Moebius 2157 | ONC2019 Short List [Complete]

2 | Black Space

Over the next few days, the rumor spread like a disease, a festering cancer eating away at the already weakened tissue that held the underground society together. Civil unrest erupted throughout the city and spread like a wildfire. Brutal robberies and lootings left the decrepit bunker city in even more disarray than before.

Alyssa spent all that time in a daze. When she went to bed at night, she couldn't even remember what she had done all day. As she lay awake, too restless to sleep, but too exhausted not to try, she listened to the sounds of the fighting outside. Screams, shouts and gunshots echoed through the corridors, as Security quelled the riots. In the morning, on the way to the market hall where she would look for work, she stepped over corpses.

She felt nothing.

In hindsight, she was glad for the utter numbness that the shock had left her with. Otherwise, she might have taken desperate, drastic measures to ensure that she wouldn't be around to die from suffocation. Surprisingly few others chose that path - the authorities were quick to refute the news as outlandish rumors and somehow managed to quell the fears of the citizens, like they always did. The people wanted to believe, because the truth was too devastating, and so, at the edge of a total collapse, humanity miraculously recoiled and settled back into their meager, pale shadow of a civilized society once more.

In the end, when a horde of security guards with their guns couldn't stop the fighting, all it took were some placatory words, numbers, statistics and positive projections. Boring but reassuring things that nobody would bother to double check. Except people like Computer Guy perhaps, but he was one among the few, and had been found with his veins cut open with a jagged metal scrap.

And the riots? There were riots all the time. Within a week, nobody could tell what they had been about any longer anyway.

But Alyssa saw through that charade. She had once been on the other side, she had once worn one of those white uniforms, and had stood guard before closed doors behind which the rich and powerful plotted the fate of the bunker city. She wondered what kind of plans they were making now.

Her only comfort was the thought that no matter if rich or poor, they would all die, long before the surface would be habitable again. She just hadn't yet made her mind up about how she herself would be going about the dying part.

Her decision was postponed, when a week after the incident in the canteen, she came upon the card. Amidst all the trash that littered the corridor before her doorstep, she considered it refuse, but somebody had lodged it into the crack between her door and its frame on eye level. And it had her name printed on it.

As she pulled it out, her touch left dirty fingerprints on the unblemished white paper. She unfolded it, and found that it was a message. A location, a shady, abandoned corner on one of the lowest levels of the bunker city, and a date, two days from then. And on the backside, three more words: Project Last Hope.

The message intrigued her in its mysterious minimalism. At first, she thought it might be a joke, or perhaps some sort of trap. Then, she realized that she was just as desperate to believe in something as the rest of the people down here, and that she was willing to go to the meeting either way.

Over the following two days, she began to spin fantastic theories about the sender of that message. She imagined them as saviors with a secret plan and powerful ace up their sleeves, to save humanity from its demise. Perhaps stockpiled resources. Perhaps some secret technology. Perhaps a plan to make all of the things that were going so terribly wrong in this place right once and for all. She was so enthralled by the prospect of being given new hope that she forgot to stop and wonder what these mysterious saviors might want with her, specifically.