Together, We Stand

Chapter 2

"Don't you worry now, Felix. Michelle will work it out, as she always does." Daniel comforted her. News headlines everywhere were talking about the increased radiation levels. Daniel could not fathom why Felix was so troubled over the news. He believed undoubtedly in both her and Michelle to find a way out of this fix. Felix fiddled with her glass of water, turning it around and around out of nervousness.

Daniel sensed Felix was hiding something, and it was bothering her. He placed a hand on her shoulder as she glanced up at him. Daniel had a way with people - getting them to tell him their deepest troubles was one of them. He gazed at her with unrelenting eye contact. She blinked at him and heaved a sigh. With visible effort, she said, "The radiation levels, they have been going down again." "So, that's a good thing, right?" he questioned. "Yes, but the solar sensors have been malfunctioning since today morning. That is why we initially panicked about the radiation levels. But there is something else going on out there.", she voiced ominously.

Daniel felt a chill go through him. He did not say anything about it and waited for Felix to continue. "The last time this had happened was over 3 or 4 millenniums ago. A solar storm had hit the Earth, prompting a massive blackout across the world, and the aftermath had been devastating. Second only to the Doomsday disaster in 3000 A.D. that wiped out the world as we knew it back then."

"So, Michelle knows this, right?"

"Well, no, no one does. I was at home because I had taken leave. Michelle called me about the radiation levels, asking to find any information I could. So, after looking up the archives of Disaster Control's database, I tried to contact Michelle, but I could not reach her. Her phone, it seemed, has been switched off. I am worried."

Daniel looked tensed. Phones ran on the pulse of the user. So, technically, they could never be switched off unless some emergency caused them to force shut down. He scrambled to open his phone's screen and called Michelle. The phone rang for three rings and then disengaged with an automatic message, "Phone is unreachable, the user may have switched off the phone" He tried again and again but to no avail.

#

Kate repeatedly tried to open the news application, but it seemed to be malfunctioning. She stepped inside the dome, closed the window, and sat down at her desk. She connected to her computer's screen and held up her phone to redirect to the news application she had been trying to open. The computer's screen flickered, and a second later, the news portal opened. She swiped through the articles surrounding her until she stopped at a headline that caught her attention – Raining Radiation.

She opened the article and read the developments at the Disaster Control department. She felt the sudden urge to be with her mom, knowing how stressful this news must have been for her. She tried to call her mom but could not. Confused, she walked outside to ask her father when she heard Felix talking. Katie hid behind the kitchen's wall, in earshot of the conversation. She did not know what a solar storm was, but she did not like the sound of it. Having realized that her mom might be in danger, Katie ran back to her room, her heart thumping loudly in her chest. She felt a sudden need to see her mother.

Picking up her backpack, she set out towards the garage. She had never been on the ABC alone, but she knew she had to do something; the restlessness she had been feeling had magnified tenfold. She sat on the seats, and the car's doors whirred upwards from thin slits on either side of the seats. They created an almond-shaped covering for the seats, after which the car took off from its charging station, levitating over a thin track laid onto the floor of the garage. It followed slowly over this track towards the back of the dome.

When Kate entered the location of her mother's office, it made a jump up into the air and swooshed away on a curving path towards the Disaster Control department. The trajectory followed that of a roller coaster's zigzagging in between other cars and below the arches of entrances to different vicinities. Kate held on tight to the joystick in the middle of the ABC made to handle the path manually.

She looked mesmerized as the expanding ocean below her revealed more domes of different sizes, two-room, three-room, pool-villas, and even public park domes. She saw the one where her college campus spread over the expanse, a beautiful crystal dome, half of which was a library full of books from before 3000 A.D., preserved precariously over the last few millenniums.

She crossed a densely populated vicinity, the commercial center of the Asian-Pacific region, and she knew she was nearing the Disaster Control dome. She could see its outline far to the horizon, where the giant diamond-paneled glass dome stood against the sky in all its majesty. Six domes dominated the Asian-Pacific region. These included Disaster Control, Space Management, Land Restoration, Food Management, Medical Aid, and Mecha-technical Management. Of course, other public domes handled various other aspects, but these had become of utmost importance since the Doomsday disaster of 3000 A.D.

However, something was wrong with the dome. The nearer Kate got to it, the worse her fear deepened. The dome seemed to be short-circuiting at random intervals of time, the walls inside dancing with a mix of color shades, and it seemed to be bobbing up and down ever so slightly. There seemed to be no life around. It was located far out to the East where the land used to be. The scatter of smaller domes around it, however, seemed to be doing fine.

Domes' design enabled them to vary their magnetic force at the bottom in synchrony with the gravitational waves of the Earth to stay very stable while hovering over any surface. Its power systems took energy from a combination of the wind, sun, and the seas, so there would never be a power cut. Over the last two millennia, their design had been refined over and over again by the brightest of minds. Kate was perplexed at the state of the dome in front of her.

Her ABC began bobbing up and down as soon as it entered the sphere of influence of Disaster Control. She felt a chill finding the domes encircling it deserted, void of life. It was astonishing given the number of people that worked at Disaster Control. She manually touched down the ABC to one of the empty domes close to Disaster Control's and stepped out into fresh air. The dome loomed over her like a giant umbrella. She assessed the look of it, conflicted on whether to go inside or not. She had not heard the ten missed calls from her father.

#

Daniel went into a total frenzy when he heard the silent swoop of the ABC as it became airborne. Felix heard it too and stared, frozen, at Daniel. The two ran into Kate's room to find it empty. Daniel realized what must have happened when he saw Kate's computer screen showing the headlines of the day. He and Felix ran outside to Felix's ABC and got in. That would be the last time they would ever see their domes, but neither knew that, as the ABC flew up and away.