The girl was sitting- her knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. Her head slightly tilted forward, a metal thing covered her mouth and nose while a tube lead from the mask to the wall she leant against. A small monitor in the wall reads her heart rate, and had a small text across the bottom- “Low Power” – after a moment it blinks, slowly at first and then quicker, until finally the screen turns off. Her eyes slowly open, and glance around. Her hands rip off the mask and she takes a deep breath before standing.
“Hello?” She asks, getting worried as she realizes that she is stuck in a chrome two foot by three foot cell. The wall behind her slides like a door to reveal a hallway and she steps out just as a cubby’s front slides away to reveal a stack of folded clothes and a small blue canvas purse. She looks down and is suddenly embarrassed- she puts on the clothes as quickly as she can, then grabs the purse and slings it over her shoulder. On the floor are arrows- she follows them. There is a labyrinth of turns and ramps, but whenever she encountered a hallway, the arrows led her so that there was never a choice of which way to go. He legs ached when she encountered a door- she opened it to a flight of stairs. She started climbing.
After the tenth set of stairs, the stairs ended to her great relief. Instead was a thick chrome blast door- she grabbed the handle and pulled as hard as she could to open it. The sun hit her like a bomb. A man in a yellow polo and short white jeans sat in a chair next to a woman who leaned against his legs, dozing. The man looked up and smiled warmly, while tapping his companion on the head soft to wake her.
“Hello, sweetheart, welcome.” He said, standing. “My name is Andre, and this is Diane.”
“Hi, I’m-” She stopped, forcing her mind to compute an answer. “I’m-“
Diane smiled knowingly. “Sweetie, none of us know who we are. I’ll take you to orientation,” she said , holding out her hand. She took it tentatively, and she lead her down the dirt path that swirled around the building she had emerged from.
“Where… where are we?”
“The remains of Washington DC, we think. One of the first people to emerge found a binder with some things for us to know, but we’ll look at some of that during your orientation. Here we are, orientation time,”
They had arrived at the orientation- nothing but a canopy for shade, a box, and a few chairs.
“Have a seat. Well, what’s in your bag?”
She pulled her bag up and unzipped it, then stopped and looked up. “Does everyone have a bag?”
“No, but a few people have had some interesting things in them.” She spilled the contents of the bag onto the grassy floor. A leather wallet, a few pens, a folded piece of paper and a key-chain. Diane looked over them apprehensively, then she opened the wallet.
“What does it say?” The girl asks.
Diane pulls a card out of the wallet. “Your name,” she says slowly, “Is Caroline Taylor. In 2051, you were a student at the Tucson School of Arts and Sciences,” then handed the card to the girl.
She looks at it, drinking in the meager details of her school id- a picture of her, smiling and looking childish. Under that, Taylor, Caroline G., Tucson School of Arts and Sciences, 2051-2052
The back had a black magnetic strip along the side, and the words Valid Public Bus Pass for the Tucson Area.
Caroline looked up. “That doesn’t explain how I got here, though.”
“Honey, I didn’t pick up the name Diane from a card like you can. I had to make it up, like most people do. You’re one of the lucky ones who gets an inkling of their past. You can look at the paper to see if it shows anything else about you, but it might just be the contract to enter the program here- we’ve found hundreds of those with people.”
“Hundreds?! How many people are down th-“ but then Diane thrust the paper into her hands and she wanted to know what it was. She unfolded it many times and noticed how yellow the paper was. When she opened it, all she found was a contract. Blocks and blocks of text, then her signature at the bottom.
Diane craned her neck to see. “All it says is that the air supplement you will be on is not oxygen, so you won’t age. Also, you won’t get out until they let you out. End of story.”
“So, um, what’s my orientation?” Caroline asked, eyeing the binder.
Diane put down her contract and picked up the binder, opening to page one. “Well, that,” she pointed to the silver building they were next to, “was- is- a storage center for people. When America entered third world war, these were offered all over the country, the binder says. Save yourself underground until the dangers of war were over and you could live in peace once again.”
“How many people are there?”
“we can’t tell. Thousands, we think. It’s all under ground so we can’t tell how many floor there are or even how many people are on each floor. About a thousand people have come up so far, but we can’t get back in because of the blast doors- safety feature, one way entry.
“Okay, so why can’t I remember my life?”
Diane’s face fell from her soft smile. “I… we don’t know. There’s a lot of things we don’t know. But… we think that whatever caused this city to go down hurt the center. Wherever our memories were being kept while we hibernated was destroyed, as was our memories.”
“Uh, how come I didn’t age? What year is it anyways?”
“Oh, we know that one,” she replied, smiling again. “The mask you were wearing was giving you nutrients and air, but not oxygen- and oxygen is what makes us age. It was all in the contract… but we can’t tell what year it is. From the looks of the ruins we found, it’s a few hundred years.”
“So… what now?”
“The company that made the center had a contingency plan for worst- case scenarios. When the binder was found, it was next to boxes of things to create a simple civilization and the binder has instructions. We live in a town about ten minutes away from here, outside of these woods. See that path?”
Caroline looked closer at the surrounding woods and saw an extremely narrow dirt path, as if it was made by deer. She nodded and then headed that way.
“Wait up,” Diane said softly, closing the binder and grabbing her things. “I’ll go with you, and then send someone to join Andre.”
“Why do you guys have to wait there all day?” Caroline asked, taking her bag and slinging it over her shoulder.
“It’s not just us, the whole town takes shifts. People are there all day every day- imagine if you came out and you were all alone? We have people ease the transition. Once you’ve been here for a few months, you’ll join the rotation and do this job whenever you have a turn.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, as Caroline breathed in the fresh wooded scent, listening to the birds softly call to eachother.
“So… you didn’t find anyone?” Caroline asked softly, and slightly scared sounding. “No-one?”
“Anyone left here a long time ago. I’ve seen the ruins, they’re nasty. No- one could thrive here without shelter, and there’s no shelter left from what used to be the city.”
They kept walking. The sun that made it through the tree cover fell in spots and lighted the dirt beneath her feet.
“How much further?”
Diane didn’t answer her- she just looked straight ahead for a moment. “See that white spot? Just past those two trees with the white trunks?” Caroline nodded. “That’s the town.”
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