March 4th, 2065: Yucca Mountain, Nevada

I love when it’s my turn to do security detail, especially when my shift falls at night. I get to go outside; see the stars and the mountains silhouetted against the moonlight, breathe the fresh mountain air. There are always three security guards up here, as befitting an abandoned federal facility; it’s just not always the same three people. Not that there’s anyone to watch us, except maybe a Chinese satellite. We’re surrounded by a hundred miles of desert in every direction. Even the nearest city, Las Vegas, is a shell of its former self. I guess everyone finally realized a city with no access to water just wasn’t a great idea, though there still is a market for “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” maybe even more than when that slogan was created before I was born.

We had volunteered for the MEP, and we knew that meant living in caves for the foreseeable future, but there’s something different about the adventure of living underground on another planet and the drag of living underground in Nevada in holes meant for nuclear waste. In retrospect, I wish I had never learned that part of the MEP mission was to hide the development of this base; recruitment and procurement were folded into the MEP. If you have a project enormous enough (say, a base on Mars), even something big (say, an underground base in Nevada) becomes a rounding error for the accountants. Bill and I were doing great in the training for Mars and they loved his engineering background. I thought my background, a PhD in political science and history, was lame. When halfway through the training we were called into an office we had never seen to talk to people we had never met, we thought we had washed out. In fact, they loved my background and the fact that we were both only children and our parents had passed on (fewer people to ask questions when we disappeared). I suspect that we were slotted for this program before we even were accepted into the MEP. We were only told that it was a critically important mission, very secret and if we went forward with it, then it was for life with no way out. So we bit and we were whisked off to a new site to continue our training.

Putting the base at Yucca Mountain was a flash of brilliance. There was already all the infrastructure here, just waiting to be used. By design, it was a place far from habitation, allowing the base to remain secret. The biggest concern was that there could be a change of heart about storing nuclear waste here as the fission reactors were mothballed, having been made obsolete by the fusion reactors. A group was funded to push for a more geological stable site in West Texas, which has since opened and stores some of the waste intended for Yucca Mountain.

We’ve been here for twenty years, and I’m still not entirely sure what our mission is. Are we one of those monasteries at the edge of Europe that protected the books and knowledge of classical Greece and Rome during the Middle Ages? Are we mission control? If so, what’s the mission we’re controlling and to whom are we giving orders? Are we Asimov’s First or Second Foundation?

We’re connected to all of the major fiber connections, but they’re becoming almost worthless due to almost non-existent maintenance. What communication that remains is AM or shortwave radio. Ham radio geeks are suddenly in big demand. We monitor everything with receivers across the country to understand what’s going on. There are a few people who come and go and bring back firsthand reports, but I expect that most of us will spend the rest of our lives here. In a way, we’re even more isolated than the Martians.

I’m part of a large team that pores over all of those feeds and tries to understand what the political status of the USA is. Where is the power, who has control of what territory, where is the government weak and where is it strong?

The South Greenland ice sheet only lasted four years after the ICE³ project shutdown, less time than anyone expected. With seas now ten meters higher than in 2000, every coastal city is at risk. When hurricane Rodolfo hit D.C. at high tide and overwhelmed the sea walls in 2057, the federal government nearly collapsed. The importance of states and especially the cities has been growing in that vacuum. Most of the rural areas in the southeast are in anarchy, ruled by mobs and malaria. The country has become a weak confederation of city-states. I think back forty years to the Tea Party; that this is their ideal, with everyone more self-reliant (or dead) and no fear that the government is going to take away their guns. No one is complaining about federal taxes, since they aren’t able to collect them. The federal government still has some income from leases and fees, but it’s about as close to bankrupt as could be without filling out any paperwork. And with whom could they file anyway? Grover Norquist’s dream to be able to drown the federal government in a bathtub has been realized. I just hope they have a chance to decommission all of the nuclear weapons before that actually happens.

All of this chaos out there does make me glad to be here, safe and sound, in our underground prison. Bill is busy creating an encrypted, high-efficiency, long-distance radio. I believe the signal skips off the ionosphere, or something like that. Our daughter Cecily just turned 15 and is your normal teenage girl. She’s moody and wants to rebel, but life here is so regimented that there’s very little space for that. She’s never known a life other than the base, and for that I feel constantly guilty. But when I read the reports from elsewhere, I’m sure we did the right thing. She’s smart, but artsy (I have no idea where that came from) in a world with very little beauty. I think she feels it’s her job to paint an ironic bird on everything. Doubly ironic, since she’s never seen a bird.

The reports from Mars make me very jealous for those who got to go. Life is hard there, but they now have a thin oxygen environment. Not enough to go without a rebreather for more than a minute, but it is amazing progress in just over 20 years. The population is growing and there’s talk of relaxing the one-child policy, but that probably won’t happen until the atmosphere is thick enough to breathe. Even then they’ll need solar-storm cellars, since the lack of a planetary magnetic field will always make Mars a dangerous place to live, even with a thick atmosphere.

My shift is almost over. I take as deep a breath as I can. I’ve already requested to do my next shift, in three months, with Cecily. It will be her first time above ground. She’s seen photos and movies, but her eyes have never focused on infinity. I can’t imagine what that will be like for her, but I want to be there and see the world through her eyes. She pretends to be blasé about it, but I know she can’t wait. There’s a big, scary world out there and I can’t imagine what the future has in store for her. In the meantime, I go back down into my hole to pore through radio transcripts and satellite feeds.