The Frozen Tomb at World’s End

The numbing wind lashes across the frozen desert like an icy scourge, accompanied by a banshee howl loud enough to wake the dead, were there any dead here to wake. Across the oceans there are billions of dead, but here is empty of both life and death. She ploughs a lonely furrow across the snow, one well-insulated foot after the other, never varying in pace. A gauge on her metal gauntlet beeps and flashes red. Ten percent power remaining. Without the protection her vitasuit offers, the harsh wilderness will quickly devour her. She glances at the readout and ignores it. A vast plateau of unending whiteness lies behind her. Ahead, a wall of ice. The Transantarctic Mountains. She climbs.

The ascent is treacherous. She dare not use her wrist-mounted grapple and winch to speed her passage; although the grapple will happily drill into the surface it lands upon, she is not confident about the integrity of the ice, and fears that she is as likely to pull a cliff down onto her as she is to pull herself up it. Besides, she cannot spare the power right now.

She climbs with leaden legs. Each step is a gruelling effort but she forces herself onwards. Half-way up she pauses to retrieve an unappetising block of seal blubber from her backpack. She killed the seal back on the Ronne ice shelf using a harpoon attachment for the grapple. That was many days ago. She hasn’t seen any signs of life since. Her visor is only open for a few seconds while she shoves the hunk of fat into her mouth, but still the blast of cold air that strikes her face has enough bitter intensity to send her staggering backwards. She reels but recovers. She would dearly like to lie down and sleep a while, bathed in the warm glow of the vitasuit, but the insistent flashing on her gauntlet drives her on.

Finally she reaches the summit. She glances at the gauge on her gauntlet: one percent power remaining. She scans the horizon. Below lies the ice sheet of East Antarctica. Nothing but ice and snow for endless, trackless miles. More mountains in the far distance. The red light on the gauntlet flashes even more urgently, and a high-pitched alarm begins to sound. Despite the howling wind, the alarm is still loud enough to be grating. The woman rolls her eyes, extends an antenna from the gauntlet, and presses a sequence of buttons. A small dish on the end of the antenna swivels a number of times, then stops facing out over the ice sheet. The percentage gauge on the gauntlet slowly increases. After five minutes it hits one hundred percent and she stows the antenna.

There must be an active fusion reactor down there. The wireless power transmission would have taken far longer if it had to be routed from South America. This is a good sign. The woman taps a finger lightly on her visor, summoning an infra-red visual overlay. Most of the vista is a uniform deep blue, signifying extreme cold, but down on the high plateau there are a few aberrant pixels of yellow. A heat signature. She focuses on these pixels and the view magnifies. A structure. The Amundsen-Scott research station. Still active after what must be more than a decade of isolation.

“The lights are on, but is anyone home?” says the woman to herself, softly muttering in a hopeful tone flecked with trepidation. She fears what she may find there. On her travels she has been exposed to horrors and barbarism that she has never become fully inured to, and unknown places have become synonymous with unsafe places. Most of all, however, she fears what she may fail to find. She taps her visor again and dismisses the infra-red overlay. Her finger hovers over the comms dial above her ear, hesitant. She could establish here and now whether any survivors still inhabit the research station, or if automation is all that keeps it going. Caution stays her hand.

“Caution,” said Mona Reed to the dirty young girl who stared defiantly at her, arms crossed. “Caution is what will keep you alive out there.”

“I am cautious, Mom,” said the girl, imploring.

“Not cautious enough,” said Mona firmly. “Rachel, you’re thirteen. You’re not ready. We don’t know what’s out there. We have all we need in here for now. We don’t leave until we have to.”

Rachel stamped her foot and flung herself onto her bunk, turning her back to her mother and facing the wall. Tears welled at the corners of her clear blue eyes and rolled down her face. The drops left clean tracks on her dirt grimed cheeks. The water filter unit on the shower had failed earlier that year. Showering in dirty, recycled water was worse than not showering at all, and Mona would not even contemplate using the drinking water supplies for washing. Mona shuffled the curriculum in response to the malfunction, substituting Mechanical Engineering and Maintenance for Foraging and Hunting, but neither she nor Rachel yet felt confident enough to risk dismantling the water filter. Rachel had become unkempt, but she didn’t care. When her long dark hair had become matted and greasy, Mona unceremoniously lopped it off into an irregular, tomboyish bob. Long hair and loose clothing are dangerous anyway, she had said. They’re a gift to a would-be assailant. Rachel wiped the tears from her freckled face with a bunched fist.

They had been in the shelter for three years now. Rachel was down there as soon as the first bombs fell on the East coast. She was at school when the news broke. She fled without a backwards glance, racing through the chaos and panic in the streets of suburban San Francisco to the fallout shelter Mona had had constructed at great expense in their back yard. Mona had drilled Rachel well for this eventuality. Mona was still above ground when the bombs hit San Francisco, but not in any blast radius. White flashes burned her retinas and mushroom clouds blossomed in the distance. She raised her dazzled eyes to the sky and thanked God for sparing her. Then she prayed that Rachel was also safe. It took her more than a day to cross town and reach the shelter. She opened it with her key, shouting Rachel’s name. When Rachel answered she wept with relief and closed the shelter door, locking and bolting it securely. Rachel caught a glimpse of the sky, preternaturally darkened by an unbroken shroud of thick, roiling clouds. It would be her last sight of the sky for ten years.

They were not the only ones with fallout shelters, but none were quite so well equipped and stocked. Mona had long foreseen the worst and made preparations. Many were not so prepared. After the anti-climax of the First Cold War, the majority of citizens — and, indeed, governments — across the globe were complacent about what was called — presumptuously and ultimately inaccurately — the Second Cold War. When it unexpectedly turned hot, billions burned. The first few days in the shelter were fraught with anxiety and guilt. Neighbours banged on the door, pleading for sanctuary, their voices raw and shrill with panic. Rachel wanted to let them in, but Mona held her tightly. Rachel’s tears flowed over the hand that was clamped firmly over her mouth. Some tried to break down the door, but it held firm. After a week the only sounds audible were the constant background drone of a warning siren, its usefulness long expired, and the apocalyptic howling of the nuclear winds.

Rachel Reed taps her boots and thin, flat blades telescope out from the toe and heel. She slaloms carefully down the mountain on skis made from layers of graphene, lightweight and impossibly thin, yet strong enough to have survived more demanding off-piste conditions than this. On Tierra del Feugo the shock absorption of the vitasuit had saved her life on several occasions when the mountains had proved too challenging for her intermediate skiing skills. She had thought about turning back after her first serious fall. She knew that her reward for crossing the rugged spine of Tierra del Feugo would be a perilous on-foot crossing of the Drake Passage, semi-frozen since the fallout clouds had covered the Earth, reflecting the Sun’s heat back into space and ushering in a new little ice age. She doubted her resolve. It was the remembrance of her mother’s final message to her that pushed her onwards.

For days she trudges across the snow, her eyes fixed on the heat source in the distance. Daily it grows larger in her vision, and her supplies of seal blubber diminish. Blizzards frequently descend. During the first of these, Rachel plods on regardless in whiteout conditions. When the winds die down, she has somehow turned around and is walking in the wrong direction. She curses her stupidity. In her desperation to reach the station she has failed to be cautious. She is lucky that this time the cost is merely a few wasted hours. Henceforth she either relies on her compass to keep her true, or uses the opportunity to sleep in the warm womb of her vitasuit.

When she reaches the heat source there is barely anything visible to the naked eye. The snow accumulates, driven by blizzards, inexorably encroaching on any human structures that dare aspire to permanence. The primary heat source is a torus shape buried beneath the snow. There is a doughnut depression on the surface tracing the outline of the tokamak fusion reactor that still thrums beneath; the waste heat can only partially melt the snow above. This is not on the schematics that Rachel inherited from Mona. It must have been added in the brief but flurried period of fusion proliferation before the Fall. The other structure, the secondary heat source, does match her schematics. It is a larger torus, with a vast geodesic dome spanning the hole in the centre. Only the apex of the dome is visible above the snow. In a couple of years, these last few metres will also be swallowed by the insatiable wilderness. This is the most recent iteration of the Amundsen-Scott research station on the South Pole. The buildings rise and fall, but the name continues. Rachel knows that the building is secured by rods driven into the ice that have the ability to telescope upwards, lifting the structure above the annual accretion of snow. The fact that this capability has not been deployed is a bad sign. The most likely explanation is that there are no living souls within. If anyone does still survive, they have chosen not to raise the station. They have chosen to be buried in a tomb of ice.

Rachel smashes two triangular panes of the glass dome with an ice pick, and latches a climbing rope to the exposed metal strut. She knows how high the dome is from her repeated studies of the schematics: twenty five metres. She descends. The space under the dome is — or was — a garden. Now it is barren. Most of it is cast in gloom; what scant sunlight can penetrate the nuclear clouds is feeble indeed by the time it gropes through the ever diminishing circle of glass above. Withered vines and plant husks lie rotting in cracked plastic dishes. Near a door that leads to the outer ring of the facility is a small verdant oasis, surrounded by harsh ultra-violet lights. Vines flourish from a vertical cylinder that terminates in a bed of white crystal nutrients, a tall hydroponic garden of tomatoes, squashes, peppers and strawberries.

Rachel is not blind to the significance of this well-tended garden, but hunger and nostalgia briefly take over. She has not seen fresh fruit since before the Fall. There are gardens in the enclaves of South America, but she has never seen them or any of their produce. She has never had anything of sufficient value to trade for such a prize, not that she would ever choose such a luxury over something with more tangible survival value. She removes her helmet and gloves, then plucks a ripe red tomato and bites into the soft flesh, chewing gently and savouring each juicy mouthful. No doubt the flavour is pitifully insipid compared to that of sun-grown tomatoes from before the Fall, but Rachel’s most recent frame of reference is rancid seal fat. To her the tomato is manna from heaven. She looks with longing at the other ripe fruit, but her stomach is full. The privations of the trek have shrunk it to a fraction of the size it once was.

She wipes tomato juice from her chin and focuses her attention on the door beyond the garden. She screws the harpoon attachment into the spring-loaded grapple on her gauntlet. She hopes there will be no cause to use it, but she has to be prepared for the possibility that the gardener will not welcome visitors. Caution, always caution. She silently pushes the door open and creeps into the room beyond.

Yellow fluorescent lights dimly illuminate the room that forms part of the outer ring encircling the garden dome. She is in some kind of atrium, a large, open space. The inward facing wall is lined with a padded plastic fabric in a sickly yellow-white shade. The intended effect was presumably science-fiction chic, but the end result is low-rent insane asylum. The outward facing wall is glass. Once it may have provided a bleak Antarctic vista. Now only compacted layers of ice can be seen. The strata get lighter and lighter as they rise. Ice from the years directly after the Fall can clearly be seen. They are the darkest layers, ice commingled with dust and ash blown here from the continents. A couch, chairs and a coffee table are arranged in a line along the window. Open magazines and plastic cups on the table lend the place an air of normality belied by the thick layers of dust that coat every surface. Footprints in the dust lead to a door that connects to the next chamber in the ring. Rachel softly pads over to this door. She places her ear to it. She hears nothing. She turns the handle slowly and pushes forward. The door moves only a few inches before meeting resistance. She places her shoulder against the door and puts the weight of her body against it, to no avail. The barricade on the other side holds firm. She quietly pulls the door closed and tries the door on the other side of the room. This one opens, leading into a narrow corridor. Open doorways line the inward facing wall, inviting Rachel to peer into various small compartments, some of them barely larger than cupboards. A tiny kitchen, sleeping quarters with bunk beds, a recreation room. All empty, all covered in dust.

Rachel pauses at the recreation room and frowns. She unzips a pocket on her vitasuit and pulls out the right half of a torn photograph. It shows two men and a woman sat on and around a couch. The woman is Chinese. She is petite and shy, looking away from the camera as if uncomfortable. Only one of the men is fully visible. Rachel thinks he is Arabic. He sits upright with a serious expression on his face and his hands on his knees. One of the men is only partially shown — the photo has been torn down the middle, right through him. He has long black hair that almost scrapes his shoulders, and wears self-consciously geeky thick-rimmed glasses. He is smiling broadly and holding something curved and metallic — only a sliver of the object is visible, cut off by the tear. A dartboard hangs on the wall behind him.

Rachel looks up and sees that same board. There are a cluster of darts still lodged in it.

Scrawled on the photo in a shaky hand are the words:

Now only

it can

save us all.

Mona had kept the box a secret until the week she died. By that point she was virtually bed-ridden, rendered infirm by the ravages of radiation poisoning. While her body withered her mind had remained sharp, unravelling only in that final week. She regressed; by then Rachel was nineteen, yet Mona treated her as if she were a small child, scolding her for imagined filial transgressions. Sometimes she forgot where she was. One day she absent-mindedly produced a small metal box from a compartment underneath the bed. Rachel was intrigued — after six years she had thought she knew every square inch of the shelter, so even this minor revelation was like discovering a new wing to a house.

Mona leafed through the contents, seemingly oblivious to Rachel’s fascination. It was a box of memorabilia. Letters, photos, maps. To Rachel these documents promised a window to a past she knew nothing of. All Mona would ever say about her life before Rachel was born was that she had moved to San Francisco to make a fresh start. All Rachel knew of her father was that he was dead. She had a residual curiosity about him, but no more than that. She vowed to be defined by her own actions and deeds, not by her lineage.

Rachel reached out to take some of the letters, but Mona smacked her on the back of the hand.

“These are mine,” said Mona angrily, as if chastising a naughty child.

“Sorry, Mom,” said Rachel soothingly. She resolved to sneak a look once Mona was sleeping. She slept most of the time now. “Why do you have so many hardcopies anyway?” Rachel had never written a letter in her life, having grown up with a tablet in her hand. She knew how to write cursive, but for her it was an anachronistic skill, necessary for navigating grade school but ultimately irrelevant.

“When we lived at the South Pole, net access made us more lonely,” said Mona in a rare moment of lucidity. She looked dreamily at her box of mementos. “To be in daily contact with loved ones, to be reminded of all we had left behind…it made it that much harder to cope with life in that…prison. Much easier to cut contact and focus on the work. The monthly mail drone visits were like Christmas. We’d all gather and open our packages…”

Mona tailed off, while Rachel stared at her incredulously. “You lived on the South Pole? Why’d you never tell me this before?”

The moment of lucidity had passed. Mona closed the box and hugged it tight to her chest, staring blankly into space.

That night, Rachel woke to the smell of burning. The air was hazy with acrid smoke. Coughing, Rachel clamped her bed sheet to her mouth and stumbled over to where Mona was solemnly burning the contents of her box, dropping them one by one into a flaming waste paper bin.

“Goddamnit, Mom,” said Rachel, throwing the sheet over the bin and smothering the fire. She looked at the smoke that filled the shelter. “Shit. No choice.” Spluttering, she unlocked the door to the fallout shelter and hauled it open for the first time in ten years.

Mona screamed.

“Mom, I had to,” said Rachel, racing to her side and comforting her. “You damn near asphyxiated us. Don’t worry. It’ll be OK.”

Rachel stood in the doorway while the smoke cleared. The world outside was grey and silent. She closed the door. She would have to leave eventually. But not yet. Rachel put Mona to bed and cleared up the mess she had made. Nothing had survived the fire except for a map of Antarctica and a schematic for the Amundsen-Scott research facility. Rachel sighed and disposed of the ashes. The window to the past had been closed.

Mona descended into delirium that night. She lay rigidly in bed, corpse-like, muttering cryptic phrases over and over again. Most were unintelligible. Only one was distinct: “Save us.”

Mona was dead by the morning. She was fifty, but she looked at least twenty years older. The years in the shelter had not been kind to her body. Clutched tightly in her cold, spindly hands was a torn half of a photo. Brushing tears from her eyes, Rachel pried it from her grasp.

“Now only it can save us all,” said Rachel aloud to herself. She recognised the handwriting as Mona’s. “What is ‘it’? What were you trying to tell me, Mom?”

She studied the photo. The man with the thick glasses looked familiar somehow, but she had no memory of ever having met any of them. She scrutinized the metallic object and frowned. “What is that? Is that ‘it’?” She turned the photo over. On the back was another message, scrawled in an unfamiliar hand. Two simple words: “I’m sorry.”

Rachel took Mona into the yard that afternoon, covering her with fallen brush wood. She said her goodbyes with little ceremony. Sentimentality had no place in this new world. Mona had spent the past ten years teaching Rachel how to survive. Keep moving. Stay silent. A burial would have required the exact opposite. Mona would not have wanted that.

Rachel stuffed a backpack with as much food and water as she could carry. There was still food left, but Rachel didn’t care. The time had come to leave. She rammed an assault rifle, pistol and ammunition into a holdall. Then she locked the door behind her and left.

The internet had gone down terminally before the first post-Fall year was out, the victim of a widespread ideology of retrenchment. Global trading blocs had already shrunk drastically during the Second Cold War, and after the Fall the triumph of the local over the global was complete. Trust had gone. The internet gradually winked out across the world as hardcore proponents of the new local sabotaged communication hubs. Mona and Rachel had read about the movement online and knew that one day their only link to the outside world would disappear. Before it did, they had read about the various enclaves that were springing up from the ashes, communities of relative safety that welcomed those who could make a contribution to resurrecting a semblance of civilization.

Rachel hoped that one of the enclaves she had read about had not yet torn itself apart. She walked towards the Bay. Towards Alcatraz.

The next room along is a bathroom. A dusty metal basin and toilet, a shower stall and a rack of lockers. Rachel suddenly becomes acutely aware of her own scent. The vitasuit has systems for evacuating and disposing of excreta without necessitating removal of the suit, but they are approximate at best. Put bluntly, Rachel stinks of piss and shit. She had managed to suppress her olfactory system while the vitasuit was her inescapable home, but now she cannot. Her mind screams caution but is overruled by her lurching stomach. If she doesn’t get out of the suit right now, she’s going to puke. She tears the suit off and turns the shower tap. It is stiff, but it turns. Red-brown water flows out of the rusty pipes. After a minute the water is clear and steaming. Rachel sets her harpoon gauntlet down on the basin next to the shower, and steps in. Hot water flows over her naked body while she keeps her eyes locked on the open doorway. Water black with dirt swirls down the plug hole. Soon she is cleaner than she has been since she was a child. She knows that she should clean the filthy interior of her suit and return to a state of vigilance, but the relief and delight of the shower is overwhelming. She crumples to the floor in exhaustion, crouching in a foetal position, her thin arms wrapped around her emaciated body in a tight self-embrace. She closes her eyes, lost to the soporific warmth. In the split-second between being struck on the head with a blunt object and losing consciousness, she thinks she hears Mona wail in dismay.

When she wakes she is lying on the bathroom floor, still naked, with her hands bound to the shower pipe. A figure looms over her. Her vision swims. She focuses. She recognises the man from the photograph. His face is more gaunt and his hair is longer, greyer and thinner, but he has the same thick glasses. He stares at her. Mostly he looks scared, but his eyes bulge and his nostrils flare with a feral lasciviousness that frightens her.

“Who are you?” he says in a hoarse whisper that suggests his vocal cords have not been exercised in some time.

“Call me Rachel,” she said to the boy. He could not have been more than seventeen, although the calmness with which he pointed the pistol suggested a confidence beyond his years. He had a swagger to him. An unruly mop of loose black curls framed his stern face. With his free hand he stroked the meagre stubble that sprouted hesitantly from his jaw, or pulled at his lower lip.

The piers had all been empty of boats when Rachel reached the Bay. She had not encountered anyone. Alcatraz was visible in the distance, although it was impossible to tell whether it was still inhabited. At the end of Fisherman’s Wharf she found a spotlight and a message daubed on a wall in red paint:

Alcatraz Enclave is full. Trade welcome. Our terms.

The Morse code alphabet and numerals were painted underneath. Rachel switched on the spotlight and waited for a response. After ten minutes a light on the island briefly winked.

Rachel flashed a message with the spotlight: HAVE FOOD NEED MAPS OF AMERICAS AND TRANSPORT.

HOW MUCH FOOD was the response.

100 TINS flashed Rachel.

A lengthy pause.

WAIT.

Water would have been of no use here. Desalination and limitless fusion power would have solved that particular problem for a seabound enclave like Alcatraz. It was not inconceivable that they could grow their own crops, either in the irradiated ground or hydroponically, or that there were still fish in the sea to catch, but canned food from before the Fall would always command a premium.

An hour later Rachel saw a speck of movement on the horizon. A boat, moving towards her. She hid on the upper floor of one of the wharf buildings and waited. Through a hole in the wall she saw the craft slowly resolve as it drew nearer. It was a small scow with a rusty dune buggy and a dirt bike lashed to it. A teenager and an older, grizzled man were aboard. The scow pulled into the wharf and the boy tethered it. They remained on board, scanning the wharf while aiming down the barrels of their guns.

“Where’s the food, friend?” said the man, his raised voice breaking the silence.

“Drop your weapons and get out of the boat,” said Rachel in an attempt at authority that was undermined by a rogue quaver in her voice. The pair on the boat exchanged glances, then laid down their rifles and jumped onto the wharf.

“OK, missy,” said the man. “Here we are. Show yourself. We ain’t gonna hurt you.”

Rachel tucked her pistol into the waistband of her trousers so that it dug into the small of her back, then covered it with her shirt. She kicked the bags of food and ammo into the corner of the room, then took a deep breath and walked slowly down the stairs and into the open.

“I’m here,” she said calmly. “Got what I need?”

The man moved his arm towards his coat pocket with ostentatious deliberation, as if keen to show he was not pulling a weapon. He tugged the corner of a sheaf of maps from his pocket, displayed it to Rachel, then let it slip back in. Then he gestured to the dune buggy and bike. “Your choice. Once we have the food.”

“The food’s in a shelter in San Mateo,” said Rachel. She gave the man the address and the key. The man and boy sprang into action, unstrapping the dune buggy and rolling it off the scow.

“Watch her,” said the man, nodding meaningfully at Rachel. The boy pulled a pistol from the back of his waistband and levelled it coolly at her.

“Just a precaution, missy,” said the man, lowering himself into the buggy. To the boy: “If I ain’t back in two hours, send the signal.” He drove off. The throaty growl of the buggy’s engine slowly faded, leaving Rachel and the boy in silence. A petrol engine. That would be a liability for her journey. She scoped out the bike. It had what appeared to be a wireless power transmitter dish modded onto the chassis. That was promising.

“I’m Seth,” said the boy. “Sorry about the gun. Just protocol. Who’re you?”

“Call me Rachel,” she said. They lapsed into silence. She wore a mask of indifference but furtively stole shy, hungry glances at Seth, who gazed around at the broken wharf with a casual vigilance. He was handsome. Her pulse quickened, her stomach tightened, and she felt an unusual stirring within her. Mona had taught her the facts of life, but until now it had been an abstract, academic body of knowledge. She had just experienced ten years of living cheek by jowl with her mother in a single room half the size of a train carriage, with little hope of ever leaving or meeting another human. That was enough to kill even the horniest teenage libido stone dead.

“You OK?” said Seth, eyeing her warily and tightening his grip on the gun. “You look funny.”

She was scared. Not of the gun — she felt confident she could disarm him — but of the confused feelings that muddied her thoughts, the unfamiliar hormones that coursed through her bloodstream.

“I’m fine,” she said, staring defiantly at Seth although well aware that her cheeks were flushing.

“Huh. OK,” he said. “So. Going on a trip?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Down south.”

“Cool,” he said with a touch of envy in his voice. “I’ve never been further south than Palo Alto.”

“Oh, I’m going further than that,” she said grimly.

“If Frank comes back with food,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Otherwise you’re going nowhere. Most people want in, you know.” He jerked his head back towards Alcatraz.

She shrugged. “You’re full, apparently.”

Seth sighed. “Yeah, full. The council decided on a number, and we stick to that. One in, one out. And even if someone dies or leaves, we never take in an outsider. Too many couples waiting for permission to have a baby.” Seth looked Rachel up and down slowly. “Shame. I’d let you in.”

Rachel felt breathless with desire. She suppressed her lusty feelings adequately enough to respond: “No thanks. I’ve got a mission, and it doesn’t involve an island of incest.”

Seth looked hurt. They stood in awkward silence until Frank returned. He drove the buggy back onto the scow with a whoop.

“Good haul, Seth!” he said excitedly. He threw the maps at Rachel. “There you go, missy. Pick a vehicle.”

“Give me the bike,” she said. Seth wheeled it down the ramp and let it fall to the floor at her feet. He jumped back onto the scow without a second glance. Frank unmoored and threw her a salute, and they chugged back to Alcatraz.

Rachel picked up the maps and shoved them into her pockets. She collected her bags from the building and strapped them over the rear mud guard like panniers. Then she wheeled the bike into a dark, empty warehouse and started it up. She straddled it, and slipped her hand down the front of her trousers. She pushed down hard onto the vibrating saddle and slowly gyrated her hips, closing her eyes and thinking of Seth until she gasped with climactic release. Her body went limp and she hunched over the handlebars, shuddering with fervour.

She drove south, avoiding cities unless she needed to scavenge food or water. The dirt bike turned out to be a good choice. The top speed was poor, but she was able to veer off the highways at a moment’s notice and vanish into the undergrowth that was reclaiming the stilled arteries of civilization. Traffic — indeed, humanity in general — was virtually non-existent, but there were a few occasions when a truck or humvee rumbled ominously past while she crouched hidden in the scrub.

She drove relentlessly, pausing only to rest, scavenge or recharge, or when the pain became too great. The chronic pain was saddle-soreness. The acute pain was the cramping that struck her low every month, more viciously each time. She felt like she had two buzzing Tesla coils lodged in her lower back, never fully dormant, always just building up enough charge to dissipate in a prolonged lightning display of crackling agony. She was a late bloomer. She got her first period shortly after entering the shelter. There was discomfort then, but nothing like this pain. Mona had been less than sympathetic. She said the pain was nature’s way of nudging a woman to bear a child, but that Rachel had better get used to it as that clearly wasn’t going to happen.

She was only twenty-one, but she yearned for a child. She had long felt an emptiness inside her, but it took the perpetual road trip to make her understand what would fill it. She knew that part of the craving was hormonal. Perhaps her body was somehow aware that background radiation would destroy her fertility long before the menopause did, and that to secure its long-term safety her child would have to become self-sufficient while Rachel was still in her physical prime. Still, the desire did not fade even when the hormones did. She wanted to create something of beauty and hope in this corrupted, desolate world.

The journey through Central America was gruelling but without major incident. Rachel was adept at spotting danger ahead of time and adroitly avoiding it. Then she reached the Darién Gap and found herself in a situation she couldn’t avoid. A ferry crossing in a dusty little enclave was the only way to cross from Panama to Colombia. The ferry master was a brutish man, bald and muscular and covered in self-inflicted tattoos of such spectacular crudeness that they would be comical were it not for his thinly-concealed propensity for violence. Rachel did not want to trust him, but she had no choice. She traded her rifle for a one-way trip to Colombia.

She handed the rifle over. He grabbed it with relish, inspecting it and aiming down the sights at some imaginary target across the water. Then he smashed the stock of the gun into Rachel’s face. She fell to the ground dazed, clutching her bloodied cheekbone.

“I changed my mind,” he said in a menacing growl as he hauled her roughly to her feet and marched her into his crude adobe house. He pushed her into a chair and barked a command: “Tie her up.”

A timid looking woman emerged from the shadows and bound Rachel’s hands behind her back. She didn’t notice — or at least didn’t give any indication of having noticed — the pistol tucked into Rachel’s waistband, beneath her clothes.

“I like your gun,” he said admiringly, stroking the barrel of the rifle. Then he gazed at Rachel with a carnal look that filled her with revulsion and terror. “And I like you.”

He laid the gun down and took a step towards Rachel. She felt sick, yet also felt a little stab of electricity from the tesla coils within her. A biological urge that did not care for context. She felt a surge of anger at her own irrational hormones. Not like this. Even if he didn’t plan to kill or imprison her after he’d had his way; not like this. She harnessed her anger, slipping a hand out of the inexpertly tied knot, grabbing the pistol from her waistband in a fluid motion, and firing a shot at the lumbering ferry master. He went down with a howl of anguish. She was aiming for his kneecap, but had hit his crotch. The end result was the same, at least from her point of view. She stepped over his whimpering, foetal form, pausing only to retrieve her rifle and to kick him in the back of the head. Three more women ran into the room and flocked to the ferry master, sobbing over the prostrate brute. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps, thought Rachel. Or perhaps he had been protecting them from a worse fate.

She hauled her bike onto the ferry and set out across the Darién Gap with the lamentations of the women still ringing in her ears.

When she exchanged her bike and weapons for the vitasuit in Buenos Aires, it was done on her terms and with rigorous caution.

She says nothing. She is still stunned from the blow to her head. The grogginess fades, but she does not know what she can say to improve her situation. He bends down over her, his gaze lingering on her crotch and breasts before snapping to her eyes. He holds her face up tenderly and stares at her imploringly.

“Who are you?” he says. He speaks in a quavering English accent. “Why have you come here?”

Still Rachel says nothing. He lets her head fall to her chest and begins to rummage through her backpack and suit pockets. He emits a low whistle when he finds the harpoon gauntlet. He makes a gagging sound when he finds the seal blubber. His back and shoulders stiffen and he gasps audibly when he finds the torn photo. He turns to Rachel with wild eyes.

“W-where did you get this?” he says, unable to keep the astonishment from his voice.

“My mother,” says Rachel. “It’s a message from my mother.” The man’s face crumples, contorting rapidly as emotions wash across him, from shock to confused delight to disgust. He reaches around Rachel, giving her a wide berth as if she is toxic, and severs the plastic zip tie that binds her hands to the shower pipe. Averting his gaze, he throws a towel in her direction and leaves.

Rachel pulls the towel over herself defensively, covering her nakedness. She rubs her chafing wrists and quickly dries herself. She climbs into an oversized boiler suit that she finds in one of the lockers, then grabs the harpoon and slowly leaves the bathroom with the weapon aloft.

She doesn’t have to go far before she finds the man. He opens a book from a shelf in the recreation room and removes the bookmark. A torn photo. He sits on the couch, in the same position as he appears in the photo. He holds the two halves together and stares at the reconstituted image with tears in his eyes. He cringes when he sees Rachel levelling the harpoon at him.

“Please, put that down,” he says, turning his head so as not to look directly at the vicious barb. “I’m sorry for…I’m sorry. I didn’t know who you were.”

“But you do now?” she says slowly, digesting the implication. “Who are you?”

He looks stunned. “My God, she never told you? I’m Victor. Rachel, I’m your father.”

Rachel slowly sinks into the armchair facing Victor, staring into his eyes, glassy with tears. He proffers the two halves of the photo. She lays the harpoon down on the table and takes the fragments. When she joins the halves together, three details strike her with hammer blows.

The first is the presence of a young, smiling Mona, sat on the couch next to Victor with her head resting on his shoulder.

“You were conceived on the night this photo was taken,” says Victor. “Maybe that’s too much information, but from the sounds of it you’ve been given none at all. We were celebrating a victory. Or what we thought was a victory. Mona found out she was pregnant a month later, then left as soon as she could. I sent letters to you both for years. I guess she never gave them to you.”

The second detail of note is the metallic object in Victor’s hands. It’s a beer keg. This isn’t a photo documenting the device that can save humankind. It’s a snapshot of the most isolated house party in the world. Next to Mona is a fellow scientist with a goofy grin and hair like a bird’s nest. He wears a t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Scientifically speaking, alcohol is a solution.”

It’s not the solution Rachel was looking for.

The most obvious detail is that the message Rachel had thought to be an instruction from her mother is but a fragment of a phrase. The full message is:

What folly have we done? Now only

time will tell. It is done, and it can

never be undone. May God save us all.

Now, too late, it is obvious to Rachel that the message was never intended for her. She lets the photo drop from her hand to her lap. Shoulders sagging, she looks forlornly at Victor.

“What did you do?” she says. “What was your folly?”

Victor laughs nervously. “Where to start?” he says, clearly unwilling to continue. “To cut a long story short…the Second Cold War. We started it.”

Rachel stares at Victor with disbelief. “How?” she says incredulously. “And why?”

Victor sighs. “Why? Because it had to be done. Or so we convinced ourselves. There were five of us. Min, Arkady, Reza, your mother and me. We were young, the most promising in our fields, thrust together from across the globe into this…bubble. Whenever we weren’t working on our research, we were together in this room, discussing science, politics, art, theology…everything. We thought we knew it all. The naivety of youthful brilliance. Our first winter came, and we volunteered to be the skeleton crew while the rest of the base went home. Perhaps it was the isolation of that winter that unhinged us. Allowed us to contemplate war as a rational act…no, as an imperative.

“Of all the things we discussed in those days, we always came back to energy. The world was addicted to fossil fuels, and nothing could wean it off. Peak oil was a myth — there were always new reserves to plunder, and there would be until long past the point of no return. Oil corporations had governments in their pockets, ensuring that renewables never got rolled at at the scale needed. And all around us we could see the disastrous effects as ice shelves slipped into the sea.

“We had no hope that anything would change. Governments across the world were too invested in the status quo, too beholden to parasitic corporations that couldn’t see further than the quarterly dividend. The only glimmer of hope we saw was in fusion power. But fusion power had been worked on for eighty years at that point, and a viable commercial reactor was perpetually twenty years hence. To transform it from mirage to reality would require serious investment. A new Manhattan Project. And that would require a war.

“So we decided to manufacture that war. That winter was spent planning it. The next winter we did not stay. We went home and began to carry it out. The first stage was to recruit like-minded co-conspirators. We networked like you wouldn’t believe. We attended every scientific summit going. Me in Europe, Mona in America, Arkady in Russia, Min in China, and Reza in the Middle East. We found people we could trust. Our network spread. We bided our time, waiting while our agents manoeuvred themselves into positions of governmental influence.

“The second stage involved internet hacktivists. Some of them had beliefs that aligned with ours. Others just wanted to cause anarchy. We didn’t care as long as they did what we asked. Forging internal memos and allowing them to be leaked, sowing dissent and rancour between nations.”

Victor has come alive in the retelling of this tale. He lowers his voice to an apologetic whisper when he glances at Rachel, but he often forgets she is there and his voice takes on a nostalgic, wistful quality, as if pining for days of glory.

“How did you keep all of this secret?” says Rachel. Her incredulity has hardened into angry acceptance. Too much of this tale rings true for it to be the fabrication of a madman.

Victor laughs. “We couldn’t. We didn’t. Word got out. Thankfully, it got out first onto conspiracy websites. We couldn’t have planned it better. When the people who were talking publicly about our cabal were also talking about the twin towers being destroyed by missiles disguised as planes using holograms…well, we heaved a collective sigh of relief. No-one took it seriously.

“We used strong cryptography in everything we did. Even so, I don’t doubt that intelligence agencies knew something. How much, I don’t know. Perhaps they thought it was not in their best interests to stop us. Capitalism was failing, domestic unrest was rife. Perhaps they thought that a new cold war would unite the people against a common enemy and stop the riots.

“They didn’t, or couldn’t, stop us from pulling the trigger. Hostilities between countries across the globe had been ramping up for years before our government agents simultaneously pushed for unprecedented sanctions. Global trade dried up overnight. Most importantly, from our perspective, the oil stopped flowing. We focused our efforts on isolating Israel and Japan. Little oil of their own, geographically isolated from potential allies, technologically advanced — they were our best hope.

“They did exactly as we’d predicted, pumping money into fusion research. Ostensibly they were rival projects, but most of the scientists on the teams were with us. They shared information. Six years later, they had cracked it. They had a safe, stable reactor with a staggering net gain. The five of us were here when the word broke. We leaked the reactor schematics to the internet. Our gift to the world. We celebrated that night.”

Rachel looks at the photo again. Victor and Arkady look overjoyed. Mona looks relieved. Min and Reza look more concerned than happy.

“What went wrong?” she asks. Victor slams his hand down on the coffee table with sudden anger.

“Human nature,” he says bitterly. “That’s what went wrong. It turns out that it’s much easier to start a war than to stop one. We thought that once the world had fusion power, the Second Cold War would thaw. We were naïve. We’d forced a global Mexican stand-off, and no-one was prepared to be the first to put down their weapons. All it took was one itchy trigger finger…”

Victor tails off and looks sadly at Rachel. There is a long, awkward pause. Victor doesn’t know what to say. Reparations for his deeds are impossible. Rachel is angry, but knows that retribution would be empty.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” he says at last. “I wanted to come and see you, but Mona made it clear that I wasn’t welcome. When she first moved away her letters were full of hope and happiness. We vowed to be reunited when my assignment here was done. Each month the letters became colder and more bitter. I sent her this photo to remind her of happier days. Next month, all I received was the photo, with that message on it. I tore it up in anger.”

“You do understand why she wrote that?” says Rachel angrily, leaning forward and looking Victor in the eyes. Her hands grip the arms of the chair tightly. Her knuckles are white. “While you were pontificating in your ivory bunker, she was seeing the results of your — her — actions. The riots, the fear, the violence. Society on a knife-edge. She had to live with what she’d done every day. I can’t even begin to imagine the guilt.”

Rachel slumps back in her chair listlessly. Her anger is spent. It seems futile to hold onto it.

Victor wipes tears from his eyes and gazes at the floor. “I can imagine,” he says in a low voice filled with shame. “I was angry with her for years. Then I realised I was angry with myself. Angry at my own hubris. Words couldn’t do it justice, so I didn’t even try. I just scribbled an apology on that photo and sent it back to Mona. I never heard anything more from her.

“Then the bombs fell and we were stuck here. No more mail drones, no more internet, no return ticket home.”

“We?” says Rachel. “Are the others still here?”

“No,” says Victor bluntly. Rachel sits up, suddenly more alert.

“Where are they?” she says, her eyes darting towards the harpoon on the coffee table between them.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t eat them,” says Victor with a feeble chuckle. “I’m not that sick of fruit and veg. Rez and Min were always more conflicted about what we had done. Five years after we lost contact with the outside world, they couldn’t take it any more. They contemplated a lifetime imprisoned with the co-authors of humanity’s doom, and decided they’d rather take a long walk in the snow, Captain Oates style. Arkady followed them a few years later.”

“But you remained,” says Rachel.

“I had something they didn’t,” says Victor. “I had a child. I had hope. I thought of you and Mona and pictured you rebuilding, repairing the damage we had done. I had hope.

“I never expected to see you. I never dreamed you’d come. I dreamed that you’d find a place of safety, have a family of your own. And now…now you’re here at world’s end.”

Victor gazes into space with dull eyes, drained of hope. Rachel covers her face with her hands and gently weeps. A scraping noise fires neurons in her lizard brain. She instinctively reaches for the harpoon, but it is gone. Victor has it. He puts his mouth around the barb and presses the trigger button on the gauntlet. The harpoon fires through his skull with a metallic grunt, burying itself deep in the bullseye of the dartboard behind him. His body slumps forward, slowly lowering itself onto the table in front as the metal coil of wire attached to the harpoon spools out of the gauntlet with a whirr.

Rachel sits in silence for some time. The only sound is the irregular squelch of grey matter and viscera that drips from the harpoon shaft onto the floor. The iron stench of pooling blood makes her feel sick. She walks out of the recreation room and into the atrium. She stares at the window, at the striations of ice that have surrounded the research station over the years. Layers upon layers. An hour passes.

She strides to the bathroom with determination, and pulls her sheaf of maps from the pocket of her vitasuit. She marches into the recreation room. Her face screws up in disgust as she pushes Victor backwards and yanks the harpoon out of his face. She lets him topple to the floor. She plucks a handful of darts from the grisly board. Back in the atrium she uses the darts to pin her maps to the padded wall.

Rachel looks at her wall of maps. The Americas, at a variety of scales. She turns and walks towards the window with one remaining dart in her hand. She looks at the ice layers, the ash of yesteryear covered by fresh growth, and throws the dart over her shoulder.

Cover image taken from http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/pole/dome/