Quintessence

19 Percent.

Life in the Oven was steady, and it had remained steady for decades. I was conceived when my parents had just reached twenty years old. There was a dire need to keep up our population. While at the time of my birth there were more than enough Residents to maintain the operation of the Safehold, the majority of the Residents and workers were aging. I was among one of the second generation to be born within, and from a young age, I realized this would likely be where I died.

For most of human history, this was not unusual. From the ages of the caveman, up to the industrial revolution and beyond, many were born, grew, and died not miles apart. The generation of my grandparents and those before them had been the first to be able to experience the freedom of the entire world. It was common for some to spend years traveling the world, for people to move halfway around the globe and find a new life, with a new family and a new culture. I grew up knowing that this time was over. It had been lost to the cold, and would never return.

I remember reading books and magazines with articles and pictures of the world as I grew up. Oceans, deserts, and forests, the warm wind and feel of the sun, these were all pleasures which I could never experience. I was born to a life of captivity, of slavery to a system that I could never escape, save for the release of death.

I talked openly with my parents about this, who told me to turn to the arms of a higher power, to release my anger, and give in to the plan of god. I never could. A god who would kill a world, that would undo billions of years of astrophysical, geological, and evolutionary progress was not one I could understand, and was certainly not one I could respect.

My parents did not comprehend my troubles. They had lived lives similar to mine, away from the sun and under the earth. Through each other and devotion to a higher power, they had found a way to live. This would never be the life for me, though I often wished I could give in to their way of thinking.

They grew frustrated with me as I became a teenager. As was supposed to have been common, I grew rebellious of them and how they lived. My anger grew and, through my frustration, I struck out. After I had hit a boy at school for mocking my lack of faith in the machine of the Safehold my parents had reached their ‘wits’ end’. It was my Grandfather who had offered to take me under his wing, to look after me, and give my parents some time to reflect on how to ‘fix me’. I went back to live with my parents.

Until that point, my Grandfather had been okay with sitting back and letting my parents raise me as they saw fit. Once he saw how this hurt me, how I was of them but not like them, he took it upon himself to get to know me, to try to understand me in a way that my parents never did.

He always said that he saw himself in me, that had he been in my situation he likely would have believed as I believed, and acted as I acted. He was my first real exposure to an objective view of the world. He had told me that the way I thought, that my abandonment of faith in favor of the harsh reality of the world was how he had grown to become. He had said it was because I was too honest with myself, and while that could be dangerous, it could also be guided to become something more, to giving me sight in the world of those who had chosen to be blind.

He regaled me with tales of his youth, with a first-hand history of the First Pass, and the havoc which ensued. He told me of the time he had woken to the sound of frozen rats, apparently brought into the high atmosphere during an Icarus Climb, smashing down on his roof with enough force to shatter them to pieces. He told me of the reactions of the world after the First Pass, of the saints and the sinners, of hope and despair. He had told me the story of how he and Grandmother had executed the plan to open the doors of the Safehold, of an action which many would have called treason.

He helped me understand the world in color. Not in the simple shades which my parents had painted with, but with the vivid, beautiful, and often terrifying palette of reality. He had also taught me art as a form of expression, something that I had always had an interest in, but not something in which I ever excelled.

Grandfather said that my mind was more analytical than artistic, and that was not something of which I should be ashamed. The new earth needed those who could see the world for what it was, and while what people like us see would often be unpleasant, there would be pride in seeing truth.

By the time I had moved in with my Grandfather we had regained contact with the remaining four Safeholds. The first of this new group to reacquire contact was the Safehold in Munich. The Germans had already suffered their share of division in the past, and eager to prove they had learned from their history, they had secretly been in contact with their surrounding Outsiders since the first lockup, unbeknownst to the Munich Coordinator. They operated in secrecy. While many shared their views the guard generally did not. These guards were the ones with the weapons, and their dedication to the Coordinator created a situation where the Residents had grown to fear them.

It was out of sheer luck that a random guard had stumbled across their operation of trading excess food and medical supplies with the Outsiders.

One guard escaping back to warn the Coordinator caused a fight which had spread and broken out between the guards and Residents. While some of the Residents might have been inclined to join the ranks of the guards, once the indiscriminate gas attacks began, they quickly lost support. In the end, the guards and Coordinator lost through a war of attrition.

The Residents had the supplies on lockdown and without them, the guards had nothing to survive on. The Germans had been quick to repair their communication equipment, with all their gear operational within a month of the Coordinator’s sabotage.

The second group to regain communication was the Safehold of Johannesburg. The Residents of South Africa had taken a path similar to that of the Germans, though with less conflict. Once the Coordinator of this Safehold had been discovered by the general population he had simply enacted the sabotage protocol and shot himself in the head.

The Safehold of Sao Paulo had ended up opening its gates through necessity. The haphazard construction of the Brazilian Safehold had left problems in the air quality controls, somehow the sewage system had ended up leaking into the air-conditioning system, through some sort of construction error. While the Coordinator was quick to espouse the dangers of opening up to the ‘savages’ of the outside world, the Residents had ultimately decided that fighting off a horde of angry Outsiders would be a preferable fate to spending another week in a box that smelled increasingly of human waste.

When the doors came open and the truth was revealed, the Coordinator had been free to leave his position and join the Residents of the Safehold, that is until the standard sabotage of the communication equipment. After this, he was moved to the fringes of the city, allowed to live off the excess power but never again allowed to enter the Safehold or hold any position of power.

The last Safehold to regain long-range communication was the Safehold of Jiangxi, China. The reactor they had called the First Fire, and the areas receiving the generous output, had an unusually comprehensive and intact infrastructure, to the point where those who had been locked outside of the Safehold had been able to live, with moderate difficulty, while being otherwise unassisted by the goods and services of the First Fire.

This was largely due to the concentrated population of the Outsiders who had access to the Safehold’s power output. They had mostly gathered in coastal cities, cities which had been long since abandoned after the food shortages and mass starvations that followed the First Pass. These cities still held troves of useful technology and were easily adapted to be used as growing fields and processing plants.

It was after thirty years of operation, running smoothly by all accounts, that the Coordinator had come down with a rapidly worsening illness. On his deathbed, he had confessed to what he did, after which the Residents threw open the doors and begun conversation and cooperation with the Outsiders.

Within this time they had become somewhat xenophobic of the Outsiders. The Residents had swallowed decades of propaganda regarding their barbarity, but reason ultimately trumped fear, and eventually, an accord was reached. While the Coordinator, before his death, gave codes to fix the built-in issues with the communications systems, his code also burned out some private stores, activating long-dormant thermite packages which quickly ate through personal hard drives, the contents of which were never recovered.

This was the only Safehold where communication was restored through the wishes of the Coordinator.

As I mentioned, I’m writing this under the assumption that whoever reads, receives, or finds this message has an understanding of the scale of the Safeholds, but not their history. As this is where I was born, and where I grew up, the scale of these bunkers was quite natural to me. Like a child growing up in former urban New York might take the skyscrapers of Manhattan for granted, so too did I when it came to the cavernous nature of the Safeholds.

Grandfather had told me that he felt dizzy when he had first seen the scale of the Safeholds. These were buildings and tunnels without equals in the old world. While not having particularly high ceilings in most cases, as this would needlessly complicate construction, the square footage of the Safeholds far and away surpassed every project which came before it. Even historically impressive sites, such as the Boeing Factory in the US state of Washington were dwarfed by the ever-expanding millions of square feet which made up each Safehold.

Since they had first entered operation and had opened up to the outside world, the Safeholds continued to expand. While for most locations this created the difficult task of building in the freezing cold outside world, the Oven was unique in that its expansion continued underground, as more tunnels were mined out, reinforced, sealed from the outside, and finally, adapted to whatever state they would be most useful.

As it stands now, the Oven contains almost twice the area as it did before reopening to the outside.

When I was 28 years old I had settled into my life, as unhappy and unfulfilling as it often was, as an engineer, following in the footsteps of my Grandfather.

My life was one of comfort, and of boredom. I never had many friends, as most of my compatriots had joined some religion or another. These people despised my frankness regarding their beliefs, and most of those who didn’t considered my sense of humor too dark to appreciate. By this time the air outside the Safehold had become difficult to breathe for extended periods, and our scouting missions had to be abandoned. Even with the extended heating and sealing of the city of El Paso, we had problems with maintaining proper airflow.

While the Oven had far more power than we could use, the systems which maintained a livable level of oxygen could not handle the excess work of feeding the maze of buildings and passageways which extended into the city.

As more of those who lived outside the Safehold begun to suffer hypoxia, we had no choice but to force anyone outside to rejoin the rest of us within the Oven. I was there when they closed the doors for the last time. That was the first time in my life I had to fight back a panic attack.

Grandfather had said in his generation there hadn’t been so much religion, that it was only in the first and second generations of those born inside the Safeholds that it had begun to reach the level of popularity and dogmatic adherence of the Pre-Pass era. Even then, the level of fervor that was growing in the Safehold was usually reserved for the more radical devotees of the old world.

Most of these followers were ultimately benign in their beliefs. The way I had grown to see them was through conflicting ideals of comfort, which occasionally came to a head, usually with self-righteous snark and the occasional bouts of violence. It wasn’t until the founding generation started to die out that the situation started to escalate.

My Grandfather passed away when I was thirty years old, peacefully, in his sleep. It was challenging for me. I had grown estranged from my parents, and I felt too selfish in opening up my complaints to the few friends I had. Grandfather was the greatest person I have ever known. He was my teacher, my family, and my best friend. I’ve done my best to continue his legacy, to internalize everything he had taught me, and even question these lessons every step of the way, just as he had taught. He was one of the last of the founders to die off, and by then had become one of the strongest voices on the Safehold council. He was replaced by a member of the Fatalist religion, who had in life shown Grandfather nothing but contempt.

Soon after his passing, it was by using my local computer terminal that I found a private communication channel with Hwei-Ru Jackson.

She had told me she was part of the communications team for the German Safehold, and since her work was often simplistic and easily finished, she had ample time to chat. Communication with her was slow, as was to be expected with the amount of signal bouncing which was necessary over such long distances, and with the remaining strands of what was once the world wide web, but I didn’t mind. I finally had someone new to talk with, somebody who, as it turned out, thought much the same as me.

Over the next few years, we grew close as she told me how life for the Germans had taken a similar route as had we. There had been deaths and brain damage slowly accumulating for many Outsiders, owing to the slowly thinning air. Once it had become evident that living as an Outsider was no longer tenable they had opened their gates to refugees. Of all those who had received power from the Safehold generator, only a small fraction had the means to reach the Safehold proper. As many from Munich that had been able to make their way into the growing crowd, many more had perished in their attempts to reach the Safehold. Some had used their ingenuity to maintain bio-enclosures, running off large vats of specially bred oxygen-producing plants and algae, however, most were not so lucky.

As we had learned, this course was similar across all Safeholds. The Safehold in China was the one that had met with the worst fate. Owing to the success of the Safehold and its extended external infrastructure, in addition to having the highest surrounding population of Outsiders of all the Safeholds, revolt and violence were inevitable.

The Chinese Safehold was the first to spread the word of the declining quality of outside air, and had announced their intention to shift all available resources to the production of the specially engineered oxygen producing plant life. Although the word spread quickly, there was an issue of finding environments that could be sustainable as oxygen-producing. Many of the more isolated communities were hampered by the fact that they only had enough sealable area to produce either their own oxygen supply or their own food supply.

This, combined with the already limited output of other communities, lead to a mass migration to the few areas capable of sustaining both a food and air supply.

Many of these communities capable of self-sustaining operations had the foresight to mislead others about their maximum output, meaning they would not be overwhelmed by a sudden influx of survivors. Others chose to simply cut all communications until the issue had resolved itself.

The First Fire saw immigrants from as far away as Japan, immigrants who had loaded up supplies in trucks and made the slow journey across the frozen sea.

There soon became a point where denial of inevitability was no longer an option. The rapidly overcrowding communities and the Safehold itself had completed their calculations and reached similar conclusions. Either people would have to be ejected from these communities, or they would have to prove themselves worthy of a spot within. If this rule was not followed then the entire population would slowly succumb to either starvation or hypoxia.

Packages were created for those who would have to be excluded. These were labeled Seed Kits and came with multiple vehicles, startup supplies for food, oxygen, and heat, as well as directions to areas with power that might be amenable to habitational engineering. Few freely chose to belong to these groups, as at best this meant gambling for your life, and at worst meant a torturous death sentence.

To decide on who would be eligible to stay in Safehold and tenable communities, tests were held. These took into account health, former and likely future community contributions, and the size of their families which these contributors would choose to bring with them. This practice was similar in effect to those degrees of social engineering which were developed and instigated before the first lockout, though in this instance, the people were aware of the consequences of denial.

Unrest, at this point, had already reached a fever pitch. To subdue any claims of favoritism and nepotism, all current Residents of these communities were required to undergo the same testing process as those outside. Naturally, this didn’t sit well with most Residents, many of whom had families living in bunkers and Safeholds for generations. The reasoning behind this decision was that applying this test exclusively to Outsiders would result in mass unrest, and as the Outsiders massively outnumbered the Residents, the consequences could be difficult to control.

It didn’t matter, the approach didn’t work. Anybody whose result marked them as a new colonist knew they would likely be forfeiting their life and the lives of their families in their pursuit of a new home. While a few enterprising individuals and families accepted their fate, perhaps through a devoted sense of justice, perhaps to secure the more promising sites before others, most of those who had been tagged as colonists stood against their rulings. There were fights to retake the test, of which a few were granted before the mass of requests far outstripped the rate at which the tests could be analyzed.

There were attempts to break into established communities, to hide and be covered by friends and families who had been allowed reservations. These were largely futile, as this degree of anonymity was impossible in these public and rationed populations.

It eventually reached a point where the Residents had no choice but to attempt to force the Outsiders on their way. Food supplies in Safehold proper could no longer keep up with the influx of refugees, and the outlying communities had greater problems with a lack of food and a decline of breathable air. These Residents had no choice but to take up arms, to force out those who would endanger the rest through their own desperate desire for survival.

I could never find out who had struck first, but it didn’t matter. Guns were rare. Most of them sat in the hands of the Safehold Residents who had used them to fire above and upon those who refused to leave. Once the Safehold was satisfied they had closed their doors, which guaranteed no further influx.

Less lucky were the Residents of the small external communities and bunkers. These people had no such means of resistance, nor had they the strength of buildings to simply lock out those who would not leave. Bloodshed spread throughout these bio-enclosures almost unabated. While the Safehold had sent out sorties of volunteers to counter these rule-breakers, they had not the supplies, nor the manpower to fully suppress the dissidents.

Their fight continued for two years, as the oxygen concentration finally dropped to a point where all attackers who had remained in heated homes, off of scavenged and home-grown supplies, had succumbed to their inevitable fate. The Chinese Safehold had eventually reported the death count was calculated at twelve-thousand seven hundred, eighty percent of whom were those who had failed the tests of admission.

Of those who accepted their fate as colonists, the rate of survival was determined at a higher than expected 55%. Most of the colonists’ deaths were of the late adopters, usually those who had only committed to this approach after failed attempts at interloping the existing communities.

Throughout these hardships, Hwei-Ru remained safe. She had often told me of the ease of her job, of how a monkey could do it, were there any monkeys left. All of her complaints of simplicity had, as I mentioned, afforded her unusual amounts of free time for a full-employment worker. Not content at her place in the world, she spent this time studying with me, as we shared our knowledge of communication and engineering systems.

She had an impressive degree of natural talent. Her communication with me was only possible after she secretly reprogrammed small portions of the long-range communication code. It was usually the case that any long-distance communication was visible in the outgoing data lines, however, she had managed to develop a compression algorithm which was eventually adopted by the entire Munich Safehold. While combining this code into the main data stores, she had built herself a backdoor that was based on terminal code she had secretly taken from the former Coordinator. Almost all of this code was destroyed, what she had managed to retrieve was lifted directly from a hard drive that had been presumed useless after the efforts of the Coordinator.

The tools she used to restore partial data from this drive were not available to the rest of the world, not anymore. On examination of the city maps, Hwei-Ru had found a former police station that housed one of the country’s largest cyber-crime divisions. She had taken a scouting trip into the city under the guise of finding old flares and ammunition in the station proper which could be stripped for their chemical fillings. While in the station, she took a detour to the cyber-crime unit and lifted some of their high-tech hard-drive recovery units, one of which was still in good enough order to be repaired, with some time and a lot of struggle.

What she recovered had offered her a direction more than anything else. Most of what she accomplished was based on inference and her talent in reverse engineering. She was just being sneaky at the time, but what she had learned and built ended up being the deciding factor for keeping her place in the Munich Safehold, once faced with the inevitable revolt of the oxygen-deprived Outsiders. What she had also uncovered, which would eventually prove useful to me, was a set of override commands which had been hidden in deep layers of the Safehold operating systems. It was one of these codes, the ‘deltree –burn –comm –cohdd’ command which had been used by the Coordinators to knock out the long-range communication systems.

The commands didn’t come with an explanation as to what they could do but some, including various codes referencing reactor feedback loops, painted a picture of the Coordinator’s power which few had dared believe, at least before the lockout.

She managed to stay out of the way for most of the revolt, her residence and place of work were located next to each other, as many living and working stations were, and hers just so happened to be in one of the centermost and well-fortified parts of her Safehold. On two occasions the Outsiders had managed to breach the reinforced concrete walls of her Safehold, with the use of drills and shaped explosive charges. When this happened, Hwei-Ru had remained ignorant until well after the fact, so well insulated was she from the outside.

On our side, it wasn’t difficult for me to stay in communication. The Oven had become so insular that most contact with the outside world was simply overlooked as unimportant, and since we had no Outsiders with whom to share our communication lines, we had no reason to limit our bandwidth. People would, on occasion, ask me directly what I was doing spending so much time on the computer systems. I would tell them I was simply studying the state of the other Safeholds, trying to adapt what they had learned to our community. This satiated their curiosity, for the most part.

As Hwei-Ru and I grew closer I became increasingly detached from the state of my own Safehold. I had my work, sure, but this didn’t take up much of my time. Once I learned my way around the equipment and techniques used in the maintenance of the power systems I could have my work finished at midday. When I returned to my personal terminal I usually found Hwei-Ru waiting for me. We made efforts to share the same experiences, to read the same books and watch the same movies, a difficult prospect when almost all of the old media had been wiped out by various pulses and time’s decay.

I’ve known that I was in love with her, with you, for a long time. I’m sorry I could never say it. I felt the distance was so great that it would never matter. You should be able to find someone from your own home, someone who can offer you the type of intimacy I never could. I know that telling you this is selfish, I know leaving you this in a message isn’t fair.

We both know that life is not fair, not for us. I won’t go without you knowing my true feelings.

I’m starting to get dizzy, but I’m getting close to the end. You’ll want to remove that last part from the record.

Before I continue, I should tell you about another surprise I have waiting for you. If you check the attachments to this message you’ll find a file called JAMP.zip. I finished transcribing Mansfield Park for you. I was going to send it to you on your birthday. Given the circumstances, I know you’ll understand.