The Shaft

Nobody alive has seen the sky. Your grandmother swore her grandmother had, but she also swore the pumps could talk, so nobody listened. What everyone knows — what the Broadcast repeats every shift change — is this: the surface is dead. Burned. Poison for a thousand years. The Shaft is all there is, and the Shaft is generous, and you should be grateful for your bunk. You are a mechanic. You work the machine decks at the bottom, where the great pumps hammer day and night and the air tastes of hot grease. Last week, clearing a flooded service crawl, you found a locked steel box. In it: photographs. Green hills. A sun. And a maintenance log, dated one hundred and forty years after the surface was supposed to have died, signed by an inspector who had walked out of the top airlock and come back. You have told nobody. There is nothing to tell them yet. There are fifty-nine levels between you and that airlock. The machine decks, then the agricultural terraces that feed everyone, then the light-flooded administrative floors where the elite live and the Broadcast is written. Every one of them is locked, patrolled and watched. You have a cable whip, a strong back, and one piece of evidence. The truth is above. Climb.