The Tunnels

Title	The Tunnel
Genre	Sci-Fi
Warnings	None
Rating	PG
Words	724
The Tunnel came from a combination of random stimuli, including the short film More, a rereading of Fahrenheit 451 and a healthy dose of nihilism.

* * *

The underbrush left a pleasant sting against her skin. Full of brambles and webs and thousands of nameless insects, the thicket engulfed her in oxygenated protection. Faceless hunters crawled from the tunnel, their spotlights pale and weak compared to the sun.

Her respirator lay in the gravel near the tunnel. The metallic hounds circled it and considered the taunting challenge. In a sea of oxygen, the mask continued to breath, to filter, to alert the hounds to its owner’s transgression.

She crawled through the brush without fear. Here, above the tunnels, the hounds couldn’t track her respiratory signature. No matter how much noise she made, they couldn’t find her. She knew this. The mechanized beasts that hunted her were her father’s “other children.” They were the babies he had nurtured for years under harsh fluorescent lights.

The sound of the hounds’ motorized limbs came as long-forgotten memories. As a child, the colony had hailed her father’s research. The hunter hounds would guard the colony against the insane mobs that remained on the surface and the unbalanced residents that tried to disrupt the peace. Each person’s individual respiratory signature could be programmed into the hound’s memory. No parent would ever need to worry about their child losing their way in the tunnels, and no child would ever fear their parent wandering into the darkness alone.

Her grandmother fought the program for years, to the point that it drove her mad and she activated a prototype’s guardian system. Her father had hung his head and listened to the words of the medics - dementia, Alzheimer’s, psychotic episode - as they incinerated her eerily still body. It wasn’t until her father died, and the project was turned over to her cousin, that the people understood the horrible repercussions.

The cousin and his power-hungry nephew seized control of the colony. The respiratory signatures of any dissenting member were transmitted to the hunters’ guardian systems. In those first few weeks, the incinerators ran day and night, until any remaining dissenters closed their mouth and learned to accept their new rulers. Her cousin ordered teachers to stop telling the truth of the underground colonies, and an entire generation of children grew up believing humans were underground creatures.

It was that afternoon, when her son came home repeating the nonsense from his class, that she decided she couldn’t be silent any more. Her father created the mechanized monsters. It was her duty to stop them.

She had her son gather his friends in their small, dusty apartment and showed them her grandmother’s albums. Images of golden fields and foamy surfs, of children climbing trees and high-rises reaching the sky. She gave a picture to each child and told them to get their parents.

Within an hour, the colony was on lock-down. The children were taken to a secured room, the pictures confiscated and the parents assembled. Her cousin assured her that the infraction would be forgiven. The group of guards, flanked by hunter hounds, told her differently.

The sound of the motors was so distant it was barely a whisper, but it reminded her that she’d left it all behind. As she pushed the branches out of her path, she knew she was a coward. Her grandmother stayed until the very end and tried to use her death to change the future. Her father dedicated his life to work he was sure would benefit his child and grandchildren. She was nothing like them. She did enough to cause trouble and left without making her stand.

She stumbled into a vast sea of green. Behind her, the sun set in waves of red and purple and orange. She lay in the soft grass and, for the first time, watched clouds move across the sky. All her grandmother’s stories and pictures could never prepare her for the simple beauty of the moon’s journey through the night.

She didn’t sleep all night. When the colors of the sunrise splashed against the endless sky and the birds began their day again, she realized she’d made it. She was alive. The hounds were miles away, probably standing over her respirator waiting for her to come back. Her family was going about their day, not mentioning her name or even thinking of her. She was alive, but so very alone.

She prayed for the hounds to come.