“Morning, Sally!” I greeted her with zest, bouncing jubilantly into the dining room.
“Good morning, Pete! Got anything new you want to test on me today?” she said with a chipper ring in her voice. With a pair of tongs, she transferred freshly cooked chicken breasts from a pan to one of the temperature-controlled bins from which we serve ourselves.
“Not today. My muse and I worked all night, but alas, I don’t feel confident with anything I made. It’s missing something. Can’t quite seem to pull it together.”
“Well I’ve liked the little bits you’ve come up with so far.” Sally pulled a small chicken breast from the pile and pulled it apart in little pieces to snack on it.
“That was the stuff that I actually felt confident sharing, and they were little rhymes at best, not even fully lyrics. I don’t understand why I can’t string together a song. It feels like it should be so natural but it just isn’t happening.”
“You’ll get there. Why don’t you sing for us what you’ve got so far?”
“No way, I’m not singing a bunch of random rhymes for people.”
“Why? Are you shy about it? It’s just us. We’re like family,” she said, slicing chicken.
“We’re also the only humans alive. I’d be literally embarrassing myself in front of every human alive in the universe.”
“When you put it that way, even I feel the pressure. Geez.” Sally shuddered. She absently grabbed a nearby knife and put the chicken down on the cutting board.
“You know, it would be nice to have some backup out there when I’m playing music. When we were all playing with the instruments, was it just me, or did you know your way around a violin?”
“What? Me? No. I was just playing with it. It was really pretty and I liked how it sounded.” She tried to shrug it off, but when she touched the violin and held it close, it was like she was cradling an old friend. The music that came from it when she played was heavenly, albeit short.
“Yeah, my point is that nobody else could make it sound like that, just you. I’m pretty sure you used to play the violin pre-apocalypse.”
“What? Me? No way. I can’t make music as pretty as you.”
“You don’t know that if you haven’t tried it since then. You don’t have to play in front of everyone, we can play in private until you feel like joining me one day, maybe.”
“But, it would be so scary to play in front of everyone.”
“Would it, Sally? You think so?”
“Oh, shut up,” Sally and I shared a laugh. It was the first pause from our conversation that gave me time to realize she was cutting the chicken into tiny cubes instead of strips.
“Hey, Sally, what are you making, there?”
“Oh, I’m cutting up the meat for Mister Sprinkles. He could choke on the meat if it’s too big and he’ll just start swallowing it whole if…” Sally stopped cutting the meat and paused, looking down to see herself. Her smile melted and she gently placed the fork and knife down then backed away from the counter.
In my bumbling foolishness, I asked, “Who is Mister Sprinkles?”
“I don’t remember.” Sally’s lips trembled. She put her hands to her face as water welled in her eyes. She took deep breaths and began to fan herself. “I don’t remember, but… I know he needs me. It’s just him and me, but… I can’t remember his face. Sometimes I wake up hugging a pillow expecting it to… be alive. I don’t know.”
Breaking down into sobs and sniffles, she shook her head as she removed her plastic gloves to wipe away the tears running down her cheeks. I slid over the counter to comfort her with a hug.
“Has this happened before?”
She nodded her head and after a few breaths spit out, “almost every day.”
“Have you told anyone?”
She shook her head. For the last few months, she had been dealing with this in silence, telling not a soul. Her chipper demeanor masked her quiet sorrow, but that was all of us, was it not? Surely, the others were each dealing with shadows of their past, holes in their reality unfulfilled. I did the same thing when I was assigned to be a janitor. Even though it didn’t feel right I did it anyway. Luckily, I found what felt right for me.
Sally asked only one thing of me after the incident. “Please don’t tell the others.”
I kept it to myself and life went on normally. Wake up, clean, play music, explore. Life wasn’t bad. Sally began to play the violin and jam with me privately. She was shy at first, but competent.
Once she became comfortable playing around me, she made some beautiful music. Her emotions were powerful, and so too was the music she coaxed from the violin. I wouldn’t be making music for the new world alone, we would all do it together.
In my explorations, I began to encounter more restricted areas. On the first floor, the only restricted area was the airlock for going between the bunker and the outside world. That was the only exit and locked until the conditions outside were permissible. Nobody had the access to open it prematurely.
Since we could not go outside, observing was all we could do. We stared out the window at a city in the distance, or what remained of it, in the midst of another storm. The tall buildings were stripped and worn down to their bones with one collapsed and leaning on another. We collectively pondered how our species almost wiped itself out.
“I wonder how many people lived in cities like that.” I absently strummed the guitar, playing with the chords as we talked.
“I feel like I lived in a city like that,” Susan said, a book in her hand. She had begun taking books out of the library despite the sign not to do so. I would sometimes find them lying around the bunker with a corner folded to mark her spot. For all the books that had been stored, nobody thought to include bookmarks. After a pause to contemplate, she continued. “I hated it. There were so many people. Easily a million or two in a city like that. You won’t find peace and quiet like you do here. We’re better off without places like that anymore.”
“But if it weren’t for those cities, we wouldn’t have all the technology we developed. Cities weren’t the problem, it was the people in them overusing everything. I don’t remember too much, but I remember waste being an issue. People were dirty, lazy, and thought the planet wouldn’t bite back after we abused her so much. Speaking of abuse, I need to teach my kidneys a thing or two. Hey’a, George, can you hand me the whiskey?” Joe coaxed a round of laughter from the group. Next to him, Sally was more publicly affectionate than normal after a few drinks.
“You know, Joe, you’re good at breaking the tension that immediately arises when the apocalypse becomes the subject of discussion,” I said, noting the welcome mood shift.
“Nobody wants to talk about the end of the world, even after we’ve lived through it and are tasked with starting humanity over again,” Willow said from her bean bag. She was curled up near the heater in a blanket, reading a book Susan had recommended.
She was right. I myself didn’t want to talk about it, but when I was trying to come up with songs it didn’t seem like there was much else to talk about. In an attempt to delve into the human soul, I tried getting the others to open up.
First, I approached Susan, but she was not receptive. I tried to catch her before she started reading, but that only annoyed her. Since she spent most of her time nestled away, it was tough to speak with her. To the contrary, I could talk to Laura any time I wanted about whatever I wanted. In fact, the more philosophical the line of inquiry, the better. But, neither of them seemed conflicted, or burdened like Sally.
I caught Anthony on his way to his daily soil test. He was in a bright mood, which could be noted from down the hall by the pep in his step. Every day the tests were a bust, so his mood was curious.
“Hey, Anthony. You’re in a good mood. Where are you off to?” I already knew where he was going, but wanted to make sure I hadn’t got the time wrong.
“Daily soil test!” He smiled. “Want to join me?”
“I’d love to.”
“How’s your day going, Pete?” he asked.
“Pretty good, I guess. I’m a night owl, so my day just started a couple hours ago. But, I’m looking for musical inspiration to write songs and stuff. So, I’m trying to spend some one-on-one time with everyone, see what you guys do, you know?”
“Totally, man! I can’t wait to hear some music again. I like to just kick back and close my eyes in the dining room and just listen to you play. There’s something really relaxing about it.” Anthony led us into the lab, a small round room with a sealed compartment on the far end from which Anthony would retrieve the sample every day.
Next to that compartment was a station with lab equipment. One of those things that spin the vials, a microscope, stuff like that. I didn’t know how anything worked and I was told explicitly not to touch it.
“Oh, wow. A meaningful emotional response is the goal of every artist, so that’s quite a compliment, thank you.” I followed Anthony past the desk with the equipment I wasn’t supposed to touch to a mini fridge I had found while exploring.
“You’re welcome.” Anthony reached into the mini fridge and withdrew a bottle of tequila, then set it on the shiny metal table. From a cabinet full of vials he pulled two shot glasses. “Tequila okay?”
“Sure. What are we celebrating?”
He poured two shots and put the quark down next to the bottle. “Let’s say, it’s for the company!”
“You got any salt? Or a lime?”
“I used to, but now I just do it straight.”
“Okay, well, let’s do this.”
We picked up our glasses and dinged them together, then took a shot. My face puckered up and I squirmed, but the chill made it easier to bear. After the shot, I followed him to the compartment with the soil sample. He pushed a button on the control panel and a smoky white gas was sprayed into the compartment, accompanied by a loud whizzing sound. After the spraying stopped, a loud whoosh of air filled the compartment.
Upon completion, a light turned from red to green and Anthony withdrew the vial of dirt. He poured the dirt into a small metal tray and slid the tray into a machine with which I was completely unfamiliar. It had a large screen where Anthony directed the machine to analyze the sample. A circle appeared on the screen, written in the middle: Analyzing.
All this time, I thought he was looking with his own eyes at something to determine if the soil was good, but if this was how he did it, anyone could do his job. Then again, perhaps the machine was more technical than I was giving it credit for.
“Is that it? This thing just scans it?”
“The machine administers a set of volatile chemicals that breaks up the sample and identifies the substances within. If it weren’t for this machine I’d have to carefully do it myself. The dirt always has a high metal content, it’s very strange,” Anthony said.
“So we just trust this thing to tell us if the dirt is okay?”
“Gotta trust the science, my friend. Ready for the next one?” While the machine analyzed the sample, he poured another round of shots and handed me one.
“Alright. What’s this one for?”
“What else are we going to do while this thing analyzes the sample?”
“Couldn’t Susan recommend a book?”
“Those books are lame,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why they got stored here in the bunker to restart our species.”
“Maybe you just didn’t vibe with the genres you read?”
“Nah, I checked, they were all stupid. Cheers!” We dinged our shots together and took another drink. After a few seconds of silently watching the screen count up to one hundred, Anthony turned back to me. “So, find any more cool stuff?”
“I haven’t been exploring since I found the instruments. I’ve mostly been playing music but I’ve found a few more locked doors. Maybe I’ll get back to exploring. Hopefully I can find some inspiration deep in this base.”
“Do you think you’ll find, like… you know… all the people in stasis?” Anthony asked.
“I hadn’t considered that possibility. That would be weird, wouldn’t it?” The thought of finding a room full of sleeping bodies freaked me out. Anthony pressed his lips together and nodded his head.
“I’ve thought about that, all the people somewhere in the base, and about how we don’t remember anything.”
“What do you think?”
“What if we’re clones? What if we couldn’t keep people alive long enough to survive the apocalypse so they cloned people. That’s why our memories aren’t there. They weren’t erased, they were never there to begin with. They programmed our minds with learned knowledge, but not memories.”
“Woah, dude, you’re blowing my mind. We could be clones?”
“Clones of important people, maybe? Or, very capable people? Because, why would they wipe our memories? It doesn’t make sense. That could be useful information to prevent us from going down the same paths we did before.”
“That’s a good point. Preventative knowledge is useful. Shit, I could be a clone.” I looked at my hands and examined them, feeling my skin to see if I was any less real than a minute ago. What if I was a clone? What does that mean about who I am? Does it change anything? I’m technically still me, whoever I’m supposed to be.
“Yeah man… Why do you think I started drinking?”
“This thing is barely forty percent done. I just wanted to hang out and get to know your life and you’re over here blowing my mind, telling me I’m a clone. Let’s pour another one, fuck it.”
With a laugh, Anthony poured another shot for us both. The results were a bust and we drank to celebrate. The rest of the day was filled with drinking, board games, and playing with instruments. Anthony did not have a musical bone in his body, so he was pretty useless. Still, we had fun, but I got nothing done that day. The greatest thing burdening Anthony was the theory that we are all clones. After that, I also had uncomfortable questions about the nature of my existence.