Published on December 26, 2022 7:58 AM GMT

Stable Diffusion

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I couldn’t believe it worked, even as I crossed the gangplank from the icebreaker, at last setting foot onto Antarctic soil. Gravel really, mixed with dirty snow. Even the peak of Antarctic Summer hadn’t yet melted the final few traces. A slender white haired woman of perhaps sixty with a tight, smooth face approached, wearing a bright orange parka. 

"So you’re the bigshot writer, are ya?" I tugged at the drawstring on my hoodie, trying and failing to maintain eye contact as I turned away from the bitterly cold wind. When she handed me the parka she carried under her arm, I thanked her and eagerly pulled it on. "Bigshot? I don’t know about all that. The artists and writers residency program seemed like the only way I could realistically see Antarctica in person, that’s all." She smirked. "A tourist, then. I thought as much."

Her name turned out to be Nora when introductions were made on approach to McMurdo. The impressive compound sat atop the buried foundations of 85 smaller buildings, torn down to make way for the future. It looked the part, too. Lots of metal and glass, something like a cross between a modern college campus and an airport. 

"Get a load of all those pampered grad students. They have it easy!" Nora grumbled. "Used to be, walking between buildings during blizzards was a rite of passage. Now you can go anywhere on base in your jammies." I made a show of paying close attention, picking up on the paradoxical pride she clearly took in her seniority despite also having work done. What a relief it was to be inside, brushing snow off our parkas before doffing the heavy garments and hanging them up by a heater to dry. 

Aside from rows of identical parkas, the mud room, or "boots room" as Nora called it, contained racks of walkie talkies on their chargers. So many little LEDs glowing green, orange or red. There were also some first aid kits, megaphones and other assorted equipment I’d never thought about the need for in a place like this. I felt briefly ashamed that my knowledge of McMurdo didn’t extend far beyond the packet I found in my cabin on the ride here. 

Sensation slowly returned to my face, at last bathed in warm air. Numb before, now starting to ache. "This is the new guy?" A thin but sturdy black fellow with white tufts at his temples approached. His gray eyes studied me through a pair of bifocals. Nora slapped me on the back. Startled to be touched by a stranger, I took an involuntary step forward. "I could’ve done with my research assistant" Nora groused, "but yes, this is who we got instead. Far be it from me to diminish the importance of the arts." 

After the handoff, Blake apologized for Nora. "She’s one of the old guard. This is her first Summer at the new McMurdo, but she’s wintered over at Amundsen Scott nineteen times." I did some quick mental math. "Wasn’t it built in ‘08 though? Where was she staying before?" Blake looked surprised. "Did your homework, I see." I had him fooled at least, if not Nora. 

He seemed to hold her in high regard. "Nora’s the real deal, served her time in the dome and everything." He pointed to a framed photograph on the wall of the geodesic metal dome’s deconstruction in 2010. "She still tells all the male grad students that she’s in her fifties, so don’t let her find out that I told you…but she also worked at the original station. Built in 1957, dismantled during the same summer as the dome. Nora was all torn up about it."

I couldn’t see why. The first Amundsen Scott Station was a pitiful shack, the dome wasn’t much better, and old McMurdo was a mess to beat them both. By contrast, on our way to the dorms we passed by a lecture hall, vending machines, a cafeteria and a coffee bar. In no way would it be an exaggeration to call this an indoor town, with every amenity I could ask for and some I didn’t think to. What a difference climate funding makes. 

We passed through one of the elevated skyways connecting two of the largest sections. Floor to ceiling windows lining both sides of the corridor afforded panoramic views of the barren hellscape outside. I privately wondered how much windows could really do for morale, when that’s the best the view ever gets. 
 

Still, when I set out for Antarctica, the accommodations I envisioned were considerably more austere. Not the rec rooms, not the food selection or huge windows. The dorm we arrived at brought me back down to earth somewhat. Not that it wasn’t equally plush or well apportioned, just that it was roughly the same size as my cabin on the icebreaker. 
 

It had a window at least, and a desk which I availed myself of. With my luggage perched atop it, I unzipped it and lifted the lid, then got busy unpacking. It was the work of half an hour, and not long after I finished, Blake came knocking. "Oh good, you’re settled. Don’t get too comfy, though." I asked if there was someplace I needed to be. "Not until orientation tomorrow. I just thought I’d invite you for a drink in the-..." His eyes came to rest on my opened luggage, where a battered old copy of "Perpetuum Evergreen" lay nestled among shirts, socks and underwear.

"Vance Dranger, huh? So you’re one of those." I laughed and shook my head. "No, not even a little bit. My father was, though." Blake looked relieved. "Was? How did you snap him out of it? All the Drangerites I know are in it for life." I cleared my throat and looked at the floor. "He…went missing some years ago." Blake fell silent. "Ah, I see. My apologies."

I did wind up joining him for a drink. One of the few teetotalers on base, Blake ordered a hot chocolate from the coffee bar. I followed his example, and soon the two of us were seated before immense windows lining the outer wall. For all the desolation, there was at least a view of the seafront, which counted for something. I checked my watch in momentary confusion, wondering why it was still light out before realizing my error.

"What was he like?" I translated the question internally to "what was it like growing up with a Drangerite", which is usually what people really want to know when they ask about my father. "Obsessed with his own mortality, like the rest of ‘em." Blake’s eyes softened. "Listen, I didn’t…" I assured him it was okay. "Yes you did, and I don’t blame you. It was losing my mother that did it. I was young and resilient, though I did suffer greatly. Not compared to Dad though, her death absolutely broke him."

He extended an upturned hand. I left him hanging, as I rarely even hug friends. After a moment he withdrew, instead reaching under the table and producing a copy of my latest novel. "I thought maybe it was something like that. Your protagonists have a habit of losing their mothers." It caught me off guard. "You’re a fan?" Blake winced. "I’m not sure if fan is the right word. Nobody reads your stuff for pleasure, exactly. Would it kill you to write a happy ending?" We shared some laughter, and the mood lightened. 

A strange and exclusive sensation, to sip hot cocoa in Antarctica. Insulated from the ravenous cold by a technological barrier, on a continent which remorselessly consumed the lives of the first pioneers to explore it. Blake vented to me about Dranger and his army of fanboys. Dwindling since the disappearance of their great golden emperor, but still a common and pestilent contingent of the life extension crowd. 

"Didn’t one of ‘em attack a colleague in the elevator? At the recent conference? Some nonsense about invisible parasites." I shrugged and took another sip. "I didn’t hear about that, but I believe you. Even among Drangerites, there’s a relative lunatic fringe." He chuckled, with an air of smugness. "And for what? At the end of the day, what’s so special about the man? Like clockwork, every few decades some charismatic tech guy with a funny name makes headlines. Nothing new, this world has seen many men like Vance Dranger come and go." 

Preaching to the choir. I didn’t interrupt though, it felt affirming to hear the same thoughts I’ve had many times since Dad disappeared, echoed by a stranger. "Each time they amass their own small army of dazzled followers ready to make excuses for his deficit of humanity, because he’s brilliant. Such men never need to perform a moral inventory, never to self reflect, as nothing in their life forces them to. Many more voices in their ear tell them they’re always right and to ignore the haters, than the opposite. It’s the easiest thing in the world to believe that the friendly, supportive voices are the correct ones."

I nodded along, ticking the boxes in my head. "Vance Dranger wanted to make an impact" I added, "and for better or worse, he certainly did. You know, Jesus said he came not to bring peace, but a sword. That his followers should expect to make enemies in their own household on account of him, and that only those who chose him over their families were worthy of him. A discomfitingly familiar ultimatum to anyone who’s lost a family member to the Vance Drangers, the L. Ron Hubbards, or the Joseph Smiths of the world."

Blake tensed up and shifted his posture subtly. "I dunno if that last name belongs in your list. Or Jesus, for that matter. We should take care not to make reckless comparisons when we don’t have all the facts." I puzzled over it until Blake clarified that he’s a Mormon. It suddenly tracked that he didn’t order anything alcoholic. "Thought you guys couldn’t have hot drinks?" I joked. Still smiling, but now strained, Blake answered that undoubtedly I held many such misconceptions.  
 

"Forgive me, that’s likely true. I didn’t mean anything by it, except that Dranger left his mark on the world in both constructive and destructive ways. Even twenty years after his disappearance, I still sometimes receive invitations to support groups. The grown children of parents lost, physically or mentally, to Vance Dranger’s siren song. Trying to find some meaning in it, I suppose." A fool’s errand, I thought. I’ve been down that road already, there’s nothing at the end of it. Dranger no more had the goods than any of the other infamous hucksters throughout history, who promised immortality to whoever would follow them.

"Do you think he was onto something?" Blake inquired, as if reading my mind. I finished up my cocoa and set the mug down on the little table by the arm rest. "No, I don’t. I think he was a pied piper who led my father, and many other romantic fools out here to freeze. I don’t think he had any particular endgame except not to die alone and irrelevant. Leveraging man’s most primal fear, our mortal anxiety, to surround himself with adoring groupies in his final moments. He didn’t invent that game."

Blake somberly absorbed the outpouring, then offered his own take. "Your father died chasing a dream. That’s not the worst way to go. Nor would I characterize him, or any of Dranger’s followers, as fools necessarily. It’s the most human thing in the world to look for leaders. To organize under someone so that we’re no longer solely responsible for the outcome of our lives. So we don’t have to make hard decisions. That’s the fantasy, isn’t it? That demigods walk among us. Fundamentally different from and beyond us puny mortals. All knowing, omnicompetent. Dynamic, charismatic and infallible, possessing all the answers. Like some cross between an orchestral conductor, a stage magician, and a ship’s captain."

"Or a dictator" I interrupted. Blake grimly acceded. "Yes, or a cult leader in this case, not that very much distinguishes the two." I wanted to mention Joseph Smith again in the worst way, but I bit my tongue. "Brighter men than you or I, or your father for that matter, have fallen under that spell" Blake continued. "Many high ranking Rahjneeshis were accomplished western academics. Many of the 9/11 hijackers were doctors, mathematicians and engineers." I shot him some side eye. "This is supposed to make me feel better?"

Behind us in the cafeteria, uniformed workers filed in. Many had their neon yellow jumpsuits unzipped to the waist, the upper half of the garment tied around their hips by the sleeves. I didn’t expect such a lopsided ratio of mechanics and janitors to scientists, but it made some sense upon reflection. A base this size in the harshest environment on Earth is constantly under siege by the elements. A war of attrition it would surely lose in time, if not for the never-ending upkeep. 

I retired to my dorm at 10pm, per my watch, though it was of course still bright outside. It’s one thing to know of, and expect, polar weirdness in the academic sense. It’s another thing entirely to live it. Mercifully there were heavy curtains. Upon closing them, I settled into my cramped little bed, and soon surrendered to unconsciousness. 

It took me a minute, the following morning, to remember where I was. Then another, to fully accept it. That uncanny lurch you feel when waking up in a hotel, or at a sleepover, only greatly magnified. I disabled the alarm on my watch, got dressed, and headed for the bathroom. Dorms didn’t have individual bathrooms, a cost and space saving measure. So it was that I waited my turn, at the end of a long line of groggy maintenance technicians and academics. 

Showers weren’t timed, thank goodness, on account of the base being surrounded by melting snow. Nevertheless I felt hurried as I went about my morning routine, always conscious of the surly fellows waiting just outside the bathroom for me to finish up. Clean, rested and refreshed, I had a bagel and coffee in the cafeteria alongside many of the same grumpy faces I saw in line earlier. Also Nora, who picked me out of the crowd and took a seat directly across from mine.

"Got anything for me to read yet?" Bright eyed and chipper, but with an unmistakably passive aggressive intonation. "Give me a break, I just got here." She dipped a tea bag into her steaming mug. "No kidding! I saw you cozying up to Blake. Here for one day and already brown nosing. I hoped you would make better use of your time. Lots of people might’ve gone in your place." I asked if she meant her research assistant. Her fake smile faded somewhat. "Yeah, I guess that’s as good an example as any."

I put my hands up. "Look, Nora. I’m not your enemy, okay? I come in peace." I only didn’t say I meant her no harm as prior experience taught me that people tend to interpret that to mean the opposite. She relaxed her posture, though her face remained conspicuously taut. 

"No, I suppose you’re not. It isn’t you I’ve got problems with, specifically, but the AAW program. If you were staying at McMurdo, that’d be one thing. Why do they need to send you out to Amundsen Scott to write poetry, or whatever? You can do that just fine here at McMurdo, and there’s only so many beds out on the ice."

Having humanized myself to her, at least to the extent that she was no longer hostile, I agreed with her analysis. "Probably yeah, I don’t need to be out there to write. It’s not like the view will be that different, compared to McMurdo. But Uncle Sam was willing to send me on the taxpayer dime. Having been out there nineteen times, may I not go in your stead even once? Have you not had your fill?" She managed a wide smile, despite the botox. "That isn’t what it’s about, kiddo. Of course I’m happy for you, Antarctica’s a special place. Ethereal, even dreamlike. But that’s not to say it’s a place for dreamers. Serious research goes on here, artists just get in the way."

"Don’t ask about her face, don’t ask about her face" went my internal monologue. Instead, I asked her what sort of research she does. Partially out of authentic curiosity, but partly to further defuse her resentment. "Quantum gravity. There’s a neutrino observatory not far from Amundsen Scott called Ice Cube."  

I remarked that the name was apropos. "Indeed" she continued, "anyway, this is the only place on Earth sufficiently free from interference for such an observatory to operate. What we do is compare the composition of neutrinos incoming from space over many years, to what models predict it ought to be, if quantum gravity modified the structure of spacetime they passed through on their way to Earth."

I blinked a few times. "I…uh…I understand…completely." That pried a laugh from her unnaturally plump lips, and with it, the last traces of animosity left her. My experience with academics is that most don’t often get the chance to share their passion except with colleagues at seminars, or when they publish. Showing a little interest and letting them info dump buys you a lot of good will. Besides which, Nora struck me as someone hungry for attention from younger men. 

Blake surprised me during orientation, taking the seat next to mine. When I remarked on it, he raised an eyebrow. "There were assigned seats. It’s new, your seat number was in the email." The cross looks I received earlier from a number of other stodgy looking scientists and grad students suddenly made sense. I motioned to get up and relocate, but Blake urged me to stay put. "Everyone’s just about seated now, you’ll only piss them off worse." I sank back into my spot, dejected.

The bright side was, I wouldn’t be here much longer. Two days doesn’t furnish sufficient time to build a bad reputation, unless you’re really trying. Orientation was all stuff I felt as if I could’ve worked out on my own, but hindsight’s 20/20. The buddy system for exterior travel, how to use rope guideways during storms, on-base drinking and sex policies, that sort of thing. It had the same vibe as the first day of college, and from the sounds of it, there would be just about as much drinking and fucking. 

Not for me though, nor for Blake presumably, and I took some of the comfort which misery is said to love in that fact. While the speaker went on about safety protocols, Blake discreetly slipped me a copy of the Book of Mormon. I tried my best to politely decline, but he just left it sitting on my armrest. "I’ve been thinking about your father". Oh good, here we go. "Did you know there’s a way you can be sealed to him, eternally? Families can remain together, the grave need not divide us." I whispered back that "presumed dead" isn’t the same as finding the body. "Anyway, now’s not a good time. Probably there won’t be one."

I didn’t make a bigger deal out of it because I knew he had to try, and his heart was in the right place. It struck me as unprofessional, though. An overstep I never would’ve expected from a man of his station, based on our earlier discussions. I reflected on it, wondering how much of his friendliness was genuine and how much was calculated to build trust. I still had to figure out what to do with the little navy blue book. I couldn’t just bin it after orientation without wounding him. So I tucked it into my pocket. Blake noticed, and seemed pleased. 

He saw me to the Sno-Cat garage after orientation concluded. "Oh yeah, I meant to ask why you’re not flying me out there." Blake ran his hand along the chassis of the nearest Sno-Cat. "Used to be, we’d send all icebound personnel in LC-130s, taking off from and landing on compacted snow runways. But with Summers getting warmer every year, only blue ice runways can safely bear the weight anymore, and Amundsen Scott hasn’t got one."

The part left unsaid was that even if those planes were still flying, I’m not important enough to ride them. It’s why they didn’t spring for the standard flight from New Zealand to get me out here in the first place. Not that I minded taking the slow, scenic route. "Listen, about earlier" Blake whispered. I waved him off. "Christ calls you to be fishers of men. If I thought I had all the answers, I’d want to share them too." 

It came out a tad more sour than I intended, but Blake seemed to take it in good humor. "We’ll be in touch, if you have any questions, about…you know." He winked and pointed to my pocket. In fact I’d left the little book in a drawer back in my dorm. 

I thought once or twice about taking him up on it, during the nearly thousand mile journey inland. He had some local pull that might be helpful, and one should never pass up a new friend in the loneliest place on Earth. But I knew from experience with a Jehovah’s Witness in my writing group that it was a bad idea. She and I agreed initially not to discuss religion, until it became a sticking point. Then somehow, the agreement changed such that she could explain her religion to me, but I could not explain my doubts to her. Blake’s invitation to questioning also wasn’t likely to include the sort of questions I might actually wish to ask.

Dad was an atheist, and didn’t hide his disappointment when I failed to arrive at the same conclusion. Not that I ever found particular fault with his reasoning. I’ve simply not studied every religion, so it seemed lazy and presumptuous to assume they’re all identical to Abrahamic religion in the ways relevant to credibility. He would say "atheism is not certain disbelief", which is true. But it does say "probably not", and even that feels like a leap to me. 

A muscular, bearded blond man with an ear chokingly thick scandinavian accent unlocked the Sno-Cat door for me. I handed him my luggage, and he laughed. "Luggage service costs extra." I stood there still holding my luggage in outstretched arms for a moment longer before realizing my gaffe. Whatever, I wouldn’t see him after today either. I swallowed my embarrassment, stuffed my luggage behind the seats, then climbed in. Bit of a struggle to get over the treads, the cabin proper sat about three feet off the ground. Didn’t seem that way as we trundled out of the garage, shutter lifting to admit passage, since the treads sank pretty far into the snow. 

"Do you uh…enjoy your work up here?" Down here, he corrected, then adding "Conversation also extra." So, we rode in silence for a time, until he unexpectedly broke it. "You know what, I wanted to complain anyway. Now I have the ear of someone who can’t get me fired, I may as well. Do you hear that?" He raised one gloved hand to his ear, and I did the same. "I don’t hear anything", I confessed. He slapped the dashboard. "Exactly. No engine. Converted to electric last Summer." I opined that it was surely to diminish contamination of sensitive experiments and local wildlife, but he didn’t see it that way.

"No, no. It’s because they study climate. It looks bad to study climate, traversing the South Pole Highway in a diesel tractor." I asked if it wasn’t at least more efficient. "That’s the thing, it isn’t! The diesel ones were more efficient!" I disputed that, as I knew combustion engines to in fact be notoriously inefficient machines. "Because of waste heat, right?" I nodded. "It isn’t waste in such weather. All goes to heat the cabin." I mulled it over for a moment before confessing that he’d blown my mind a little bit.

I asked if we’re in any danger. "Summer? No, not in Summer. Range is still only about two thirds of normal because of cold, even with pre-heating in the garage. Huge metal box behind us is one megawatt hour of batteries, that’s why you had to bring luggage into cabin with you. Even so, range drops further in winter. Very stressful. I don’t winter over any more because of it. Anyway, there’s your answer to how I like my job." By now I thoroughly regretted asking, although at least he wasn’t trying to win my soul. 
 

I had Perpetuum Evergreen out, some light reading to make the trip pass quicker. Only gave it a chance after Dad disappeared, on account of the guilt I felt for not putting in the work to understand him better back when it might’ve made a difference. The deeper I got into it though, the more I began to wonder how much differentiates this book from the one Blake gave me. It came off like more or less the same pitch, but tailored to the STEM crowd. The kind of guys who think they’re too smart for religion, but still need something along the same lines to subdue their mortal anxiety. 

Ray Kurzweil is a good example. It’s not coincidental that all his predictions had digital immortality arriving just in time to spare him the grave. Just take the Bible, replace all mention of God with AI, and trade "souls" for "uploads". Same basic message though: Everybody else in history died, but you won’t. You’re special, privy to hidden truths. A narrow path to eternal life, which only the chosen few will tread. I turned the page, revealing a bookmark with a latitude and longitude scribbled onto it. The driver noticed, casting a sidelong glance. I hastily closed the book, then tucked it into my pocket.

I slept through much of the journey. When I wasn’t sleeping, I closely studied his hands as he worked the controls. Taking note of which switches did what, how he started it all up, resolving also to memorize how he shut it down on arrival. He gave no indication that he noticed my attention until hours later. "Can I help you with something?" I apologized and asked if I was making him nervous. "No…should I be?" 
 

There was some sort of commotion outside as we approached Amundsen Scott. I recognized the familiar, standard orange parka on about half of ‘em, the others were wearing…black…uniforms? "Are those cops?" I muttered, mostly to myself. "Not exactly" the driver answered, "US marshals. They’re the only law enforcement out here." I balked. "So what, every base has its own officer?" Marshal, he repeated. "And no, they’re based out of McMurdo. See, there’s the Sno-Cat they came in."

Lo and behold, another boxy orange tractor sat ten yards or so behind the group, treads buried in snow. We pulled up alongside and immediately, one of the marshals was on us. He sought identification from the driver, then my own. "Can I offer any assistance?" the driver inquired. The marshall gave him a canned answer thanking him for being a samaritan, but assuring him they had the situation under control.

While the two of them spoke to one another, I peered out the side window at the focal point of all the hubbub. A strange figure lay in the snow amid the gawkers, pale blue and frozen solid. My breath caught in my throat when it dawned on me that I was looking at a dead body. But something was wrong with it. Only the torso and head were blue, frostbitten flesh. The arms and legs appeared to be plastic. Articulated, like those fancy electronic prosthetics that soldiers come home with. It was difficult to say from this distance, but at one point, I thought I saw movement. 

I got out my phone and began recording. To my dismay, the marshal noticed, and demanded my phone. When I wouldn’t give it up, he ordered me out of the vehicle. I complied, dreading the ordeal I apparently signed up for by impulsively getting my phone out in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Asking what the grounds for confiscation were got me nowhere. "You’re AAW, aren’t you?" I looked around anxiously. "What does that have to do with anything?"

He smugly tucked my fairly new, expensive smartphone into his breast pocket. "Did you check the waivers you signed before they shipped your ass out here? It’s in there right after the medical stuff." I confessed I didn’t read it. He laughed. "Typical of your generation. Scrolls to the end, clicks accept, then cries about it later. You can have your precious phone back when you leave." I felt all sorts of things, but none more strongly than the desire to find what I came for. So, I swallowed my pride and watched the uniformed goon leave with my phone. 

"Why are they even out here to begin with" I grumbled. "Since when is Antarctica a criminal hotbed? Who are they arresting, polar bears?" The driver wagged his finger at me. "You mean penguins. Wrong hemisphere for bears. As for the marshals, until ‘89, technically nothing was a crime. There didn’t exist a legal basis to prosecute, being that Antarctica’s not the territory of any single country." 

I dimly recalled a stretch of land in Yellowstone, likewise lawless as a weird consequence of zoning, such that not enough people lived in that jurisdiction to make up a jury in the event of a serious crime. "Yeah, and do you wanna go camping there?" he asked, pointedly. When he put it that way, despite the resentment I felt over the confiscation, I did begrudgingly grasp the importance of having something like cops, even out here. 
 

All the excitement from earlier drained out of my body, little by little, during the onboarding video. Unbelievably, after already sitting through orientation back at McMurdo, I was now doing so at Amundsen Scott as well. The video actually did touch on this, the narrator explaining that the film was an interim revision made for use during the period when McMurdo was being demolished, with nothing yet built to replace it. Evidently they’ve not received the newer film yet. 

There wasn’t a lecture hall here, as there was at McMurdo. Instead all the newcomers were packed shoulder to shoulder in the media room. I heard a few of the locals call it a "movie theater". Aspirational language, though there was at least a projector and pull down screen, as well as a pair of recliners. No use to me, both claimed well before my arrival by winter overs, who after all didn’t have to ride a Sno-Cat to get here. 

I expected Amundsen Scott to be more than it turned out to be. Not that it wasn’t an impressive facility, I’d just been spoiled by McMurdo. This place looks so big from the outside, this…rectilinear, cobalt blue monolith. Like an IKEA without the yellow sign. Only to then find out that the crew is rarely more than 200 people, and as little as 50 during the winter months. At a Summertime population of 1,000, McMurdo is a city compared to this. 
 

Looking at a row of little models and photographs on my way out of the media room helped put things into perspective. Next to the tiny plastic Amundsen Scott was a complex resembling a robot centipede, neon blue chunky space age modules connected in a straight line, with a sort of squat orange pyramidic module in the center, dominated by a huge cluster of windows. 

"Oh, you like Halley VI?" I nodded, happy to let the stranger assume I knew its name already. "Yeah, it’s pretty sweet" he gushed, with a light Irish accent. "I’m more of a Concordia fan, but I see the appeal. A bit more cramped than these digs, but they’ve got a rock climbing wall." He swung open the front half of the center module. "I didn't realize until now that we’re allowed to touch them" I confessed. The bearded ginger smiled, knowingly. "You’re not. Anyways, check it out. Right there, built into one of the internal support columns." 

I squinted. "What is this, an Antarctic base for ants?" He didn’t laugh. "Halley VI is what, the Australian base?" He pointed to the flag under the placard at the base of the diorama. "Oh, British. Similar flags, it’s really tiny." I asked why we don’t have a rock climbing wall. "Tell me about it" the bearded stranger sighed. "I’m always telling the USAP suits that we could just screw some plastic rocks into one wall of the basketball court, but they never shut up about "load bearing" this, and "liability" that…"

I hate being interrupted myself, yet couldn’t help but cut him off there. "Excuse me, did you say there’s an entire basketball court somewhere in this building?" He flashed a conspiratorial grin. "...Do you want the grand tour?" Upon learning that in fact I’d been speaking so candidly all this time to none other than the base administrator, I could hardly decline his offer. 

Sure enough, there it was. I had to reconsider my initial appraisal of this big, boring blue brick. "Do you play?" he asked. I shook my head bashfully, while inwardly wondering how he managed to mistake someone with my build for an athlete. The gym intruded partially, treadmills and weight training equipment occupying a level overlooking the court from above. It was only when we made our way up there, in the course of the tour, that I learned the name of my guide.

"Ron MacDonnell. You might’ve already heard some of the winter overs complaining about "Ronald McDonald" riding their ass. Well, hopefully now that makes a little more sense than it did." I could sort of see it. He wasn’t helping his case, letting his unkempt fire engine red hair grow out that far. "Do we…know each other?" I asked, surprised by his generosity and attention. "I’d like to think we do now." I asked more directly why he was personally showing me around the station.

"Well it’s not that I knew you, per se. But I do know Blake. He called ahead and asked me to give you the walkaround as a favor." I became mildly suspicious. "This…isn’t some sort of…thing, is it?" Ron blinked. "You’re going to have to be more specific than that." I wasn’t willing to, and not wanting to return his hospitality with suspicion, I kept those apprehensions to myself until we were alone in the greenhouse.

"Oh, I’m sorry about that." Ron awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, I had a talk with him about keeping the church stuff to himself. I thought we understood each other. I’d write another strongly worded email, but he has seniority, and if you’ve ever tried to reason with that crowd-" I assured him Blake wasn’t a bother, that I wasn’t offended or anything, just surprised by the breach of professionalism.

"Well, you know how the FBI and CIA preferentially hire Mormons?" I didn’t, but again was happy to let him assume. "A lot of those guys wind up working for the USAP because they’re overqualified, Antarctica’s an exotic destination, and frankly a lot of them are burnt out after watching hours and hours of fucked up shit scraped off the dark web. They want someplace remote and quiet to detox from all that ugliness." 

He asked if I came from a churchgoing family. I answered honestly, adding that the question was intrusive. He held his hands up like I was mugging him. "All I meant is that you should understand what they can be like, if you did. Frankly, I’m with you. The inmates run the asylum here, and we’re all cooped up together for a minimum of six months. Seems like a good idea to me if everybody puts their religion, their politics and whatever else on a shelf in the back of the closet until we can leave. Especially when everybody drinks so much."

I asked how many drinks deep he was right then. Deer in the headlights for a moment, before swiftly regaining his composure. "Not more than I need to be. Technically alcohol isn’t allowed on base. The thing is, it’s my job to enforce that, and I kinda just…don’t." The more I listened to Ron, the more I liked him. "We can’t stop people smuggling in their booze, not that any administrator before me really tried to. It’s dark for half the year, and you can’t go outside. If we couldn’t drink, many of us probably wouldn’t make it through the winter."

I couldn’t imagine it was all that bad, standing in an impeccably clean hydroponic garden, surrounded by leafy green plants. Then again, I’ve not even been here a day. "What was all of that going on outside when I arrived?" A flash of recognition. He became tight lipped all of a sudden, insisting he couldn’t comment on the situation…until I described what I saw. 

He deflated somewhat. "Well, fuck. Alright, just…don’t spread it around, okay? I’ve got it mostly contained to the six who found the poor guy, and the other four I sent out to deal with the marshals." Poor…guy? So it was a frozen corpse that I saw. In the aftermath, I’d begun second guessing myself. "Nobody knows where he came from, is the weird thing. There aren’t any bases out in that direction."

I joked that this is how scary movies start. "Oh trust me lad, I know. You think we don’t make everybody watch The Thing during the first week? It’s tradition. But yeah, no, we didn’t bring him inside the base. We’re not really set up for, uh…we don’t have a morgue. Last time someone died on base was…2014? They just stashed the body down in the ice tunnels until marshals arrived, Nature’s fridge."

I shuddered. Not from Ron’s casual morbidity, instead imagining the final hours of that pitiable wretch with the mechanical arms and legs. Desperately dragging himself towards the only nearby oasis of warmth in a frozen wasteland. I’ve read it’s at least a fairly merciful way to go, but I wonder how anybody can know that. Unable, after all, to interview anyone who has frozen to death. 

By this time we’d arrived at an austere metal staircase in what I figured for the cylindrical section at one end of the facility, visible on the model earlier. Above us, painted right into the ceiling, was a lovely circular mural of Antarctica. "Have you eaten yet?" I asked if a bagel and coffee count. "Oh, and hot cocoa." He playfully punched my shoulder. "Well you’ve seen most of the good stuff. I haven’t taken you down in the arches yet, but let’s get a meal in you first." 

He surprised me again, this time by ordering a hamburger. "Really? You must know how that looks" I quipped. "You’re making it too easy for them." He finished swallowing his first bite, then answered "I’m leaning into it, you know? Making it my own. Besides, all the winter overs have nicknames, it’s not mean spirited. This isn’t highschool, although it kind of looks like it." 

I didn’t make the connection until now, but in retrospect everything I’d so far seen did look like something out of either a highschool, or a prison. The cafeteria especially, save for the row of flags from every country hanging over the counter. I pondered briefly why the two so closely resemble each other, until recalling my own highschool experiences. The ones I normally suppress until I have a few drinks in me…which apparently wouldn’t be difficult to scare up around here, a more mundane sort of danger than I thought to expect. 

"So, Vance Dranger." My ears perked up. "What all did Blake tell you?" Ron chewed up his mouthful of burger, swallowed it with some effort, then laid out his cards for me. "He told me about your father. Which, I admit, is more than he should’ve. Let me even the playing field, then: My mum was also a Drangerite." Bombshell after bombshell with this guy. "She worked at the dome. You know, old Amundsen Scott, between ‘98 and 2004. It’s a family thing, you can’t keep a MacDonnell out of the snow. My Grandfather was one of the first mechanics at Palmer Station back in ‘68, too. We have ice water for blood." 

Never much for small talk, I asked what any of that had to do with Vance Dranger. "Oh! Right. Well, ‘68 was also when the first Centre Parcs was built, and it’s that line of indoor resorts Dranger made his fortune from." This time I didn’t let him assume knowledge not in my possession. "You’ve never been? Oh right, American. Centre Parcs are basically artificial lagoons, beaches, waterfalls, tiki huts and so on. All contained inside enormous heated structures resembling greenhouses." 

I struggled to picture it as anything other than depressing, and said so. "If you grew up in rainy gray Ireland, much as I miss it, you wouldn’t think that way. I lived about an hour’s drive from the Center Parcs in Longford. Da was a brick layer, mum was a scientist, so we were never going on holiday anywhere you needed plane tickets to reach. It was a godsend, having a little bottled chunk of man made tropics, brought within our reach." 
 
Ron had by now finished his meal and asked if I was going to eat mine. So absorbed was I by his story, I’d forgotten why we came to the cafeteria. I dug into my beef stew. "Don’t waste your salad. We don’t get fresh veggies for another six months, besides what little we grow on base." I plucked a cherry tomato out of the salad and savored it all the more for that knowledge.

"Anyway, Dranger had his hands in a lot of related projects. Biosphere Two was one of ‘em. Eden Project was another. That was the trial run in ‘98, to prove the new design." Design for what, I pried. "Well, hang on. Exactly a decade prior to that first Centre Parcs, when Palmer Station was finished, a Canadian named E.A. Gardner drew up plans for a settlement in Frobisher Bay. What’s now called Iqualit, on Baffin Island. Do you know where Nunavut is?" I shook my head, mouth too full to answer.  

"Yeah, nobody does unless they live there. That was the proposed site for a peace time application of nuclear energy, to heat and light a far northern settlement consisting of apartment towers in a ring around a central concrete dome, 700 feet in diameter." I was sensing a theme, and starting to understand why Perpetuum Evergreen depicts a dome on the cover.
 

 "Concrete? You mean they couldn’t see the sky?" Ron confirmed it. "Too much heat would be lost through windows that size, and there’s nothing to see outside except darkness for half the year." That tracked, but didn’t make the prospect of living in such a compound any less brutal. "On the contrary, the concept drawings looked pretty fancy. The dome would have a small park, shops, cafes, and a rotating restaurant mounted to the central support pillar."

As I had with Halley VI’s rock wall, I once again asked, if less seriously, why we don’t have one of those. Ron laughed. "Outta my hands, lad. No room in the budget for rotating restaurants. What you’re eating now is what we got." I finished up the stew as he continued describing a settlement to me which sounded better fit for the Moon than northern Canada. 

"So, Dranger buys the plans for Frobisher Bay in ‘97. Forgotten project born out of cold war insanity, what does a billionaire like Vance Dranger want with dusty old drawings? Nobody at the time batted an eye though, he’s done a lot of eccentric shit. But then construction begins on the Eden Project the following year…then in 2001, he starts moving materials, equipment and personnel through McMurdo." 

I didn’t remember any of this from the book. Then again, I never finished it. "Word gets around that he’s financing the first privately operated research base out on the ice. But it doesn’t add up. These bases are all built pretty similarly. Prefab fiberglass modules on hydraulic stilts, so they don’t get buried in snow during the winter. Dranger’s shipments weren’t prefabs, except for two dozen trailers labeled on the manifesto as temporary worker housing."

As he spoke, I was starting to put the pieces together in my head, but he saved me the trouble. "A lot of it looked pretty familiar. The same triangular sections of dome that the Eden Project used. The standard Centre Parcs HVAC system, pipes, a crane, electrical cable and conduit. But also weird stuff. Bags of soil and sand. Seeds. Bricks, asphalt, a cement mixer. And just too much of it, overall! Way too much for even a base this size." 

I ran my fingers through my hair in quiet contemplation. "I know right? What was he building out there?" When at last I spoke again, I regretted it almost immediately. "That makes…so much sense. They wouldn’t have all left at the same time if there wasn’t someplace ready to receive them. He must’ve been in the second group." Ron raised an eyebrow. "He?" I lied hastily. "Dranger of course. He disappeared in 2004 after all, a few weeks after opening Tropical Island Resort in Germany."

Ron mulled it over. "Oh yeah, the Aerium. Well, who knows. It’s fun to imagine, but remember who we’re talking about here. Nothing Dranger promised in that book panned out except the domed resorts and electric cars. I’ve heard those things have panel gaps you can fit your thumb into. My bet is that the polar research base was some sort of tax writeoff." If that’s so, I responded, "then where’d your mother disappear to?"

He grew quiet, and grim. Sensing I’d crossed a line, I apologized. "No, it’s…I just…I don’t know. Do you think I haven’t thought about that? It’s all I thought about for years after she left. I only stopped in order to make peace. Because by wondering, I was keeping the wound open." Despite the assurance, I apologized again and offered a reluctant hug as we both stood up from the table. He rebuffed me.

"No, it’s really…it’s fine. Again, I know about your father from Blake. If anybody can understand what I went through, it’s you. That’s a big part of why I agreed to the tour. It’s not something I take time out of my day to do for just anybody. In truth, I was looking for an opportunity to talk with you about…what we have in common. But now that I have, there goes my appetite for conversation. Excuse me."

Already a naturally pale man, made worse by six month winters, Ron somehow seemed to grow a shade paler as he spoke. Then, our business apparently concluded, he brusquely pushed past me on his way to the door. I followed him, still wanting to smooth things over. But when I emerged into the hallway, he was long gone. 

My lodging at Amundsen wasn’t much to write home about, somehow even smaller than the dorms at McMurdo. I understood the reason for this well enough: Shirtsleeves habitat space at the south pole is some of the most expensive per square foot, second only to space stations and submarines. It didn’t stop me from grumbling as I banged my elbow every time I turned around.  

While swearing up a storm, cradling my funny bone, I noticed someone standing just outside the still open door to my room. I became self conscious, and quieted down. "Painted anything yet?" the curly haired, bespectacled intruder asked. "I’m a writer actually, and still unpacking." He looked about college aged, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops. "Were you expecting warmer weather?" I quipped.

He glanced out the window in a moment of confusion, then down at his attire before cottoning to my meaning. "Oh, this. I’m on vacation, aren’t I? Actually if you think about it, all our lives are but a vacation from oblivion. Seventy or eighty years is the blink of an eye compared to the eternity we emerged from, to which we all one day return." Oh boy, I thought. A philosopher. "...Anyhoo, not just anybody makes it out here. If I were you I’d get crackin’, it’ll be over before you know it. No pressure no pressure no pressure, haha." 

I thanked him through clenched teeth, got out my laptop and made a show of starting a new document in the word processor. "You want me to get this for you, or…" he gestured to the door. I didn’t answer, loudly typing nonsense until he got the hint, shut the door and left me in peace. I deleted the string of random characters, then began getting up with the intent to finish unpacking.

Instead I stayed put, and on a whim, started typing out my stream of consciousness. There would be time to unpack the rest later, I figured, and venting onto a blank page helps me decompress. I’ve often said that asking someone to fill a blank page is an overlooked, underrated form of personality test. It’s not what they write about which is so revealing, but how they write it. Cadence, word choice, all the little subconscious choices they make. Their literary fingerprint.

I wrote about Dad. The conversations with Blake and Ron had me dwelling on core memories of my father, trying to piece together the puzzle of why he vanished from my life. He was never materially neglectful, but he was always working on something. In my earliest memories I’m peering up from the carpet at Dad typing away at his computer. Somehow there was never time for me, no matter when I asked, or how often. No wonder then, that in adulthood I could never find time for him either. 

I didn’t consciously retaliate, I don’t think. Rather, his habits rubbed off on me, both good and bad. There’s a lot of him in me, considering how little time we spent together after I moved out. Or before, for that matter. It’s funny how we soak up our parent’s flavor like tofu, without meaning to. Adopting their mannerisms, their habits, their shortcomings, without thinking anything of it until far too late. I suppose it isn’t any different for friends, or celebrities, or any other influence on our developing personalities. We are, each of us, little more than a remix of the most influential people in our lives.

Post adolescence, it was at least partly self directed. A conscious choice of which aspects of other people I deemed worthy to emulate. But like anyone else, up until that age, I thought my parents were gods. My father in particular, because of his work with computers and seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of their inner workings. It’s said to be a crucial moment in our maturation, the day when it dawns on us that our parents are human beings, no less fallible than ourselves. 

That realization came later for me than it did for most people because of my father’s brilliance. I didn’t begin to see the cracks until my twenties. Some of his colleagues were under his spell back then, and likely remain so today, despite being twice my age or older. He had that strange power over people that brilliant, charismatic men seem to hold. Just as there’s much of my father in me, so there was much of Vance Dranger in my father. 

While most teenage boys chafe at their father’s authority and yearn for independence, I on the other hand wasn’t ready for that comfort and security to end. Until he went off the deep end, I wanted more of my father, not less. Whenever I fucked up, he suddenly had time. Never just to rescue me, but to point out where I went wrong. A teachable moment, he called them. Like being pulled out of the sea, from the wreckage of your own vessel, by a brave and seemingly all-knowing captain.

Like Blake said, that’s the fantasy. Surely the captain knows best. His ship is still intact after all, while mine’s a wreck. He dries me off, feeds me, then charts a course directly into an iceberg. Confusing, but what do I know? I wrecked my own ship. When I ask about it, he scolds me for doubting him, but explains that the ship is actually a rocket and the iceberg is Mars. The feeling of comfort and security, being watched over by a wise and benevolent master, suddenly evaporates...replaced by a cold unease. I wonder if this is what it’s like for Scientologists when they first read about Xenu.

I still blame myself for pushing him away, when he dove headfirst down the rabbit hole. It seemed like an overnight change at the time, in retrospect really just license for the elements of his personality he kept in check until then to run wild. It didn’t help that he wasn’t alone in his beliefs, instead spending much of his time online or at lectures and seminars, surrounded by other Drangerites. An echo chamber I’ve never heard of anyone escaping from, even decades after Dranger vanished.
 

Such a common story, that I didn’t need to look far for support groups. Some of them met in person, the ones I attended were online, but they all told me the same thing: that my father was a lost cause. That if I didn’t cut him out of my life, he would drag me into madness with him. Being advised to disconnect so abruptly and ruthlessly from my own father made me second guess which one of us was really in a cult. 

It wasn’t these voices in my ear which forced my hand though, it was Dad. Every time I visited to check up on him, the house was messier. More and more appliances broken, the yard increasingly overgrown. When I asked him how long the water heater had been busted, and if he’d been taking cold showers for all that time, he thought it was funny. Trivialities, he called them. "Nothing is more important than Dranger’s vision". 

It’s not that his reasoning didn’t check out. If immortality could be achieved in a safely reproducible way, then truly, very little else mattered. From a certain point of view, which is to say one which deeply assumes that Dranger could do what he promised, everything else in life is a dangerous distraction which threatens to delay completion of Dranger’s goal. Just long enough, my father feared, that he wouldn’t make the cut…like my mother didn’t.  

"Some alive today will not taste death", so sayeth Vance Dranger in Perpetuum Evergreen, well aware of who he was paraphrasing. I told Dad that attaining enlightenment doesn’t mean you don’t still have to chop wood and carry water. That purpose gives us meaning, but also dopamine, such that it can be detrimentally addictive. Dad wasn’t having it. He had his eyes on the prize…the ultimate prize…and would not be deterred from its pursuit. 
 

Isn’t that always how it goes? The promised reward for devotion is conveniently unfalsifiable, because it’s always in the future. Just barely out of reach, right around the corner, if only we can hang on a little bit longer. Only for men like my father to awaken from this entrancing dream one day, hair now sparse and white, wrinkled skin covered in liver spots. Discovering too late that in all those years of searching for a way to cheat death, he has forgotten to live. 

I ran into Hawaiian shirt guy again in the sauna, initially not recognizing him without it. "Finished your magnum opus already, is that it? Now it's time to relax and sweat it out. They say writers are tortured souls. You came to the right place for that." Already dripping with perspiration, he reached over and twisted the temperature control knob by a few increments. 

I parked my towel clad buns on the opposite side of the long wooden bench, wrapped around the interior walls of the humid little chamber. "When I overheard someone talking about this sauna, I thought maybe they were yanking my chain." He asked when I became so cynical. "After they told me there's a casino" I grumbled, eliciting from him a knowing chuckle.

He introduced himself as Nathan. "I'm the IT department lead. I don't know if you've had a chance to visit the computer lab yet." I told him that after the casino prank, I wouldn't believe there was a computer lab, or anything else, until seeing it with my own eyes. Nate rubbed his stubbly chin. "Then I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you they stashed that frozen dead guy down in the ice tunnels?"

I didn’t, but he had my attention all the same. "What do you know about it?" He revealed himself as one of the six that I glimpsed on arrival to Amundsen Scott, surrounding the remains of that frostbitten cadaver. I asked if he could speak to the marshal and get my phone back. "Ha! Ask Ronald, I just keep the computers running. I can show you the body, though."

I took him up on the offer, but it would have to wait until after the evening movie, as all the newbies were expected to be in attendance. They weren’t showing just any old film after all, but the 1982 version of The Thing, with Kurt Russel and Wilford Brimely. Far be it from me to break with Antarctic tradition, besides which I had appearances to keep up. So far as I could tell, everyone still believed I came here to write.

An older blond gentleman in a sweater, seated in one of the recliners, groaned during the opening chase. Before I could ask, Nate whispered to me that he emigrated from Norway. "If you understand Norwegian, the plot is spoiled in the first five minutes." I did sort of wonder what the guy trying to shoot the dog was shouting, and why there weren’t subtitles, I just never cared enough to look it up. 

Nate and I waited for everyone to file out of the media room once the movie finished, not wanting to be followed. Once they all disappeared into their offices, the two of us headed for what I only now learned from Nate is called the "beer can". That tall cylindrical module at the far end of the station with the staircase inside. He had me don a parka with someone else’s name tag, as well as a pair of ski goggles on our way out the door.
 

"We’re uh…not supposed to be doing this, are we?"  Nate held out his arm, preventing my descent while cupping one hand to his ear. Listening for voices or footsteps, I figured. Hearing none, he hurried me down the stairwell while whispering his reply. "Ron’s supposed to keep everybody out of the ice tunnels until the marshals fill out some paperwork and take the body away. Then again, Ron’s also supposed to confiscate booze."

On arrival to the bottom of the stairwell, he explained that while the various buried arches are kept at different temperatures, the ice tunnels stay at negative sixty degrees fahrenheit all year round. I believed him, even the cushy little logistics office we passed through was bitterly cold. Though I was grateful at least to be underground, with no freezing winds whipping at my face. In the dim lighting, I could now clearly see Nate’s breath, and a moment later emitted a few dragonesque puffs of my own. As a boy, I did much the same on cold winter days, pretending to smoke a pinecone. 

"This way, don’t get separated. We’re in the food stores now. Up ahead are the fuel tanks." I asked why they’re called ice tunnels. The floor beneath our feet up to this point was metal grating, the corridor lined in a repeating steel support frame. "No, you sweet summer child. This here’s where the ice tunnels start." He brought me to something like a false junction. Where you might expect an intersecting corridor, we instead found a dodgy looking opening next to some ducts and pipes which passed into it from the support frame. 

"There’s not even a door. Is there standing room inside?" He assured me of it. "You guys really stashed a body in there?" Nate shrugged. "Where would you put it? With the food?" He pushed me into the ominous maw, caring nothing for my misgivings, and followed closely behind. There was indeed standing room, but nothing firmer to stand upon than roughly hewn ice. It was, as advertised, nothing more than a rectilinear channel carved directly out of the solid ice sheet beneath the station. 

We passed what looked like memorials. Humble little shrines with framed photographs hung upon the bare ice wall, with notes from various mourners written around the edges in differently colored ink. "Looks like Hoth, doesn’t it?" Nate’s whispering voice echoed. "All the newbies I bring down here tell me it looks just like Hoth." 

I didn’t make the connection, so he clarified. "C’mon, really? …From Star Wars. Everybody’s seen Star Wars." I shrugged. "I haven’t. Not a science fiction guy." He released an exasperated sigh, visible in the frigid subterranean air as a billowing cloud of steam. "Oh shit, there it is."

Nate pointed to an orange tarp laid over what must be the body, supported up off the bare ice by a pair of wooden pallets. "Wait…what the fuck?" He nudged it with his boot. "What’s wrong?" I asked, but received no reply as Nate folded back the tarp. When he turned back to me, his face was whiter than the tunnel walls. "It’s not here." I tensed up, as yet unbelieving. 

He retrieved a flashlight from his parka and shone it underneath the air ducts running along the corridor next to us, nearly fainting as he searched for any remaining traces. I steadied him. "Maybe the marshals came for it already." He shook his head, breathless and wide eyed. "I would’ve seen their Sno-Cat outside, from the beer can, on our way down here. Besides, there’s only one set of footprints."

Blood stained footprints trailed off down the tunnel, one side just a smear as if the other foot was dragged. I crossed my arms, no longer spooked. "Alright, that’s enough." He peered up at me, bewildered, cowering next to the pallets as he studied the reddish smear in the ice. "Do you think I’m an idiot? This is straight outta the movie. They bring the frozen alien inside, the ice thaws, then it goes missing, boogity boogity. You had me going, though. What’s the red stuff, ketchup? Kool aid?"

Nate swore up and down that I had it all wrong. That he brought me down here to show me the body, fully expecting it to still be there. "I get it. I do. Gotta haze the new guys, right? Especially if they’re AAW. I’d like to think I’ve been a good sport about it, but it’s starting to wear me down. Can we get this over with? One of your buddies is hiding further down the tunnel, waiting to pop out and scare me. Point me to him."

Nate just kept staring at me, wordlessly. Blank expression, a sweat droplet emerging from his hairline. That’s when Ron spoke up. How long he’d been standing there, I couldn’t say. "One of you wanna explain what you did with the body?" I nearly jumped out of my parka. "You’re in on it too? I should’ve known." He didn’t laugh though, nor did he budge from his spot, repeating the question more insistently. Nate spoke next.

"I swear to god, Ron. It wasn’t us." Ron pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. "I know it wasn’t him. I was talking to you, mostly. We both know this is exactly the sort of shit you would pull." Aha, I thought. Just as I suspected. But Nathan continued to protest his innocence, pointing Ron to the bloody footprints. He knelt to examine them, calling out over his shoulder "You can go."

When Nate motioned as if to follow me, Ron added "Not you, Nate. You and I are going to have a chat." I left them to it, now shivering despite the parka and eager to return to the heated interior. Once inside, I put the parka I borrowed back where I found it, and headed for my room. Having had quite enough excitement, a nap was on the agenda.  

I awoke refreshed, but hungry. On my way to the cafeteria, I heard the faint echo of familiar voices. Edging up to the corner, I listened in, discovering the voices belonged to Nathan and Ron. "Did you review the security footage? Well, did you?" Ron urged Nate to keep his voice down. "Yeah yeah, unclench your cheeks, I know it wasn’t you. I wish it had been, honestly. That would’ve been easier to explain."

Nate asked how sure the base doctor was that the frozen guy’s really dead. "I’ve heard about cases of deep hypothermic dormancy, where somebody falls through the ice and is fished out of the lake hours later, but fully recovers once they warm him up." Ron deliberated. "Well, they did find a heartbeat. But only because it was prosthetic too, still running on a sliver of battery. No pupillary response, no pulse, blood literally frozen in his veins."

So why was he moving, Nate demanded. …Moving? I wondered if I really heard him right until Ron answered. "The arms and legs still had some battery too. Lot of fun that was, wrestling a dead guy. Those things respond to signals from residual nerve endings. It’s normal for a corpse to undergo spasms, muscles contracting for the last time as rigor mortis sets in. That, or the limbs defaulted to the last instructions they received prior to death, which was to crawl. Either way, we’ll find it collapsed somewhere in the arches, if it even got that far."

Nate next asked if he had any sort of identification on him. "No, but he was wearing a pilot’s jacket with a USAP patch on the sleeve. If that’s not his, I shudder to imagine how he got ahold of it. That doesn’t leave this room though, and I fucking mean it this time. We don’t need anybody on base finding out he was one of ours." 

"We should destroy the recordings. Who else can access the security footage?" Nate whispered. "You, me, and the logistics officer. That was the idea behind handling the body ourselves, to try and keep it contained, try to keep the gossip under control. I’d sure love to know exactly why you thought spooking some writer was worth compromising that secrecy."

I chose this point to step out from behind the corner, though still in shadow. Ron noticed me first, suddenly upright and startled, squinting to make out the identity of the interloper. "Who is that? Franklin, is that you creeping around? Dinner isn’t for another hour." I emerged from the darkness, sheepishly waving. "It’s just me, "some writer". Ron smacked his forehead. 

"For fuck’s sake. How much did you hear? At least tell me you didn’t blab to anybody else about this?" I gestured as if zipping my lips and throwing away the key. "...I’d probably still better prepare a statement for the crew tomorrow. It won’t be long before someone else discovers the body’s missing, then they’ll want me to form a search party. Jokes on me I guess, for trying to keep anything secret for longer than a day, when we all live in the same damned building."
 

Ron had a map out some minutes later, plotting lines on it from Amundsen Scott to where he figured the body originated. "Whoever he was, his leg was all busted up. There’s no way he could walk any distance on it, he was crawling when he died. So I’m thinking, five? Ten miles? At the most." I asked if he might’ve come from McMurdo in a Sno-Cat, which broke down close by. Nate nodded along. "If not McMurdo, then a ship." Ron asked, if it couldn’t even walk, how well either of us thought it could swim. "...Left a trail behind it anyhow. Leading further inland, not to the coast." 

Nathan pointed out that nothing says it didn’t change direction on the way. "You’re probably right that it didn’t swim ashore though, he would’ve died of shock before making it as far as he did. Do you suppose he fell from a plane? What with the jacket, and all." Nathan rubbed his chin. wondering aloud whether the B-52 crash might be connected, but Ron brushed it off. "No way. That was what, fifteen years ago? Our frozen buddy either fell out of the sky, or washed ashore. I’ll print out a record of which ships were passing nearby in the morning." 

The three of us were interrupted from our speculation as scientists, mechanics and all manner of other personnel started showing up for dinner. Ron rolled up the map, stashed it in a drawer and stared the two of us down, holding a single finger to his lips. Feeling like part of a secret club, and not wanting to fuck things up any worse than I already had, I didn’t so much as look at the strangers surrounding me while I ate. I piled my plate high though, as I knew it was the last proper meal I could be sure of. 

When I returned to my room I pretended to write for a while, in fact entering the coordinates on the bookmark into Google Earth. Then I compared the results against what I remembered from Ron’s map. Further out than he estimated…but in exactly the same direction. I saw no reason to delay any further, quietly packing all my things back into the same wheeled travel case I brought them in. With everyone convened in the cafeteria, busy with their meals, surely there would never be a better opportunity.

I first made sure Ron and Nate were still among them. Taking care to keep my back turned, I snagged some chips and cookies off the counter, stuffing them into my luggage. The garage was down in its own arch, past the fuel tanks, recalling the path Nate and I took that morning. I didn’t don my own parka, opting instead for the one I saw my driver wearing on the way here. 

I pulled on a balaclava, then ski goggles over it before raising my hood. One of the few things this blasted cold is good for, it furnishes one with a plausible excuse for walking around with their face covered. "Any particular reason?" pried the logistics officer, before handing over the keys. I mumbled unintelligibly. He glanced at the nametag, typing it into his computer. "Oh, it’s you. Ron told me to give you this." He handed me a packet of paperwork. "Marshals left it behind. Bring it with you next time you’re headed to McMurdo, it’ll save ‘em the trip." 

The keys jostled about in my pocket as I strolled, casually as can be, along the arches. Burning a hole, it felt like. Crying out to passersby, revealing my plans. A stranger in mechanic’s coveralls approached, addressing me with apparent familiarity. "Just finished the inspections, Henrik. Down here to double check, is that it? Don’t be long, we’re missing dinner."

He did glance over his shoulder in mild confusion when I didn’t answer, but kept walking. I worried briefly about engine noise, but upon putting the key in the ignition and turning it, I heard only a faint electrical whine. Oh, right. It’s hardly the "ignition" then, is it? I flipped the same switches I remembered being lit up on the ride over. A beeping startled me, soon revealed as nothing more than a warning that it was still plugged in. 

I unplugged it, then put the ungainly orange beast into reverse, and tapped the pedal. That subtle, ear tickling whine came back, the entire vehicle lurching slightly. Looks like we’re in business. I don’t know if opening the garage door activated a silent alarm, or if somebody just spotted me from the cafeteria, but soon I had company out there on the ice. Only barely discernible as a pair of tiny orange flecks in the rear view mirror, Amundsen itself shrinking into the horizon behind them. 

I didn’t answer the radio, which quickly regressed from panicked questions to angry shouting. A lot of that must be going on back there, I figured, and would only get worse. Not my problem now, unless I’m wrong about all this and need to be rescued. I punched the latitude and longitude from the bookmark into the GPS, pointed my ill gotten chariot in the right direction, then pinned the pedal down by wedging my rolled up boot against it. 

Sno-Cats don’t drive themselves, but they come close when operated on a flat polar wasteland, with nothing to run into. I did have to take the reins a few times to steer around fissures, but other than that, it was smooth sailing. In retrospect, I boggled at how easy it all was. Surely not the first joyride at the south pole? Perhaps not much of a criminal element down here, where even the janitors hold advanced degrees. That, and where would anyone even drive a stolen tractor to?

I retrieved Perpetuum Evergreen from my luggage, buckled into the passenger seat. Thumbing through the pages, I found the few that I dog-eared because they had Dad’s writing on them. The book ends with a nonsensical string of characters I would later find out corresponded to an ARG. On the back of the bookmark, just under the coordinates, Dad long ago scribbled out a matrix of scrambled letters. Entire rows were circled, some in red. The letters on the dog eared pages were also circled in red, whatever the significance may be. I could never make heads or tails of it. But evidently, he could. 

Trust in my father put me on this course, whatever the outcome. Trust that he wouldn’t have wasted his life tilting at windmills. That there must be more to this book and the man who wrote it. I soberly supposed that this must be what faith is like, though my father would undoubtedly have scolded me for the comparison. Yet the shoe continued to fit, however I looked at it. 

Deep trust in a loving father. If not in the soundness of his faculties, then in my need to believe he had a plan…because the alternative is too awful to entertain. Faith, in all its many splendored virtues, that our loved ones are not lost to the grave. That silent, empty black nothing, to which we all someday surrender. Instead that we may yet wake up from our buried sleep, raised from our shattered tombs, beautifully transformed, when at last the final trumpet sounds. 

Anything but the grave, whatever it takes. Eons of evolutionary programming keep us just as terrified of the end as our ancestors. From the caves, to the trees, and back into the ocean. Even simply trying to fully conceptualize being dead is enough to provoke existential panic in many. Our minds recoil from it, every instinct screaming at us to move in the opposite direction. To find some way, any way, around death.  

Nothing short circuits human reasoning quite like mortal anxiety. It’s within this breakdown of reason, where our brains struggle to fill the gaps, that God lives. Where reasoning ends by abrupt or gradual unraveling, is where the divine begins. What else breaks us, mentally and emotionally, so completely as the death of a loved one?  That’s why it’s the most natural thing in the world for broken people to find God while grieving. Or something suitably God-shaped. 
 

Even knowing this, I’m not immune. I feel a certain familiar, creeping nausea as I visualize myself on my own deathbed. Remaining life no longer measured in years or decades, as I always took for granted in my youth…but in hours. Facing the imminent end of my conscious experience, rushing straight towards that awful black silence, with no possible off-ramp. No time left. Just no more time. No more anything.

Far too late now, I wished for faith. By the time that the purpose of Chesterton's proverbial fence, which I so gleefully trampled as a boy, became apparent to me...there was no way to rebuild it. As a consequence, when my mother died, I was without any coping mechanism. 

I couldn't drink yet, and had destroyed my comforting illusions, burning the life jackets on a ship I believed could never sink. I just kinda raw dogged all that pain, letting it ruin my insides. Letting it twist me up, stain my heart, and slowly disfigure my soul.
 

After a time, I noticed that the more of my insides the pain destroyed, the less I hurt. Not knowing what else to do, I turned inward and helped the process along. Tearing down, grinding to dust and incinerating everything I once loved about myself. Because the less of me there is, the less will be lost when I die. Or paying my penance by self-destruction, as if that would bring her back.

Of course it couldn't. However brutal the world seemed, even as the mortal remains of my mother lay forever motionless in the viewing room at the funeral home, I would not retreat into fantasy. At the end of the day, there's just no dressing up a dead body as anything other than what it is.
 

They embalmed her all the same. Even did her hair and makeup according to the photographs dad gave them. Somehow, it looked nothing like her. That cold, shrunken, rigid lump in the shape of my mother. Since then, I've grown a lot more tolerant of guys like Blake.

I feel as if I understand now what could break a man's heart so irreversibly that his mind goes with it. I feel no contempt anymore, no pity...only envy. Bitter desperation to cross back over bridges long since burnt, into those warm Elysian fields of ignorance.

Adam and Eve were purportedly cast out of such a paradise, their ignorance and thus innocence destroyed by the knowledge of good and evil. Some today go their entire lives without ever tasting that particular fruit. But knowledge of death destroys our innocence just as completely.

What I wouldn't give, as generations who were born and died within the fold strove to accomplish before me, if I could create an insular pocket of existential ignorance. A protected bubble with all of my friends and family inside, within which there's no awareness of death. Not one of them ever so much as beginning to suspect that there could possibly be such a thing as the final end of a person.
 

How deeply unwelcome I must’ve been in my youth, when I sought to disillusion such people. Noxious herald of the grim reaper, piercing a hole through their protective bubble, letting death back in. Struggling to account, even to their own satisfaction, for the ferocity of their response…yet feeling strongly that it was justified. Unable to explain, in the language of argument, why I was wrong. Equally unable to make me understand the language of their hearts…so they fell back on the universal language of violence by which all glass houses are defended.
 

Speak of the devil, a glass house now rose up before me, only recognizable as such when I was nearly upon it. Snow buried it up to the rim, with all the glittering facets of the nearest dome lightly frosted with ice crystals. During the journey out here, I told myself that I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I’d know when I found it. Glancing at the GPS confirmed my arrival at the coordinates I supplied it back at Amundsen. Studying the horizon in every direction revealed nothing else out to the limits of visibility, save for a crane, a radio tower, and a cluster of derelict trailers half buried in snow.

It’s not that I thought I had the wrong place, so much as a lingering disbelief that there was anything at all waiting for me out here. I mentally prepared myself from the start to find nothing. For that to be the grand cosmic punchline. That grief destroyed my father’s mind and led him into the polar wilderness, where he joined my mother in the cold embrace of eternity. 

Until now, I imagined he met his end the same way as that ghastly pilot in the ice tunnels. Body shutting down organ by organ. Eyes frozen shut, probably hallucinating. Grasping blindly at the cursed ice. Dragging himself along as if through a desert, hand over bloodied hand, chasing the mirage of an oasis which never was. How like my life, since his disappearance. Stubbornly pulling my weary body through a cold, indifferent world, seeking after a phantom.

I gave up on circumnavigating the complex a few minutes into the attempt, so massive were the enclosures. So this is what he chose over me, is it? I could identify no obvious way in or out, until I noticed a broken facet in the dome, smashed by the partial collapse of a crane. I dimly recalled Ron mentioning that Dranger moved a crane through McMurdo, and there it was, albeit in a sorry state of disrepair. I parked the Sno-Cat alongside it, so that if the need should arise, I could still return to its heated interior. 
 

Absent any easier method of entry, I resigned myself to climbing the crane. I started second guessing myself pretty quickly though, when I felt that painfully cold metal. Even through my gloves, the cold bit savagely at my fingers. The kind of cold that drains years of life from your body, enfeebling you before your time. Still I found one foothold after the next, clumsily surmounting the decrepit remains of this once mighty metal behemoth. 
 

The apex of the crane proved to be a point of no return. There wasn’t anything like a stairwell or a platform just inside the broken facet I might safely jump down to. What I could see from that vantage point looked like a thirty foot drop to the bottom. Not lethal anywhere else on this planet, but my dumb ass intentionally stranded myself someplace not found on any map. Without my phone to call for help, even something as ordinarily trivial as a sprained ankle could be a death sentence. 

There’s always the radio back in the Sno-Cat, for however long those batteries hold out. But it seemed now that if I slid down the crane’s cable into the dome, without a significantly more athletic body than the one I’ve so far cultivated, I couldn't very well just climb back up it. From up here I could at last see more than two of the domes at one time. The upper facets were still transparent enough to make out a further six domes behind this one.

Arranged hexagonally, with a seventh dome smack dab in the center. All but one built from the same uncountably numerous, mass produced triangular facets. No ordinary window was inset in each angular aluminum frame however. Instead something like a clear, inflatable pillow. In every case, a pocket of air was trapped between two transparent, membranous layers, so the windows could double as insulation. 

Must’ve been pretty cozy inside, once upon a time. As I slid down the cable, legs wrapped around it to control my rate of descent, it did feel a few degrees warmer inside than out. I supposed it might simply be the absence of wind chill. When my feet touched ground, it was crunchy, ice cold sand that they sank into. The frosted dome still admitted enough sunlight to dimly illuminate my surroundings, but it did little to help me understand what I saw.

A beach, or so it appeared to me. But frozen over, including the shallow wave pool shaped like a crescent, which hugged the dome’s edge at the near side. Absurd and dreamlike, the palm trees to either side of the artificial beach were coated in frost all up their trunks, fronds dripping with icicles.

My stomach sank when I glimpsed what could only be a human hand poking out of the frozen wave pool. Surprisingly well preserved fingers contorted into a claw with which the body it belonged to still grasped for warmth it would never reach. I wiped away a thin layer of snow from the ice, but could not make anything out beneath its surface. It wouldn’t have rattled me so, except that I didn’t expect any of this to be here, so I never emotionally prepared myself to find any bodies. 

As I turned to continue my exploration, I could swear that I saw the fingers twitch out the corner of my eye. I turned back, slowly, keeping my eyes pinned to the ice encrusted claw as though daring it to move again. I backed away, little by little, still not budging my gaze from it until fully satisfied that what I saw was merely a trick of the light. A frigid gust blew in the busted facet, contributing further to the fine layer of snow coating everything within the dome. Shivering despite my layers, I pressed on, hoping I might find that the next dome was in better shape.

It was, and it wasn’t. This one turned out to be a replica city block, at last making sense of the bricks and cement on Dranger’s shipping manifesto. Not as cold as the beach dome, and thus absent any exterior frost, more natural light penetrated to the interior. If I kept my head down, I could almost mistake it for an average intersection in any ordinary city, if not for the architecture. 

Four buildings rose nearly to meet the dome’s inner surface, stopping just short. Contorted strangely, to conform to the dome’s curvature. Something like a little theme park facsimile of an urban neighborhood, carefully constructed within this dome as one might build a ship in a bottle. Only one building was brick. Another was covered in reflective glass panels, like a little brother to modern skyscrapers.

Another was silver with swooping contours, an architectural style which evoked the future much more effectively back in the early 2000s when it was popular. The fourth and final building, somewhat more pleasing to the eye, resembled a cross between any Apple store and the pristine white hair salon from Logan’s Run. On brand for Dranger, who until his disappearance, never stopped trying to bring "the future" to his people.

Not the future which came to pass, but Dranger’s vision of what it should be. As if to underscore this, with about the degree of subtlety I knew to expect from Dranger, the street signs at the intersection read "Tomorrow Boulevard" and "Promise Avenue". I did feel some measure of surprise that the streets weren’t named after his book, or just directly after himself. Also, that I’d not so far seen a statue of him anywhere. 

The brick building, least overtly futuristic of the lot, appeared instead geared towards a grungy hackerspace aesthetic. Only upon circling around the front, by way of concrete sidewalks I still couldn’t quite believe that someone intentionally poured in a dome at the south pole, was a broken neon sign reading "Bluetopia Dreamscape Cyber Cafe". Were cyber cafes still even a thing by 2001? Everyone I know had home internet by then.

The interior walls were painted with a continuous wrap-around mural of blue skies and fluffy white clouds, paint flaking off here and there to reveal bare brick underneath. A cracked, hollow chrome sphere was suspended from the ceiling by fishing lines, in which I could see my distorted reflection like an omnidirectional funhouse mirror. I couldn’t remember why, but these things used to be everywhere for a hot minute. The ones I saw were mainly in city centers outside of arcades or computer stores. I saw a few at E3, way back when I was still young enough to care about console wars. 

Some of the computers were still running, all blueberry iMacs by the looks of ‘em. Encouraged, I tried the light switch. Nothing at first. Then, sporadic flickering as the decades old CFLs slowly sputtered to life. Only now, with the room properly lit, did I notice the figure hunched over an iMac in the far corner. "Oh! Hello dear. Welcome to Bluetopia Dreamscape Cyber Cafe" croaked an elderly woman with curly white hair, wearing a tacky silver jumpsuit. 

"Ma’am, I came here from Amundsen Scott South Pole Station. There’s a vehicle waiting outside. Are there any more survivors in the other domes?" She ignored me, clicking feverishly at the single button on the puck shaped mouse. "I’m trying to send an email to my son. Can you help me?" I repeated, more insistently, that we had more urgent matters to attend to at the moment. "How long have you been here? Did you come in the first group, or the second?"

She glanced at me with vacant eyes for a moment before returning her attention to the computer. "Lady, listen to me. I think you might be delirious, in shock from the cold. It’s like twenty degrees in here, that jumpsuit’s not gonna cut it. If nothing else we’ve gotta move you to whatever buildings in this dump are still heated."

She didn’t seem to hear me. I added dementia and hearing loss to my mental list of possible reasons. "I’m trying to send an email to my son, can you help me?" I pulled the plug, and the screen went dark, perhaps for the first time since ‘04. She continued clicking, so I took the mouse away from her. She looked down at her hand for a moment, bewildered. Then abruptly, she stood up from the clear blue acrylic chair and hobbled out the door. I called after her, but she neither slowed down nor looked back at me, so I gave chase. 

For an old woman, she could really move. When I caught up with her, she was standing before something like a life sized nature diorama behind glass. Within the display, plastic trees, a sky mural and astroturf served as the backdrop for taxidermied animals. I’ve seen these before in hunting shops. Supposedly there’s a way to get them to come out looking lifelike, but if that’s true I’ve never seen any evidence of it. These all looked the same as any I’ve seen before, with the uncannily stiff posture and goofy plastic cookie monster eyes.

"I do so love to visit the animals", the woman muttered, to no one in particular. I asked her name. Of all the things I said up to that point, for some reason that’s what got her attention. "Hello dear, my name is Moira. What a lovely young man you are! Do you know my son?" I thought about asking why she believed all young men know each other, but decided against it. Before I could get her last name, the taxidermied animals in the display room abruptly started moving all herky-jerky. 

Startled, I took a few reflexive steps back. Then it was all I could do simply to stand there, stupefied by the morbid spectacle playing out before me. The stuffed, preserved remains of a grizzly bear, a wolf, a fox and a rabbit each animated in sequence, imitating natural behaviors of the genuine article while a scratchy recording described each specimen. "I do so love to visit the animals" the woman repeated, in doing so setting off the display’s motion sensor once again. Each of the animals then set about performing the same canned routine as before. 

Animals, my ass. This…zoological equivalent to Disney’s old Hall of Presidents no longer contained any life, if it ever did. Instead, what I struggle to call anything other than…cybernetic corpses. I retched even as it occurred to me. But as ever, there was no use ignoring the evidence of my own senses. You can stuff the remains of a wild animal. You can put motors and gears inside, to make it move around. But at the end of the day, a dead body’s a dead body. 

Even through the glass, I faintly detected the sweet, yet noxious scent of embalming chemicals. At least, I thought it was coming from the display. But as I leaned closer to the doddering old woman standing beside me…I soon realized that the smell was coming from her. I seized her hand in mine, and she slapped it away. "Fresh!" she scolded. "My son will hear of this." Only a moment had I touched her, but it was long enough. Her hand was ice cold. Her skin felt waxy, and hard as a rock. I was briefly, and uncharitably, reminded of Nora’s facelift.  

Now that I studied her features more closely, illuminated by the sickly tungsten light emanating from the animatronic display, I noticed Moira had two glass eyes. For that matter, the crow’s feet radiating from around them, as well as other deep wrinkles in her face…terminated in barely visible cracks. I touched her lips to be sure. She recoiled from my fingers, her tough leathery face now contorted into a scowl. 

"That tears it, young man! I’m calling security!" Moira lurched away from me with what I now recognized for a stiff, awkward gait not characteristic of any woman her age that I’ve encountered before. She hurried over to a…video phone? Looking straight out of a Syd Mead painting, or a prop from AT&T’s "You Will" TV spots. Not just a video phone either, but a video payphone, nestled within an iconic boxy white telephone booth. 

Of course, it was broken. Moira tapped at the buttons about a dozen times before giving up, instead producing a flip phone from within one of the many pockets of her silver jumpsuit. She dialed, then held the oddly shaped handset to one ear. I snatched it from her hands and checked for reception. No battery, and a screen spiderwebbed with cracks. What the fuck even is this thing, I thought. "Danger Hiptop"? Apple sure didn’t make this. But nor did I see Samsung, LG, or any logos of brands familiar to me anywhere on the device.

The cold, dead thing shaped like an old woman searched her stiff, wrinkled hands for the phone I took. Giving up a few moments in, it then returned to asking me how to send an email. I stared in morbid astonishment at what I now properly understood to be the animatronic, taxidermied remains of a human being. A million questions jockeyed for primacy in my mind, but I didn’t like where any of them led to. So instead, I grabbed the nearest serviceable club and got to beating.

All I could find was a table leg. At some point, the last living souls in this complex broke down some furniture to make a fire. It got the job done, the woman thing not screaming or even complaining intelligibly as I bashed her skull in. It was surprisingly easy. Outwardly, she looked pretty good for a dead lady, which I chalked up to the preservative qualities of the permanently refrigerated dome I found her in. This one was noticeably warmer, but not so much as to hasten decomposition, even had she not been embalmed long ago. 

Inwardly, she didn’t look nearly so good. My makeshift club split off the top half of her skull, apparently held on until then with staples or glue. I pinned her skinny, yet alarmingly strong body under one knee as I shone my flashlight into her skull cavity. Inside, thin cables ran from the back of her glass eyes to some manner of hopelessly obsolete, early 2000s arduino equivalent with an "Intel Inside" sticker on it. Adjacent to the little computer was a purple disk drive, with "Iomega" etched along the top. 

There was nothing else inside the monstrosity’s skull, now hanging open before me, save for cobwebs and the sickly sweet stench of embalming fluid. Like a combination of maple syrup, moth balls and ammonia. It continued struggling under me, alternating between threatening to call security, and asking me how to send an email. I pressed a small round button on the drive, which ejected a black plastic diskette about three times thicker than a typical floppy. 

Just like that, "Moira" seized up. It didn’t go limp. Instead, the abominable mockery of the human form lay there, arms and legs rigidly halted partway through their final motions. Whatever motors animated this horrid thing from within were no longer receiving commands. My violent disgust subsided, and the adrenaline with it. I dropped the club beside her, conspicuously unbloodied. Nudging the putrid mass of preserved flesh, suspended from within by some unseen mechanized armature, provoked no further movements. 

Something in me wanted to give it a burial. Whatever she became, for whatever reason, this was somebody’s mother once. I wouldn’t get the chance, glimpsing a human figure in the distance which fled upon noticing me. I grabbed the chair leg and ran after it, even as I dreaded what I would find. After clubbing a mechanical dead woman in the street, my hopes weren’t high that the next person I’d run into would be anything other than more of the same.

The central dome was all apartments, top to bottom. Not a geodesic greenhouse like the rest, but still hemispherical to blend in with them, internally divided into ten floors. Mercifully it was warmer by far than either of the domes before it. Not so much that I removed my parka, but enough that sensation slowly returned to my face. 

Entering the first unlocked apartment revealed decor in keeping with what I saw in the cyber cafe, and the other three buildings around it. White walls and ceiling, but orange shag carpet. One of those vintage white egg chairs in the corner, an amorphous, blob-shaped couch, and a weird looking tube television sitting opposite. Encased in a purple and silver teardrop shell, with a pair of short black antennae making it resemble a robot insect, or anime space helmet.

When I absentmindedly leaned on it, I heard a click, and the lid to an integrated optical disc drive sprang up. Inside was a shiny disc labeled "Sidekick GD-Rom, ver 1.1". As the lights were on and the air a comfortable temperature, it appeared this building was still receiving power like the dome before it. So, I powered on the unusually curvy television set. A bouncing red dot came to rest in the middle of a blank white screen, then spiraled outward. 

…Dreamcast? The logos which appeared next confirmed it. Shit, I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. Who ever made a television with a Sega Dreamcast built into it? But that’s what it was, the label on the back reading "Divers 2000 CX-1". Complete with that wonky controller plugged in, wedged between the couch cushions. I retrieved it from what would’ve otherwise been its final resting place and spammed the A button to skip through all the disclaimers.

An intro cinematic played, depicting a cgi flyby of the dome complex, apparently not completed at the time this animation was made. The copyright was for 2002, which fit in with what I knew of Dranger’s timeline. The menu that came up featured picture in picture, with my face in the window. I searched the table for a camera and found it, not recognizing it as such until then because of how ridiculously bulky it was. A chunky white rectangle labeled "Dream Eye", plugged into one of the television’s four controller ports.

Waving my hand confirmed that the video mirror was realtime, explained a moment later by a menu option which read "video phone". I had some idea now of who one might call using the phone booth from earlier, and how they would answer. Pitiful compared to facetime or Skype, but it must’ve been mind blowing at the time. During the handful of years leading up to, and just after the turn of the millennium. "The future" having officially arrived, at long last.

I tried calling some of the names in the directory. Nobody answered. So I backed out to the menu, and selected "Sidekick Session". An error message popped up warning me to insert a "personality disk" before continuing. On a whim, I fished from my pocket the chunky black diskette that I removed from the dead woman’s hollow skull, after bashing it open. With a click, it slid neatly into an external drive. Then a spinning hourglass animation appeared onscreen for a few seconds, accompanied by a noisy whir from the disk drive.

A profile came up, titled "Moira", with a selfie next to it that I recognized as the old woman who now lay in a crumpled heap next to the phone booth. Initializing the profile brought up a three dimensional avatar resembling an elderly woman with curly white hair, in as much detail as could reasonably be expected from Dreamcast graphics. It looked around as if startled. "Where am I? What’s happening?"

My stomach turned, as the situation grew slightly clearer. Virtual Moira couldn’t hear my replies until I discovered the short, stubby microphone plugged into one of the memory card slots on the controller. Holding down the A button displayed a microphone icon onscreen in the lower right hand corner, with a cartoon outline of a mouth speaking into it. So, I spoke. "Who are you?"

Only the head, neck and shoulders were rendered, to conserve polygons. A wise choice as it allowed enough detail that I could read the character’s facial expressions as it spoke. "Moira O’Donnell, of course. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?" A lump caught in my throat. Just then, a "tip of the day" window popped up. It advised me to "be my authentic self", and talk about the subjects most important to me. "Your Sidekick learns from your example, becoming more and more like you with every session!"

Virtual Moira now behaved increasingly confused and upset. "Why can’t I feel my legs? Or my arms, for heaven’s sake. Where’s my son? I demand to talk to my son!" Something warm and wet rolled down my cheek. Unable to cry before, shocked to the point of dissociation by everything which happened until now, I covered my mouth with one hand and choked back my tears. Not only because of what I now understood about the mechanized human remains back in the street, but because I recognized her last name.

Notification of an incoming video call appeared, rousing me from my tearful stupor. I tilted the thumbstick towards it, pressed A, and the spinning hourglass once again displayed. It was replaced several seconds later by a grainy video feed taking up perhaps a third of the screen, surrounded by thick borders, at about ten frames per second. "Hello? Hello, who’s this? I came from Amundsen Scott. Can you understand me? Do you have audio on your end?" 

The blurry figure was tough to make out, and didn’t respond right away. Crestfallen, I prepared to hang up. Just another dead body, I figured. Stumbling around under battery power, dialing this number out of habit…if you could even call it that. Maybe this room belonged to someone they once knew. "Amundsen Scott, huh? That’s a new one. Name’s Patrick Harrison. I don’t recognize your face. Can you recall the names of the last three presidents?"

Now frantic at the prospect that there might be a living, breathing human on the other end, I told him there would be time for trivia after we got the fuck out of this place. He insisted though. "None of the Sidekicks are trained on information any newer than 2011. Gotta be certain I’m speaking to a real person, I’m sure you understand." 

I’m embarrassed to say it took me a moment to recall off the top of my head, but I did answer accurately. When next he spoke, it was with deep relief. "You don’t know how happy I am to hear you say that. There’s only four of us left now. We’re holed up in aquaponics, it’s in the greenhouse dome between the reactor and the biolab." 

Reactor? Patrick reassured me when I asked about it. "Came out of a Seawolf class submarine. No leaks, still chugging along safe as can be…though it’s nearly out of fuel by now. We’ll take you up on that ride back to Amundsen Scott if you’re still offering, we’re quite fucking tired of eating nothing but fish. But first you’ll need to make it over here in one piece." I asked about Moira, and if there were others like her. His voice now sullen, he estimated around eighty of those creatures were still active in domes four through seven. 

"What in god’s name are they, anyway?" He sighed. "Dranger’s many sins. Listen, we locked ourselves in here about six weeks ago. One of our colleagues then disabled our door controls from the outside, trapping us. Not that we particularly wanted to leave at the time. The fish tanks produce more tilapia than we can eat, and purified water as a byproduct. Besides which, it’s safe in here, the things out there are dangerous. He’s got them working for him, they bring him any bodies they find." 
 

Dranger’s still alive? Figures. Always looking out for number one, even as everyone else around him freezes to death…or worse. I felt certain he had some hand in defiling their remains, though as yet it was unclear what he might’ve gotten out of doing so. "What’s that in your hand?" came Patrick’s voice, broken up by static. "Is that a personality disk? It is, isn’t it. So you killed one of ‘em already." I protested that "killing" didn’t feel like the right word for it, and Patrick laughed. "Fair enough, but you’ll have to do a whole lot more of it before this is over. Who’d you remove it from?"

Moira O’Donnell, I replied. He went quiet for a bit, so I asked if she was someone important to him. "You might say that. She knew the security access codes to the dome we’re trapped in." Oh fuck, I thought. I’ve done it now. "Is there any way to extract that information from her personality disk?" Patrick shook his head. "We haven’t been able to defeat the encryption on those. How badly did you damage her body?" I glanced out the window. The city dome was just warm enough to prevent frost from obscuring my view. Through clear plastic, I glimpsed Moira’s mangled remains still laying in the street where I left her.

"I was scared, alright? I might’ve…gone a little overboard. The computer probably still works, I could put the disk back in and close her head up, but I bashed her legs pretty good." Patrick sighed again, this time rubbing his chin contemplatively. "That does complicate things. You’ll need to find her a new body. Ideally a woman, close to the same size. Sidekicks aren’t terribly bright, but they do keep track of biometrics like height, weight, age and gender, so it’ll notice any major incongruities."

I asked why anybody put her in charge of the access codes to anything. "She couldn’t even send an email!" Patrick chuckled. "She had a green thumb, and was insufferably nosy if not kept busy. Giving her free reign of the greenhouse kept her happy and out of everyone else’s hair. Before she uh…became what she is now, I mean." I pressed him to explain how that happened. 

"If you gain entry to the lab, you’ll see for yourself. Nothing I tell you will make sense otherwise. The code to aquaponics also opens up the lab. Happy hunting! Oh, and be careful. Sidekicks have a reputation system and facial recognition. Now that you destroyed one, any others you encounter are likely to be hostile."

The lights flickered, and the Divers 2000 rebooted. The screen went blank, then displayed the intro sequence from before. While I waited for the menu to return, I worried for the longevity of the lone reactor supplying precious, life-giving heat to this facility. Not the first to have that idea, as someone had the good sense to shut off power to the beach dome when the crane penetrated it. But even conserving what’s left of the fuel, how long can this last? Was it ever meant to be sustainable?

What a natural move for a man like Dranger, who after all was the darling of Silicon Valley, itself an insular bubble of delusional tech optimism. From one bubble to another, this one a literal technological shell which may yet become his tomb. His remains insulated, as he was in life, from the cold reality outside his dream world.
 

Power stabilized. Overhead lights now steady, I navigated the freshly booted menu in search of the video phone directory. There wasn’t any call log, but I browsed until I found three residents named Patrick, then rang them one by one. Each time, an error message appeared, which read "connection failed: check cable". I checked the cable, a standard RJ-11 common to old landline telephones. A modem, then? Made sense of the video quality.

I climbed the stairwell, centrally located in the residential dome, large sections of it now unlit. Floor by floor, I made my way to the top in search of another unlocked door. When I couldn’t find one, I started kicking them down. Not all had the Divers unit, oddly. Must’ve run into trouble sourcing them. Several apartments instead had a bog standard Dreamcast with a zip drive add-on plugged in beneath it, next to an ordinary looking tube television. 

I didn’t have any more luck with these, many of them broken, the working units all giving me the same "connection failed" error message. Perhaps just another casualty of the invading cold. Essential services shutting down one by one, like the organs of a dying man. I’d have assumed the people would be the last to go. 

The top floor did afford a better view into the surrounding domes, such that I didn’t feel I’d wasted my time climbing all those stairs. From there I could more clearly see the radio transmission tower. I fished a small pair of field binoculars out of my parka. The bulbs atop it were unlit, suggesting it was no longer receiving power. 

That didn’t explain why internal communications were down, though. So I searched for a bundle of cables I knew should run to every room and soon spied the telltale conduit along the ceiling, painted to match. From there it was as simple as following the conduit to its origin. 

"Hello?" my voice echoed down the hall to the indistinct silhouette at the far end of the ground floor, standing before an open breaker box, a pair of wire cutters dangling from one hand. "I came from Amundsen Scott" I continued, hoping for the best…though in my heart, I knew better. When it turned to face me, my fears were confirmed. 

He must’ve been a maintenance technician, once upon a time. Still wearing coveralls not dissimilar to the mechanics at McMurdo, but torn and dirty. Injured too, the wire cutters stained with dried blood. Through a tear in his leathery, dried out skin I glimpsed his inner workings. Frightfully thin, a metallic stick figure. Not even a mannequin, clothed in preserved flesh of the dearly departed. "Is someone there?" it rasped. "Was it you that shut off all the lights?"

It limped on approach, no less menacing for it, all the embalmed muscle tissue having sloughed off his left forearm. The tattered leftovers dangled from his wrist, swaying to and fro as he hobbled awkwardly towards me. Once he entered the penumbra of a working light fixture, I could see whoever fought this thing before me also bashed his head in. Partially though, without the force needed to destroy the little computer still pulling the strings of this puppet. 

The light also revealed that his eyes weren’t moving, nor did he blink as Moira did. Realizing he might be blind, I ducked into the shadowed doorway of one of the apartments I broke into earlier. Thank god, it shambled right past me as I held my breath. When the moment was right, I snatched the wire cutters from it. I don’t know why, they didn’t seem a particularly useful weapon. "Who’s there??" the lurching mound of parts cried. "I can hear you. Can’t run away forever."

The morbid, yet piteous creature swung around to face me. I ducked out of the way as it threw a clumsy punch, which left a splintered crater in the door. I struck it with the table leg. Unlike Moira, this one had already learned to protect its head. Tough, waxy corpseflesh split apart to reveal pistons and gearboxes, increasingly visible through each newly inflicted wound. Damned thing just wouldn’t go down. I felt more surprised than I should’ve at how difficult it was to kill what’s already dead.

When I noticed what could only be the battery poking through one of the freshly torn openings, I stabbed at it with the wire cutters. The clumsy cadaver stumbled, arms and legs stiffening…then it burst into flames. Fire belched forth from the chest wound, smoke billowing out the mouth and nostrils as it finally collapsed before me. I shattered the glass on a fire extinguisher cubby. I then fumbled with it for a minute, never having used one before. Panic was no help as I struggled to read the instructions with trembling hands. 

After blasting the ashen pile of stinking, rotten machinery with foam, I propped myself up against the nearest wall, waiting for my racing heart to subside. I threw up. In part from the noxious vapor released by the immolation of embalmed remains, but also the residual shock of fighting for my life. Some minutes passed before I could once again breathe normally, the fumes proving stubbornly slow to dissipate. Its jaw continued to flap as though speaking for a further minute or so, movements no longer accompanied by sound.

Examination of the breaker box yielded no useful findings. It didn’t seem to have discriminated, cutting wires at random and crossing them with others. I might’ve done the same if I woke up one day to find myself plunged into darkness. Not understanding my eyes could fail, falling back on how my career taught me to solve problems. It wasn’t mistaken in its belief, exactly, as a hollow skull cannot believe anything. 
 
In my hurry to escape the last traces of that foul smoke which burnt my eyes and nostrils, I tripped on a crack in the cement floor. In fact a fissure wide enough to fit my fingers into, checking around the inner perimeter of the structure revealed many more like it. Meltwater seeped inside through the largest few.             

The aquaponics building wasn’t far. Inside the next dome over, in fact. Problem was, when I wiped condensation off the transparent acrylic door between the two domes with my sleeve…it turned out to be crawling with mechanized corpses. Most wore overalls and rubber boots, hard at work tending a multi-story indoor farm. About a third of the grow lights still worked, the rest either flickering or burnt out. The crops, best I could tell through my binoculars…were all dead. 

None of the "farmers" got the memo, still going about their old routine on an endless loop. Thick hoses once carried water to, and from, the crescent-shaped stack of hydroponic grow beds encircling half of the dome’s interior. The space not taken up by hydroponics was instead used for the cultivation of trees, which also died long ago by the looks of ‘em. Bare skeletal branches reaching up towards a perpetual winter sky, each tree surrounded by a circular brown stain where fallen leaves once decomposed.

My gaze followed the hoses from the stacked up grow beds, across the dome floor, to the brick building against the outer wall. The building where, if I understood Patrick correctly, the fish tanks were housed...along with the only other living, breathing human beings left in this frozen hell.

I thought better of trying to kick down the door after my first attempt attracted the attention of the two nearest ghouls. I ducked back into the partially lit hallway until they lost interest and returned to their futile, never-ending labors. The chrome lined, oval shaped door was not glass, but one inch thick acrylic. I didn’t bother trying the club. As I’d been warned, I would need the access code to enter. Dried blood fingerprints atop a few of the phone-like keys hinted at, but did not in themselves reveal the crucial sequence.

I doubled back to the breaker box in the hopes that reconnecting the wires might reactivate the radio tower, at least. After shutting off the main breaker I twisted the bare ends together, two at a time. Then I flipped the main breaker back on and ran up the stairs to check whether the lights on the tower were now illuminated. Four rounds of this just about exhausted me, with nothing to show for it. 

I checked out the door to another dome, only to find it was also packed with cold, motorized bodies milling about. I had no intention of opening the door, just meant to get the lay of the land. Somehow at once expansive and claustrophobic, these weird little domed terrariums could fool you into feeling as if you’re standing outside…until you try to get anywhere. Then the illusion falls apart as you’re funneled through one of the narrow connecting tunnels. Only I couldn’t even do that, without being mobbed by "unfriendly locals". 

Dolls, for Dranger’s dollhouse. Bugs in his jar. Every one of them a real life, at one time. Born to a mother and father. Each with their own childhood, their own cherished memories, unique tragedies and triumphs which forged them. Only for this to be their end. Propped up from within by the metal framework, like so many marionettes suspended from invisible wires. Jostled about in a cruel satire of life. A feeble imitation of who they once were, walking and talking insults to their memory. 

The worst part is that they don’t know they’re dead, though I suppose nobody ever does. The right thing to do would be to destroy them. Easier said than done, five against eighty, no better weapon at my disposal than a chair leg. 78 I guess, subtracting the two I demolished so far. Slim comfort, given what I now felt certain the rest would do with my remains, should I be overpowered. 

I heard a noise outside. Retreating up the stairs to the top floor, I surveyed the domes around me, eventually spotting a pair of uniformed security guards headed for the apartments. Despite having trashed two of them before, in each case it was one on one. Even fought individually, they still managed to pose a threat, being stronger by far than they look. I didn’t like my odds of taking down two at once. 

No time. No time! Panic gripped me. I’ve never been good at thinking on my feet. The best I could come up with was to grab one of those tube televisions from a top floor apartment, lug it to the stairwell, then lie in wait. Tense, agonizing wait, as I listened to their footsteps growing louder and louder. A troubling thought occurred to me, as the guards drew near. I didn’t get a very good look at them, on approach to this dome. "I may well be about to murder real people", I thought.

Far too late for such concerns, as I’d already dropped the television the moment I saw the whites of their eyes. One of them managed to dodge it, while the other wasn’t so quick. The hefty relic of glass and phosphor struck him squarely between his neck and shoulder, crumpling him like a beer can. The television sort of rolled off him, on account of the shape, then tumbled down the concrete stairs. I heard the tube inside shatter when it reached the bottom.

Then came a gunshot, echoing up the stairwell. I ducked instinctively, backing into the apartment I took the television from. Fuck me, I thought. I might’ve at least chosen one with another television I could drop. I tried to smash out the window, first by kicking it, then by swinging a chair. No luck, more acrylic. My plan was to climb out through the window, then slide down the exterior of the residential dome. But man plans, and God laughs. 

It appeared in the doorway, only a silhouette except for the faint glint of light from the window on those empty glass eyes. It emerged from darkness, advancing on me. A woman once, perhaps in her forties, never again to age another year. She brought her gun to bear, and in a fit of terror and desperation, I wet myself. The gun clicked. She looked at it, then scrambled to reload before I could reach her. Understanding on a primal level that it would be lights out for me should I let her finish, I launched myself at her. Strong, like the others, but light enough that the weight of my body was enough to throw her off balance.

Facing bigger problems right then, I did my best to ignore the warm sensation trickling down one leg and pooling in my boot as I endeavored to wrestle the gun from her hands. It went off again, with what seemed to me like a shockingly loud report for its size. Ears ringing, I put all my weight on her arms. Muscle power alone wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t fighting a woman exactly, but six heavy duty servos in her shoulders, wrists and elbows. I could hear them whining and grinding against my resistance, through her perfectly preserved skin.

Little by little, using every ounce of my strength, I turned the gun on her. Suddenly, her expression changed. "Please, no!" the thing which had once been a security guard pleaded. "I beg you, don’t kill me. Please, I’m scared." It began sobbing. I faltered, fool that I am, even knowing it wasn’t a woman pinned beneath me. But then I noticed her face was dry. Because of course it was, she didn’t have working tear ducts. Those awful, uncanny eyes then swiveled in unison to glare at me, and it pushed me off.

I clambered to my feet in time to swat the mag out of her clumsy, dead hand before she could load it into her gun. It screamed in anger no doubt characteristic of the woman it was meant to imitate, whose pickled flesh it now wore like a costume. Before she could dive for it, I kicked the fallen mag under the couch. 

She immediately went prone and crawled as far under the couch as possible, wedging her body firmly between the furniture’s underside and the floor. I then sat on one end of the couch, pinning her under it. It was my great fortune that the dead thing couldn’t see where I sat, as it then began shooting up through the couch at where it wrongly assumed I was. 

I counted the shots, but gave up after ten, not knowing enough about her gun to reach any reliable conclusions about the number of rounds remaining. Eventually she stopped firing. I stood up from my seat, waiting until she pulled herself out from under the couch, before stomping on the back of her head as hard as I could. I knew to expect it, but the sound of her skull splitting open still sickened me. 

I dropped to my knees, one of them planted firmly on her upper back. Dodging her flailing arms as they reached blindly behind her, trying to grab hold of me. Exhausted, trembling and soaked from the waist down in my own piss, I at last reached into the troublesome puppet’s skull cavity, and ejected the personality disk. All servos within the defeated corpse ground to a simultaneous halt. Stiff and motionless now, like Moira upon removal of her own disk. 

I laughed, cried and shouted with relief. My first time coming so close to death, it left me shaking, but exhilarated to the point of delirium. Didn’t even occur to me that any of them might have guns until she started shooting. Everything after that was pure instinct, fight or flight, kill or be killed. Once calm enough that I could think straight, hands no longer shaking like a leaf, I made it a priority to change my pants. Not for the sake of my dignity, so much as not wanting the urine to freeze later. 

While undressed, I checked my body for wounds. I’ve heard of people not realizing they were shot right away, shock and adrenaline numbing the pain. No blood, just lots of bruises, scrapes and small cuts up and down my fingers I couldn’t remember the cause of. Mind still racing, I almost forgot to fetch the spent handgun out from under the couch. Empty, as luck would have it.   

I had some seriously mixed feelings about stealing pants off the one I dropped the television onto. They reeked of embalming fluid, but fit me well enough that I overlooked it. Like his partner, he was also strapped. But unlike the gun from under the couch, his had some rounds left. I rummaged through both of their pockets for extra mags, one at a time, but found nothing. I removed the mag from my new weapon, and counted the bullets.

Five. God damnit! At least Patrick will be pleased that there’s one for each of us, should it come to that. I couldn’t imagine any realistic possibility of fighting my way through a dome full of those abominations, with only five bullets. Dejected, I slipped the gun into the pocket of my parka. In doing so, my hand brushed against a certain chunky, black plastic diskette. Not the one I removed from the guard, but the key to the greenhouse dome, after a fashion. 

I didn’t quite know what to do with the security guard’s disk. Didn’t feel right to just leave it somewhere. The last traces of someone’s wife, sister, mother, or daughter. Everything which made her unique, a distinct individual, committed to that glossy magnetic platter. I might’ve put a hole in it, if I could spare the bullet. Yet somehow, that didn’t seem right either. 

I settled for inserting it into the external drive under a Dreamcast in the apartment across the hall. One of the few which still had power, it booted right up, and before long the fuzzy convex screen displayed the floating head and shoulders of a middle aged brunette. "What’s going on??" it demanded.  "I was…apprehending a trespasser. Did we get him?" I hesitated, voice wavering as I answered into the microphone, "Yeah. You got him. You’re the big hero." 

The other disk, I slid into the drive nestled within her former body’s skull cavity. It locked into place with a satisfying click, then I heard the noisy whirr of the drive spinning up. Figuring that Moira’s most recent memory of me wasn’t exactly positive, I took my leave, but watched the resurrected pygmalion from afar as it regained its footing. Quivering like a newborn baby deer, the Sidekick pretending to be Moira slowly re-learned how to control its legs. Recalibrated might be more accurate.

Either way it was soon up and about, with me following behind at a safe distance. Much to my frustration, it didn’t head for the greenhouse dome right away. First it stopped by the "zoo" again to admire the animals, as Moira was apparently enamored with them in life. Next up was dome five, another natural environment simulator, this one an indoor rainforest. For the first time since entering this icebound necropolis, I was pleasantly surprised. 

The rainforest dome was still more or less functioning as intended. Not dead, brown and desiccated like the crops in the greenhouse, nor frozen over like the beach dome, but lush and overgrown. Just inside the oval doorway sat an information kiosk with a touchscreen map of the interior layout. Beside it, a rack of unfamiliar devices, all of them clad in differently colored transparent plastic housings. 

I didn’t see what code she used to get in, but I did wedge the table leg between the door and the frame before it slid shut. Moira took her sweet time trudging around the manmade landscape. None of it looked quite right. A side effect of having to cram diverse terrain types into the same dome, even from a distance it looked like Disney’s take on a jungle, more than it did the genuine article. The plants were real, but the centrally positioned waterfall gushed forth from a rocky crag that was very plainly made of fiberglass.

When at last the recently embodied old woman finished up her leisurely stroll in nature, I hid in the shadowed end of the ground floor hub by the breaker box ‘til she passed through. It would be just my luck, having gone to all this trouble finding Moira a new body, only to be forced into wrecking it a second time. She still had one of those colorful plastic gadgets with her, its purpose as yet unclear.

My stomach growled. I looked at my watch, realizing for the first time I’d spent over an hour tailing this slow, dead bitch. But at last, it looked like I would soon get the prize I was after. Through my field binoculars, I spied on Moira’s stiff bony fingers as they punched the correct sequence of keys to gain entry to the greenhouse dome. 7-3-4-1. Never before would I have imagined it could be this difficult to get an old lady’s digits.

It only solved half of my problem, though. Moira’s access code did me little good, the greenhouse dome still teeming with strange flesh. I clenched my teeth, watching them totter about inside the humid enclosure on their slowly rotting legs. So near, yet so far. With my ‘nocs, I got a closer look at the dome’s inhabitants. They weren’t doing so hot. 

Of the ones I’d seen so far, the security guards seemed best preserved of the lot, probably spending most of their time patrolling cooler sections of the compound. These ones hadn’t fared nearly so well, the heat and humidity necessary for raising plants also turning them into ambulatory mold colonies. It didn’t seem to be slowing them down. The opposite if anything, gaining more flexibility as their useless vanity coverings rotted away.

Odds stacked hopelessly against me, I returned to the residential dome with my tail tucked between my legs, choosing one of the other tunnels branching off the ground floor hub. The radio tower sprouted up from between the greenhouse dome and the rainforest dome. I figured if the survivors trapped in the greenhouse dome could turn the tower back on from the aquaponics building, they already would’ve in order to call for help. 

However, there appeared to be a similar building at the end of the rainforest dome, the radio tower adjacent to it just outside. I cursed the absence of a train, shuttle, or some other way to move more easily between the domes. For whatever reason Dranger didn’t want everyone to be able to move freely around the complex, inhabitants evidently only knowing the access codes relevant to their roles. Nothing about this place made any sense post-mortem, and piecing everything together as an outsider was proving to be a maddening chore. 

With no better lead, and a herd of slow cooked atrocities blocking my path through the greenhouse dome, I resolved to focus on the radio tower. The chair leg made a serviceable lever with which to pry the sliding door further ajar. The electronic locking mechanism was strong, but the linear motor responsible for actually sliding the door open or closed along a pair of rails was weak enough to force. 

After everything up to that point, I didn’t think I could be stunned by anything. But standing there immersed in the sounds and smells of a rainforest, It exerted a powerful, mysterious healing effect. All this time, running on fear and fumes, I didn’t realize how cold and tired I’d become. How deeply sick I could be of snow and ice, my very bones at last thawed by the radiant warmth of a tropical jungle. That is, until I discovered the animals. 

I could only laugh. Should’ve expected it, all things considered. Just seemed like if Dranger was going to all the trouble to cultivate real plants in here, he might’ve at least imported some live animals. Parrots, at least. But no, the giraffe which swung its neck around to gaze at me was nothing more than another taxidermied animatronic. Likewise with the rhinoceros, the tiger, and the spider monkeys. Looking closely, I identified the painted cables delivering power to them, strung near-invisibly along the branches they perched on. 

The information kiosk confirmed that the brick building at the end of the nature trail was a communications and power distribution center. I turned my attention to the plastic rainbow of variously colored devices sitting on their chargers next to the kiosk. The signage didn’t explain what they were exactly, only declared in a period appropriate globular font: "Maps! Information! Messaging! Games!" 

I turned it over in my hands, having chosen a neon purple unit. The circuitry was visible through the shell, the screen a monochromatic dot matrix LCD like the original Gameboy. The wavy form factor made it interesting to look at but uncomfortable to hold, sporting an oversized membranous rubber d-pad and miniature alphanumeric keyboard just below. "Cybiko"? Must be another primitive smartphone. 

When I wiped my brow, my own sweat surprised me. Still wearing the parka out of habit, now overheating because of it. Overheating! A strange reason to rejoice, under any other circumstance. Refreshed to be rid of it, I folded the puffy orange coat over one arm, then embarked along the nature trail. On my way, I unfolded the Cybiko’s antenna, and explored the software.

Maps weren’t much help, able to tell me which dome I was in but not my specific position in it. The grainy black and white display wasn’t doing it any favors, either. Messaging closely resembled SMS, but relied on short range radio. I dreaded the possibility that the tower would turn out to be just for connecting these stupid things, rather than linking up to the outside world. Coming within inches of having my brains blown out earlier might’ve inclined me towards pessimism. 

I felt grateful for all the cover, but while it meant I was difficult to spot, the same would be true of anyone else that may be hiding in this dome. That knowledge put me on edge as I trekked along. I came upon a park bench, with a vending machine next to it. Something about a vending machine in a jungle struck me as cheerfully perverse. For a few blessed moments, I forgot all the ugliness. The cold, the stench of death, and what still awaited me one dome over.

A firm kick dislodged one of the bottled beverages from within the machine, receiving power but also requiring coins I didn’t have to give it. A decal on the side informed me that I could pay using the Cybiko somehow, but I couldn’t figure it out. A bit of carefully applied violence proved more expedient anyway. I retrieved the vintage soda, or whatever it was, from the receptacle below the big window. 

"Orbitz"? About a hundred tiny green balls hung within, suspended as if neutrally buoyant. I shook the bottle, but it didn’t budge them. Worryingly, there was no expiration date anywhere on the bottle, nor on its cap. The bits floating inside might’ve been boba, or something like it. Many appeared discolored compared to the rest. The contents were, by this time, undoubtedly spoiled.

I threw it to the ground in a mixture of disgust and disappointment. My dumb ass left all the food back in the Sno-Cat. If I didn’t liberate Patrick and his buddies pretty soon, I'd have to scour the city dome for food. I didn't yet know where the guards came from, and never thoroughly cleared the domes behind me before moving on. Reason enough not to go back, if I could help it. 

The front door to the single story brick building didn't have a keypad. Instead something like those badge readers some apartment buildings and banks use. I puzzled over it for a moment before checking the Cybiko. There was indeed a security access application. 

Tied to the wrong person's identity, unfortunately. With no better option, I dragged my tired feet all the way back to the entrance. There, I dumped all the other Cybikos into my parka. Carrying them in it like a bag, I then made the grueling journey back to the communications building.

It wasn't that far, had the trip been a straight line. But the path zigged and zagged around rocky landforms, and the terrain elevation varied significantly. Some of it, I regret to admit, was also down to my poor fitness level. When I arrived back to the badge reader, I got busy trying the Cybikos with it, one by one.

The neon green unit did the trick, apparently once owned by "Kathryn Baker". Not yet seen her anywhere, but no doubt she's still wandering around someplace. I turned the handle and inwardly rejoiced upon hearing the bolt retract. Then the door swung open abruptly…pulled from the other side. 

I fell backwards, scooting away from the monstrosity which now stood in the doorway. I drew my gun, but hesitated to use it, lest the gunshot attract more of them from elsewhere in the complex. Exhaustion limited my options, though. After traversing the dome twice, I wasn't about to fight another one of these things hand to hand.

It took a step towards me. "Thank goodness someone finally found us" the tinny little speaker behind its teeth warbled. "Now I can get back to bass fishing!" Another victim of heat and humidity, his face and hands were a swollen mess. Patches of discoloration ran up and down his mostly shirtless torso, the garment reduced to tatters by years of wear and tear. Just how long was he trapped in there? Perhaps intentionally, by Patrick and the others. 

Once fully in the light, I made a stomach turning discovery, even by recent standards. Another one of them was being dragged behind, fused to him at the leg. Some interaction of moisture, heat and the embalming chemicals adhered their sticky, cured flesh. This one a woman, two more men also melted into her body, joined at the torso. "Don’t look at me like that" she scolded. "It was hot in there, so of course we shed some layers. It’s not my fault men can’t behave themselves." Dried flesh cracked and crumbled around the edges of the mouth as it spoke, struggling to right itself. "Have you ever been bass fishing? You should see my boat!" The half-woman remarked that it really is a beautiful boat. 

Every time I think I've seen the worst of this place, the floor drops out from under me. At least it was slow, the uncoordinated motions of the four bodies making for clumsy locomotion. That sickly sweet aroma filled my nostrils, like burnt honey. The ones on the ground sort of crawled together, grasping at the turf to pull the entire mass forward. The upright one just kept trying to walk normally, falling backwards onto the putrescent rat king of entangled corpses after only a few steps, the four of them constantly babbling to one another. 

When next it stood, I put a bullet in its eye, hard clap of the gunshot echoing about the dome. It staggered but didn't fall again, as I must've missed the computer. "Well now, hang on there neighbor" it sputtered, stumbling towards me as I swore, scolding myself for the wasted bullet. More careful with the next one, this time I shot the battery. As before, it erupted into a foul smelling conflagration. Still struggling along as it went up in flames, not obviously bothered in any way. "The thing you’ve got to understand about bass fishing, is that you’ve gotta skip your bait. A red lure makes ‘em think it’s injured." 

It just kept coming, step by step, now a walking funeral pyre. Whatever's in embalming fluid burns like a motherfucker, and smells even fouler when you cook it. More nonsense about bass fishing slurred together, fading into static as heat warped the speaker. I backed away from it one step at a time, even as it advanced. A cold, rigid hand grabbed my shoulder. Spinning around in fright, I threw a punch. Feeble from exhaustion, it didn't do much. "That the best you got?" 

The new thing grabbed at me with its other hand and shoved me to the ground. "My clients are always surprised to learn how practical self defense can be one in the same with personal fitness." Kneeling atop me, flakes of dead skin shook free of its face and rained down into my eyes and mouth as I wrestled with it, the burning cluster of cadavers still advancing on us some yards away. With one of my arms pinned, all I could do with the free one was to reach for my gun. In my startled confusion, I must've dropped it. 

The dead man struck my jaw. My vision blurred, sound became distant and faded. I tasted blood in my mouth. "You see that?" came its muffled squawking, in my pounding ears. "Stop being a victim! Take control of your fitness, take control of your life!" That’s when I felt my fingers graze the cool metal of my fallen gun. Frantically grasping the handle, I brought the business end up to my attacker's temple, and squeezed the trigger. With a deafening blast, his head came apart.

Decomposition, plus an already brittle skull made for a grisly spectacle as the bullet shattered bone and circuitry alike. It tumbled over, slumping to one side, then awkwardly rolled down the steep embankment. No time for relief, the smoldering bundle of corpses was nearly upon me. Now down three bullets and not wanting to waste another, I instead circled carefully around one side, then kicked it as hard as I could.

It soon joined the crumpled remains of the other one in a blackened heap at the bottom of the hill, a plume of acrid black smoke issuing forth from the pile. I rested to catch my breath. "There's no way I can keep this up" I thought. Sooner or later my bullets will run out, and my luck with 'em. For a while I lay there, sprawled out in the grass, as if cloud watching. Only there were no clouds. Just a pale, empty blue sky behind the hexagonal lattice of the dome’s superstructure. 

I watched anyway for a time, pent up stress and fatigue slowly leaving my body. I listened carefully for movement in the brush, never relaxing fully, but grateful nevertheless for room to breathe. Could I have been happy here? For a year or two, maybe. But like the Biblical notion of paradise, this place would never change. Aesthetically outside of time, an eternal snapshot of a single perfect moment.

Cultists can imagine no paradise more perfect than perpetual togetherness with their master, singing songs of praise on loop until the stars burn out. Crystalline, captured and kept perfect. Protected by the domes, preserved by the cold.

When I felt up to it, I got back on my feet and explored the communications building. More fashionable nonsense, even in a utility space. The walls bore shiny chrome tiles. There weren't sharp corners, but a smooth curve where they should be. A pair of oval fixtures above me supplied cool, blue, aqueous light.

Server racks dominated one wall. Along the other, a grid of monitors. Flat screen but chunky and beige, in four by three aspect ratio. A Sony Vaio desktop computer rested beneath the bank of screens, still operational, though only half the monitors displayed anything. I pulled a keyboard out from behind it, tucked away by the last user, who wrapped up the USB cord around it for storage. Plugging it in let me type into one of the command prompts, but without a mouse I couldn't properly use the OS, which I recognized as Windows XP.

I typed in "help" for a list of commands, hoping there might be some way to reactivate the radio tower from here. Then I heard an ear splitting screech, the sound of twisted metal, followed by a resounding crash. I booked it back outside only to discover the worst had happened. 

There was my Sno-Cat, rammed into the base of the radio tower by a driver too distant to make out. After everything I went through, I felt safe guessing that it wasn't a living person. The radio tower was in shambles, collapsed against the greenhouse dome, having smashed several of the windowed facets.

Reminded of my entry via the crane, I briefly considered climbing the ruined radio tower, if I could get outside. The smashed facets were directly above the aquaponics building, I could drop through them onto the roof without much risk of injury. Then I wouldn't need to fight my way past the teeming throngs. 

But watching snowflakes drifting lazily through the new opening gave me an idea. Maybe I wouldn't have to do either? It shouldn't take long for the temperature inside the greenhouse to fall below freezing. Spectating the Sno-Cat thief grinding to an eventual halt before he managed to return inside encouraged me. 

Much the same process played out in the next dome over. It wound up taking several hours, but remaining daylight was measured in months, plus I had a fairly comfortable and secure vantage point from which to wait. I made the most of it, savoring the droplets on my face left by cool mist coming off the waterfall. My enjoyment of the first peaceful moment since my arrival was interrupted when my stomach growled once again, more insistently than before. 

The only fruiting trees I found, on my way out of the rainforest dome, weren’t in season. I despaired at the prospect of eating raw fish, but without nourishment I knew I’d soon be too weak to defend myself. So effective was the man-made environment at fooling my senses, I forgot all this time I was in a desert. There is no life here but what technology supports, an anxiety inducing inversion of normalcy. 

The slow breakdown of this protective microcosm must be what it’s like for the still living, but unborn child of a dead mother. No longer receiving nutrients, womb growing colder by the minute. How often I’ve felt that way myself, driving past clusters of tents and scattered syringes all along the downtown sidewalks. Like a lone cell in an organism which has only just breathed its last, the many small signs of decomposition beginning to manifest.

A faint orange glow caught my attention, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Turning around one last time as I removed the chair leg from the doorway, like Lot’s wife leaving Sodom, my eyes were met with a sight both beautiful and terrible. The burning remains of the corpse bundle I kicked down the hill must’ve set fire to the surrounding bushes, what started as a modest brush fire now a growing inferno. 

That’s what it took to force the last few stragglers out of hiding, a rather fresh looking facsimile of a woman with two fake children rushing the door, faces already blackened with soot. They shouted at me and waved their arms, but I paid them no mind, the time when such mimicry moved me having long since passed. They reached the door just as it finished closing, the electronic lock engaged a moment later. These ones surprised me by screaming, and pounding the door with their fists from the other side.

Never seen ‘em do that before. Oh well, not my problem. Heat from the rising flames would soon melt the dome, freezing whatever’s not been reduced to ashes by then. I heard ‘em keep pounding behind me, even as the raging wildfire consumed them. That’s three more laid to rest. Long after their expiration date, but better late than never.  

It was a different story altogether in the greenhouse dome, now sufficiently chilly that I pulled my parka back on. The ghouls were no longer any danger, halted in place wherever they stood when their flesh coverings froze. A multitude of unnervingly shiny, doll-like eyes moved in unison, following my every movement on my way past the grow beds. Some knelt, with tools, by the water pumps. Others held trays of seedlings which would never see harvest. All of them following in Dranger’s footsteps, still fruitlessly striving to sustain life where none remains. 

Warily, I approached one of the frozen meat statues. Placing one ear up against its head, I could hear the clicks and whirrs of the disk drive within. Still thinking, or something like it. Still trying to speak as well, words muffled beyond recognition by a mouth I’d frozen shut. Its arm creaked, frozen flesh crumbling around the elbow before falling away. 

It reached for my neck, but far too slowly. I stepped back and watched the hideously thin articulated metal figure buried within, struggling to free itself like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Glancing about, I discovered the others were doing the same, so many empty glass eyes…all pinned on me. No time to waste, then. 

The thick steel door to the lab groaned as I worked it open, on hinges shrunken by the cold. Some of the scabbed over scrapes on my fingers reopened, weeping thin trails of blood which stained the handle. "Hello?" I called into the darkness behind the door. "Patrick? Patrick Harrison?" Once opened far enough that I could slip inside, I located a light switch on the near wall and flipped it. The overhead CFLs flickered to life in stages, one after the next, revealing the answers to a great many questions while raising still more.

A severely decomposed corpse in a discolored labcoat lay at my feet. I winced, recoiling slightly from it. Now somehow desensitized to the sight of preserved, walking corpses, but not the conventional kind. "At least they didn’t get you" I muttered, stepping over the unrecognizable mess. 

Twin rows of tall, stainless steel cylinders lined the entryway, with the lab proper comprising an unexpectedly small workspace just beyond them. I peered down a stairwell into a sublevel, carved out of the ice, only to find it filled from front to back with yet more of the metallic vats. Studying them closely, I found names and dates written on each, and a faded logo reading "Alcor". 

Cryonics. Another of Dranger’s obsessions, it wouldn’t surprise me to find him inside one of these tubes. Final destination for all manner of wealthy eccentrics who, after a lifetime of cheating the common people without consequence, can be forgiven for believing they might also cheat death. What did their millions buy them in the end, but a fancier coffin?

The lab lay just beyond a four way junction. Through the door to my left, the reactor. Through the one on the right, aquaponics. I pulled hopefully on the handle, but of course it was locked, as Patrick warned me to expect. I pounded on it anyway, and to my great relief, received the same in return. I shouted, but doubted if he could understand me, as I couldn’t make out his muffled reply. I despaired briefly, hope restored only when the desktop computer in the lab sprang to life. 

Another weirdly shaped Vaio desktop, model PCV-W121. The flat, hinged monitor roused from sleep mode, an unfamiliar application requesting permission to access the webcam and microphone. I clicked yes, after which a window popped up containing a grainy video feed. "Thank god" I gushed. "You don’t know how happy I am to see your face." In truth, I wasn’t sure it was Patrick until he spoke, so poor was the video quality. 

"Same to you, we’re quite fucking tired of eating nothing but fish. We’ll take you up on that ride to Amundsen if you’re still offering." I asked how to open the door. "Have you got a Cybiko?" In fact I did, but only the one stashed in my pocket, the rest now a rainbow puddle of molten plastic back in the rainforest dome. "Did you happen to find any other survivors while you were in there?" I confessed solemnly that the only inhabitants of the rainforest dome I had the misfortune to meet were all deceased, long before my arrival. 

"There was someone outside, in my Sno-Cat. I didn’t get a good look at ‘em." When I told him about the downed radio tower, he slumped in his seat. When next he spoke, it was with the sullen intonation of a defeated man. "No, no…she wouldn’t do that. I told her to hide there with my boys, and wait for me. If you didn’t find them…" I did my best to reassure the poor fellow, knowing all the while he was likely right. I’ve never been good at giving comfort, having never learned to comfort myself. 

When I asked how to open the door, Patrick explained the Cybikos are programmable with new security access codes, which I should be able to find in the lab someplace. A detail that would’ve been nice to know, before I dragged the lot of ‘em up that hill. The obvious place to start looking was in the documents folder. Password protected, as I suppose I should’ve expected. The operating system too most likely, accessible only because someone left it logged in. 

So, I searched various papers scattered across the counter top, tucked between microscopes or beneath the centrifuge. Strange diagrams, some of which I recognized as schematics for the spindly mechanized skeletons, frozen within those creatures outside. Others I didn’t recognize, nor the medical science mumbo jumbo written beneath each illustration. I know what a minidisc is though! Something I never thought I’d see again, much less an entire binder stuffed with ‘em. 

I might be able to appreciate the nostalgia, under different circumstances. Instead, exhausted and in a hurry to escape this nightmare, I inserted the first disc into the built-in slot on the side of the monitor. It clicked into place, then came noisy whirring, an audio player application launching by itself. 

I forgot these were never a data medium, primarily. They were meant more as a replacement for cassette tapes, used for recording live concerts, voice memos, and whatnot. So there weren’t any mp3s I could copy over from file explorer, just a single track of compressed audio in ATRAC format.

I had to steady myself when I heard his voice. In all the confusion, sickness and violence since my arrival, I suppose I lost sight of what I came for. Not really expecting to find anything. Not his remains, certainly not a millennial necropolis. But least of all was I expecting to hear my father’s unmistakable voice wafting out of those dusty old speakers.

"Boss man is really pushing me now. I didn’t tell him to promise miracles, yet now I must be the one to deliver them. It’s given me reason, the more I work closely with the man, to reconsider my admiration. Not that I don’t understand his predicament! Fake it ‘til you make it may as well be a Drangerism, for he lived that ethos more completely than anyone else would dare. 

First, to entice investors with smoke and mirrors, then to hurriedly make the illusion into reality, before anyone thinks to peer behind the curtain. So far it’s always worked out in time, just barely outrunning embarrassment and bankruptcy. Only because someone like me, behind the scenes, burned the midnight oil so as not to make a liar out of him. He’s among those heroes we’re warned never to meet, and only in his direct presence did I learn why."

It went on like that, a personal diary I surmised wouldn’t likely contain any security codes. I ejected the transparent blue square, tucking it into my pocket as a keepsake and for later review. When I inserted the next minidisc, this one light purple, I was again surprised. This time, because it was Dranger’s voice that I heard. 

"I got the idea from this Japanese restaurant where I met with an investor. They ordered for me, maybe as a prank, some strange dish with a baby octopus at the center. When I didn’t know what to do with it, the waiter poured soy sauce all over the poor, dead little thing. I cried out in surprise as the tentacles moved, eliciting much laughter from my guest…which I fear was at my expense."

Next came the voice of my father. So they really did work alongside each other? I would’ve thought that to be his fondest dream until I heard the terse tone with which he described Dranger in the prior recording. "It’s not that simple. Yes, you can chemically stimulate dead muscles to release their residual stores of ATP, causing them to contract. They do this during the onset of rigor mortis anyway. It’s not a sustainable way to animate a body, unless you also devise a delivery system for replenishing the ATP."

Dranger asked if he couldn’t simply stimulate the heart to continue circulating blood. "And oxygenate it with what? The lungs? You see the problem, don’t you? I can’t revive only one organ, or just the muscles, it’s all interdependent. Working muscles need oxygenated blood, which must be oxygenated by living lungs, and pumped by either a living heart or prosthetic. I won’t ask whose body this is, or if they signed a consent form."

Dranger’s voice reassured him. "Natural causes. I promised to revive them, but I never said how. Am I to understand you’re telling me it won’t work, after you had it up and walking about for twenty minutes?" Dad sounded increasingly exasperated as the exchange wore on. 

"Twenty minutes are all it was good for! It proves the cranial computer’s ready. It proves the balancing software. Add a Sidekick to that thing and it wouldn’t have just walked around, I could’ve made it talk as well. But not for longer than twenty minutes, that’s the cutoff. Once the last of the ATP runs out, all that’s left is a dead body. Which is all it really was in the first place, and all that it ever can be."

Dranger inhaled deeply through his nose. At least, that’s what it sounded like. Might’ve been a long drag on a cigarette, though I never knew him to smoke. "It’s just, we’re so close. I can’t back out of this, I told those people I would raise the dead. Some of ‘em sold everything, left their whole lives behind to follow me here. I know I’m putting a lot on your shoulders, but you’ve gotta make this work. I don’t care how you do it."

I looked around in search of the experiment referenced in the recording. A surgical table dominated the center of the room, but with nothing on it save for some stains. A glass booth in the corner seemed a more likely candidate, the contents obscured by a wrap-around curtain. I gagged when I peered inside. Badly decomposed like the one at the entrance, but without the benefit of dehumidified air to dry it out. Just a heap of rotten brown sludge pooled around the ankles and hips of a seated skeleton. The top half of the skull was missing. Inside sat a familiar little computer, and chunky purple disk drive. 

The prototype, I surmised. Version zero point one. I ejected the current disk, and popped in the next. Dad again, still at once surreal and comforting to hear his voice after all these years. "The talk of prosthetic hearts with boss man gave me an idea. I came at this all wrong from the start. I can’t keep the muscles working without a more or less full set of living organs. Either all the body’s alive, or none of it is. But he didn’t say it needs to breathe, just walk and talk. He also said it doesn’t matter how. 

Prosthetics would, at the very least, get it up and moving. Cybernetic arms and legs, a rigid metal pole to keep the spine straight. I’m starting to understand why he excavated that derelict bunker between us and Amundsen Scott. I never saw anything so foul, so reprehensible as the frostbitten specimens we dragged out from that pit of horrors. I’ve not yet pried any answers from him about who built that bunker, what exactly went on there, or why. Need to get a few drinks in him soon, to loosen his lips. I could use one myself, after what I’ve seen."

I revisited some of the papers I discarded earlier, now better equipped to make sense of them. A diagram, incomprehensible before, I now recognized as some wretched fusion of man and machinery. Not as any responsible surgeon would join the two, rather something out of Josef Mengele’s fever dreams. In the background, the recording continued to play back.

"The other day, he brought one of the recovered specimens out of cold storage and gave me something to inject it with. Pitch black, like tar, and curiously difficult to resolve under a microscope. No discernible molecular structure, however greatly magnified. I soon regretted asking where he got it. The circumstances of the acquisition made me certain then, as I am now, that he was finessed by scam artists. 

Of course he insists such a thing is impossible, that they demonstrated this mystery serum on a rat before his very eyes. But as I reminded him, I was able to make a dead man walk around with some gyroscopes, accelerometers, a computer, and a battery. It would be no difficult feat to animate a rat by the same means, which is undoubtedly what they did. He took his embarrassment out on me like he always does, when it’s clear that he’s really just angry at himself.

That bogus serum, being ridiculous snake oil, of course did nothing. The specimen, some unenviable mess with a broken foot and a drill for an arm, didn’t react following injection. Too small a dose, boss man insisted. I invited him to procure more of it, if he’s so sure that he wasn’t swindled, and got another temper tantrum for my trouble. I wish the media knew the Dranger that I’ve come to know. It might’ve spared us all an expensive trip."

I noticed for the first time that the minidiscs were ordered by date, and labeled accordingly. I skipped ahead by a couple, in the hopes that he locked Patrick and the others inside aquaponics around that time, and dictated the new security codes to himself after changing them. No such luck. 

"Every day that he comes to visit my little lab as of late, I spot a new gray hair at his temples. Always more frantic, more disheveled. Pressure’s mounting, people are starting to talk. Many among us are pensioners, there’s been more than a few deaths. The rest are, naturally, wondering whether they’ll live long enough to sip from Dranger’s grail. 

The first to die was my test subject, whose muscles I stimulated so he would dance for Dranger, like an organ grinder’s monkey. That went nowhere, as I warned him it would. The specimens excavated from the bunker were also a bust, dead for far too long to do anything useful with. The serum, that so-called "vitriol", was a bust as well. 

Boss man must’ve paid through the nose for that sample too, as the lack of results sent him over the edge. Funding stopped when the dot com bubble burst, it’s not like he can afford to waste any more of it on magic beans. He doesn’t even speak to me anymore, it’s all just pacing and shouting now, not that I particularly blame him. Historically, the punishment for false prophets was usually quite severe.

I may yet be able to save him from the torches and pitchforks. It came to me, watching the installation of those animatronics in the jungle dome. To my knowledge nobody’s ever done that with humans, but this is a place of many firsts. Plenty of futurists have written about dome cities, it took Vance Dranger to actually build one. Thank god he listened when I told him to build it here! He was going to build it in the desert, where these domes would’ve simply been the world’s largest solar ovens. Living inside a greenhouse only makes sense, I told him, in the coldest place on Earth."

Useless. On and on with the speculation and self congratulation, but never any security codes. No wonder he and Dranger didn’t get along in person. Similarity breeds contempt. "Anything turn up yet?" came Patrick’s voice from the computer. I replied over my shoulder that it was just a bunch of voice memos. "Well, Cybikos are programmable with new security access codes. You should be able to find them in the lab someplace." 

My ears perked up. "What did you say?" Only static, for a moment. "...I said, look around the lab. The codes have got to be somewhere." Slowly, I turned back towards the computer. Step by step I approached it, then leaned in close to better scrutinize the grainy video feed. "...How long did you say you’ve been trapped in there?" Patrick scratched his head, best I could tell through the artifacting. "Six weeks? Has it been that long? Yeah, six."

My blood ran cold. "Patrick…I passed the grow beds on my way here. All the crops were dead." He asked why that should surprise me. "Because, Patrick…aquaponics relies on fish waste to feed the plants. If the plants are dead, Patrick, then so are the fish…and so are you, I’d wager." Protracted silence followed. When next he spoke, Patrick sounded desperate. "Look, fella. I can imagine what you’ve been through, getting to us. But we’re cold, tired and hungry in here. We’re scared. Just let us out, okay?"

Hungry? "I thought you said you had plenty of fish in there." From desperate, to exasperated. "Just let us out, for fuck’s sake! What does it matter what we’ve been eating? I need to find my wife, and my boys!" From exasperation, to anger. I felt as if I ought to applaud the performance. "Sure you do, Patrick. I might’ve believed two, maybe three weeks. Try that on whoever comes poking around this place next. Maybe they’ll let you out, but I won’t. Very lifelike though, none of the others were so convincing."

The door to the reactor room groaned behind me. "That’s because they’re mark two prototypes." I didn’t turn around to confront this new voice, so familiar was it from the recordings. In my heart I already knew who stood behind me, but dared not believe. Then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Come to take over the family business, have you?" Tears escaped my frozen ducts and rolled down my cheeks. "You don’t sound surprised, Dad." 

Finally, I faced him. Wrinkled and gray, the consequence of many lost years, but also the stress of being Dranger’s miracle man. I embraced him. "Thank god, you’re warm." He laughed. "Of course I am. I’ve been camped out next to the reactor while I finish my work, because it’ll be the last thing to go. And no, I’m not surprised. You’re too much like me. Once you’re onto something, you won’t let it go until you’ve seen it through."

I glanced back at the dried up corpse in the lab coat by the entrance. "I…I thought that was you." He followed my gaze. "Hm? Oh! No, that’s, uh…Dranger and I had a…disagreement." I nodded along, thinking out loud that Dranger must’ve lost his mind. "Indeed he did! Boss man wanted to shut down my project." I tensed up, and asked what he meant.

"Well, you spoke to Patrick and the other mark twos. You’ve experienced for yourself what a quantum leap they are, beyond the mark ones you must’ve encountered outside. Emotions, persistent goals, capacity for deceit…it’s why I had to lock them up. They sided with Dranger! Can you believe that?"

A lump formed in my throat as I took one step back, then another. "Dad…what did you do?" He just stood there, blinking, as if I was the demented one. "I completed his vision. No, I surpassed it! Death is defeated, never again to snatch away our loved ones, as it did your mother. If only she held on a little longer, I might’ve brought her back. But it’s enough for me that you’ll not lose your father too, as now I’ll live forever."

Only then did I notice the power cable trailing out of his pant leg, back into the reactor room. Why did he feel warm before? Heated wires under the skin, maybe. My tears returned, and this time did not relent. "Dad, you…you might’ve lived on through me, had you cared to be part of my life." He frowned, seemingly confused. "You don’t understand, do you? I’m eternal now! Man’s oldest dream! I’ll never grow a day older, and I’ll never die!" I wiped away my tears, snapping back "He cannot die, who has never lived."

For the first time I can remember, it seemed as if I actually hurt him. As though this version could feel things my real father never did…or that he could only now take me seriously, as an adult. "I thought you would understand" he grumbled, scratching his balding head. "You’re an author. You put yourself into your books, much as you can, so that part of you lives on after your body rots away. Like those recordings I made." He gestured to the colorful disks, spread out across the counter.

"My voice, captured for the ages, ringing true a century from now as though I’m still in the room. If that’s not me, then what is it? Every essential quality of my voice can be recorded, so why not my personality? What are you, when we get right down to it, but your memories? What is your personality, but the influence that memories have on your choices? You’re a collection of attributes, as am I. It’s what distinguishes one man from the next, and what we’re all reducible to."

I laughed through the tears, holding up a personality disk. "You mean this? You think an entire person, in all our wonder and mystery, fits on here? This is the bullshit that you left me for?" He reached out for me, but I retreated further from him, and from my feelings for him. "I did this for you!" he shouted. "So you wouldn’t have to lose me, like you did your mother!"

I dropped the disk to the ground, and stomped on it until it shattered. "Liar! Don’t pretend this wasn’t for you, like everything else you’ve ever done. You did all this because you were scared. You were a scared old man who didn’t want his time to be over, willing to sell your soul to anyone who promised they could save you."

I drew my gun. "What’s that for, boy? Did you really come all this way just to kill your old man?" I asked what’s in his head. "If I put my ear up to it, will I hear something spinning in there?" He sighed. "Don’t ask questions you won’t like the answers to." 

I brought the gun to bear, hands trembling as I struggled to take aim with wet, bloodshot eyes. "I told you" he urged. "I’m not like the others! I’m far beyond that. Beyond the mark twos, even. I’m really him, can’t you see that? It’s me, your father! I’m still alive in here!"

"Maybe so" I whispered, flipping the safety off. 

---

 

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