The New Society of the Underground Sun

The power had been off since the start of the revolution. The government had bombed the major power stations and shut off the rest in their unsuccessful attempt to force the remaining population into submission. Though she had been cursing them for the entire week prior, Serene now found herself grateful that the subway tracks had no electricity. Muted sunlight shone gently down the tunnel stairs, illuminating the platform just enough to see the bright yellow paint lining its edge. After checking over her shoulder a final time, Serene crawled over the yellow paint line onto the tracks. A twisting pain shot up her leg as her body hit the uneven metal below, a scream fighting to escape her lips. Bringing her hand to her mouth, she bit down on it hard, feeling the relief as the urge to scream turned around inside her throat, finally deciding to redirect itself to her crushed fingers. Breathing deep into her lungs, she prodded at the cold ground around her and began crawling along the tracks.

Which direction she travelled in did not matter; she just needed to get away from them. Down here, she thought, they won’t even follow me; it’s much too dark for them to breathe. The government’s technology had been far more advanced than they had let on to citizens – that had been exposed at the start of the revolution, when the government first announced that they would be joining forces with the invaders – but they still had not created anything even remotely similar to the machines of the Kolphopuder invaders. Their machines were unlike anything on Earth, classified or not. Their technology was far more than just advanced; it was completely beyond the human comprehension of science, technology, and everything in between. Their breathing machines, for example, managed to harvest Earth’s sunlight and converted it to a gas similar to the air on their homeworld, allowing them to breathe. They had tanks of the gas which they could carry to travel in the dark, but after ten minutes without sun exposure, the gas transformed into something, it seemed, they could not breathe. This fact alone had saved Serene; condemning her to roam the dusty, dark places of the Earth like a rat, only feeling the warmth of the sun when the cold scraps of food below were no longer enough to sustain her.

At the beginning of the revolution, Serene had lived, surprisingly comfortably, within the depths of the city’s sewage system. She had lived with a small group of rebels then, families and students mostly, and they managed to get along quite well. A rotating crew of volunteers would emerge from the sewage system at precisely planned times, and quietly travel a low-risk route to a guaranteed food source. One night, three weeks into her time with them and eager to show her new community the gratitude she felt for them, Serene volunteered to go. Almost everything went according to plan; she emerged at exactly the right time, travelled cautiously along the quiet path set out for her, raided the store for cans and boxes of food, and headed back along the path. She arrived safely back at the sewer cover where she was set to descend, but just as she lifted the metal away from the dark opening it covered, an absurdly small metallic pin fell from her sleeve. She watched as its reflective surface threw white moonlight back to her, becoming smaller and fainter until it disappeared altogether, buried, she assumed, somewhere deep in a pile of moulding waste. Taking it to be a piece of plastic or shrapnel, Serene continued her descent, climbing slowly down the ladder, her arms and back strapped full with dense food.

Later, after dinner was finished and everyone lounged sleepily around the yellow fire, Serene told the others of the odd pin that dropped from her sleeve, recalling how she had not seen a pin so small since years before the revolution. The warmth and familiarity dropped from the air, replaced with a bone deep, sickening shiver of dread. The leader of the group, a broad-shouldered woman, rose briskly and alerted her security force to immediately evacuate everyone from the sewers. Confusion ensued as Serene searched for a familiar face of guidance, or friendship; but all the faces of familiarity had been wiped clean with a dirty rag of hot terror. Hurled forward by the swarm of escapees, she had found her way up the ladder and into an emergency tunnel, off to the side of the main exit. She slammed the door behind her, and cowered there for four days, drowning slowly in sweat and the deathly screams of her new found friends. When she had finally opened the latch on the emergency tunnel door, the sewer was littered with charred, blue bodies, staring at her accusingly. Her first time outside had left Serene alone, accompanied only by the tremendous guilt of the sea of her blue-bodied friends.

This was her second time emerging from her depths since the revolution began, and, she feared, quite possibly her last. They had spotted her when she ran towards a squirrel in the light outside, chasing her through levelled buildings, bridges, and rivers; but they stopped when she reached the subway. Serene knew they would not risk coming down into the darkness – she was elusive prey, and it would take them more than ten minutes to catch her – but regardless, a static buzzing above her head made her knees shake with fear. The pitch darkness, moments before a safe blanketing cover, now reached its deceptive tentacles through her ears, making her whole body hot with fear. A drone! Her mind jumped to the conclusion, but its next thought slipped through her grasp. As she searched her empty mind desperately for anything at all, a crack of yellow lantern light morphed into a square on the track to her left. Interrupting her blank stare, a grey limb reached from the bright square, wrapping itself around Serene’s arm. With a single tug, Serene was swallowed into the brightness, and the light was sealed off. Perfect darkness returned to the desolate tunnel, pierced only by the small drone’s disappointed hum.