Quintessence

28 Percent.

Twenty years went by with relatively little fuss, given the state of the world. Grandfather and Grandmother had been hard at work on their new jobs of expanding the closed city of El Paso. My mother’s parents held the same teaching job for many years, only stopping to go on their annual scouting and gathering trip. My parents were of the same age, born only 5 months apart, and were both placed in the same class, where they met.

It was during my mother’s twelfth year that she lost her parents. A road had collapsed on a standard trip north for chemical supplies, carrying them into a ravine and to their deaths. Mother was put in a foster home before being unofficially adopted by Grandmother and Grandfather. Grandfather says it was during this time that my father and she fell in love.

The world outside continued on its steady path. A full rotation of the earth had steadied at 45 hours, which was a slow and difficult adjustment to those who had grown up under 24 hour days. The regular sleep patterns no longer holding, the days were separated into two sections. The first section took place entirely in the day, the second at night. With the artificial sunlight pouring in from all over the Safehold and city, this was a strange adaption, but not one which couldn’t be adjusted to, given time. In effect, the time was spent as two slightly shorter days in one.

The cityscape of El Paso continued to grow over this time, eventually reaching a point where entire streets and their businesses had become covered over and insulated as could best be managed. I spent considerable time there as a child before it was closed down, and it really was a magical place. Graffiti, have you heard of that? People used to take spray paint or markers and plaster their names, or in more impressive cases, enormous murals on the sides of buildings, buildings which they didn’t even own.

Grandfather said these people used to get in trouble for this work, a public nuisance he had called it. I can see his point. If I had put all my effort into running a business, only to have the display ruined by some unruly kids, I would probably consider it a nuisance too. Still, it was an interesting look into a type of crime that simply didn’t exist anymore. At least as far as most knew.

I took it upon myself to keep the traditional alive, sneaking around and writing my name in hidden little areas, under tables, and in ceilings, just so I could become part of this long-dead society. I might very well be one of the last graffito artists alive.

I say this type of crime was no longer common, but that’s not to say crime itself was no longer an issue. Theft had become a growing problem as time passed. While the Residents of our Safehold did not go wanting for necessities, this was not true for luxuries. Items of the old world became highly sought after and valued, often with little reason other than their rarity or attractiveness. Old posters of long-lost movies, actors, and pinup models became an almost official form of currency.

Occasional outbreaks of violence also ran through the Safehold population. The working sociologists and psychologists believed this to be an inevitable consequence of a contained and isolated community. Before the operation of the Safeholds, it was common for people to take a few days off for trips or simply stay at home, away from all others so they could recharge. This became a difficult method of relief in this new world. Trips or holidays to outside locations were obviously impossible, and a relaxing and rejuvenating stay away from all but your family was also impossible, given the communal setup and layout of the Safehold.

Prior to the major expansion into El Paso, most who were desperate to get away for a while signed up for the long-distance truck-based scouting and recovery trips. As I mentioned, it was on one of these trips where my mother’s parents were killed, on an expedition selected in no small part because they had grown, as Grandfather called it, ‘stir crazy’.

As the El Paso enclosed township kept expanding, some of these buildings were developed especially for the purpose of getaways. A few of these, usually nice little houses which had escaped most of the damage in the time between the First Pass and the inhabitance of the Safehold, had been retrofitted to offer the best possible ideal of a holiday home. Furniture was restored or rebuilt to a comfortable state, books were printed to fill small shelves, and even televisions were installed with access to old movies on various storage formats.

Outside of some of these houses were yards that were enclosed from the wind, with large heat lamps shining down on the earth to simulate the heat which had been formerly offered by the sun. Enough of these were built that each family had a week’s access every six months. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave many residents work to keep them busy, and the restoration and upkeep of these locations became a popular activity to anyone with spare time.

For further stress relief, numerous other activities were planned, many of which eventually entered operation. While the Safeholds had been built with entertainment in mind, the developers had underestimated just how crucial this area would prove to be. Game and recreation rooms within the Safeholds were expanded to include movie theatres and video game systems. Finding fodder for these mediums was left for the scouts and reclamation crews. While many older magnetically sensitive formats had been wiped out by the electromagnetic pulses triggered by the Dark Star, there were some which had managed to survive entirely intact.

Helping this was the fact that many items had been abandoned where they stood after the mess and evacuations which the Dark Star created. When people had taken their things and evacuated to safer pastures they had not been especially concerned with digital entertainment. With no new films, TV shows, or video games being produced, these became incredibly popular as a means of appreciating history, even if the materials gathered weren’t held in high regard at the time. Have you ever seen the film Biodome? It is not good. It was also incredibly popular in the Oven.

Recreational drugs, as a means of escape, had been popular amongst human culture for thousands of years, yet no designers had thought to include these in their considerations as they planned out the Safeholds. Grandmother told me that she believed this was because they were overly idealistic in how they thought those dwelling in Safeholds should be able to live. Drugs were only intended to be used as treatments, nothing more. Some of the older drugs, such as tobacco, marijuana, or cocaine derivatives, were no longer possible to create, given the raw plant material had died out, and no seeds were available. Others that could be synthesized out of medical crops, such as opioid derivatives, were considered too dangerous to be available for free use. Instead, what was eventually settled on was alcohol, as some had already begun to create their own with disastrous consequences.

After one man went blind and another suffered severe burns after his still exploded, it was decided that the Safehold would create officially, and safely, several brewed beers and spirits. While all users would have to agree to a level of measurement to avoid addiction and other incidents of risk, this drug would be available for free, just like food and water, with reasonable rationing.

All of this work, all of this social engineering, and all of this technological achievement, and people still needed a drug to escape. It’s just part of human nature, I suppose.

During these years of calm, the Residents of the Safehold had examined the possibility of repairing the power conduits which had previously been looked upon to deliver energy to the surrounding areas. The eventual hope was, given the enormous amount of energy that the Oven’s station generated, we could easily expand and light entire roads to the nearby New Mexico town of Las Cruces. Despite years of effort, these lines were never fixed. It was eventually determined that there had been some sort of fault with the deep ground transmission. A gentle but ongoing tectonic shift in a seemingly impossible area had destroyed the main cables and most redundancies. Those which remained, while technically repairable, couldn’t be accessed without equipment crippled that had been by the cold. Maybe we could have done something about it, if we had the time.

Religion had also seen a resurgence in the Safehold in these decades following the First Pass. Chapels and churches of various faiths had been expanded in the Safehold, against the wishes of a vocal group of the more atheistic Residents. My parents were among those who had gotten in deep with the church, and despite my Grandfather’s continued disapproval, he never sought to pressure them out of their beliefs. He was ecstatic when I told him that I couldn’t bring myself to believe as they did, he had considered atheism the only logical spiritual conclusion of those who valued rationality and a scientific mind, and after he had lost Grandmother, he had no one to speak with on such matters.

Religious freedom was fully approved officially by those inside the Safehold, no matter how harmful or deluded the ideas it put forth. We should have known that this type of freedom would have eventually led to problems, but we chose to see only the best in people, even in those who weren’t worthy of such appraisal. I don’t know the exact date that saw the birth of the Fatalists. What we do know is that it was started by one of the few Outsiders who had survived the locking of the Safehold. Despite their initial lack of support by the rest of the Residents, the Fatalists didn’t appear harmful. They merely sought to live their lives under the understanding the end was coming.

Grandfather supposed that it was their way of coping with the stress. He said that if they viewed the death of the world as an inevitability then it made acceptance that much easier. He equated it to those who used to believe in the rapture, in fact, many had believed this event had already come and gone.

It was around thirty years after the Second Pass that we had noticed the problem which would eventually signal the end of our life outside. The oxygen in the air had been dropping steadily for years, this had been expected as there were no longest the forests and algae to convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What was unexpected was the rate at which the oxygen concentration declined. It had previously been calculated that, given there were less than a million remaining humans, air would remain breathable outside the Safehold for several hundred years. We never learned where the mistakes had been made in these calculations, and ultimately it didn’t matter.

What few humans had survived until this point had proven their dedication and determination. They had seen the end of the world, and it would not cause them to quit, even if they thought collapse inevitable. This trudging on, this hope against hope, kept our people together. It was human nature, hell, it was nature of almost all animal life to keep fighting, even against impossible odds.

When it comes down to it, I’m impressed that we made it this far. Who knows how long the other Safeholds will last, it could be hundreds of years. I wish I could see it, just a little more. I want to know how far we can go.