The Fear of Living

Social hour was always the highlight of Mickie’s week. Every Saturday afternoon, she headed out of her family’s pod and started the decontamination process. In the first chamber, she stripped down to her underclothes, shivered through the freezing cold decon shower, and then stood in the little dryer stall until her skin was pink with heat and moisture-free again. Then she moved to the second chamber, where she donned a new set of pre-sterilized clothes, a cleanroom suit, a pair of latex gloves, a set of goggles, a cloth facemask, and a plastic face shield, before pulling the hood of the suit up over her forehead and making sure her hair was all safely tucked away beneath the crinkly material. Finally, she stepped into the third chamber, waiting for the door behind her to seal completely before the door in front of her opened into the bunker’s common area.

Something inside her loosened slightly at seeing other people her age in person, even though she Zoomed with her friends daily. She headed for a two-person table on the far side of the room immediately, seeing Jake already there waiting for her. A monitor with a red badge pinned to his suit nodded a greeting at her as she passed and she nodded back, both of their movements automatically exaggerated to make sure it showed through the gear they were wearing.

“Jake!” she said, sliding onto the stool bolted to the ground on one side of the table. “You look exhausted. Did you stay up all night working on that coding project for Dr. Samuels?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Jake agreed. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, staring down at his gloved hands instead, seemingly fascinating by the way the latex moved as he clenched and unclenched his fists. For perhaps the first time in her life, Mickie wished she could reach across the table and cover his hands with hers, but touching outside the family unit was strictly forbidden.

“Hey,” she said instead. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

Finally, Jake looked up, but not at her. Instead, he glanced sideways at one of the monitors. “Not here. I’ll Zoom you tonight, okay? But wait for me to secure the connection.”

“You’re being really weird,” Mickie said. She meant for it to come out lightly, teasingly, but instead it was a wavery whisper. Jake was one of the least-serious people she knew. This wasn’t like him at all.

“Not here,” he repeated. “Let’s go talk to the others.” And then he got up and walked off, leaving Mickie with no choice but to follow.

*****

It was three hours after social hour ended before Jake Zoomed her. Three hours where Mickie faked normalcy through dinner with her parents and younger sister in her family pod, then spent the remainder of the time pacing a U-shape around the twin bed in her room. All the worst-case-scenarios kept running through her head. What if Jake had the Z10 virus, or one of the variants? What if that was why he had looked so tired and it had had nothing to do with coding at all? What if a whole new virus had found its way into the bunker, one they had no defense against? Mickie’s parents were always talking about how viruses mutated, about how even with all the precautions they took, there was always the chance that something could slip through.

Finally, though, Mickie’s tablet beeped with the announcement of an incoming call. She lunged across the bed, tripping over her own feet and nearly dropping the device in her hurry to answer it before finally swiping it on.

“Jake?” she asked.

“Just a second,” he said. His brow was furrowed and his fingers were moving rapidly. After maybe thirty seconds, there was a soft click and Jake’s expression relaxed. “All right, the connection’s secure now.”

“What’s going on, Jake? Are you sick?” Mickie asked.

“What? No!” he said. “Of course not. Like I wouldn’t have set off half a dozen alarms if I’d tried to go out into the common area if I’d been running a fever.”

“Don’t give me that look,” Mickie said. “I know how good you are with computers. You set up this super-secret connection that no one can monitor in nothing flat.”

“I’m not sick, all right?” he said. “If anything, it’s the opposite of that.”

Mickie, who had already been drawing a breath to press the point some more, stopped with her mouth half-open. “What do you mean, ‘the opposite’ of being sick? Why would you be upset about being healthy?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Jake said. “Look, you know I was working on my graduation project for Dr. Samuels, right? The coding thing?” Mickie nodded. “Well, I was tinkering around in the system, because I wanted to be able to make a case for doing more than just, you know, entry-level stuff when I started working in IT next month. And I found something really weird. There was this—”

“I don’t do computers, Jake, so whatever you’re going to say next better be in plain English,” Mickie interrupted.

“Okay. Okay, so, basically, the stuff we see on the internet, it should be coming from everywhere, right?” Jake said. “All around the world. Only it’s not. It’s all originating from right here, and all within the last eighteen years since the bunker was established. There’s nothing before that, and nothing from outside of here. Even the stuff that says it’s way older, and the daily news articles we get from around the world.”

“There must be some mistake,” Mickie said. “Maybe it just shows up that way because it goes through the servers here before it shows up on our tablets or something.”

“No, Mickie, I’m telling you, that’s not it,” Jake said. “It’s all coming from here because it’s all fake, all right? Look, when I saw the code, I started digging deeper. And I found out we weren’t connected to the internet at all. We’re just seeing what’s on our own internal system. But I figured there had to be a connection to the real internet somewhere, right? I mean, someone in the bunker has to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. So I found that link and followed it out. And I read the real news, not the stuff they’ve been telling us.”

“Jake, you’re starting to sound crazy,” Mickie said. She wanted him to be crazy. Maybe she even needed him to be crazy.

“I know,” he said. “But I’m not. The Z10 virus was real, Mickie, but it wasn’t some plague like they taught us. It had less than a one percent fatality rate. There was a vaccine for it before the bunker was even fully built, and no one even really talks about it or any variations of it anymore that I could find. They don’t even wear masks or gloves up top anymore.”

“That’s insane,” Mickie said. “Even if what you’re saying about Z10 is true, there are a thousand other viruses out there. How can those people be so careless?”

“Mickie, you’re not listening,” Jake said. “They’re fine. They’re going places and doing things and actually living, while we hide away down here, cowering in fear of something that hasn’t been a threat in almost two decades.”

Mickie shook her head vehemently. The very idea of risking one’s life like that, and worse, risking passing something on to someone else unknowingly, was anathema to everything she had ever been taught.

“All right, look, I know it’s a lot to take in,” Jake said. “I’m going to leave the secure connection up on your tablet and set up a link to the real internet so you can see for yourself. Just don’t let anyone else see your tablet or we’ll both have a lot of explaining to do. I’ll Zoom you again tomorrow night and we can talk more then.”

Jake tapped at his own tablet rapidly for another minute, until a small blue dot appeared in the lower right corner of her screen. Then he looked up at her silently for a moment before cutting the connection.

She stared at the little blue dot for what felt like an eternity. It looked so benign. So harmless. Eventually, when her eyes started to burn from staring at the screen unblinkingly for too long, she tapped on it and, for the first time in her life, connected to the world outside the bunker.

It was…jarring. Apparently it was summer aboveground. There were images of people at the beach, camping, walking or cycling in parks, doing any number of things outside. And all of them were bare of any protective garments at all. No masks, no gloves, no glasses. They were crowded in close together, touching more often than not, with no care at all for maintaining distance from each other. She followed link after link, searching for the articles about viral outbreaks, about super spreader events, about the inevitable results of their carelessness. There was nothing.

Finally, after nearly an hour of increasingly frantic but unfocused clicking, she calmed enough to think properly. What she really needed was to find out about Z10. About the bunker, about why she and the others were down here. Mickie may not have had a knack for computers, but she’d always excelled at research when she put her mind to it, and she could pick the best source from a pile of rubbish with her eyes closed. When she found that source this time, she almost wished she hadn’t.

It was a long essay, a comprehensive look at how Z10 had started and society’s response to it. At first, everything matched up with what Mickie had been taught. The sudden appearance of the virus on a global scale, the lockdown of societies around the world as everyone sought to contain it, the mandatory use of masks and gloves as well as orders to maintain distance from others when leaving the home for essentials. And then the author’s tale began to diverge from the history Mickie had learned.

Within a few months of the appearance of the virus, the author wrote, it became clear that it was largely only the most elderly or most immunocompromised that were at risk of death. Most testing positive had no symptoms at all, while others showed symptoms akin to an ordinary case of the flu. Some states lifted lockdowns completely, a few even doing away with masks and gloves as well. Later comparisons of infection and fatality rates showed that states without restrictions actually had the same or better rates than the states that imposed the strictest measures, suggesting that all these precautions had been ineffective from the start. Vaccines were created and circulated, and cases dropped drastically. While Z10 and its variations never completely disappeared, they were relegated to the ranks of influenza, no more or less deadly, and society got on with life. Much, much later, analysis of testing methodology suggested that the initial case rate and death toll attributed to Z10 had been far lower than originally thought, with financial incentives driving the overreporting. 

Already slightly nauseous, Mickie’s eye caught on a link at the bottom of the report. It said, “Interview with Maureen Colinsky,” and it was dated five years ago. Except Mickie knew Maureen Colinsky, the kind, grandmotherly woman who had taught English to the kids in the bunker until she died eight years ago. Well before the date of the interview. With shaking hands, Mickie picked up her ear buds, slipped them into place, and tapped on the link.

“You have to understand, when we built the bunkers, we thought it was the only choice we had,” the woman on the screen said. There was no doubt that it was the same Maureen Colinsky that Mickie had known. “All around us, people were throwing caution to the wind. Businesses reopening, people throwing away their gloves and masks with no care for who they might infect, and all against the advice of the government.

“I lost both my parents to Z10, you see. And I couldn’t bear the idea of seeing anyone else suffer that way. Yes, there was a vaccine, but the government was putting its doctors on the news daily, telling us how careful we still needed to be, and warning about variants and mutations and such. And, of course, the government strongly condemned those states that weren’t staying with the restrictions. But there seemed to be no stopping those selfish people, so the bunkers were our only hope. And they do work wonderfully at keeping everyone healthy. It’s just very difficult for those like me who live alone. It’s not so bad for those with family, of course, but those of us who are alone, well…It’s very difficult for us. That’s why I decided to leave. I’m sure I’ll regret it one day, when I’m dying from a virus I wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed in the bunker, but I must admit, it is so very nice to talk to people in person whenever I like.”

Mickie stopped the interview. She didn’t want to hear any more. Dropping her tablet on the floor, she turned off the lights in her room and wished for sleep, knowing it wasn’t going to come.

*****

The next day passed, somehow, though Mickie didn’t remember much of it. She thought maybe she should be angry. Maybe sad. Something, at least. Instead she just felt numb. When Jake Zoomed her that night, she answered without any of the urgency of the night before.

“You all right, Mickie?” Jake asked hesitantly. “You look kind of out of it.”

“Yeah, well, you know,” she said. “I did a lot of reading last night. What did you expect?”

“Fair point,” he admitted. 

“What are you going to do?” Mickie asked. Jake tried to look surprised but it wasn’t very convincing. “I know you. You’re not just going to ignore this. What are you going to do?”

“It’s a lot easier to go along with living in a cage when you think there’s a good reason for it,” Jake said. “When you know there’s not, what’s the point, right? I want to see what’s out there, Mickie. I want to see the sky and the grass and the ocean. Can you imagine what it must be like? There’s an entire world up there.”

“And what if you get sick?” Mickie asked. “We’ve lived down here our whole lives. What if we don’t have the same natural immunities that people who grew up out there have. What if you get to live in that world for a day or two, and then you get sick and die?”

“Then I guess I get sick and die,” Jake said. “Look, at this point, it’s not even about how dangerous Z10 really was or is or whatever. I’m tired, Mickie. I’m tired of everything I do being about keeping myself alive instead of being about actually living. I mean, what’s the point? Those people up there, they’re living. We’re not. We just fooled ourselves into thinking we were.”

“When are you going?” she asked.

“Tonight,” Jake said. “I’m going to cut the locks and alarms at midnight. I guess the real question is, are you coming with me?”

Mickie’s instinctive reaction was I can’t. Leaving the bunker was a death sentence. That had been made very clear to all of them since they were old enough to walk. But there were those people, on the beach, in the park, camping. Free to feel the wind and the sun on their skin, to breathe real air. To see people in person whenever they chose and to do so many things that couldn’t even be dreamed of from the confines of a bunker. Free to live, not spend all their time fearing death, when death would come for them all eventually anyway.

“I’m in.”