Endurant - A Hard Sci-Fi Anthology

Front of Flames (2126)

Front of Flames
Year: 2126

The Sakhalin dome teemed with life and activity, more so than it did just fifty years ago. Light transport units ferried people and materials to-and-fro: little bubbles with chairs. The grand atrium in the center of the dome was a park with lush gardens lit by umbrella-like lights. Trees grew there: conifers, white birch, and Japanese holly trees, and gardens manicured by killer robots. One could live their life under the dome and not realize that there was a roiling storm of fire and putrescent gases outside.

Suna had just finished his engineering class: going into the manufactory sectors and learning the inner workings of the machines: the air pumps which were the vast lungs of the dome, the radioactive diamond reactors which were the beating hearts, the food-producing nanite tanks, the robot-operated assembly-foundries, the recycling plant... He was fascinated, yet it was so much to take in.
This was his area of passion: making things, and learning how to fix things. He liked to make friends, but he wasn't a very sporty person. He would've preferred to sit in a room full of electronics and draw. His parents- Reimu and Kaneru, saved the dome by taking parts from another and fixing everything in the dome and improving them. The apple doesn't fall from the tree.
...

"I'm home, Hokori!" he said to his big sister, entering their cramped living quarters. She was sitting in her bed eating a food pellet- the texture and color of a dry tonsil stone, but heavy and slightly sweet. There were electronics and keepsakes all around her room.

"Oh hey, Suna." she said unenthusiastically. "I left you a pellet in your room. Just a friendly reminder: your assignment to go outside starts in one week, you're going to assist a team outside. Apparently they found another dome out in Miyagi Prefecture with people still living in it, crazy right!"

"Yeah, and I'm so excited." said Suna. "But I'm also kind of scared. This is my first time, didn't father almost get killed in the Asahikawa Dome?" he asked. "He lost a few good friends, said it was a miracle to come back alive- where did he even go?"

"Don't know." said Hokori. "I was eight when he left, and you were like four. I don't know what could've taken him, father's tough as nails and smart beyond anyone. He was a kid your age, fourteen, when he went to the Asahikawa dome and killed a few people himself. Seriously, I don't think anything could've killed him."
"Reportedly, he left to go to Honshu and never came back, in 2116. He was about thirty four at the time, and was also with mother. The whole team was lost."
"Oh... Ok." said Suna. He took the food pellet and took a bite. "If you need me, I'll be in the grand atrium. He took off down the halls, squid-like killer robots cleaning the walls and floor. They moved on a pre-planned path, moving out of his way as Suna walked.

. . .

"No, no." said Manalishi, the mission supervisor, sitting on top of a transport in a hangar. "We need to pack more than this! It's a long way to Miyagi. We'll have to take a chain of barges and ride in a caravan of transports. There's no room for resupply, if we underestimate the supplies we'll starve to death."
Manalishi was an upbeat man- graying beard and very neat white hair. He looked strong and tall, and had an imposing presence in the room. He was both an engineer and an expedition leader, having known the hero Kaneru personally.

"Hello!" said Suna, stepping down hastily into the hangar. Teams of expeditioners loaded boxes of supplies into the back of the transport.

"Oh, Suna it's you again! You came at the most opportune time!" said Manalishi jovially. "I need some help. One of these transports needs some repairing, and I can trust your hands at this job."

"I'm on it." said Suna, clambering into the transport. It was a massive tank-like machine meant for every kind of vehicle. There were once only twelve transports, but now there are dozens produced every day. Foundries melt down the scrap metal of society, barges dredge through landfills, and the scrap metal and plastic are melted down in refineries outside and brought to the assembly-foundries. The whole process is engineered to be non-polluting, but considering how putrescent and stale the earth is, this really didn't make much of a difference.

Manalishi was the closest thing to a father to Suna besides Kaneru and Reimu. When the two went missing, Manalishi took in the now orphaned Suna and Hokori, teaching them engineering and his father's vision.

- - = = = = = - -

It was time to leave, sitting in the seats of a transport. A team of four people per transport, riding twelve transports: forty eight in total. Suna got to know his teammates: Alina, Hana, and Ivan: all rookies like him. Ivan was his best friend in engineering class, and Hana was quite close with Suna. Sometimes they teased Suna, saying that he was in love, but he shyly brushed it off every time.

They sat in the transport as it was being loaded with essentials: tanks of liquid oxygen, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and batteries: canisters of diamond made from waste graphite. These toxic radioactive ashes of the past, ordered into a diamond and made to produce energy. It was uncomfortable waiting for the trainees to load the transports, as they were sitting in uncomfortable suits made of vulcanized plastics, mylar, and threaded with a silver mesh containing shungite pieces to block any radiation.
At last, the transports rolled out into an airlock. They were excited to finally see the fucking buckets of tin finally move. The airlock hissed, a steam emitted from the transports, and the door opened.

"This is the first time leaving the safety of the dome for many of you." said Manalishi, leaning into the microphone and pressing a button on the simple dashboard. A computer-generated vision using Perlin Noise appeared, seeding the mountains with conifers and weeds. Large birds- a sea eagle, a flock of puffins, and great egrets flew across the sky.
"Isn't it beautiful- the diversity we once had." said Manalishi as the transports rolled out. Suna had the urge to initiate an airlock sequence and step out of the transport until Manalishi pressed a button.

The rich lush conifers of the Sakhalin forest turned into a land of bare rock cloaked by a yellowish-orange haze. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

"Um, Manalishi!" said Suna. "Isn't thunder bad news? Everytime thunder hits, methane gas from undersea deposits explodes." he worried. "Are we going to be alright?"

"We will be totally fine- as long as we aren't outside, of course." he said confidently under darkening skies. "The transports are like iron fortresses, nothing can perturb their iron will. You can drive one directly under a nuclear blast- although you'll suffer heavy damages and lose all your windows, so I wouldn't advise that. Being licked by flames is but a nuisance."
"Since this is a caravan of rookie transports, I've taken the liberties of adding an air valve. It can introduce oxygen to the crew- not like we need it because we have bottles and bottles of solids. But you can fill a canister of the outside air and breathe it. Try it!" he said.

Hana handed Suna a canister, and Ivan looked. They filled it up quickly- the gas being odorless and colorless in these quantities. As Alina came closer- the four of them face-to-face, they opened the canister, letting out a hiss. The smell was fucking horrible.
The foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide smelled flatulent- like someone took a big old nasty fart down your nose. The sulfur dioxide and trioxide smelled sharp and pungent. It wasn't an enjoyable smell, they quickly turned on the vents to get rid of the stench.

"Is.. Is all life extinct on the surface?" asked another student in another transport. "Surely nothing can survive out in this shithole?"

"Oh yes, there are survivors!" said Manalishi. "The Permian Extinction was a tragedy- with Earth's rich biodiversity being reduced into rotten detritus in an instant: a period of a few decades, the temperature skyrocketed. There was no rock record save for the source of the calamity itself- the Siberian Traps: a plain of basalt and tuffaceous rocks just west of us.

He was hammered with questions. "What's Tuff? How did these animals survive? What were we doing during this time..." they asked, talking out of turn.

"Now now, one at a time!" he said firmly. "Anyways, so during this extinction event, temperatures were just as high as they were now. The only survivors on land were the lystrosaurus- our ancestor, proterosuchus, and thrinaxodon. pareiasaurs and gorgonopsids were all wiped out. Mosses, ferns, gymnosperms... Sharks in the sea." he rambled. "Whatever had a simple and effective mode of survival: able to eat anything and to stay out of the anoxic air or adapt to it survived."
"There may be rats living underground, feeding on roots and detritus. There could be sharks, fishes, deep sea life. And there could be other simple plant organisms still alive." said Manalishi. "We caused this extinction- we were the basalt flats, or our ancestors were before us, but life will still find a way."

- - = = = = = - -

Suna and the three others riding his transport pulled out sleeping bags and sprawled them on the floor. It wasn't time to sleep yet- Manalishi had just stopped giving lessons.

The sun: a red circle without a glare, fell over the horizon. Suna opened a projection on his tablet, sketching on an Inventor Desk diagram. He took out a smart electronic metal plate, a series of projector-cylinders, and saw the intricacies of his creation come to life. Like a surgeon operating on a patient, he modified his creation bit by bit and ran the simulations on the transport's dashboard, it got extremely hot extremely quick.

"Woah woah! What are you doing?" said Ivan, playing a computer game. "Are you trying to blow all of us up?"

"Oh, it's just a project I've been working on." said Suna. "Like it? It's a carbon sequestration machine. I've been working on this for a few months now." He said. "I'm just simulating carbon dioxide and methane patterns on the Earth and planting sequestration machines.... It seems feasible, if we produce these machines on a very large scale over a couple thousand years."

"Running a simulation of the entire Earth on our dashboard, you've got to be shitting me." said Ivan, shutting off the simulation. "The fan's spinning like a chopper blade, you're gonna get us all killed in this transport. But, do tell us what you're working on."

"Ok, so you know carbon right?" asked Suna, closing his diagrams. "Great building material, floating in clouds of carbon dioxide and swimming in the oceans. Sulfur floats around in the form of hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and sulfur trioxide. Well..."
"We'll plant these machines on land and on sea, and they'll rake in all these gases for us. But what now? We have two hundred years worth of mankind's pollution in our hands. Well..." said Suna, switching his presentation from sequestration equipment to buildings.

Buildings- they were tall, needle-like, gleaming buildings unlike the flat dome shaped like a shield volcano. They were intricate with vast living spaces, gardens, and non-polluting manufactories. He had multiple building designs in hand.

"We can use carbon nanotubes to make the structure of these buildings. That material is no joke, hundreds of times stronger than the best steel. I took some carbon nanotubes and brought it to the tailor, and I made cloth: soft as silk, but able to stop a bullet." he said, pulling out a black wispy cloth which floated in the transport's ventilation. Ivan snatched it out of the air and threw it back at Suna.
"Heh." he said. "Also take into account our vast wealth of sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen we have. Sulfur can be made into sulfuric acid, plant food, and as a disinfectant. It has so many industrial uses. Also, if we have a decent oxygen atmosphere. When we have a decent oxygen atmosphere, we can burn hydrogen as fuel and emit water in return. As for oxygen, that goes back into the ozone layer and the atmosphere." he said.

"You really thought this through." said Ivan. "Understand that you won't live to see this. This will take years to complete. Sure you'll be remembered as the guy who soaked all the harmful gases, but you'll be sitting in a transparent coffin in a mausoleum, possibly in the Sakhalin Dome surrounded by a garden of your favorite flowers."

"I know." said Suna. "I ran plenty of simulations, in the best case scenario we can right all our wrongs in about three hundred years. Isn't it morbid- we killed the Earth in a few decades, but it will take us centuries to fix. Or, or we can wait for a second Mesozoic Era, but nobody has time for that." he joked.

"I think it's fascinating." said Hana, reading a book in her sleeping bag. "It's fascinating that what we do will impact the destiny of man. We will be remembered." she said, pondering. "But it's a scary thought, they'll remember your name, children will learn facts about you, and they'll know everything about you. It's comforting knowing you'll be remembered, but also scary." she said.
This scared Suna, suddenly, eyes peered on him from the darkness: first hundreds, then millions, then billions, then trillions. They stared discerningly. The weight of the future was placed on his shoulders, a tangible heaviness on his spirit.

- - = = = = = - -

The fleet of transports, at long last they came across the dome. It contained the survivors from the city of Sendai. The ruins of which are submerged under the water and crumbling. Like all coastal cities around the world, people were displaced inland and attempts were made to save the city slipping into the sea. All of these ended in futility, and when the first storms of fire tore across the skies, and the first winds of flatulence howled, the people retreated into the dome on the mountainside.

"Finally we're here." said Suna, hopping out of the transport without initiating an airlock sequence. He sniffed the transport- it smelled of flatulence and sulfuric pungency, an absolutely disgusting stench, but smelling the odors which clung to a transport wasn't as bad as breathing the outside gases.

"Come in!" said Manalishi. "We're allowed to enter. Our emissaries will give a speech, and our relations with the Sendai Dome People will be established. Whoever is assigned to form a radio link will do as such. You'll be expected to display utmost decorum- this isn't no Sakhalin Dome, so please leave a good impression."

. . .

The speech was long and verbose, with technicalities which bored the hell out of the younger listeners, but everyone had to attend. It opened up into ceremonies, and the singing of classic Russian hymns.
Everyone was eager to leave when the ceremony was done. Suna observed the crowd as the ceremony went on. He was dressed in his radiation-proof suit, but he noticed the shabby knee-length tunics that the Sendai Domers were clothed in. He noticed the environment- a lot dirtier. He assumed that the people here did their own engineering, but not as much as the department at Sakhalin. He felt grateful to his father's grit, toughness, and ingenuity.

"All is dismissed." said Manalishi, standing on the podium. He instructed the rows of attendees in the Grand Atrium to leave in an orderly fashion. Suna left to go on his own mission: he disappeared into the grimy halls.

"Hey Suna, where are you headed?" asked Hana, catching up with him. Ivan followed close, watching a video on his tablet.

"Oh hey, where did Alina go?" asked Suna. "Oh, I just have something I need to do."

"Alina's setting up the radio comms." said Ivan. "We're going to be engineering at Sendai. We're going to be recruiting other domes into an interconnected allegiance of multiple domes."
"Just with one singular dome at Sakhalin, we were doing wonders- taking apart abandoned domes and using them as stock for ours. Building outposts and manufactories, and mining landfill locations for plastics and metals. Imagine what a network can do!" he said. "Also, where were you going."

"You know my mother and father? They disappeared when I was four. I remember their faces- just barely. I want to find out the truth about their deaths, the team they took with them. I want to know if they're still alive, and if they are, I want to find them."

"You don't mean..." said Ivan.

"I'm going to find him. Send my apologies to Manalishi, but I need to find out where he went. If he's still alive, he left with good reason. You don't have to go with me if you don't want to, but will you please help me prepare?"

Ivan sighed deeply. "Yes, I'll help you prepare, and I'm sure Hana is willing to help. But yes- we will have to think this one over deeply. We aren't sure if we're following you on your expedition. It's risky, and hate to break it to you- you might come back absolutely fruitless.

- - = = = = = - -

It was a week since they arrived at the Sendai Dome, and much progress had been achieved. Broken manufactories were being fixed, and the comms link was close to being done. Friends were made.

"Ok, father will be waiting for me in the north of Shikoku Island." said Suna, strapped into his transport. "We'll be there- I just checked, and all systems are nominal. Nothing's broken, nothing's missing, is that right, Hana?" he asked.

Hana sat beside him: two in a transport. Alina was too busy to leave, and Ivan didn't want to ride directly into the fog with the two, so he instead assisted via radio. As they initiated an airlock sequence on the mighty gates, they were met by the angry voice of Manalishi.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he bellowed, coming through the radio. "Head back at once, and there will be no consequence- I'm being lenient on you." he beckoned. It was the first time he saw Manalishi become this angry.

"No." said Suna. "I made up my mind, and I'm looking for my father." he said. "I deserve to know the truth behind this. You'll have to forgive me later, bid my farewells to Ivan."

"You're disobeying protocol. We are to leave in exactly two weeks, and in the meantime we complete our assignments. We are to set an example to the residents of Sendai Dome!" he hollered. "Now get back!"

"I told you plenty of times, I want to look for my father." he said as the transport rolled out the hangar door. "You should know what I mean. Ever since I was an engineering cadet- I wanted to go find him. I shirked away at the risk, but I knew he was a great man who found a calling. You knew him better than I do. I'm not coming back, no matter how hard you try and reel me back in."

The transport rolled into the hazy distance, the land overcast with flatulent clouds. The sun shone high in the sky, casting a bright glow, but neither Suna nor Hana could make out the direction in which the sun came from.

- - = = = = = - -

"I'm going to run a simulation in the dashboard." said Suna, surrounded by transparent cylinders. He constructed virtual environments, re-enacted the warming of Earth with a sequence of factories, forest die-offs, decaying matter, and permafrost gas deposits. He saw the first firestorms hit, and planted the machines during the time he lived- year 2126. His carbon sequestration design, deployed in large amounts, took two hundred years to completely sequester the toxic gases into pre-greenhouse levels.

"Oh, this may be the most accurate simulation yet!" said Suna, squatting in front of the cylinders. "Good, good."

As the dashboard fan whirred, he viewed a map of the ocean currents: hot and cold lines churning around the earth. As the Earth heated, the polar regions warmed at a much faster rate than the equatorial regions. This newfound balance equalized oceanic temperatures, causing the currents to slacken. The stagnant oceans, now full of dead and decaying sea life, heated by the risen temperatures produced hydrogen sulfide in great amounts.

"I like your carbon sequestration machines, I really do." said Hana. "But have you considered this: all the manufactories in the dome, and even in the outposts can't hope to build everything for your plans. You'll need hundreds of millions of machines."

"I understand." said Suna. "We can add another fifty years, it will take a while to lay down the infrastructure to even begin." he sighed. "I might have to download myself into a computer to see my plans come into fruition."

"Can we do that?" asked Hana. "The downloading part?"

"I don't know. It should be possible, if not extremely expensive."

. . .

The sunlight faded, Suna leaned against the transport's dashboard with Hana passionately kissing him. His one-piece protective suit was partially undone- his shirt hanging down his back heavily.

In the hazy setting sun, Suna and Hana made love. They were surrounded by the howling fiery winds of shit, protected in a sealed canister of breathable air. The firestorm subsided, but the aftermath remained. Hana, pinning Suna against the wall could see fires turn the black skies orange, and little flames flickering on the ground like embers in a campfire.

The flames which sprawled on the ground were like an amber constellation, moving quickly near the crumpled road and slowly in the outlying mountains. Lightning cracked through the red skies, igniting the highly flammable methane and hydrogen sulfide. They bathed in the fiery afterglow under an infernal backdrop of flame.