A Remnant In the Morning

The sun is beginning to shine through the window. Just a shaft of light, streaming through onto the wall. It must be around 6. How long have I been awake? A few hours? Half an hour? A few minutes? I didn't look at the time when I woke up, so I have no real idea. Time isn't what it used to be. I hate being in here during the daylight. The whole room, taking on this red tone. Part of me wishes I'd never watched any of the old movies, read the old books. Better than the relentless grey of the storm clouds, I guess. Yesterday's forecast said we should expect another one, starting tomorrow, two to three weeks long.  I wish I'd never seen or heard of a blue sky or a yellow sun. It's like someone else's memory, haunting me every morning. I sometimes wonder if I even know what colors used to look like. Is my blue what they would have called blue 75 years ago? I don't see the colors some of those old movies have. I don't think I ever actually have, except in movies, and even then... Are we seeing what they saw? Would we know if we weren't? I wonder how much is getting lost as we just keep going, and whether we even know it. 

The hum is constant. It eventually starts to work on everyone. You think you stop hearing it after a while, but you don't. Really, it takes over, a little bit at a time, so you don't notice it. All day, under these LED lights, that sound under, behind and through everything. You know it's day because you see the sun when you wake up, and it shines through the window, but you walk out the door, into the halls, and it's just the lights and the hum and the clock that tell you. I wonder sometimes if they don't mess around with the speed of the clocks and the cycle of the lights. I wouldn't be surprised if they slowed the clocks down sometimes, kept the lights turned up longer, to get some extra hours out of us. How would we even know? We think we know the date and the season, most of us haven't been outside in months. The last person I know of went out what we think is nine months ago. We think we know the date, but if they slowed down the clocks on enough days, the cumulative effect would mean we've lost it. We could be months off, and we'd never know. The hum is always there though. 

There's nothing for us out there anyway. Blistering sun, blistering cold, rank air, dirt, wind, punishing storms. It's just asking for grief, anger and pain. Memories of what we were. What we could have been. What we could have done. What we lost. No matter how maddening it can be to stay in here, no one wants to go out there anymore. Going outside is nothing but a reminder, and everyone is tired of that, so we stay in here. We stay in here and we "save our way of life." 

We're the "brave" ones though, right? The fucking posters and promos are everywhere and constant, telling us what this all is, like our lives have meaning, like we have meaning. I don't know anyone who chose this. We're all here because this is all there is left for us. We tend the machines. We keep them going. They say it's so everyone else has a chance to keep life going, we choose this so "our way of life" can continue. It's a farce, and we all know it. I don't know if it would be any better if we just tore down the posters and stopped running the promos, smashed all the screens and just admitted we're all doing this because we don't know what else to do, and we're all afraid of what happens if we stop. 

With each passing year though, we're down more often and for longer periods. Each year it takes more and more to keep this all going, and we have less and less to do it with. We need to do major overhauls, replaces major systems, do major repairs, but we know they're not coming. It's too expensive. The expenses can't be justified because the money needs to be spent on the settlements. We get people in two or three times a year to check on things, and take reports back to the committee, but we know. We're the remnants. Too stupid, too dull, and too poor to have left for the settlements. None of us had "necessary skills" either. They won't say it, but it shows in the dwindling budgets every year, the dwindling orders for what we need to do repairs and overhauls. As far as they're concerned we deserve what we get, and they're tired of having to think about us. We're the past now, and they've left to escape the past, so it's time for us to let go, to stop bothering them, to stop demanding to exist. They know they just have to wait. Like the old saying goes, starve the beast... 

I don't know how long it's going to take, but it is coming. I've heard some of the new transfers talk about how much better things are here, and they left where they came from because things were just getting too bad. Well, two years is the difference. What then? Crowd into the next plant, the next city, hoping it last as little bit longer? What happens when some of those plants go down for too long? What happens when one overload or one juiced stabilizer causes a cascade of failures, and it will take months to get up and running again? If we're in better shape than some of the others, then it's coming. A plant is going to go down, somewhere and not for a few hours or a day or two, but weeks or months. Where do they all go then? On to the nearest city? What happens to that city? What happens to the plant there? 

The extra hours, the extra output, all it does is speed up the inevitable. What happens if they get the plant that went down back in order, up and running again? The people who left aren't all going to go back. After a while, most of them might, assuming the plant doesn't go down again in between and scare them off for good. Realistically, it will only be a matter of time before that plant goes down again. How many times will people pick up their lives and leave on a few days notice? Will we all just exist in this constant state of going from city to city, just waiting for the plant to go down or for the last plant in the last city to come back online? Probably. 

It'll never be everyone leaving either. That means stragglers, people who are too tired, too sick, too lost to leave. If those plants are down long enough it means those stragglers turn into scavengers. If we send people back to those citie, where scavengers have had their run of things for a while, it's not going to go well. There will be resentment of the scavengers for scavenging, and to the scavengers, it will have become their city, and they'll resent the people who left, and left them behind. They're not going to just accept people who left and think they can come back and everything will go back to the way it was. The people left behind are not going to be happy about being left behind, even if we decide to call it their choice. We'll call it their choice, because we won't really want to talk about the fact that it was the choice of the people who decided not to fund repairs and overhauls, because it is the inevitable result. 

It's untenable, all of it. I keep going because I don't really know what else to do. It's taken four years, but I've read every book in the library, at this point. I've seen every film in the available library, some of them multiple times. I need to remember to get on the list so I can get whatever copy of Jansen's short story collection is being passed around. I heard Thompson is starting to write. Hopefully she'll get something done soon. I'm betting she can get something decent written. I don't know how they do it. I come back here, and all I want to do is escape from my own thoughts. They're going back to their rooms everyday, and delving deeper into their own minds. I'm glad they are though. It gives me some hope there's still something to look forward to, someone's thoughts other than my own. Something other than this constant circular sense of alarm. 

I feel like we're all chumps though. We all just keep going. I sometimes fantasize about just giving up and accepting it all for what it is, going outside, into the hills and wilderness and trying to find some group to join up with. I feel guilty for even thinking about it though. I have this sense of some level of responsibility for the kids growing up right now, and what we're leaving them. What happens if we all just give up and walk away, go out into the nothing out there and let whatever pollution or disease finally take us, finally pay the price for what we've wrought? We doom them further. These kids didn't ask for any of this, anymore than I did really, but they at least haven't contributed to it by their own choice yet. Even if I don't have much faith that they'll make different decisions than we have, they deserve the chance to prove me wrong. They're going to be taught all the same things we have been. Chances are high they'll be more like us than not, but they deserve the chance to do something different, even if it seems the odds are highly unlikely they'll do so. 

It's getting to be time now... The red shaft of sun is moving across the desk. It's got to be about 6:30. I should eat before shift. Maybe I'll get lucky and the elevator will finally fail on the way down. I don't really want to die, but I don't know I want to keep living like this either. 

Jimmy tells me not to be such a downer. He's stoned all the time, and it does genuinely seem to help. I worry it would make the days run together too much, and I'd be losing too much of my life to be stoned all day, everyday. Realistically though, it's not like I can really tell my days apart when I try to think back. It's all just the same. Maybe Jimmy has the right idea. Yesterday he said he was talking to a woman in the commons who works in the tower. Apparently, she was up there on shift a few days ago when a family of deer passed. It's the first anyone's seen in six months. Jimmy gave me a big smile and said, "See. It's not that bad. Life is still out there."