DT 2023: Alerian Morning

A new day broke over the surface of Aleria, as the extrasolar colony’s sun Elduros peeked with rays of pink and orange from the far horizon. The desert’s megafauna fleas and lone-wolf dust locusts chirped across the vast rocks and sand. An alien morning, but not for anyone important to observe it.
Instead, morning rang out with a distant alarm bell somewhere in the near-pitch black as electrical power slowly creeped along fiberoptic wires mounted to earthen walls deep below the Alerian surface. Bulbs sparked to life but with a weak intensity just enough to see one’s own hand and cast long, faint shadows against the cave walls.
People shouted again down the strip mine halls but were far enough away they sounded like whispers. A body shivered to life from a thin layer of dust and a blanket of excavated gravel. A young boy, barely thirteen, opened his dull eyes in the darkness and unclasped the transparent oxygen mask from his nose and mouth. The retractable mask coiled back to its power unit hooked onto his belt; the boy wore no shirt; only a dented hardhat strung together by ancient string, some faded camouflage cargo pants, and open toe sandals two sizes too big.
The most modern item of clothing on his person was the rebreather, hooked into the mine’s shared network, at least when it worked. He was lucky when a signal refresh managed to get an accurate time of day. Today’s local time seem thirty-seven minutes early from an actual work period, not that it bothered anyone. There wasn’t a choice. Below the surface, the Guild owned everything: food, water, air, and time.
But it was still better than being stuck in the surface heat, eating mud-cakes and watching friends mummify under a relentless sun.
The boy took a deep breath and replaced the plastic-tasting air in his lungs with salt-tasting air pumped into the mines, sometimes taking hours and days to get down to his level. It was a slow start like every morning; more of the same, shallow breaths and adjusting to particulate-contaminated oxygen. He couldn’t remember the exact details of a Alerian sunrise; the distant, foggy memory only came to him in dreams.
He admired the slight sparkle of the mineral rocks over his head in the narrow mineshaft, glinting in the very same light he barely navigated the darkness in. The dull, apocalypse-proof lightbulbs were still going strong after five years since miners carved out this level of tunnels and made them semi-protected against cave-ins, not to say anything of an earthquake.
At least the boy had this quiet moment while the shift leader had to walk the maze of tunnels with a computer tablet, making sure everyone on the twelve-hour team was up and beginning to crack at the walls with hand pickaxes, chisels, and bottles of nanite-vapor to separate the rare ores from the regular stone.
Unfortunately, the peace and the stillness of wondering on life could not last and the day of tuning out the thinking-part of his brain would begin. Another boy, younger than the dirt napper, rounded the corner shouting up a storm. “Jeffery! Jeffery!”
“What? What!?” The groggy thirteen-year-old Jefferson growled out.
“The Boss heard from Dwain you exchanged your rations to get out of that rotation yesterday! You got to hide or something.”
“Aw… Do I have five more minutes? How far is he?”
“Boss is two left-turns from here. You gotta-go!”
“Fine. And thanks for the lookout, Speedy,” Jefferson grumbled out his acknowledgment and shimmed his way out of his hiding hole making sure not to hit his head on the narrow, three-feet-high ceiling and crawled out into the larger five-feet-tall passage. “You should either go hide, or get to work too.”
The boy Speedy nodded furious and bolted off back in the direction the Boss was supposedly coming down. Whether to distract, rat out, or get to his own work – Jefferson wasn’t sure, and didn’t really care. Down here, it was every miner for themselves. It was always that way.
Jefferson laid back in the dirt, missing the damp, warm touch of the earthen blanket from earlier. Speedy said to go now but he couldn’t help wanting any second more he could afford. Jefferson mustered his courage and crawled out into the main tunnel. There wasn’t much space to stretch out, at best a child’s single arm wingspan, but he did his best to refresh his constricted muscles.
Completing his morning routine, Jefferson leaned against one of the walls, jogging-while-feeling his way around a side tunnel leading deeper into the strip mine. He laid out a plan in his mind, considering what waited for him.
The Boss would find him eventually, otherwise Jefferson would return to the fold eventually for much-needed food rations. He would be punished of course, but it depended on if he somehow returned with something useful from the deeper tunnels. The difference between backlashes and no rations for the next few days, or getting a shock bracelet to motivate him through a long double-day shift without sleep.
To Jefferson, the choice was easy – better to lose sleep than go hungry. He was certain anyone would agree with his rationale there. Of course, he wished life could be something else entirely. Maybe a full day of sleep. Or a piece of dried meat in a single bread bun. Those sounded pretty good.
A crackle of gunfire broke Jefferson from his thoughts and sent him tumbling to the stone floor, tearing small cuts in his skin. Jefferson thought it was the sound of a nearby tunnel collapse, but after a few seconds and not feeling dirt rain down his back or bury him alive, he looked up.
The stream of gunfire erupted again, sending a thunder down the tunnel and a ringing into his ears. Jefferson blinked, dazed by the brash eruption of one of the few loud sounds he recognized on Aleria. How long since joining the Guild had he heard gunfire? Jefferson couldn’t remember. It was a sunriser-experience, not a miner-experience.
Jefferson was coming around to hating his self-indulgent wish for change. He got it today. The gunfire was getting closer. His hands shook, he could feel his heart-beating through his numbed ears. The boy laid to the ground and hoped he would somehow survive; he did nothing wrong, but he had no god to beg for salvation in this time.
Would he die in these caverns? Never to see sunlight again?
Jefferson prepared the equivalent of a prayer under his breath. He hoped if there was a universal creator out there, that they spare him. The little boy quivered, thinking of a million ‘whys’ and ‘what.’ If only he could know his future; if only he could meet a hypothetical older-self. Maybe they would tell him everything would be okay. The bullets were not for him.
The scream of gunfire was deafening, but it called to him – a time for a change, a time for adventure. But in this moment, he would not know until after.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories