The Burn

by Annie Oldham

The Burn

  by

  Annie Oldham

  * * * * *

  The Burn

  Copyright © 2011 Annie Oldham

  Cover design by Renee Barratt

  www.TheCoverCounts.com

  * * * * *

  For Maggie—my own Jessa—thank you for everything

  * * * * *

  Chapter One

  The world as we knew it ended in a bang. That was a hundred years ago when the first rumblings of World War III started up, and a rumble was all it took. All the countries that said they never had or had already powered down their nuclear weapons let loose in one fell swoop and boom! There goes the neighborhood.

  Luckily, I guess, I am a marine biologist’s great-granddaughter. After the crisis in Iraq was winding down and things looked like they might actually be relatively peaceful for a while, a group of scientists from all over the world got together—biologists, horticulturists, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, doctors, you name it—and started coming up with a plan. The basic gist was this: if anything like a global catastrophe were to occur, is there anywhere safe on Earth? And all they came up with was the ocean floor.

  So they started building. They got funding with grants detailing studies into the life cycles of the weird creatures that deep, how the oceanic plates moved, and finding alternative energy sources. No one flat-out said they were looking to colonize, and nobody asked. They were selfish about it (not all of them, but those who were more altruistic were quickly shushed), being careful who they told and what investors and builders they used, because the last thing they wanted it to look like was a replay of the Titanic—they were obviously first-class passengers and everyone else on the planet was steerage.

  They built their first colony in the Pacific Ocean next to the Mariana Trench. Five hundred people went to live there—mostly the scientists and their families, including my great-grandfather (the marine biologist) and my grandmother, who was twenty at the time. They just fed their friends and family some bogus moving story and gave them phony addresses.

  Then five years after that, another colony was built in the Atlantic Ocean next to the Puerto Rico Trench. And soon every couple years another colony or two would pop up somewhere else. By the time of the Event (when all the bombs went off), there were fourteen colonies scattered throughout the earth’s oceans.

  I was born sixteen years ago to a marine biologist dad and a nutritionist mom. Everyone is an -ist down here. I think it makes them feel that they deserve to be down here instead of up there. My dad also happens to be the speaker for the Mariana Colony. My grandma was before him, and now my dad is. It’s like being governor. Sure it sounds important, but when you live down here, everyone sounds important. There are just a lot of jobs to do.

  I hate it.

  Especially on days like today when I don’t have school, I don’t have my scheduled “introspection” time, I don’t have my field studies. I don’t have anything to keep my mind occupied. I just have my job. Everyone gets a job when they’re twelve—selected “with all your aptitudes and interests in mind”—and most of them stick with it. I’m on my fifth job since then—I changed every year. Well, I guess I should admit I changed twice in one year, too.

  I’ve tried structural design, but I fell asleep about five times before they decided to switch me. I tried medicine, but no one liked my bedside manner. After old Earl Kather finally marched to my dad’s office with his gown hanging open in the back and complained, they finally gave me another job. I tried culinary arts, but after I burned some hot chocolate, the sous chef rolled his eyes and shooed me away for the last time. I’ve tried marine biology like my dad, but I hate going down the Trench. There are beacon lights every fifty feet for the first quarter mile, and after that it’s nothing but blackness. There’s too much of that living down here. I didn’t want any more.

  My current vocation is agriculture. Yes, dress me up in overalls and give me a straw hat. Well, not quite. (Though that’s not how it was when the bombs went off—or so Rint Klein, my history teacher, tells me.) I wear a solar radiation suit. The lights we have over our artificial fields simulate real sunlight, so if I were in there for too long, I’d get a sunburn just like if I was on a beach. I guess up on the Burn (that’s what we call the land) they had something called sunscreen, but then some dermatologist down here designed the solar radiation suits and said they were much more effective protection. Sometimes I want to smack him.

  Today is my work day, and I go to the pod that opens onto Field #3. The fields are huge domes that sit half in the colony and half under the crushing ocean. If you were to look down on us from above, you’d see five fields all bubbling out on the west side of the colony. The field is covered in a big dome of UVA/UVB filtering borosilicate, so you can peek in at what’s growing, but the solar radiation can’t escape and toast everyone walking by. There are temperature regulators, solar lamps, and air regulators all hanging from the top of the dome. You go through the door of the pod, and then there’s a door on the opposite side that leads to the field. The pod is a small room about ten feet square with lockers on one side for the workers for this field, a bench down the middle of the room, and showers on the opposite side.

  I run a hand through my short, black hair and stuff the helmet on my head. I talk my claustrophobia into submission. My therapist (which we are all required to see at least monthly) said the claustrophobia would ease up as I got used to the suit. I’m thinking I might be in for another vocation. That’ll be three in one year. I will never live it down.

  My sister, Jessa, and my friend Brant walk in through the sliding door, grab their suits from their lockers, and suit up. Jessa looks just like me—black hair (but hers is long—luxurious, some girls call it), green eyes, short but strong—but where my skin is fair bordering on translucent, hers is coppery. She got that from my mom.

  Jessa is my only sibling. I should have four more sisters, but things happened. There’s a law down here—each couple can only have two kids. Something about sustainable populations and all that. But when my mom and dad got pregnant and went to their first prenatal appointment, the doctor told them they were having sextuplets. My mom was so happy she started crying. She’d always wanted a big family, and knew it wasn’t possible. Maybe this was how it needed to happen. But my dad, Mr. Speaker of the Mariana Colony, just worried about what it would do to his reputation—the speaker who broke laws.

  He pulled the doctor aside and asked what could be done. The doctor just stared at him. When my dad explained his concern, the doctor said that surely this would be an acceptable breach of protocol. A couple in another colony five years ago had triplets, and that was allowed. People treated it almost like a fulfillment of prophecy or something. My dad asked if aborting four of the fetuses was possible. The doctor said no one in his right mind would condescend to that kind of murder. So he talked my dad down. When my mom went into labor six months later, four of the babies were stillborn, and my sister and I were the only ones who made it. My dad held us like a miracle—like we had something to do with upholding the laws—and he fawned over my mother who gave us to him. To hear my grandma tell it, he was a doting husband and loving father, and my mother couldn’t ask for anything more. But then my mom found out about what happened with the doctor. With four of my sisters being stillborn and only two surviving, my mom grew depressed and then suspicious. She moved out of our quarters. When that wasn’t far enough, she left the colony. Said she was going to the Puerto Rico Trench colony, half way around the world. But my dad never heard from her again. No one really knows where she ended up.

  It tore my dad up, and he threw himself into his work. My grandma moved in to help out. And now I have to live with two speakers of the colony. Sure one’s retired, but it f
eels like they’re both on active duty.

  My dad never told me this dark chapter of his past. I know about it through the colony’s archives. Everything down here is recorded and kept for posterity, if you know how to access it. You really can’t have a moment’s peace.

  “Terra, what’s wrong?” Jessa asks. She shakes me right out of that reverie. I flip down my visor and it clicks into place. She carefully ties her long hair into a knot and puts on her helmet. Jessa knows me so well. She can’t even see my face through the visor, and she already knows something is bugging me.

  “Nothing.” My voice crackles through the microphone and into her ear piece under her helmet. “Just wanting to get this over with. Again.”

  “Liar. And if you actually tried to like it, it might not be that bad, you know.” She reaches out a gloved hand and almost touches me.

  I can just imagine her motherly look under that helmet, the look she’s given me her whole life. But strangely, I don’t mind it. Most other people try to be protective (my Dad’s a pro at being protective), and I shut off. Not with Jessa. I don’t feel like she is condescending. I just feel like she cares.

  “I don’t care if you like it or not,” Brant says, grabbing an aerator. “Let’s just get this done fast so we can hit the Juice Deck if we have time.”

  Jessa raises her visor and kisses him. She grabs a pair of pruners and a bucket and turns to me. Her eyes are bright after the kiss. She snaps her visor back in place.

  “You up for irrigation monitoring today?”

  I sigh. “Again?”

  “It beats fertilizer testing.”

  That is true. All the colony’s fields are fertilized with pelagic sediment. At least that’s what the marine biologists call it. We call it “the ooze.” Or “the crud.” Or the “gross stuff on the ocean floor.” The ocean floor at this depth has this layer of shells, animal skeletons, and decaying plants and stuff. It’s yellowish, and well, oozy. There are people whose job it is to go out and actually harvest the stuff. Blech. At least that hasn’t been one of my many vocations.

  When it’s my day to do fertilizer testing, I just stand around vats of the stuff with big rubber gloves up to my shoulders and poke around in it and take samples to test to make sure it’ll help our veggies be good for us. Then I usually start thinking about how eating one our tomatoes is just like slurping a big glass of the ooze. Gross. Best not to think of it. Better yet, best not to even be on the fertilizer testing schedule. I might need a vocation change sooner than I thought.

  But I suck it up and go into Field #3 with Jessa and Brant. The field is full of corn. Brant walks around with the aerator, poking holes in the soil around each plant, being meticulous not to damage roots. Brant definitely has what it takes to be a good agriculturist, and I admire him for it. He knows what he wants and goes for it. He never founders.

  Jessa takes her pruners and cuts off any dead or sad-looking plant parts and puts them in the bucket. They’ll go to fertilizer processing to be added to the composter. Jessa is pretty good at farming, too. Not like Brant—he definitely has the touch. Her speciality is fertilizers and stuff like that, how to feed the plants to make them the most nutritionally dense. Jessa actually likes being on fertilizer testing. She has my mom’s knack for nutrition.

  I make sure that all the plants are equally watered and then adjust the irrigation system controls. Even though I could give her a hard time about it, I appreciate Jessa giving me this job. It requires the least amount of finesse.

  As I examine the soil around a plant with browning leaves, Jessa sidles up next to me, absently trimming at the same plant with her pruners.

  “For real, Terra, what was bugging you back there?”

  I sigh. The temperature control in my suit whirs to life as the thermometer reaches 75 degrees. Except during exercises, I don’t think I have ever sweat a day in my whole life. Everything around here is micromanaged.

  “Do you ever feel trapped down here? Like there’s nowhere to go except where everyone else wants you to?”

  “It hasn’t gotten any better, has it?”

  “No.”

  Jessa doesn’t answer my question because we both know she doesn’t understand. We’ve had this discussion before, and she does try to see where I’m coming from. But she’s happy down here, so she just can’t get it. She doesn’t try to offer advice—she knows there isn’t anything she can say that will help—so she just listens better than anyone else can, and tries her hardest to cheer me up. Sometimes it works, but more often than not she leaves frustrated that she can’t do more.

  She gives me an awkward hug through the radiation suits and bumps her helmet against mine in one of those ridiculous gestures of camaraderie that looks inane, but I know the depth of feeling behind it. I don’t want her worrying about me.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll have time for the Juice Deck. It’ll be fun.”

  I try to smile.

  It takes us four hours to finish up, and then we head out to the Juice Deck. The Juice Deck is on one of the higher levels of the colony and has a huge observation window overlooking the Mariana Trench. A kind of romantic idea, I guess, but at this depth, light doesn’t make its way down here, and you can’t see anything. There’s nothing to see, but for some reason people still want a seat by the window. If you’re here in the morning or the evening, you can see the sub going for the trench or coming back, its lights glowing until it disappears in the murk. I don’t know why there are windows in this place at all. There’s nothing but black and cold all around us. It feels oppressive, and I sit with my back to it, which isn’t much better. I feel like something is always watching me.

  Brant orders for us: a mango mash for Jessa, a blueberry blast for me, and chocolate chug for him. The Juice Deck serves smoothies and light snacks—all nutritionally optimized, of course.

  Brant takes a long swig. “Ow, brain freeze!” He holds his forehead for a moment. “Mmm, that tastes so good after working in the field. How’s yours, Jessa?”

  Jessa nods, still slurping at hers, closing her eyes in satisfaction. Brant wraps his arm around her shoulders and buries his head in her hair.

  “Mmm…your hair always smells good. Like strawberries.”

  Jessa flips her hair over her shoulder. Half the guys our age are in love with her for her hair. A few publicly fantasize about running their fingers through it. It is a shiny, black waterfall. Brant knows he’s lucky to be the one to touch it.

  I avert my eyes and sip my drink.

  “You know, in Mr. Klein’s class, he told us that up on the Burn they had something called refined sugar. They added it to smoothies like this, and it made them taste ten times better.”

  Brant rolls his eyes. “I guess that’s something they teach you when you’re three grades ahead of everyone else in history. Why don’t we have it?”

  I shrug my shoulders. “Empty calories.”

  “Figures,” Jessa says.

  “Stuff up there was so weird,” Brant says. He grabs my smoothie and slurps it.

  “Hey!” I swat his arm. He slides my drink back.

  Brant and I have been friends for a few years. I ran into him on one of my ill-fated house calls, and now it’s like we’ve known each other since diapers.

  Then he met Jessa two months ago, and it was spontaneous combustion. I give credit to Jessa for not letting things get awkward when the three of us are together. He’s googly for her, but she keeps it cool when I’m around.

  Brant tries a sip of Jessa’s smoothie.

  “So weird,” says Jessa. “I mean, can you believe the mythologies? Those ancient cultures on the Burn believed such crazy stuff. And the most enlightened cultures, too.”

  Brant grins, leaning close like a conspirator. “Crazy names too, like Zeus, and Hera, and what was the goddess of earth’s name? Ga-, Guy-, shoot I can’t remember.”

  “But can you imagine?” I say, not wanting to let the sugar die. “Something tasting better tha
n this?”

  “Just let it go.” Jessa reaches out her hand and touches my elbow. “You talk too much sometimes, and you know it.”

  I shrug. So what? But I smirk at Jessa—she knows exactly how right she is. She raises an eyebrow at my cheekiness.

  “You know what happened the last time you went on about something up on the Burn.”

  I do remember, and I resent our dad for it. When each kid turns fifteen, they enroll in Mr. Klein’s Burn History class as part of the school curriculum. By school board mandate, the first thing they see is old news footage of the Event and its aftermath. It’s just in high-definition instead of 3D projection, so naturally there’s always a few elbow jabs and eye rolls at the primitive technology. But everyone sobers up pretty quickly. Naturally, no one is too curious about the Burn after seeing that carnage.

  But after I had been in Mr. Klein’s history class for two months, he came to my dad and recommended I be put in a more advanced course. What he didn’t tell my dad was why I was so much more advanced. It wasn’t my superior intellect (which I don’t have), it was just my obsessive fascination with the Burn and anything related to it.

  At the time I didn’t realize that could be a dangerous thing. After all, we take a history class about the Burn. If they want to teach us about it, how bad can it be? The first day in the advanced course, Mr. Klein taught about scuba divers and submarines, and how primitive ones were crushed by sea pressure. After the Event, some of the survivors salvaged a few remaining submarines and tried to locate the colonies.

  So I ran home after school and talked my dad’s ear off about scuba divers and submarines. But when I asked him if any of us had gone up there to explore, he just about lost it.

  “No one has ever gone up there. No one ever will.”

  And I had the guts to ask why.

  “Nuclear fallout. Roving gangs. Complete anarchy. No reliable plumbing. Take your pick!” His face had gone beyond red and was almost white with anger. “I am never to hear about exploring the Burn, visiting the Burn, or anything related to it unless it is a purely historical, intellectual exercise. Do I make myself clear?”

  I had fled to our room. Before I had even closed the door, I heard him sink into the sofa and begin to sob.

  “Oh, my love, what can I do better?” Dad always talked to the ghost of my mom when he was in trouble.

  Jessa was in our room, studying. I spent the rest of the night curled up against her shoulder, crying.

  By morning I had catalogued the excuses: nuclear fallout, gangs, anarchy, plumbing. I would go to Mr. Klein’s office and ask about those. It was scheduled introspection, so I knew he’d be in his office instead of teaching.

  His office was a small room just off a corridor. One wall was a window covered in bookshelves. You could just catch a few glimpses of the dark ocean between books. He deliberately covered up the dark space. He didn’t like a window into night anymore than I did. In a corner was Mr. Klein’s desk, all titanium with a couple slots for papers. He hunched over a small laptop, probably working on lesson plans. He ran his fingers through his salt and pepper hair. He wore brown pants and a tweed jacket. No one else wore tweed. But he always said it was the traditional uniform of academics, so he had the colony outfitter produce enough tweed jackets for his lifetime and then tell them they could stop production if they wanted to. The door was ajar, so I rapped on the door frame.

  He jumped up and closed his computer in one motion, like he was caught red-handed doing something bad. Weird. Then he turned, squinted, and smiled. A little relieved, I thought, when he saw it was me.

  “Hello, Terra, come on in.” He gestured to an empty seat by the desk. I sat down quickly, staring at my shoes. I had no idea how to begin this conversation. If being obsessed with the Burn was such a bad thing around here, how did I bring it up with a teacher who could just report back to my dad?

  Mr. Klein studied me for a moment. Then he nodded, folded his fingers, and put his hands on his lap.

  “You got in trouble with your father?” he said.

  I glanced up. “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “You’ll find that not everyone has an appreciation for the Burn like you or I do.”

  “But why? It’s where we came from. We should know about it. And there’s survivors up there! My dad said so. Shouldn’t we help them?”

  Mr. Klein gave a sad, low chuckle. “You should be easier on your father. He’s never been quite the same since your mother left.”

  “Then maybe he shouldn’t have been so stupid!”

  Mr. Klein ran a finger around the rim of a mug, ignoring my outburst.

  “Did you know in my early teaching days I advocated a new vocation? Burn Exploration. It was shot down before it could even be introduced at committee. And I was strictly warned that if I ever brought up something like that again, I would lose my teaching position. I couldn’t be a liability—infecting children’s minds with such bad ideas.”

  He smiled at me, but his eyes were tired and old.

  “I had no idea,” I whispered. What else could I say?

  He nodded. “There are two schools of thought in the colonies. There are the Old. They want to keep life down here a secret. Of course people up there suspect about us. How could they not? But they’ve never seen any proof, as far as I know. So the Old want to keep it that way. No contact, no exploration. They’re afraid there’d be a run on our colonies—people trying to find a better life.

  “Then there are people like you and me, Terra. New. People who don’t believe the lies about radiation poisoning—and they are lies. Sure a week, two weeks after the Event, conditions were still incredibly dangerous. But after a hundred days, fallout dangers are all but gone. Land can be cleansed and improved. It’s been a hundred years. We could all go back up there and resume a normal life. It’s true that socially things have been rocky. Understandably so. But they’re trying to get their lives together, establish order. Some are succeeding, some aren’t.”

  “How do you know all this? I thought contact with the Burn was illegal.”

  Mr. Klein’s eyes flashed once, as if I’d asked something too close to the mark, and then ignored the question, uncrossing and recrossing his legs as he leaned closer to me. He moved his hands gracefully with his words, as if we were discussing nothing more than this morning’s breakfast.

  “The trouble is—besides the fact that the Old have more influence—is that the Old can’t see past the ends of their noses. They think they’ve created Eden down here. That they’re safe in their high-tech cocoon. But I’m a history teacher, and I know better. You know my mantra in class about history and ignorance?”

  “They’re doomed to repeat it,” I said, seeing where this was going. The Old refused to listen to the past or learn the lessons from it by embracing the Burn. In another hundred years, who knew. Maybe all the colonies would blow themselves to hell and only a few scientists would escape and want to colonize the Burn.

  Mr. Klein nodded. “I’m glad you pay attention.”

  He reached for his coffee and brought it to his lips. Then he paused before taking a sip.

  “Up on the Burn, their coffee has caffeine in it. Produces quite a satisfying little buzz of energy.” He studied his mug for a moment before continuing.

  “I know how you feel about life down here, Terra. We’ve had a lot of conversations before.” His eyes flickered to the watcher, the small, black camera in the upper corner of his office. Every moment of our discussion would be added to the colony archives. You can’t ever think you’re alone down here. Then he looked at me hard, and I could tell he was going to choose his words carefully.

  “So if anyone wanted to explore the Burn, they should be cautious, listen to good advice, but shouldn’t believe false information. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He finally took a sip of his coffee, turned his back on me, and opened his computer. “Please shut the door on your way out.”