Aboveground

Chapter One

1.

I trace my finger around the spiral indents on the leather-bound cover.

"It was my grandmother's," my mother tells me. "She wrote it when she was about your age."

I flip the pages slowly, with my thumb. The paper's beginning to yellow, but the ink is intact. Great-grandma seemed to have precariously neat, compact, printing.

"And Great-grandma was born at the turn of the millennium," I clarify. My mother nods. "So this was around 2016."

"I believe that's the year, actually."

"Two thousand and sixteen. And it was written before-"

"Oh... yes, you know... I believe it was. Your great grandmother lived in a different world, Lizzie." She sighs, then adds, as an afterthought, "You'll forget all that when you read it, though. Barely any cultural difference..."

"Where did you get it?"

"It was recovered at the archives, along with fourteen more. That's nearly a decade of her life, you know. I suppose she got distracted when she finally grew up, however, and left her routine practice of writing altogether. And I see no harm in that."

* * *

I've often wondered what life was like belowground. When I was little I'd ask my mother about it.

"It was much the same as today," she'd tell me. "Only, they had problems. They're all gone now, so be glad you're here, aboveground."

By the time I was old enough to read, I'd check history books out of the library. I learned about the Environmental Depression and a lot of historical geography.

One night my father came home from work and I asked him, "What happened to this?"

He didn't understand, so I pointed at my library book, opening it to a map of the world.

"Oh, honey, nothing," he told me. "That's earth! It's still there, you know."

"Do people live down there?" I asked him.

"Oh, sure," he said. "Plenty of 'em live down there, but it's not quite as nice as it is up here, and still dangerous."

"I want to go there someday," I felt myself say. I used to be quite impulsive.

He said, "Elizabeth, don't be silly. Nobody goes there."

I mumbled out an apology.

"Now, why would you want to go belowground?"

I gave him what he wanted to hear. "I don't know. I suppose I don't."

I had many reasons, of course, once I gave it more thought.

"Then why would you say something like that?"

"I don't know, daddy."

* * *

"They're in a box, downstairs."

...

"Elizabeth?" My mother put her hand carefully on mine, watching me flip through pages.

"Great-Grandma Abigail was dedicated," I noted, astonished at the sheer content and organization. "This book is massive and only covers six months."

"Abigail loved to write. She became a poet after she retired, you know. Her practice must have paid off. At least, eventually it did..."

* * *

One day I was playing dolls with my sister, Anastasia. She was nine years old, I was seven.

"Ana?"

"Yes?"

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"I'll be an architect, like mother."

"Why?"

"Don't be silly, Lizzy. Mother's an architect, and her father and mother were both architects as well." Ana adjusted the sleeves on her doll's blouse.

"So?"

"So?" Anastasia shook her head. "It's the sensible thing to do, do the same job as your parents. Otherwise, there would be too many people doing one job! Everyone would do all the good jobs. Who would be left to... you know, clean the city?"

"When I grow up I'm going to travel the world," I announced. "I'm going to go belowground, and I'm going to see Rome, Paris, London, New York. The African savannah!"

Anastasia shook her head. "No. No, we learned about Africa in school. There's no savannah, just asphalt. And radicals. Radicals are idiots! All of them!"

At the time I didn't know what asphalt was, nor radicals, so I was quite content with the image of the African tribesmen and tropical rainforest that I'd learned about in the old textbooks. Asphalt must be a foreign type of tree, I decided.

* * *

"D'you think Elizabeth got her imagination from Great grandma?" Anastasia calls from the kitchen.

"Yes," mother says, flashing me a smile. "Yes I do. You would have loved her, Lizzy. She was so much like you. And she looked like you too! I should show you a photograph of her sometime... There was one in the box, although it was rare by that time to have physical copies of pictures. Photography was already digitized by then, I'm afraid. But my cousin keeps all the family's digital files, and he's all the way in New London..."

I take a minute to think about the distance between here and New London. It's a single day's drive from where we live, in America. The Earth's upper layer of society is much more connected than belowground. There are no oceans to prevent us from travelling there by land.

"Someday we should travel there and meet your cousins and your aunt and uncle," I suggest. "We never go anywhere."

"Oh, Elizabeth. Some day we'll travel. It's just so hard... it would require a dozen visas, another half a dozen interviews, and, most importantly, a good reason to go. It's better to stay here anyhow. Can you imagine if everyone was going everywhere all the time?"

"Well, no," I answer reluctantly.

"You've got an adventurous personality," she says eventually, sighing.