“Impact” by Ben Talley
3rd Place winner of our 2024 Winter Flash Fiction Contest
No one knew at first where Patty found the picture book, with its vibrant pictures of planets and stars and nebulas. There was a formal inquiry following the immediate confiscation of it. The questions were simple, yet I heard they yielded little. Best the regulators could surmise was that she’d had the book for a few hours. She’d stayed in the cafeteria following lunch, reading after pulling it from her backpack when everyone else had scattered to other activities. Others who passed her by paid it no mind, noting in their reports that it wasn’t unusual to see a child reading a book, and none had gotten a closer look.
It’s true that our stock of books is sizable. Aside from the digital backcatalogue that houses almost every book ever published, the physical selection is still impressive. More than half the initial population of the Trench Arc facility had packed books in their rush to flee the surface. Weight limits had originally been strictly imposed in pamphlets and orientations in preparation for Evacuation Day. But when Omega’s path accelerated and topsiders went from having weeks to prepare to days, the emergency subs found themselves packed to the brim with unnecessary paper. A few subs never made it, including the private vessel of one of the Arc’s architects. When the wreckage was found months after the impact, an entire library was discovered inside.
Three generations since then and we still haven’t been able to catalogue all the books. Citizens of the Arc are fiercely protective of their ancestral belongings, those artifacts of an open air world they’ll never see. Despite the laws and regulations regarding historical media getting stricter and stricter, despite the punishments becoming more severe, everyone still guards what is theirs.
We can all see where it’s going. In two more generations, knowledge of the surface will be thin. The digital archives are already being locked away bit by bit. The oral tradition of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ lives is being stamped out. Education is shifting its focus from the world that was to the world that is. No mention of the world that could be. All in the name of the survival of this delicate ecosystem we must maintain.
Everyone’s too afraid, too comfortable in the stuffy metal walls that are all we’ve ever known. That world our grandparents tell us about isn’t ours, it’s secondhand. It’s history. No one’s bothered to venture to the surface because no one wants to go on a suicide run. The ripples of the impact can still be felt.
Yet when I look into Patty’s eyes, there’s something there that I’ve not seen in all my life. There’s a question, one that won’t be satisfied with the answers those in charge will give her. There’s a yearning for more than what her world can provide. She’s not yet half the size she will be when fully grown, but already this place is much too small for her.
One day, weeks before the inquiry, she came to my desk after class and asked me, “Mr. Han, if the surface is above us, what’s above the surface?”
I could already sense the regulators breathing down my neck. “There was the sky, Patty. Miles and miles of air. The same that we breathe.”
“And above that?”
I chuckled. “What do you mean?”
“You said light comes from the sun, but my ummah says the sun is a star. She said the sky is full of stars, but I haven’t seen any in the pictures you showed us, so they must be above the sky, right?”
I trained for two years to obtain this position. Read a six hundred page regulation manual on what knowledge was to be encouraged and what was to be discouraged. I endured intense psychological examination to determine that I would not buck the system, that I knew what was best for the long-term survival of this community, perhaps the last human settlement on the planet. I was trusted with the education of future generations that would have to endure and surpass our own. Endure and surpass.
What I saw in Patty’s eyes as she asked those questions was a mind that still thought for itself.
I reached over to my desk and opened the bottom drawer. Beneath a mountain of colorful classroom supplies I found the notch and slid up the bottom panel. From that thin space I pulled a well worn copy of my grandfather’s favorite childhood book: Cosmos: An Encyclopedia for Young Explorers.
I knew she’d be discovered with it eventually. Like many young readers, she sometimes forgot where she was whilst enraptured with the book in hand. What surprised me was that she never gave me up when interrogated about where she got it. Of course the regulators figured it out anyway. They’re very good at their jobs.
But you know what? So am I.
I was hired to do a teacher’s job, and a teacher’s job I did. Endure and surpass. They may have taken the book from Patty’s hands, but they will never be able to take the knowledge from her. Just like they will never be able to take the imagination and the curiosity from the children that follow her.
Humanity was never meant to be confined to this trench below the sea, let alone this planet. Patty will see to that.
About the Author
Ben Talley is an Alabama Gulf Coast native, currently residing in Upstate NY. A former librarian and bookseller, when he’s not writing he can be found at the nearest movie theater or bookstore, or petting a cat somewhere.
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