Page 6 of A Better World

They pulled up a long, circular driveway. At the center was a giant colonial three stories tall, with a wraparound deck. “Should things work out, this house will be yours,” Zach said.

The kids went bananas. They ran from room to room, claiming potential bedrooms, standing over the fireplace like it was magic:Does it work?Hip asked.We could roast marshmallows!Josie cried. Then she did a hula hip dance, shouting,S’mores!

The thing about fifteen-year-olds: they act like they’re thirty, and they act like they’re three.

The smart house was four hundred square meters and came with a maid. Handprints opened every door. The windows darkened or became transparent by voice command. Food got ordered and deliveredthat way, too. Though the furnishings tended too much toward red velvet and gold paint, it was sumptuous, with the kinds of small details, like plaster molding and blown-glass door handles, that cost a fortune back home.

When Linda’d seen pictures of places like this—screenies showing trillionaire lifestyles—she’d never really believed they existed. She’d assumed they were fantasies generated by sophisticated AI.

…Russell was great at his job. But was hethisgreat? Was anyone?

She breathed, practically high off the sweet, clean air (it was so fresh!), and pictured her family in this big house, walking from room to room, laughing. They could host plenty of dinner parties. The kids could invite scores of friends to basement sleepovers. With all that company, she’d keep the fridge permanently stocked and she’d never have to say:Sorry, no milk this month; no fruit this week; it’s all cans until the farm shipments arrive, because they lived on the farm. It was all here.

Their tour ended with the underground shelter. There were six entrances across town. The access point Zach chose was at the lip of Caladrius Park.

They climbed down a stone staircase, where Zach pressed his palm against a steel door. It opened, leading to a wider, grander set of stairs with bright motion lights that tripped as they walked down, down, down, until her ears popped.

“Cave-in is impossible,” he said, as if reading her mind. “This structure is meant to survive a ten-kilometer-wide asteroid. It’s stronger than Offutt Air Force Base. Better funded, too.”

The landing brought them into the Labyrinth, a five-kilometer network of winding tunnels that ran the perimeter of the actual shelter. To defend against invaders, walls moved and tunnels led to dead ends. You had to know your way to penetrate the belly of the place.

They walked a long stone hall until they came to a crossroad. Looking in any direction, each crossroad led to another crossroad.Labyrinthinewas accurate. It would be easy to get very lost.

“Watch,” Zach said. He pushed his hand against the wall. Like footage of high-speed cell proliferation, a glinting, handle-like protrusionbirthed from the stone. Zach pulled on that. A four-by-four strip of wall separated from its base. He let them through, and the wall closed behind them, blending utterly.

“Super cool, right?” Zach asked the twins with put-on excitement. It’s hard to get your tone right when talking to a teenager. They smell phony like a gas leak. He didn’t get it right.

“Kinda, yeah,” Josie said. “Unless we’re trapped and die here.”

It was cheerier now that they were past the defensive shell and inside the actual shelter. The floors were Spanish tile, the air dry, the soft lights following their movements like flowers in bloom.

“Is this technology using intuitive biometrics?” Hip asked.

Linda had never heard of intuitive biometrics. The world moved fast, and it should not have surprised her that her son knew something she did not. And yet, every time this kind of thing happened with either of her kids, she wondered: Where had they learned this? What was the shape of this future they were about to inherit, and would it be very different from the present she inhabited?

“Exactly!” Zach said. “You’d do well here to study that, by the way. We always need engineers. This shelter is the only place in PV where dayworkers aren’t permitted. That means we have our executives and our scientists—the best of BetterWorld—but we also need nuclear engineers, biotech specialists, architects, and even plumbers and sanitation specialists. There’s something for everyone. This doesn’t just have to be a buy-in for Russell Bowen. It can be a buy-in for your whole family.”

They toured the shelter’s various amenities: two libraries, several gymnasiums and lecture halls, and a sustainable garden. The bathing areas were communal, and the bathrooms were the European style, using little water, and connected to sewer pipes that funneled into a large tank with a bilge pump that pushed its contents to the surface. They also passed through the barracks: deep round rooms with spacious bunks, and an enormous kitchen, painted light blue and equipped with giant industrial ovens whose vents made a complicated architecture along the ceiling. Entire rooms on either side of it were stocked with canned and frozen goods.

“This is the showstopper,” Zach announced as they came toanother set of stairs, going down, down, down, for what looked like a half kilometer. The landing was open, but she could see metal pipework down there, and more tunneling. She was relieved when Zach pointed instead of descending. A day of touring had mashed her leg muscles into cooked spaghetti. It wasn’t so much the exercise, which she was used to, as being on someone else’s schedule; having to act cheerful and enthused was exhausting.

“There are three nuclear reactors built for the sole purpose of transmuting radioactive particles in North America. These absorb and stabilize radioactive nuclei. In other words, they reverse the harmful effects of nuclear radiation. We have one such reactor. Fat Bird is online and standing by. No matter what happens outside this town, Plymouth Valley will survive.”

“You’re kidding. That’s a nuclear reactor?” Linda asked as she peered over the railing and down.

“A mini one. In the event of ambient radiation, we’re safe. In the event of a direct hit, we’re still safe. Though we’d have to live down here for a lot longer than any of us would like.”

“How long?”

“I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but it would take twenty-five years to clean the Bell Jar. We could surface before that, but the snow would be neon green.”

Back home, the streams shrieked all the time about nuclear disaster. She’d never allowed herself to worry about it. The whole idea was too scary. Now, she gave it real consideration. In the chaos of the Great Unwinding, no one was watching the nukes. No one was safeguarding the reactors out in Asia or Pennsylvania, and making sure they didn’t leak now, or in transport to the bottoms of mountains, upon decommission. Leaks had happened in Nevada. In New Mexico, too. As for Tehran, it was uninhabitable.

“Don’t let me scare you. We hope never to use it,” Zach said, patting the stone leading down with pride.

“Right,” she said. But a survivor shelter industry had emerged over the last few decades. Companies had them and rich people had them and some families even pooled all their money together to reserve singlespots, as if these places were Noah’s Ark, and they needed at least one of their own to survive… Would people really spend trillions on something they’d never use?

“We’ll cast shadows for eternity,” Hip said in that awed way kids have, when they’re too young to know the apocalypse isn’t cool. They think they’ll survive it, and from the wreckage learn kung fu.

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