2030 Life in the Earth

“For campers who may remember this story the title is changed as this was a story I told last about 1970.” - Wayne Towne

The graviton hovered over the entrance to the door. This was a rare day when the conditions were right to explore outside Substate the underground home of Totalla and his wife Fitsalla. The graviton is a flying vehicle that has the ability to turn off the effects of gravity and floats above the earth. It moves through the air by two fans that push it like propellers on a boat.

Substate had been occupied by the people who had lived at the time of the Great Fire that destroyed everything on the shell of the earth. The original people were all dead now. The Great Fire caused them to die young from some kind of poison in the air and ground. They had just lived long enough to build Substate under the crust of the earth and have children. In Substate there was only light from the ceiling. The light was controlled by a station that automatically brightened the light and dimmed it. The bright light is called day light and the dim light is called moon light. Some people say that you can see a real moon sometimes when you are outside Substate.

There is a meter by the door that tells if it is safe to take the graviton out to look at the sights on the crust. The graviton also has a meter that tells when you must hurry back to avoid the hot wind. The shell of the graviton can only keep the hot wind out for a limited time. There is something in the hot wind that will make people sick and die like the people who built Substate.

Once people raised animals and ate them. Some old books in the library show pictures of them and say how to raise them. In Substate there are no animals, only people. The creatures outside of Substate do not look very much like the pictures in the books. The food people eat in Substate is raised in the wet rooms. Plants grown from seeds are made into pellets. Parts of the plants are hard to eat so that no part of the plants is wasted all of them is made into pellets. Each person gets a daily ration of these pellets. Lights in the wet rooms are different than the lights in the family chambers so that the plants have all the nutrition possible.

The clothes that Totalla and Fitsalla are wearing are made of fibers from plants. It is said that people once smoked these plants and it made them crazy. Now the plants are too valuable to smoke. The plants are only used for making clothes. The weavers are always busy making cloth to keep the people clothed.

Metals are very hard to get. Men go out to someplace on the crust to find ore. The top layer of the crust is too “hot” to bring into Substrate so they have to dig deep to get useful ore. A special graviton with a jaw on the front is used to dig into the crust. Ore is brought back to a Substate foundry to make the metal. The metal that is used for the gravitons has special properties so that it shields people from the poison air.

Today Totalla and Fitsalla were allowed to take a graviton out to look at things on the crust. They went to a place that is called Chicago. There are mounds there. Some are low and some are huge. The old books tell that these mounds were once buildings, that's box like things people lived in on the crust before the Great Fire. In some places there are things sticking out of the mounds, but most are smooth. It is beyond the green streak called a river. On the edge of the mounds is a large red lake. Old time pictures color it blue.

Totalla and Fitsalla enjoy these trips out. Everything in Substate seems so confined. You can only see from one wall to another in Substate. On the crust there are no walls. The light from the sun star is very bright. One day they would like to see the moon. The sun makes shadows on the crust form the bumps and orange plants called trees. The shadows make interesting shapes as they fly over the crust. Sometimes they dream of running in the purple grass and feel a real breeze in the air. The fans in Substate feel nice, but what would the real wind feel like on the crust? They would never know? To venture out without being protected in a graviton means death.

Bovines were in the open prairies today eating the purple grass. Their massive heads with strange twisted horns, long necks, and tails covered with long hair hardly resembled any pictures in the library books. Hiding in the tall grass was the bovine’s enemy. It is a creature that walks on two legs, it has short arms, a head like that of an alligator and covered with scales. Although it hardly looks like the pictures of wolfs in the library books, that is what the people call it. In fact none of the animals that they see on the crust look like the library book pictures.

Their short vacation time is up so they must returned to the doors of Substate. Totalla pushes the button in the graviton that opens the outer door of Substate. There is a hum as the outer door opens into the locked chamber. Fans turn on to push air around the graviton as it moves into the locked chamber. The outer door closes and a buzzer sounds that the graviton is cleared to enter the next chamber. Totalla pushes a button that opens the next set of doors to the failsafe chamber. Again powerful fans blow out the air. They will not be able to leave the graviton until the third door will open and they are in the parking area. Only then will the doors of the graviton open.

Out of the graviton they walk down a hallway to the exercise room to do the mandatory 10 minutes run in place, 25 push-ups, lift 20 pound weights 30 times and their stretch routines. Totalla is going to a dodge ball game and Fitsalla will join in a game of tennis. After the games they will go to their cubby hole where they live and eat three pellets for dinner.

Today they may go to the music chamber to listen to the choir sing popular songs, watch a video on the wall size viewer, play a card game with friends or go to the library to read a book. At 9:00 PM the lights will dim and it is time for a shower and go to bed in the cubby hole.

In many ways the lives or the people in Substate are like being in prison with a few hours of release a month. The people here are descendants of a few soldiers in the last war of the world. Their job was to turn the keys that triggered the Great Fire. The electronics are still in the control room. The keys that were turned when the President gave the order are still in place. Dust covers them now. They are worthless relics of a lost world.

The 200 people who were in the facility at the time learned to live in the man-made cave. The supplies stored there gave them enough time to turn their prison into a prison of survival. They learned to make power for their cave from heat of the earth. Their gardens use every source they could imagine, from toilet waste to the cremated bodies of their dead. By the time that Tatalla and Titsalla were born the survivors of Great Fire had developed a life style. What the world would become was hardly imagined when the keys were turned. What could have been if the opposing politicians had sat down one more time to resolve their differences?

Tomorrow Tatalla will get up and eat his two pellets for breakfast and go to work in the control room. There he will check that all the systems that make Substate a safe place to live. If any lights on the board show that maintenance is needed for any circuit, Tatalla will fix it. He is a qualified engineer.

Fitsalla will go to the weaving room in the morning and make cloth. She is a pattern expert and designs patterns for the cloth. She makes the designs on a computer that runs the looms.

This will be the routine they follow day after day until it is their turn to take a trip to the crust to look at the ruins of a once great civilization.