(Excerpts)
I.
A large grey door fronted the Bureau of Information and Public Service, flanked by two frozen angels cut in clean modern lines and staring placidly up at the filtered blue sky-lights in the clean wash of the dome sky. The building itself was a behemoth of cold steel and blackened lava-rock, solidly extending out of its earthen foundations for miles around in a squat, spherical shape. It was the largest structure underneath the Eureka Dome, which housed the city of Gygen-Rommus and the surrounding hydroponic gardens and mining facilities. Nathan had never been inside the Bureau, at least not that he could remember. That was the problem – he couldn’t remember much of anything these days, and an acquaintance at the local pub he frequented recommended a visit. “They’ll fix you up over there. They got all the information, so it’s no trouble if you forget some things. They can get you a job too, if you need one.”
Well his credit card still had some units left, so he must have been paid not too long ago. It was embarrassing: he didn’t even remember where he worked. It all started last week some time (perhaps): the strange dreams, the feeling of having just woken up when he was clearly in the middle of doing something. He thought briefly that it could be narcolepsy, although there wasn’t any evidence of having been asleep. There would be a wave of dizziness, a distortion of his sight like a heat-haze in mid-air, and suddenly he would be discerning his surroundings anew. He had five of these episodes last week, and now all of his memories were a jumbled mess. He remembered early things, childhood, graduating from flight school and joining the Metal Chiefs, and then other things…things that he could not possibly have experienced and unlikely to have imagined. Other places. Places that felt airy, vacant, but full of fresh air, full of colors and sounds and voices that were wholly unfamiliar but achingly sweet, filling him with sadness. Outside the dome.
How could that be? Nobody ever ventured outside – the open lands were a blighted wasteground completely unprotected from the sun’s rays. You needed a special suit and government clearance to travel between domes over the open terrain, and nobody did that except the earth-movers that repaired and maintained physical supply lines. Everybody else used the Meruul-lek and traveled through innerspace, of course.
Out on the vast reaches of black sand under the flaming red sky, nothing moved without absolute necessity. And nothing lived there, as long as memory had persisted on Earth.
II.
After his visit with the Inspector, Nathan felt a ragged weariness overtake him. It lasted for days, during which he listlessly woke up, called the Job Hotline, gave his I.D. number, moped around his apartment, went to the bar, stumbled home, called again, passed out, woke up at strange hours of the night with cold sweats and a fleeting vision of writhing black shapes, counted backwards, and lay awake until the first artificial rays of morning allowed his eyes to finally close and experience a respite of another few hours. The drunkenness lost even its pallid luster, became a sensation cut out of his body and stitched back in upside down. On one such day as this, a man approached him at the bar and introduced himself as Agent Johnson. Nathan barely mumbled a reply but the man sat down next to him and squinted with a jaundiced and cutting interest.
“How long has it been since you ventured out to the reaches?” the man asked, fixing two grey eyes upon him and cocking his head at a barely perceptible angle, a touch of the praying mantis in his poise and delivery.
Nathan frowned a little, thinking it odd that his friend Jeff wasn’t here to deflect these types of social oddities. Jeff was an imposing figure with a bright orange beard and giant metal spring boots – he wasn’t military but had covered several of their operations as an engineer and so adopted the attributes of folks spending long months out on the sand. In fact, this Agent Johnson might be referring to that exact activity – someone who dug, someone who hooked into the manacles that propelled heavy earth and erected shipping tunnels. Why assume Nathan to be that? His hair was dark brown, his skin flushed and unmarked – he looked like a coddled dome baby that never got any real earth on him, how could he have spent any time on the reaches?
“What the hell are you talking about?” Nathan said flatly. His head hurt from the booze.
The man leaned in and a frigid current of air brushed Nathan’s cheek, “You’ve been there. And you will go back. Don’t think I’m not aware of your passage. You discard truth with such abandon…but I see and I remember. Always.”
“You confuse me with someone else, sir. I do not have access to the outer layer. And I would not go without it.”
“I have a tale for you,” the man said. He looked up, his skin like grey tissue paper in the diffuse light of the bar, nutrient cigarette smoke billowing over from a nearby table and making a crown of haze about him. It blended the lines of his face with his dark and neat attire. “Two smallish people meet in a primitive setting. They have no conception of the larger sphere we all occupy, not even of the doorway which rests – purely by accident – right beneath their sniffers,” here he indicated his own thin grey nose with a tight half-smile, half-snarl. “So. They go about their queer little business until – purely be accident – one of the little mites discovers the door and peeks his sniffer in. He must have sensed the eons, all the captive light, the juice locked up in those prisms – despite his modest stature. And I saw him quite clearly…he took possession of the doorway as if it were a bauble or some hoarding bit of food. I saw him do it. And that is why, although he may like to escape into this other subsphere, he will never be safe. He will be hunted, and his prize taken from him.”
Nathan looked at the man squarely for the first time, the chill breath beating on him with greater force now as if he were being driven with unchecked velocity into the void of deep space.
III.
Nathan darted into his apartment, wheeling around on his left leg and slamming his palm into the key pad as soon as he made it through the doorway. Through ragged breaths he engaged the mag-lock, entering the string of numeric codes from the part of his memory that was thankfully not affected by his recent amnesia. He could hear the Thing tearing through the entrance of the apartment building, huffing and stamping and mewling its compound screams, sounding like the lashings of many steel-tipped tongues along a corrugated surface. He tried to stabilize, tried to unhook his wrist communicator and steady his hands for the necessary emergency-dial.
“Alpha-O Gygen One-Two-Eight,” he spoke into the audio sensor, a thin strip of blue underneath the communicator’s mouth-size screen. It issued a pleasant bell-tone and a breathy female voice responded, “Well hello there. How may I help you today?”
“I’m…I’m being chased by something…I’m in imminent physical danger. I need a security team right away. I’m on the east side of town right by the dome wall. Vorolk Building, apt. 7009139.”
“Is this a citizen to citizen dispute?”
“No – it’s some kind of Thing, I can’t describe it. I mean physically. It keeps changing. It is definitely not human.”
“Do you wish to report an illegal dome breach?”
The screaming noises reverberated up through the building’s metal infrastructure, expanding, colliding, and melting like a whirlwind of electric smoke. They seemed to be coming from everywhere, all at once. Sounds from an outside that was crushing ever inward, ripping into new life with a snarling, hellish fury.
