SOULsearchers

I touch a button on the touch screen remote on my lap, and the television turns on.

"Today is June 23, 2060. We'll be facing normal weather today, dark clouds and heavy winds. Please enjoy your day." The robotic voice from the television says before it shuts itself off.

Thanks, robotic female voice. I think I will.

I touch the remote again, hitting an icon with a little orange sun on it. The blinds disappear in transition and the sky is almost pitch black, the same way it's been for about three weeks.

What's a girl gotta do to get some sun around here? Or a sandwich. I'm in a real sandwich-y mood.

I get up from the soft, plushy, blue suede chair and head toward the basement door which sits just around the jug handle on the first floor. "Dad?" I call as I open the door, looking down the durable steel staircase. The sound of whirring and drilling muffles my dad's usual "not now, I'm busy." I don't even need to hear it anymore. I know what he's going to say, and I know that what I say back will never matter to him. Why did I bother trying in the first place?

This time, he's been down there for nine days. Since he built that miniature refrigerator and the toilet down there, he hasn't had any need to come up for fresh air and family time. And if he keeps this up, he could beat his record of 3 consecutive weeks locked up in that basement.

I slam the door shut and roll my eyes, dragging my feet to the kitchen to make a sandwich. It never ceases to annoy me that we've advanced far enough for flying cars, but not enough for instant food. Why couldn't dad be building that?

I open the breadbox on the counter next to the refrigerator and pull out some turkey and provolone cheese from the refrigerator. Yum. I pile the turkey high on my sandwich and add six slices of cheese in between to sort of even it out. Then, after deciding I want a juice to drink with it, I pull out the giant mangoes imported from the Center, stick my thumb in it, and hold it over a plastic cup from the cabinet, waiting for juice to spill into it.

When the juice squeezes out, I suck my thumb for the last bit of juice and head back into the living room. After settling down, I turn on the TV and watch The Cartoon. Each day provides 5 hours of news and weather, and an hour of recreational television which includes the options of either sports outcomes, which are predicted by a computer and no longer by actual action, or Educational Cartoon, which lasts from 10:00 to 10:30am.

I can't help but note that this is the same Cartoon that had been played for five weeks. I've even started to remember most of the lines.

"Hello Paul."

"Hello Bob."

"Let's learn how to balance chemical equations."

"Okay."

The meaningless conversation goes on and on while monotonous black stick figures appear and disappear on screen. But this is the most meaningful spot on recreational television right now.

When mom was here, she would bring so much color and joy into our lives. She would laugh loudly, smile brightly, and sing the most beautiful tunes. But, after a while, she became lonely. She somehow got it in her head that my father had no need for her, and that the life The Command has forced us to live wasn't the life for her. So she chose the only socially acceptable escape: suicide.

It's been about two years since then. And after that one sad night, the night dad finally came up after two days of basement work to find his wife hanging from the ceiling, that's the night his hermit attitude really began to set in. Workdays turned into work weeks, and breaks soon ceased to exist.

And now it's just me and my dad - well, just me, it seems like - trying to live a normal life in extremely abnormal conditions that we have been forced to believe are normal.

After letting the anger at my father sit for a minute, the sting of pain I get when I imagine what mom must've looked like hanging from the ceiling, I shrug it off. It's not completely his fault that he's swamped in work. But, let me just say, he does deserve a nice heaping pile of credit for the death of my mother.

Anyway, I turn my attention towards The Cartoon and watch the episode finish. The usual ending plays, "Thank You for Watching" with the same robotic female voice from the weather spot.

Dad's mechanical whirring and drilling on metal gets louder and I grow both increasingly annoyed and curious as to what the heck he's fixing/remodeling/building down there. So I shut off the television, because who wants to watch hours of monotonous weather reports all day? I creep silently towards the basement door and hear dad say "not now, I'm busy" yet again.

Why did he say that? I didn't even call him!

Maybe he heard the door.

Maybe he heard my footsteps.

Maybe it's just a voice recording.

Maybe I really am alone in the house.

I run down into the basement quickly, my footsteps sounding off clangs on the metal staircase. I touch the prickly cement walls and turn away from the bottom of the staircase, now, finally facing my father's lab/lair/new house, finding it vacant. Just to make sure, I check every last dark nook and cranny I can find for signs of life, and to my shock, my father isn't here.

But there are still mechanical whirs coming from by the staircase, which I'm now standing in front of, looking for a source. Finally, I see a set of PowerSpeakers my dad had made years ago, and I see that a disc is inside of the player. I press pause, and suddenly, the basement is quiet. I gasp.

So when's the last time dad actually was here? And where is he?

I look for some sort of escape door around, and then check the other side of the basement for any trap doors, perhaps behind a shelf or something. But just to be safe, I kick up a few rugs. Surprise, surprise. There's a trap door - a wooden square plank with a small nail hammered in only halfway and then bent over to its side, with a thin piece of rope attached to it.

At this point, I don't even want to open it. All the shocking news is overwhelming and I can't possibly take on another surprise. So I take shaken steps back to the living room and sit back down with my sandwich.

And the next bite I take feels like a large rock tries to fit down my throat. The house's emptiness slowly creeps into my own existence.

I am officially alone.