First Light

First Light

I step down off the train, onto a crowded rush-hour platform. The long line of electric lamps above us buzz annoyingly, and flicker rapidly on and off. The stroboscopic light pattern makes me feel dizzy. It’s five PM, here at the open air train station, as the mood of the commuter crowd drops from gloomy to abysmal – strange for a Friday afternoon.

“Same old shit,” someone complains. “Make twenty Lux a week, and still I gotta stumble home in the dark.”

Then the station lights stabilize, brighten a bit, and the crowd grumbles out their best attempt at a cheer.

Despite the cynicism, I, for one, am on cloud nine and can’t wait to get home. I just got a big promotion at work – and a pay bump from fifteen to thirty Lux a week!

Mom and Dad have been urging me to move out on my own for several years, and now I can make it happen.

High on the cement wall above the tracks, someone has spray painted “Banish the Darkness! Establish the New Order!” The work of subversives, or some punk kid pretending to be one. The news reports, now and then, about a New Order operational cell being exposed, its members arrested, interrogated – they who would destroy the fragile balance of our work, our lives. The rebels claim they can return free light to all of us, if we only question the authority of our leaders. But how can anyone create free light? It takes a lot of energy and machinery. Otherwise, we’d have only darkness, twenty-four hours a day.

Walking beyond the metro station, I enter Haversham. Wow, what a place – one of the three wealthiest neighborhoods in the world. House façade columns four feet wide. Mansions that stand three stories tall, each floor with twelve-foot ceilings. So ostentatious – the windows here are large and undraped. I cringe every time I think about the light loss through those huge rectangles. Couldn’t these folks donate some of their Lux millions to light everyone’s homes? Hell, give Wexley a few…

Our house has windows one tenth their size, with mylar blinds drawn most of the time. But Haversham is upper crust. Here, residents can collectively afford the tier three Lux tax. The streets are free of trash and vagrants, and one can always see clearly beneath the street lamps.

At the Haversham perimeter, guards wave me through, and I enter Leister. This place feels like home t – it’s almost a duplicate of my neighborhood, Lanecroft. Tidy two-bedroom homes, dimly lit streets, but I can still see my way around. I stop at a variety store and pick their fanciest bottle of gin. I slap 35 Flickers onto the counter and set off again for home.

Then comes that fork in the road. I always avoid Wexley – known infamously as The Abyss – and hoof it two extra miles to stay in brighter, safer neighborhoods. Over the years, my friends and I have only entered Wexley on a dare. But I’m chomping at the bit to get home and tell my folks about the promotion. So I pause and consider…

The gap between two towering, decrepit tenement buildings beckons. Cigar butts and bits of broken glass speckle the pavement, and the stink of rotting garbage wafts out. It’s true – police have upped their patrols here. And I do carry mace and know karate. So I think I can handle that quarter mile through the narrowest part off Wexley.

I buck up and move forward. A half block in, I round a corner and stare into total blackness. Then the orange glow of cigar ashes become visible, pulsing in the darkness. Shouts, loud conversations, and sporadic bursts of laughter suddenly cease. Dead silent, and it creeps me out. Here in The Abyss, folks congregate outdoors. Despite the stink of trash, the air circulation out here is better than the ventilation in their cramped flats. So they hang outside, to socialize, drink, smoke. Or make trouble. Now and then, anyway…

I don my dark-vision glasses and switch them on. Their heads-up display shows fifty percent battery charge, which is more than enough.

Through my glasses, I see the world around me, rendered in shades of amber. But there’s a downside, too. My face now glows like a beacon, because the image intensifier output from the glasses, in addition to entering my eyes, also reflects off my pale skin. I’m the only source of light, besides cigar ashes, in the whole godforsaken neighborhood.

Still, it’s too late to turn back. Almost two blocks in, and three or four to go. Someone inhales deeply, gathers a wad of mucous, and spits. It smacks wetly on the pavement ahead. Was that meant for me? My pulse quickens. This silence – it wraps around me like heavy, smothering velvet. I speed up my pace down 6th Street, hand in pocket, fingers wrapped around the mace sprayer. Those faint, whispered conversations – they’re worse than the silence. They’re about me, I know, about my intrusion into their realm of darkness.

Ahead, a point of light emerges from an open doorway. My glasses amplify it a thousand-fold, so it balloons into a region of blinding brilliance. I groan while I switch off the glasses and remove them. I’m seeing spots at the moment, but as my eyes re-adjust, I watch a man carry a lit candle across the street, his face shining with sweat. He halts against the opposite wall, turns to face me. Then a second man emerges from the same doorway, then another. On short order, six men holding candles stand in a line across my path.

Terrified, I spin around and see a line of men behind me. Trapped, I remove the can of mace. Then one of them speaks, in a gravelly bass voice. From his tone, he sounds in-charge. Confident.

“Put that crap away,” he says, voice echoing off among the tenement building walls. “No one needs to get hurt here. But we do need to talk.”

“Listen, if you want my glasses, you can have ‘em. Just please let me pass. I’m trying to get home is all.”

My words sound choked with panic. My heart races as sweat pours off of me.

“You an engineer?” the man says.

“Yeah, yeah I am. Mechanical. How do you know?”

“The way you dress. Your walk. Your manner. I was one, once upon a time. Come forward, so we can talk.

With no way out, I walk toward him, now standing in the middle of the line of men. I’m shaking terribly, my heart in my throat. He reaches out a hand as I near him, and I take it. His grip is strong and firm, the skin of his hands rough, calloused.

“I’m Sebastian,” he says. “Welcome to The Abyss. And, before we go any further, we need your help. Desperately.”

A shudder runs through me. Then it hits me. I know who these people are. Part of the New Order. To cut a half hour off my walk home, I’ve stumbled into a New Order enclave.

“What help can I provide to you? I’m just heading home after a hard day’s works. Does this have to do with ransom?”

From what I know, everyone here lives in poverty – not a single Lux, perhaps not a single Flicker to their names.

“No ransom. I know you’ve got lots of questions. And you’ve already figured out, from how I’ve been talking, that you we can’t let you go home tonight.”

Could I blast a few of them with mace and run for it? No, there’s too many of them. And others probably lay in wait further ahead. A pit forms in my stomach as I think of Mom and Dad worrying themselves sick, calling the police to open a missing person’s investigation.

“Join us,” he says gravely. “Make a big difference for all of us.”

“How can I help Wexley? I’m an expert in mechanics. You mean repair things in your buildings?”

“When I said all of us, I didn’t mean just Wexley. I meant the world...”

---

It’s been a grueling two months. Part of it’s the physical exhaustion from working myself ragged twelve hours a day. The other stress is mental. The fear of being exposed by the government. And knowing that my family has probably given up hope that I’m alive.

Living up here in the Roof is dizzying. Frightening. But also exhilarating. My family and I never knew the Roof existed. My grueling climb up here, through tunnels dug through the rubble by the New Order over a span of five years, took us a week.

The air is noticeably thinner, over twelve thousand feet above what I had thought, for thirty-four years, was “the whole world”. And to stand near the cliff edge, just beneath the Roof’s mammoth dome, and gaze down upon a world kept in perpetual near-darkness – it’s beautiful, but also angering. To think that, for the past four centuries, the wealthy, the powerful have purposely kept us in the dark to maintain their own dominance over the rest of us. To enhance their prestige. Their riches. To dole out their precious currently – Lux – so we can see see in the dark. So we’ve worked for them as their slaves, while they lived in their brightly lit mansions.

My Rebirth happened soon after I reached these lofty heights. When Sebastian guided me up through the long-dormant machinery of the Roof and, for the first time ever, I saw the clear light of day. And knew the difference between day and night. When I learned about the Sun, the Moon, the birds, the forests. It was all a miracle. A revelation.

But long ago, those in power disabled the Roof’s motor drive. Left it to rust as the world languished in near-darkness. Work had been underway for years to restore the Roof’s systems again, and that’s where I helped. To work tirelessly with the brothers and sisters in the New Order – the builders, technicians, craftsmen, electricians – and restore all of the disabled systems.

And at last, we were ready.

I stand at the cliff’s edge and check my watch. Ten seconds to noon, when the sun is highest in the sky. My heart races, and I pray to God this works.

On my watch, the second hand meetings up with the minute and hour hands...

A deep shudder rolls through the Roof, and a resonant hum suffuses the air around me. The main motors have come back online. Next, loud thumps and scrapes – almost deafening in loudness – as the locks are undone, their immense, foot-diameter steel bolts retracting.

Then a roar – the roar of freedom, as the mammoth structure, weighing close to a million tons, begins to retract open. I wonder what those below must be thinking right now. They can surely hear it. Down there, folks are watching glasses of water fall off tables as the whole world shudders in an all-consuming rumble.

“I’m sorry Mom! I’m sorry Dad!” I shout out into the chasm below. I’d vanished from their world, but it’s something I had to do. During my work, I could never go back, never risk blowing our cover. Not when we were getting so close…

A sharply pointed star of light burns through the hazy atmosphere, projects its blinding geometry across the city below. And it continues – each section of roof retracting like a curved pie slice, exposing more and more sky.

My world, kept in darkness for centuries, for much longer than was necessary after Great War poisoned the air above, grows brighter and brighter. Far below, people look up and see the Sun for the first time.

We are free. Free to climb up and out of this immense pit that has been both our home and our prison. It’s time to live again.

Today is First Light…