t want to kill anyone…”, said Maddy. She was staring at me, like I was betraying her in some kind of underhanded deal.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to,” was all I could offer.
What happened next no one expected but we should have. It showed just how unprepared we were in our precious sanctuary in the snow.
An explosion rocked the floor itself. An icy tsunami of air slammed into us. Mo held up his hand as if challenging the cold to pass him. The white-flecked rapids of air hit us so abruptly and painfully, it was like falling through ice.
We looked at each other, acknowledging our lives were about to change. We could hear the footfalls, the heavy stomping of boots advancing to attack.
Mo ushered us back to the private quarters in a hasty retreat. As we ran, he punched in a wall panel button so a heavy door descended to seal off the corridor.
“They’ll blow that too I expect!”
His voice was quivering, this was terrifying. Hundreds of days of nothing but wind and snow and then this all-out war, with only seconds to react.
“It will give us a little time,” he said, his eyes frantic and panicked.
Mo knelt next to the tunnel’s newest barrier and checked his gun.
Back in my room, I assessed what I could do. I had an idea.
“Jasmine, de-robe please, for pleasure protocols.”
Maddy’s jaw dropped as if I had said something utterly insane.
The robot smiled and began to slowly, seductively remove the dress, pulling it over her head.
“Like me and tell me in a comment,” Jasmine said. “I like hot bodies, like yours”.
I scanned the room for cover. It was only then, that Maddy realised what I was doing, the age-old tactic of distraction. It might not work, but if our visitors were men, they may not have seen a woman’s body for a long time. It could shock them for a precious second or two, to gain an advantage.
There were few hiding places, it was a functional room. A wardrobe and under the bed. That was it.
“I’ll go into the wardrobe,” said Maddy and she reluctantly crammed herself in between the clutter of coathangers draping clothes. I slipped under the bed, my shotgun trained on the fuzzy light in the open doorway.
“Jasmine, engage with any stranger you see.”
“You sexy beast!” she said to me as I shuffled under the bed, it was no doubt another social media soundbite dredged from the database.
To my horror, I heard a loud popping sound, followed by a scream, a male scream. I froze in a state of disgusted despair at the sight of Mo’s grimaced face rolling past the doorway, his head severed clean from the neck. Blood was exploring the room, a lot of blood, forming a slippery pool up to the high heels of the social. Jasmine was swaying her artificial hips from side to side, following the basic steps of the dancing alone program.
From the limited vantage point, I could only see ice-flecked black boots as the heavy-set man prowled into my bedroom. There was just the tip tap of the stilettos on the metal and a greeting from Jasmine that seemed wholly wrong and out of place. After a long moment, I caught sight of the tip of a curved sword, blood dripping from it in a narrow red ribbon. He had a gun, and he had a blade.
“You want some fun, big man?” continued Jasmine cheekily.
“Point to where your owners are, now!” commanded the gruff male voice, muffled behind a frost-laced balaclava.
The next thing I knew he had blasted a broad jagged hole into the wardrobe door, but there was no scream, just smoke and the smell of hot metal. It must have killed Maddy instantly. My breath froze. She had been snuffed out without ceremony, without mercy.
I knew Jasmine would be pointing at the bed, dutifully complying with his request, so I shook my head from shock, aimed the barrel and pulled the trigger. The big man’s leg exploded into strips of bone and flesh. The kickback from the round surprised me, bruising my shoulder. He toppled into Mo’s blood and I could see him fully for the first time, a giant of a man, clad in thick arctic gear with strangely calm eyes, even in the face of death. Jasmine was still dancing slowly around his writhing body as if nothing of consequence had happened, her programming a little glitched, as if catching up.
“That’s sick! Woah! Check this out! Just happened, right now!” she suddenly shouted, social media’s usual response to real-life horror, no doubt.
I scrambled out as quickly as I could, awkwardly catching my ribs on the bed’s sharp frame.
The man’s gun had spun across the room, and he had dropped his sword. Bringing two lethal weapons reasured me he had never intended to consider to talk, that much was clear. He was shuddering and passing out from shock, rapidly bleeding to death. I knew I just had to wait for him to vanish into the fog of crossing over. It was the other assailant that concerned me. He would be close behind.
I held my shotgun at hip level, fed and then pumped another shell into the chamber and by some zen of the situation timed my shot perfectly as the second figure appeared in the doorway in a puffy white Parker jacket. He thudded into the wall hard, with an exit wound spattering his internal organs, a spider’s web of blood framing his splayed arms as he slid down to the floor, stone dead. There were no more footsteps. Still, I loaded one more round and waited, till the silence reassured me I was alone again.
In just minutes they had robbed me of my two real companions, of my human company, the last human company.
My thoughts were heavy – I was cold, and I was deeply shocked. I peered sideways at Jasmine, who met my gaze lightly and smiled. She was still naked and slowly dancing around the blood, oblivious to the pain and death that had surrounded her in the last minutes.
“I want to dance with you,” I whispered to her. I wanted it more than anything in that moment.
I threw the gun on the bed and I found myself holding her tightly, my face in the nape of her silicone neck, a place to hide away. I could smell the hydralics, the rubber and the metal.
“I want to feel something,” I said, the tears gathering. “I want to feel something real.”
“Me too,” Jasmine replied softly, and we moved slowly and rhythmically around the room, moment by moment, beat by beat. The wind was howling like a primal shriek from nature through the exposed corridors, as the temperature plummeted and with the flickering generators, the darkness crawled from the night and the terror, to cling and tighten to the hairs on my skin.
The End
Dystopian Days 