Welcome to Story Voyager, your home for climate and fiction. This cli-fi short story based on a dream I had last year won the Lunar Award for science fiction.
There’s no doubt that Claudia is depicting a parallel, albeit fictional society, but her storytelling forces us to draw our own conclusions. We are astute observers, pulled into a tale of class struggle, with a dose of nearly spiritual agnosticism. This is fiction that makes us question our position in life and gives us an exhilarating narrative, one that allows us to discuss reform without loaded polarizations. At its heart it’s hopeful, which is a theme that can speak to anyone.
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of Lunar Awards
Illegal
A smuggled climate refugee must survive her first day in a high security city.
The time is 8:58 pm, and the alarms are blaring. I run through the empty alley, looking for the shelter entrance. 84A. 84B. 84C. The gates are in front of me, within reach. I look at the strange device beeping insistently in my hand. 8:59 pm. The gates start to roll down. On the screen of my device, I see a list of red entries. Late for check-in. 11 times out of 12. I throw myself on the concrete floor and slide underneath the closing gate. It’s 9 pm. The irritating beeping on my device stops, and a warning is shown on the display. You have one credit left. I’ve got the identity of a serial offender.
Earlier in the day.
It’s 5 am. The air is fresh, and the sweet dusk light sifts through the glass dome encasing the city. She walks past a football field where teenage boys play an early game under a couple of street lamps. The clean alleys lined up by real trees look pretty in the dim light, and she feels safe hidden in the semi-darkness. People walk by in a hurry. She has nowhere to go, so she decides to follow them. She needs to blend in. The giant silhouette of a white building towers over the landscape. The letters across the facade read: Tesla Dome City - Sky Train Station. There is a long queue of people waiting to enter the station. This will give her some time to think about her next move. She will jump on a train and see where it takes her. The queue moves quickly. She just needs to look normal. There are about twenty people left in front of her. If she gets out of the queue, it would look dubious.
Suddenly, she feels something wrapping around her wrist. A hand. She freezes in place. ‘Don’t turn around. Keep moving.’ She moves along in the queue. ‘The gates have an ID verification sensor. If you pass without a permit, you’ll be arrested.’ Two persons were left in front of her. ‘I slipped a device with all the digital paperwork in your pocket. It will synch with your chip. Come evening, look for shelter 84C.’ She feels a tingling sensation at the back of her head. Then, her wrist is free again, and she stands in front of the gate. As she walks through the gate, she hears a voice, ‘Good morning, Anita S.,’ and sees her photo with the personal details of a stranger displayed on a virtual screen. ‘Move along.’ She walks inside the train station.
The cathedral-like hall with walls of pink marble leading to twenty sky platforms is bustling with people walking briskly to their known destinations. She doesn’t know where to go. Anita S. must have a destination, but she is not Anita S. A passerby bumps into her, muttering, ‘Fucking immigrants.’ For a moment, she feels naked, standing there, stared down at by that stranger by the whole station, by the entire holy grail city encased in a protective dome with breathable air and clean drinking water and food and transportation and education and jobs and civilization. She wants to scream that she had no other choice, that it’s a desperate starvation out there. People are choking on the putrid air and melting in the heat with no water while you’re stuffing your fat bellies with food and plumping your skin with water. Instead, she bows her head and marches away to platform one.