Red Herring

Her Sunken Dream

*Challenge #12: Write a story which takes inspiration from the lyrics, songs or motion picture career of David Robert Jones, aka David Bowie. It must include at least 10 made-up words (a maximum of 1 per sentence). The story must feature two different significant changes experienced by the character(s) during the course of the story. The story must span a period of five years or feature a lapse of five years. It must also include all five senses.

“Now, you’re a cannish guy. Know how I can tell? Because you’re here! Everyone else is either skreeking out into space or digging down as far as they can go. But you...you know how to think outside the box! No point digging a massive bunker if some snaggly bomb scores a direct hit. No point running off all the way to Mars only to starve when you get there either. Yessir, the sea’s the place to be! Far enough from the bombs to be safe, not so far that you’re stuck there when the danger’s over. So.” Esteban smiled and took the expensive pen from his pocket. “Shall I put you down for the basic package, or will sir be upgrading to the deluxe?”

***

Five years later, Esteban Mosquera was no longer so enthusiastic about his underwater habitat. Living beneath the waves had been quite a selling point before the war—and still hadn’t lost all its novelty—but the structure itself was a god-awful small affair. To begin with, if he was honest, it had just been a money-spinning scheme. He could let rooms out to saps looking for a little extra security, and if worst really did come to worst, he’d be safe himself. Thing was, worst had come to worst, and now he was regretting cutting some of those corners during construction. The place was hardly shoddy—he was no conman—but it certainly wasn’t lavish. The narrow hallways always had pipes overhead, and there was no decoration anywhere. Just metre after metre of the same flupping metal wall to stare at all day every day. Worse still, there were no windows. Truth was, at this point he was quite aware that he might well be housing the very last little pocket of humanity in existence, and they definitely weren’t doing as well as they could have been. The money he’d made before the war was no consolation at all. He was no longer a businessman: he was the guardian of humankind.

***

The girl with the mousey hair was not old enough to properly remember the world on the surface. All she had ever known was Seatown, with its faint smell of zinc that nobody ever seemed to get used to. She had never heard a cricket; at night, she could listen only to the ceiling groaning under the weight of the water. She had never felt grass between her toes; only the thick blankets of algae that grew where the floor was wet and the lights shone strong. She had never tasted a sour blackberry, picked by the side of the road—only the pale, mushy apples that grew in the hydroponicarium.

The girl with the mousey hair didn’t particularly care that she could never come up from the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t that the surface didn’t matter. It was just that it didn’t matter any more. The things that had been up there had all been burned, or irradiated, or simply blasted into tiny little atomlets. All that was left now were stories and pictures, and it didn’t particularly matter that she didn’t have any of her own. She was happy just to watch the viddies. She had seen most of them ten times or more.

But then she saw the film about the chubbly little men who get shot out of a cannon and land on the moon—right in its eye!—and she began to wonder about Mars again. People always spoke sadly about it. They talked about how some big piece of the city there—something absolutely, positively inscrimpable—had been blown to pieces with the last rocket that was due to leave, and the place had failed. But on the moon in that viddy, the little black-and-white men met some peculiar space people who went “fwoof!” when struck with an umbrella. That made her wonder: was there life on Mars? If not the people who took their city with them, then someone else who had been there all along? And for the first time, she wanted to leave Seatown. Because for the first time, she thought there might be somewhere else to go.