A New Tomorrow

I was the first person to have seen the Sun in over 500 years, to have seen with my own eyes (though protected by an anti-UV visor in my bio-armour) that star. I was the first member of my team to step out of the Vault into the bright world of myth that existed above us.

The Sun was warm, comforting, and even with my eyes closed, its brilliant presence shone through the skin of my eyelids.

It was true. Everything that the Elders had passed down to my generation and the generation before mine, and every generation since the first took to living underground to escape the radiation from the last atomic war, was true. The sky seemed limitless above me, a violet blue dotted with clouds, and the trees, lush and green, towered hundreds of feet overhead.

I looked behind me at the entryway into the Vault. Vegetation had almost completely covered the Great Door, the massive lead airlock that had separated us from the surface for almost five centuries. My team commander stood at the threshold between the familiar subterranean world that we’d grown up in and this new unreal paradise that stretched out before my vision.

“Take a reading,” he called out to me and I did so. The radiation was next to nothing, and the oxygen, my suit told me, was safe to breathe. I have him a thumbs up, and undid the latches that held my helmet on.

And as all the oxygen was sucked out of my body and skin began to melt, I awoke from the nightmare in a cold sweat, remembering that there was no utopia above me, only the arid and desolate wasteland, pock marked with craters and scarred with trenches, my hopes of a new tomorrow shattered.

© 2003

Originally published in Aphros, Vol. 44 (2004).