Per Square Mile

Important

"Now, I have to trust you Dani. You are now important to the city. And remember the city is all there is." Joseph and I have stopped walking and have reached the door that leads to my new office.

"Don't worry. I'm good at weather." I say with confidence.

"I'm assuming you are." Joseph said as his voice turned tones to something serious and stern that sent shivers through out my body. "You must remember that you are here to do your job. The city is always smaller than it seems and that ladder is always closer. It doesn't take long to walk over there. Do you understand me?"

I take a moment to process, but I understand very clearly that he is threatening me. "Yes sir. I understand."

"Well then, this is your workspace. I need to make your job clear."

"Alright."

"Yesterday, I asked you what's wrong with this sky. Well now I need you to fix it." Joseph stared at me dead as my eyes widened.

"What? I don't understand."

Joseph took a second to look at me then walked over to the large table in the center of the room and waved his hands over it. On the table the sky as it was today appeared.

"You told me you could see what was wrong with the sky. Well I need you to fix it. I'm afraid of other people seeing the fault in the skies as well." Joseph paused talking for a moment to see if I had anything to say, but my speechlessness answered as a no and he carried on with his explanation. "The job is important. You have a choice of doing it or dying so let me be direct. The sky isn't real."

"What do you mean by the sky isn't real?" I asked stunned.

"The sky is a projector. I believe your mom was a climate change analyst. Right Dani?"

"Yeah. So?"

"She was responsible for the sky. In fact she strongly believed it was a good idea."

"I still don't understand why is it fake?"

"Because people have been afraid Dani. Afraid of what is outside these walls. But with the sky we can simply control it. We can stop them from feeling to comfortable and we can stop them from becoming too scared." Joseph stopped to sit at one of the seats in front of the big table in the middle of the room. "I'm not going to make you play dumb Dani. It's okay that you know, because you have an important job, but an even more important choice. You can chose to do this or die."

Feeling sick I sat down at the big white table showing the sky and continued staring at Joseph until I could get words out of my mouth. "How do I do it?"

He started touching the table and information about it such as the temperature appeared as a hologram above the table. "You can see the basic information like this, but in order to change anything in needs your fingerprint. The only ones that work are mine and yours. Right here we can pull up different presets, which is what we have been using these past few days without a meteorologist. If you use these scales you can adjust the details of it. I want the sky to look consistent. I want to fool them. It's for their own good."

I shouldn't have asked. It was over stepping, but I did anyways? "What is out there?"

"I've seen it Dani. There is nothing. Trust me. The surface of Earth is covered in water."