Domed City Living

A sudden throb of pain in your skull is, yet again, your first sign that a new day has begun. It’s been weeks since you’ve slept properly and your body reminds you of that in a dozen or more various ways, every second, for a while after you wake up. With a deep breath and a sigh, you swing your feet around to the side of the bed, stand up, and begin to go about your standard daily routine… but today is different. Today, you finally get some answers. Today is… probably your last chance.

Your room is just like all the other rooms in the building in many ways. Each has a computer system with all essential services on the desktop. Every computer is on the network. Everyone is connected through the same basic government services for anything essential for day-to-day living. It’s as secure as it needs to be. Just as with everything in the Domed City: There’s no way to commit a crime without being caught. Everything is logged or recorded and monitored or reviewed. The incentives to commit crimes just don’t exist within the Dome. Standard Food Orders incur no costs, and the cities many professional food vendors rarely get away with overcharging. The Market application made it easy to compare prices and see product reviews from other citizens, and each review was associated with a knowable face and a profile that was also reviewed by others and would suffer the consequences of habitually negative reviews. Everything here was scrutinized. In here, your room, you at least got to decorate it without judgment and possible negative social consequences. Aside from the scrutiny, struggle itself was rare within the Dome. The struggle was to fulfill yourself, however you deemed that task possible. As long as all the systems remained in place, the fight to survive did not exist in the Dome.

Jarring yourself from your sleep-dazed thinking, you sit down at your computer and click the icon to bring up the Daily Job Requests system. You peer through the various jobs listed, rolling the control sphere that is built into the desk around as you navigate through and into some of the details of the listings. “Janitors Needed (Standard Pay/Daily Gig)”, “Farmers Needed (Lucrative Payment, Long-term Contract)”, “Volunteer Curator Contracts Available”, and your favorite: “Volunteer Auditor Shifts (Lucrative, Daily, Competitive Hiring)”. Curators were those who dealt with artifacts from before The End. Most people had done one Curator shift, seen nothing weird, and went on to tell their friends (who’d all heard the nightmarish tales that circulated on the Social Network) that there was nothing to worry about any more. They hadn’t believed you when you tried to tell them you’d seen something out in the wasteland. You hadn’t quite understood it what it was you were seeing, so you could hardly make the claim to them confidently, but you saw something out there and that something saw you back, and ever since then you’ve been lying to your therapist about why you can’t sleep.

That is why you going through the motions. Keeping up appearances. Routine masking the deeply unsettling feeling you’ve had ever since that thing met your eyes and hopefully shielding you from the judgments of Auditors. As the videos were keen to tell you growing up: Society only works if everyone is held accountable. Auditors are the ones that make sure nothing happens and goes unanswered for. Auditors verify that no crimes are at risk of even being committed, keeping an eye out for any sign of suspicion. Our rooms are the only place free of cameras and even then, all activities you could partake in were logged somewhere, or at least your purchases were. Not that drugs were off-limits here, but it was a relatively small subculture of regular users compared to the number of casual participants in the larger social events for holidays or celebrations. Not only do Auditors exist and compete to do whatever their personal version of the best job is, but multiple positions in society act as mandated reporters for specific activity, and any behavior that leads to noted concern means the possibility of Auditors getting personally involved.

You’ve been doing research, spread out over the course of the last few months in order to stay beneath the radar: looking primarily for information on the End Times, stories about outside the Dome, and anything about artifacts stored inside the Dome that you could find. Most of it was stuff you’d heard in your teenage years and thought was cool. Strangely, newer rumors have been cropping up surrounding one of the more recently located artifacts: a Heart-Shaped Locket. It’s been placed in the Dome Museum of Artifacts in a place of prominence, with barricades keeping viewers at a further distance than most other artifacts located within the museum. The Locket itself looks strangely untarnished according to people who have seen it in person, but the museum claims that they have no idea what is inside the locket, citing risks to the structural integrity of the artifact itself. This as spawned a lot of discussion about the Locket itself. The plaque in front just says it was found in ruins over 10 miles from the Dome. You aren’t stupid, you stopped regularly using the network to look into these things a while ago. Since then, you’ve verified some of the rumors in person: Curators for the day take the Locket out for some reason, every three days, and deliver it somewhere else. Later that day, it is returned by different Curators. Through-out all of this, the selected curators wear protective gear as if they were leaving the dome and the Locket itself remains in the protective glass case that it is displayed in. It is delivered to an armored vehicle, and that vehicle may or may not leave the dome. No-one has ever tracked it very far because anything else would be too obvious. Armor-reinforced vehicles are the only kind allowed outside of the Dome, so sightings of them become far more common the closer you get to the walls.

You realized that you weren’t going to get any closer to answers safely, and ever since then you’ve been thinking you need to take some risks if you are ever going to sleep properly again. The lack of crime here doesn’t mean that there aren’t personal grievances or mental illnesses… but with everything monitored: the court system is less about determining guilt and more about recompense for victims and reeducation and support for those who are clearly struggling. These are the things you remind yourself of, because you need to steel yourself. Consequences be damned. You need answers. You need to do something, because you can’t keep dreaming of that things eyes every single night. You barely even got a glimpse of it. Just enough to know that outside the Domed City, in a world lacking most vegetation, buffeted by dust storms, and sheathed in radiation: there is STILL something living. It’s body like fog and it’s eyes like black holes.

You made the mistake of asking other Curators if they had seen anything, and you are pretty sure that is why you were never selected for a Curator position again. Honestly, if you had been allowed to go out another time or two, you might have been able to put the whole thing aside. Instead you were left with curiosity and fear. You calmly stand from your seat at the computer, get dressed, and take one final look at your room. You may not see it for a long time, but you are fairly certain you’ll see it again someday. After possible months of reeducation and strict monitoring. You are prepared to live with those consequences. With a deep breath and a sigh, you step out of the threshold and begin the walk to the museum. If it weren’t in close proximity to your housing unit, your trips to the museum might have been a little bit suspicious.

Within 10 minutes, you are waiting outside for the Dome Museum of Artifacts to open. The only person waiting with you is a solitary old man, who seems to want to avoid eye contact. You spend the time browsing the Social Network App on your phone. It provokes some melancholy when you realize this might be the last time you see some friends, there is a fear about mental illness, even with the resources devoted to addressing it, and doing something like this will have some people scared of you for the rest of your life. After all, if someone they knew for years could be one of the few willing to commit a crime, who else is capable? Humans are animals, and fear still acts as the most basic motivator. The world ended and humans sealed themselves into a dome, then they made it a practical heaven on Earth, mostly by controlling people through the fear of exposure and social retaliation. Humans crave freedom, but someone always takes advantage. No-one is truly free here, but it feels completely free because few people want anything they can’t attain here, and those who would be villains have no hope of lasting success.

A Curator dressed formally suddenly opened the door and took his position beside it. The old man was closer to the door, so you let him go first, then follow through the door. The Curator smiles and bids you a good day as you pass him, while taking one last chance to glance and verify that no-one else was coming. Once inside the Museum, you quickly pass the old man who proceeds to the first exhibit and begins reading. You know your destination, and you walk directly through the museum at a casual pace, giving a respectful glance to each of the other artifacts. You want to put distance between yourself and any responders, but just being a suspicious person will provoke a response in the Dome. Luckily, you timed this for the least popular time, on the least popular day for the museum. When you arrive into the final exhibition room containing the Heart-Shaped Locket, you glance at it before heading to the plaque to read it one more time. For the third time today, you will yourself to take a deep breath and sigh fully before making your move.

You turn and begin to walk out of the room, trying to time the moment you turn around with the point where you are mostly crossing from one camera’s viewing area into the next. Every second will count, you may only have moments to glean anything from the Locket. Before you know it, your heart is beating through your chest and you are leaping over the barricade. You weren’t able to bring anything to make getting into the Locket’s encasing easier, but you did wear steel-toed boots. You leap and drop kick the display. It topples and shatters and you are quickly on your knees sifting through debris for the Locket. You find it, you hear shouting, you fumble for the main piece and quickly find the release, pressing it down and causing the Locket to pop open. The chaos unfolding in the background doesn’t help your confusion as you stare at the small, strangely-colored and professionally-cut jewel that appears simultaneously green and purple. You quickly realize that something is very wrong. Staring into the jewel, you swear you see the room itself, but rather than reflections, you see the viewpoints of other people near your location. You want to run. You know this jewel could help you escape… and before you know any more than that: you are on the run, the chain wrapped around your fist and the Opened Heart Locket in your palm. It isn’t just displaying things, it is showing them to you, and you need to see more...