After the Fog

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. They brought with them a sense of hope, a reminder of the beauty that used to exist in the world.

It never lasted long.

Within an hour, the world was colorless again. Fog seeped through the streets and threw a blanket over any sign that pointed to the old days.

That early morning, I watched it happen. I stood at the window and sang my silent song of sorrow to the heavens. I willed the light to stay. I begged the colors not to fade. I called on the first sign of darkness to stay in its place.

“Don’t spread,” I asked of it.

But it was in vain.

I watched as the fog crept through the city, sending out arms at each corner it passed. I watched as it climbed the sides of the buildings. I stared at in its face until there was nothing left to stare at.

That morning, I lost again.

I drew another fat “x” on the calendar. That made 617 consecutive days.

“Dall,” I heard her call from the other room.

“I’ll be right in,” I assured her.

But I wouldn’t.

She would be back to sleep in moments, unbothered by the world we now inhabited, unscathed by the absence of autonomy that now ruled our lives.

I was restless. I couldn't bear to crawl into bed, knowing I was giving up on the day, knowing that I was surrendering to the hopelessness that would follow tomorrow, just like it had for the last 617 days.

No, if I was going to be defeated by sleep, I would have to be taken by force. It would have to face me right there, in front of the window.

It was inevitable, but I was still going to fight it. I looked down at my watch: only seven hours until Arbitration started.

~

I woke to the sound of her squealing.

“Dall! Dall! Dall!!” She shouted.

I had fallen asleep on the floor, just like I had every night in this dwelling.

She ran by me, hugging her morning delivery.

“I got new equipment!” She exclaimed.

She pulled a microchip out of the package and placed it in the upgrade section of her Labor Lounger.

She clapped her hands and jumped up and down as she waited for the update to finish.

“Congratulations,” said the voice in her Labor Lounger. “You have been promoted. For today’s project load, please prioritize the Pre-Processor Orientation.”

“Dall!” She shouted so loudly that I was sure her promotion would be taken away after complaints from our neighbors.

I walked to the door to gather my morning package. Inside there was just a note.

No adjustments. Please proceed with projects as normal.

It was the same note I had received every morning.

“Did you hear that, Dall?” She asked, still with her excited, squeaky voice. “A promotion!”

“I heard you,” I told her. Everyone on our floor probably heard her.

I made my way into the kitchen, if you could call it that, to prepare my morning rations. The area consisted of a sink and a filing cabinet that served two purposes: storing our rations and acting as a dining room table. Our dwelling was in what used to be an office building. The government had hastily thrown up a few walls to create separation between dwellings on the floor. Aspen and I were lucky enough to be placed in a dwelling that had a window.

I cooked a lot before the fog came. I even had a garden. I grew everything from Jlang berries to Urv root, but I had never tasted anything like the powder I was stirring into water for my breakfast. It was supposedly dehydrated vegetables, but I didn’t believe that. It didn’t taste even remotely similar to any vegetable I had eaten before.

Aspen sat in her Labor Lounger and spun in a circle.

“I’m so proud of myself. I worked really hard on my projects last week and it really paid off.”

“Paid off for you.”

“What does that mean?” She stopped spinning. “It’s not my fault you’re still stuck as an Inventory Technician. If you would just show initiative, you could-”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

She turned her Lounger so that her back faced me.

“I was just doing my job,” she insisted,

“You got that guy killed,” I reminded her.

“I did not!” She threw her hands in the air. “Dall, you’re ridiculous. That guy got sent to work at the farm. He’s probably pulling weeds all day. It sucks, but it’s what happens when you-”

“It happens when you do anything they don’t like, Aspen.”

She fell silent. I didn’t raise my voice very often. In fact, I went out of my way to avoid conversation altogether, for reasons just like this. Aspen and I had nothing in common. She thrived in the boundaries set in place from the new government. She had worked in one of the city offices before the fog.

I did not share her enthusiasm for conformity. I felt my soul fading with each passing day. That’s why they paired us together. Aspen had a proven track record in risk analysis, and I was a risk.

Once we all got settled in, the city government appointed a Board of Directors for each building. Their first task was to take inventory of all the people in their company and pair them up, in order to save space and create a buddy system, or a “safety partner” as they put it. That quickly turned into arranged marriages. In our ceremony, they had us vow to keep each other safe from the fog. What they really wanted us to be safe from was freedom.

Aspen left her desk and stood on the other side of the filing cabinet.

“Dall,” Aspen spoke softly. “The farm isn’t a bad place. It’s just where they send bad people. It’s better than sending them to a jail cell.”

I chuckled at that.

“He wasn’t bad.” I said.

“He jeopardized his safety and the safety of his partner. That’s not good.”

I didn’t want this conversation to continue. Nothing good would come of it.

“My shift isn’t for a few hours,” I informed her. “I’m going to head downstairs for the first Arbitration.”

She stared at me in silence. She was analyzing me. She was always analyzing me. I was sure that conversation would be transcribed into some sort of logbook she kept for Project Dall.

I choked down my morning rations as quickly as I could.

~

The Arbitration that morning was boring. Some jackass was requesting a new wife. He claimed the one he had been paired with was too difficult to live with. Cases like this one were the closest thing to entertainment we had inside these walls.

“Please, her voice is too loud. I have sensitive ears,” the man explained. “It distracts me from my work!”

The Arbitrator looked down at the papers in front of him.

“I see here that you work in Accounts Payable?” He asked the man.

“Yes! Yes, I do!” The man exclaimed. “I keep track of the Inventory department. I audit their-”

“And your wife,” the Arbitrator interrupted. “She does not work inside your dwelling, correct?”

“No,” the man said. “She is in Distribution. She delivers the morning packages and then helps with the sorting of the meal rations for the next delivery day.”

The Arbitrator nodded. He looked at the Council on his left, and then the one on his right.

“She gets home within two hours of my shift starting. She constantly cleans, rambles about her day, asks me ques-”

“Got it,” the Arbitrator interrupted the man again. “We’ll reschedule your shift to begin at the same time as your wife’s. Problem solved.”

He wrote something on the stack of papers and handed them to the Council on his right.

“No!” The man pleaded, but he was being escorted away from the microphone. “I want a new one! I don’t like the one you guys gave me!”

“Join the club, bub,” I muttered to myself.

“Right?”

I jumped. I didn’t realize someone had sat down next to me.

“Sorry,” the woman laughed at me.

She stuck her hand out.

“I’m Venne,” she said.

I shook her hand with a bit of caution. I was too nervous to look at her directly, but I could feel the fatigue and emptiness leaking from her body that typically accompanied a low-level worker. Still, rumors had been spreading that the Board sent spies to check in on the buildings. If they had caught wind of our plan, they definitely would have one in the room now.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she told me. “You were pretty focused on the case. I guess you didn’t hear me.”

She was fishing. If this was the woman I was to meet, she was unsure of me as well.

“Dall, right?” She asked. “You work in Inventory.”

I shifted in my seat.

“I work in Inventory, too.”

We locked eyes and I was sure she was the right person. I recognized her beautiful face; it was slender and silver. She was probably a model before the fog. Almost anyone who was blessed with silver skin became a model. It was almost an obligation for them to share their sheen with those of us walking around in dull, gray bodies.

“I’ve seen your face before,” I told her. I was almost embarrassed at how it sounded.

“And I’ve seen yours. Although, they all start to blend together at some point.”

What ridiculous jobs we had. We spent hours “auditing”, which consisted of looking in on the cameras attached to worker's Labor Loungers. Our screens ran through the cameras of random, low-level office workers, lingering for five seconds. If someone wasn’t at their desk, we hit a pause button to stop the cycling until that person returned. That person would then be put back into rotation to be checked on again later in the day.

As Inventory Technicians, we were always in rotation. Another technician was checking in on us every hour.

“You’re the only one I haven’t talked to yet,” Venne said.

“About what?” I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted to be sure she could be trusted. If this was the real Venne, she was the ringmaster, the leader, the voyager.

She looked around. Once she could tell we weren’t being listened to, she continued.

“I see you attend a lot of Arbitrations. I do too. When that man got sent to the farm last week, I watched you. You looked upset. Why?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t about to tell her my conspiracy theories. We all had them, but sharing them was likely to put a target on your back. I wasn’t looking to find out the truth about the farm firsthand.

“I think I know. You think there’s more to the farm than harvesting whatever they’re putting in our rations. You think the farm is just a fancy name for a slaughterhouse.”

I didn’t respond. If this was the real Venne, she sure was wasting time getting to the point.

“I think so too,” she said.

I stayed quiet. I needed to hear her ask me the right question.

She looked around again. Little beads of sweat started to run down her cheek and pool above her upper lip. The sweat made the sparkles in her skin stand out. The lights on the ceiling were being reelected off of her face.

“Calm down,” I demanded. “You’re sweating. You look like a damn disco ball..”

She used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe her face.

I couldn’t wait for her to ask me. Surely it was only time before she drew attention from the others in the room. The last thing we needed was someone from Council getting suspicious. Any sort of suspicion and the Board would watch us like a hawk.

“I’ll cover for you,” I told her.

I watched as a wave of relief rolled through Venne’s body. She adjusted her legs and sat back, relaxed.

“Why were you assigned to Inventory?” She wanted to know once her breath had steadied.

“I’m not from here. I was in town running errands when the fog came.”

“They didn’t want to risk you trying to return to your home.”

I nodded.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I worked in Packaging at the beginning. Started asking questions. Wasn’t long before my morning package arrived in the form of a Labor Lounger and a promotion.”

I had never met anyone from Packaging before. I had questions of my own, but most of those would have to wait,

“What kind of questions?”

“I,” she looked around again. “I wanted to know what the stuff was, the rations. It's shipped from the farm as a powder. I asked the others what it was. No one knew, they just said it was vegetables. I asked what building the farm was in. No one knew. I asked who was in charge of deliveries from the farm. I asked who our boss was. I asked who was on the Board. No one knew.”

Her voice was starting to get louder. I nudged her with my knee. She got the hint.

“I mean,” she was whispering now. “Have you ever met a boss? A supervisor? No, you haven’t. Even in Packaging, we did our training on the screen with that ugly, monotone lady.”

Prigid. She was the same face I saw during my Inventory training. Personally, I thought she was attractive. She had silver skin, like Veene, but it fought for attention alongside her thick, red hair and dark, purple eyes.

“It has been almost two years and the only face I can put to authority is that red head and the assholes up there, but even they report to the Board.” She gestured towards the Council.

“So,” I steered us back to the matter at hand. “I’m in.”

“Good.”

I started to get up. My shift was starting in the next thirty minutes, and it was going to take me a while to get back to my dwelling.

Veene put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back into my seat.

“Want to come with me?” She asked.

“Where? Our shift starts soon and I live on the twelfth floor.”

“No. Do you want to come with me?”

I froze.

“You mean?” I couldn’t even say the words.

She nodded.

I wasn’t expecting that. I had spoken to all of the Inventory Technicians before today and not one had mentioned that Venne was looking for a partner. She was to leave tonight, once the fog rolled back in. Me, along with the rest of the Inventory crew, were to cover her tomorrow. Our roles were to simply ignore her empty camera for the first few hours. The recordings for the morning audits were deleted midday to create space for new footage of the afternoon shifts. Once noon had passed, the first Inventory Technician to see Veene’s empty Lounger would report it. We knew what would happen then. Someone in a different department would be notified after ten minutes of Veene not returning to her desk. They would search the cameras closest to her dwelling to see if she had left. If she still wasn’t spotted on a camera within twenty minutes, someone would be sent to her dwelling. If she wasn’t found then, a search party would be sent out.

That’s what happened to the man who was sent to the farm the week prior. I don’t know which Inventory Technician found his empty desk, but it was Aspen that finally found him on the cameras, frantically opening doors on the first floor, hoping to find the one that led outside.

“Don’t you want to know what it’s like?” Venne urged.

“I know what it’s like.”

“What do you mean?”

I sat back and closed my eyes.

“Back towards the beginning,” I pictured it in my head as I spoke. “It was less than a week after the fog came. They hadn’t fully figured out housing, food, or work, but I could see they were close. I knew they were going to lock us in these buildings. I wanted to get back home to my…” I trailed off. I didn’t exactly have a family back in my town. I didn’t really have much of anything waiting for me. But there was a girl.

“Did you actually make it outside?” Venne interrupted my train of thought.

“I did,” I answered. “I made it three steps out of the door before someone grabbed me.”

I looked towards the front of the room.

“Him,” I said, pointing to one of the Council members. “He’s the one.”

“The one next to the Arbitrator?”

“That’s the one.”

Venne gazed at the man in question. I knew what she was thinking. He was a tiny man, smaller than me and much smaller than she was. She was thinking about how she could have escaped.

“It’s not what you expect, the fog. It’s not just thick, it’s more than that. It’s like it pushes you. It wraps around you like a weighted blanket that gets heavier the longer you stand there.”

I was partially trying to fortify my ego while also preparing her for what she would be encountering, should she make it out of the building.

“I’m not planning to just stand there,” her tone was sharp. She didn’t care for my input. “I grew up in this city. I know it better than most. They’re housing the people in the big buildings: the offices, the condos, places like that. They don’t care about the smaller buildings. Once I get out, I’m heading to one of those, and I know exactly which one.”

I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to ask, but I didn’t.

“Anyways,” she turned to me. “I already told the others you might join me. If you decide you want to make it more than three steps, meet me here. Now, go.”

“What?” I asked.

“Our shift starts in fifteen minutes. You better hurry.”

~

When I got back to my dwelling, I could hear Prigid’s familiar voice coming from Aspen’s desk. It made me want to crawl into bed. Instead, I slouched into my Labor Lounger and stared at the clock on my screen. I made it with one minute to spare.

“Sorry!” I heard Aspen exclaim for the other room. “I’ll use my headphones.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I called back.

“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”

“I’m sure.”

I had blocked out Prigid’s voice many times before, it shouldn’t have been any different that day. But it was.

The first hour of my shift flew by without me realizing. If someone had been missing from their desk, I definitely didn’t notice, let alone mark it. I tried to focus on my screen, but Prigid’s voice rang in my ear. She was in a different room. A door stood between us. Aspen's volume was at it's lowest level.

Still, Prigid sounded like she was standing right next to me.

“Your job is important,” I heard her say. “All of our jobs are important as we navigate this new terrain. We keep each other safe.”

The day I arrived here was the day the fog came. I spent the first three days sleeping on the floor of an old tram station. Eventually, they divided everyone up into different “companies” housed in the bigger buildings. It didn’t take them long to get organized. They had jobs assigned and Labor Loungers distributed within the first two months of the fog arriving. Arranged marriages came in month three. Everything was presented to us as safety measures. Inventory Technicians made sure everyone was accounted for, and safe. Your assigned spouse was there to keep you company, and keep you safe. Your meals and communications were delivered to you for your comfort, and to keep you safe.

All we knew about the fog was that it wasn’t safe. Two years had gone by and that was still the only information we were given. Or, that was the only information being reported to the low-level workers.

“Accountability is the name of the game. We are all responsible for the safety of our neighbors.” Prigid was screaming at me now.

I was almost done with my shift when Venne’s face appeared on my screen. She looked calm, bored even. She looked like she did on any other day.

~

That night, I stood at the window and watched the fog as it left the city. I watched it grudgingly retreat through alleys and abandoned roads.

I could see the tram station from my dwelling. It was the only other building in the city I had stepped foot in. It was fairly small, compared to the skyscrapers surrounding it. I wondered if that was the building Venne was talking about. I wondered that until the fog returned.

“We should try to get further,” I said to myself.

I crossed out another day on the calendar. Day 618 would be the day I left the building. Or, at least I hoped it would.