Dereliction

The university is once again, well, empty. I do the whole exercise here every week and I think I'm slowly going mad. Always the same old walls and the same rotten shelves full of old books, all of which I've already read. But every time I hope to find something new, Pa won't let me look outside the university. "Campus! Otherwise I'll take Eddy away from you!" I hear myself mutter in a mocking voice. Empty threats, Dad is far too nice for that. Well, at least this is a welcome change from my usual climes. 

The university library is in surprisingly good condition apart from the rotten wooden shelves. Huge marble columns rise some fifteen meters into the air where they hold together the almost completely preserved vaulted ceiling. On top of that, some tables stand on almost all four table legs. The plastic chairs are also holding up quite well for their age. I've even tested them myself. Sometimes I sit here as a matter of course and imagine hundreds of people scurrying around, exchanging books and knowledge and talking about their favorite novels. Other than my own imagination, however, I don't have much information about the inner workings of a library in the old days. Books on the subject are, ironically, few and far between.

At the moment I'm standing there motionless, my head-up display flashing numbers and beeping sounds that I've been ignoring for years. I look around: The same four shelves on the north wall are - not particularly surprisingly - still there. The west side has been dead for a long time. We used the usable wood from the former racks there to build an entrance to the gallery. The actual spiral staircase had already collapsed when my parents arrived. My old man helped me with the ramp so that I could rummage around upstairs for more books. In fact, the first few times I found some useful non-fiction books, on history and geography, which kept me fascinated for a few weeks. One of them was a summary of the leaders of the free world over the last few centuries. However, the book was not really objective in its portrayal of the personalities. Apparently there were already a few idiots back then. Well, that was to be expected. Non-fiction, not factual. 

Gifted as I am, I make my way up the improvised ramp to the second floor with only one stumble. Maybe a miracle has happened and everything up there looks different now - nope, all the same. I'm starting to get the feeling that boredom is finally driving our species to extinction. Okay, probably the shortage of scrubbers for the safety helmets first. Or water, probably water. 

From up here, you have a pretty good overview of the library and can also see a bit of the outside world through a few glassless window frames. Shades of grey and brown dominate the view, other colors are nowhere to be found. Sometimes I'm sad that I'll never see trees outside like the ones in the books or plants like the ones in our hydroponics. But somehow I like the shades of gray more than most of the others that remain.

Unfortunately, there are no new books up here either. Just like last week and the countless ones before that. When I take the obligatory look over the ornate railing of the gallery to the first floor six meters below, I feel a little queasy. I've never liked heights. People in the past probably didn't have that problem; some of the remaining monuments in the outside world are so high that they touch the sky. Far beyond the range of my father's occasional excursions, on a clear day you can even see a structure in the middle of nowhere that stretches for miles into the sky, like an endless cable. Pure madness, I'm already getting weak knees up here.

As I descend the improvised ramp, the construction crunches and cracks as unappealingly as ever. I'm still about two meters up, above stacked tables, chairs and wooden planks, when the crunching is replaced by a new, louder and even more unappealing sound and the ramp, on which I was standing firmly a second ago, collapses beneath me. Clever as I am, I try in vain to hold on to the air before slamming head first onto a table top a meter below, which gives way on one side and steers me less than gently towards the marble floor. The impact is cushioned by the protective suit I'm wearing and the plasto-glass visor of the helmet is almost indestructible, but the awkward landing on my spine still hurts like hell. 

"Fuck!" The numbers on my head-up display flash at a new, faster pace.

"Alex, are you OK?" a voice sounds in my helmet's comlink and I'm reminded that my father won't let me go up all by myself after all.

"Eagle One to Papa Eagle, construction is unsafe, fell over, over."

"Do you need help?"

"Negative, just a little shaky, return to base, over."

"See you in a minute then." In the background, I can hear Lily asking if I'm okay. My father replies, apparently moving away from the comlink in an annoyed voice: "Yes, but the next time I find a book about military radio, I'm going to burn it. "

"I heard that Papa Eagle, over and out."

The staircase to the living area is located two corridors away in the Audimax: a roundish hall with a plastoglass podium in the middle and around 300 seats all around. The entire room is almost as good as new, although we have borrowed some of the furniture or swapped it for more important resources. The stairs to our living area are directly below the podium, with the podium itself acting as a lever for the hidden trapdoor. The entire facility below was built hundreds of years ago and was intended for the university's students, as a shelter in the event of nuclear war or other crises. That is why it is also equipped with a security lock and three supposedly redundant filter and cooling systems - only one of which is still working. The remaining settlements further inside the city were built much later and are therefore partly more modern than our home. The majority of the remaining residents know nothing about our living area and that's a good thing. 

After the stairs lead down about 15 steps, I laboriously open the first airlock door. In the meantime, the flashing numbers on my display have been joined by a rather nasty warning tone. Wonderful. With the door closed behind me again, I operate the usual levers inside the airlock with the usual movements. The ventilation system hisses and the warm air around me finally becomes more pleasant. Even with the cooled protective suit, you can feel the heat from the outside world, which is not life-threatening in itself, but it is, shall we say, annoying. This is particularly noticeable when you have to do some business, as the suits have to be taken off for this, which is impractical. Whoever came up with this is obviously a masochist. That's why Levi has been out a few times wearing only a helmet and no suit, the maniac. 

After the small light above the second airlock door finally lights up in a dimmed yellow-green, I open the clips in the middle of the suit, which extend from my neck to just above my hips. After the second clip, the gray suit loosens over my entire body. The helmet works in a similar way: The flexible Durillium fabric of the inner material loosens over the skin via two clips at the front of the neck and the back of the neck. This makes putting on and taking off the suit and helmet child's play.

No clothing is worn under the suit, as cooling takes place via a reaction between the electron-charged fabric fibers and the skin. The big advantage of this is that we can set up a wardrobe with clothing in the airlock, which is always nicely pre-warmed by the irrespirable but still warm air when you get home. Jackpot!