year 2194

NAR Archives ©2194

     It began with panic, thick and stifling.
     No, that's not it. It began with the sirens. With the speakers blasting warnings across our sector of the North American Republic.
     It began with people running, frantically attempting to locate family members while the police force herded us off the streets and down into the shelters. With the masses craning their necks to the sky, as if seeing the missiles before they hit could somehow stop them from destroying us all.
     It began with four words. The bombs are coming.
     The panic came afterward.

     Now it has been four months since the bombs came. Sixteen weeks since they locked us in these deep concrete cellars. One hundred and twenty-three days since I last saw the sun.
     They say our sector is lucky. We are on the outskirts of the Republic, far enough away from the pole that some people lived here even when it would still be covered in snow for most of the year. Far enough from the capital that we did not suffer direct hits from the Union of Northern Asia. But even one bomb of substantial size can destroy eighty square miles, and there was not just one bomb. If the bombs detonated on or near the ground, the shelters beneath the capital and surrounding areas might not even be livable anymore because there would be giant craters blasted out. There would be nothing.
     So yes, we are lucky that we have a shelter to stay in. This vast and winding system of levels extending far below the surface, all concrete and blocky rooms, everything numbered, everything labeled. Yes, lucky that we have food and water to last a good amount of time. Or so they say. The leaders won't tell us how long. I suppose that's to prevent worry, but we find ways to worry regardless.
     And making another mark on the wall to signify yet another day without the sun or rain or sky I do not feel so lucky. This is worse than the flashblindness in people who were not ushered into the ground before they saw the explosions. That goes away after a few minutes in most cases, but mine is mind blindness, and it does not end. I do not care to see these lifeless grey bunkers one more day. I cannot bear the same boring walls and flickering fluorescent lights one more hour. Up there, before the bombs, it was warm and wet and we rarely saw even sleet, but it was open and the sky stretched on forever. It was overcrowded from the vast world population of near twelve billion people migrating towards the poles, but at least then all of us weren't all trapped in the same concrete boxes together all the time like we are now.
     There aren't that many people any more though. War tends to do that. Kill people, I mean. There weren't enough shelters for everyone to stay in; there wasn't enough warning for everyone to get to safety. So many people I knew didn't make it.
     I just wish I understood the mentality behind wars of such destruction. At some point it would seem that they'd understand that we're all just people, right? We're all just humans trying to not die. Is that truly so hard to understand?
     I would love to hate the people who put us here, but I wouldn't know the first person to point a finger at. Should I blame the idiotic leaders who decided we could use a little more destruction and decided to blast each other with bombs? Or perhaps I should go a little further back before the pressure of so many people in one place forced that conflict upon us. Oh, I would love to hate those people centuries ago who pumped chemicals into the air and oceans without a second thought. Who couldn't for the life of them stop using those awful machines and factories, and who were too greedy and too blind to see that they were killing everything, including themselves.
     I would love to hate them, but they're dead. So no, I don't hate them. I envy them. I envy their freedom and carelessness. I envy that they got to light the fuse and then die before the world exploded. Before people's hair began falling out in clumps and got their skin blistered and burned off. Before the radiation hazard trapped us underground for at least five years, if the experts really are experts on the subject.
     Not that anywhere up there is really livable anymore, what with the plumes of smoke and soot and dust that hung in the atmosphere for several weeks. A nuclear winter, they called it, with fear in their eyes. How carefully detached they sounded when they described it! Semidarkness and frost and low temperatures and radiation. Ruined vegetation and animal life. Anything and everything we had left on this burnt out husk of a planet. All of it gone. All of it destroyed.
     The only friend I have from before is Phoebe. She was in tears for days after the announcement about the nuclear winter before finding solace in history. She has become so obsessed with the past, where everything is dead and yet more alive and vibrant than we are. It must be nice to be a part of history, to have done your part and passed on in due time. They don't know the terrible inevitability of knowing the human race is coming to an end and having no way to stop it. They don't know the horror of a life not yet lived.
     The archives —which they only open to Phoebe after she completes almost twice as many service hours as the rest of us— are essentially where she lives in her free time. She pours over old reports and pictures like they hold the answers to life instead of just more unanswerable questions.
     "Do you think they knew?" She asks, holding up a plastic-sheathed picture of a factory belching smoke into the air, then a shot of a highway choked with cars. "What they were doing?"
     I touch a black and white photograph of a smiling man in a bowler hat standing outside of a factory. He is waving and pointing to a sign that identifies the building as some company I've never heard of.
     "They can't have," I say quietly. "If they knew, they would have stopped."
     Right?


I wrote that sophomore year for a research project exploring how the misuse of technology could negatively affect the future, so the weirdly specific details of this story were backed up by sources. The poem year 2156 I published here in April was from the same project.