Grass Bunker
E.P. Vardon turned forty on the exact day the Big Clock broke. Although he would never say it out loud, he knew this was the end of Homesweet.
E.P. Vardon was the lead event planner in his community. He wasn’t a natural, but ever since taking refuge in Homesweet twenty-six years prior, he made sure to try his best to keep the people around him happy. Happiness was a vital resource. He organized diversions: card games, board games, storytelling circles, milestone celebrations. His own birthday, today, was something he had organized himself—an adherence to timekeeping that only a few of his generation still held with any real passion. But not all events were focused on levity. E.P. Snowman, his former mentor, had passed away four years ago, leaving E.P. Vardon alone to handle the necessities, such as sewing sessions, major constructions, sanitation days, and, with great apprehension, the opening of the Big Door once every 1.8 years.
The dead clock sent a chill down his spine. It faced the court blank as stone, featureless, uninterested. It should have lasted a century.
E.P. Vardon sent out five messengers.
Head Sole was the first of the Heads to arrive. Despite her crooked back, knee-length gray hair, and pocked hands, her mind was still a knife. She assessed the severity of the situation and, with a patience befitting her age, told three nearby boys to begin counting seconds.
One. One. One.
Two. Two. Two.
Each Head guided one of the five communities within Homesweet. At any given time, there were 100-150 citizens per community, with five total communities. These communities acted semi-autonomously. Everyone knew each other within their community. Everyone knew their respective Heads. There was a soft specialization, for diversity’s sake: some communities held expertise in livestock and food preparation, while others focused primarily on health, medicine, sanitation, and child rearing, with all five communities being semi-self-sufficient if need be. Despite their separate responsibilities, they had no secret pride in distinction. Inter-communal cooperation was an active virtue. The other four Heads commended E.P. Vardon on his quick call to action, and praised Head Sole for the clever idea of creating a time-counting group.
The Heads and Vardon spent the next hour, as best as they could tell, establishing a course of action, while the circle of five boys counted in silence, eyes pinched tight.
Head Gilligan, who had come underground at twenty-five, reminded everyone that the Big Clock was not an important part of their daily lives. That was intentional. “It had been the clocks of the world that ended the world,” he would often recite during storytime.
In the artificial light of Homesweet, forcing a work schedule, or preparing activities for daylight had quickly become obsolete. Rather, duties were fulfilled on the schedule of their own needs. Feeding the chickens was a daily occurrence, but for the average farmer in Homesweet, a “day” was more subjective: between sleeps, or after three meals, or in sync with the duties of nearby neighbors. This staggered, loose schedule was encouraged further by the demands of their energy grid. The majority of their energy was provided by the topsiders, and in limited quantities. Power outages were not uncommon. It was only when citizens settled into a staggered living schedule that the power grid stabilized. Electricity, which was used sparingly to begin with, no longer had heavy- and light-usage hours. The Big Clock, then, was only truly important for one thing: knowing when to open the Big Door.
Head Divot, emboldened by the quick thinking of his peers, requested a mathematician to be brought over from his community. The other Heads were confused by this. In Homesweet, they had never established an occupation specifically for math, although basic arithmetic and algebra was part of their continued education. But Head Divot asserted that if time was a collection of counting—he nodded to the young boys—that they would need their best “number counter” to calculate the time between now and opening the Big Door. He recommended Victor.
Victor arrived at a carefree pace, although a few stumbles betrayed her inner urgency. She was an abrasive 20-something, born in Homesweet. She had found solace in functions and variables early on, and would butter her bread with calculus if it were possible. Even Head Gilligan, who was wary of math and science, recognized her passion early, sometimes borrowing her from Head Divot’s community to portion food with respect to protein and vitamin ratios.
Victor, pale as an eyeball, ran numbers along a sheet of crumpled paper.
“According to Victor’s math,” E.P. Vardon said, “we have around 10,512 hours until the Big Door opens.”
“The problem is the spin,” Head Sole said. Homesweet was not stationary. It rotated underground, itself a sort of “Big Clock.” It could be opened at any time, but only at risk of exposure to contaminants and criminals. “If we open too early, or too late, we’ll miss the rendezvous with the topsiders.”
“What’s our window, Victor?”
Victor’s oil-dark hair tickled the page in front of her. “I’d need to know the exterior circumference of Homesweet.”
Head Fade squinted. “The design specifications of Homesweet are not to be shared openly, young woman. It’s a security risk.”
Head Fade was a skeptic. He enjoyed the sun, the sand in his toes on the cold beaches of Oregon, the tall, humid treelines at the edges of lumber towns. Hiding in the shelter at Wilhite Ranch was a decision he took seriously, knowing full well his future would be dark and cramped. Better than dead or diseased, he thought. But, over the years, he wasn’t sure if it was the correct choice. He had once glimpsed the inside of the white medical tent through the latch beyond the Big Door and felt that it was all too... peaceful? Where was the smoke? The stench? The screaming? The topsiders—doctors, scientists, Wilhite’s lineage, all bundled in gas masks and rubber tuxedos—were capable of surviving, were they not? It didn’t seem fair that, when the door opened, only a select few children were allowed the chance to adapt to the new world, injected with sedative immunological chemicals and shipped topside in bundles. The rest of Homesweet cowered and prayed for the future of the children, the future of everyone. Still, Head Fade remained loyal and charitable to his community, content with his responsibilities. He ordered his aide to fetch an ornate metal box from his dwelling, in which were the blueprints and maintenance manuals for Homesweet.
The circle of counting boys had made 170 marks, which was almost three hours. Dormie, a fifteen-year-old with a broken pinky, stirred in place. He grew impatient. His count was three marks ahead of the average. Head Sole relieved him from his duties, but sent him to find another person to take his place.
Dormie was happy at first. He was young and full of energy. Counting silently for three hours had been torture. But, after he found his replacement, told them what they needed to do, and stepped away, he felt alone and embarrassed. His four friends stayed, eyes shut, pencils in hand. He begged Sole to let him sit in again, but she said no.
“If you want to help, you can be in charge of finding fresh recruits and teaching the process.”
With that, Dormie became the self-titled Captain of the Minute Vigil. As the adults worked laboriously on whatever adult plan they were planning, he gathered volunteers, blank paper, sharp pencils, bottles of water, and snacks. With a little help from his older sister, Arnica, he created a system. Every twenty marks, one of the Minute Vigil would be replaced. The newcomer would sit down and start counting as soon as the member to their left made a mark. After another twenty marks, the member left of the newest member would be relieved of duty, and the process would continue.
The Homesweet blueprints were more than enough for Victor to finish her calculations. The opening of the Big Door was on the outer circumference. It led to a chamber with stairs and a ramp that, through a large latch (some would consider this the “real” Big Door) exited the ceiling and, if timed right, opened onto the Wilhite Ranch in Wyoming. There were six other positions where the latch could be opened to the air, but none of these were considered safe. Only the Wilhite Ranch had facilities set up to protect Homesweet from nuclear fallout, rampant airborne diseases, and raids from desperate foreigners. In between those clearing, the latch might open to bare earth. Rocks, soil, water, and other environmental factors could cause anything from an inconvenient mudslide to a disastrous flood. It wasn’t recommended.
All of these warnings had been written onto the blueprint as if the reasons behind the creation of Homesweet were just as important as the design itself. Victor ignored most of the text and focused on the numbers.
“We have a window of time,” Head Fade said, his spidery beard resting against his chest. “Typically, we open the door for one day. In and out. We get extra medicine, extra nutrients, hand over the children, and are good to go for another rotation. We never risk opening too early or too late, so we’ve never known how long we could keep the door open. Now, according to Victor’s math, we know. It’s 157 hours.”
“That’s basically our margin of error,” Head Sole said. “We’re trying to aim for the middle point, as close to the real opening as possible. If we don’t time it right, and lose a few hours here and there, we’re still okay. But if we’re off by—” she checked the scribbles on Victor’s lap, “—seventy-eight-and-a-half hours on either side, we’re eating dirt.”
The Minute Vigil held through one period of sleep. Captain Dormie and his sister, now First Mate Arnica, switched shifts in order to get their own rest. One of the Heads stayed near at any given time as an extra badge of authority. None of the young boys and girls holding the vigil truly understood how important their task was during these early days, and yet they handled the task with the seriousness of soldiers at war.
When the Heads and E.P. Vardon reconvened, they outlined a plan of action. They would attack the problem from four angles: Mechanical, External Biological, Internal Biological, and Cultural.
The first approach, what they called the Mechanical Plan, was the most obvious. Someone should try fixing the Big Clock. The issue was that the Big Clock was one of the few objects in Homesweet that used digital technology.
To the younger generation, digital technology was seen as magic and myth. Everyone knew that computers and technology had collapsed the world, forcing refugees to live in the false sun of fluorescent bulbs and tea candles. The older generation were equally biased against technology, but not nearly as superstitious. Candace, now forty-three, had been an avid player of computer games in her pre-teens. She frequented online forums for her favorite fantasy adventures, such as the Ultima series and King’s Quest. She had an online alias (Caddie_Baddie256) and several forum acquaintances, all who made fun of her mother for believing Wilhite’s false prophecy that the world would end in the year 2000. That time of her life was a universe away. But she secretly harbored a love of computer technology, and decided that if anyone could handle the impossible task of troubleshooting a digital clock, it was her.
The External Biological Plan used chickens.
Master Eagler (“Master” was a title his deceased wife had given him) was in charge of the incubator. Every so often, a chicken would grow past its egg-laying prime and would be replaced by one of the eggs in the cryo-fridge. The topsiders, understanding the urgent need for protein in Homesweet, had developed a device to permanently freeze eggs until they needed to be incubated. Whenever the Big Door opened, they would send down more frozen eggs than Homesweet could hatch; a few dozen healthy chickens per community were more than enough. It was decided that these frozen eggs could be used as a clock.
Victor, like always, did the math.
The incubation time for chicken eggs was normally twenty-one days. But, possibly due to the egg collection and the cryogenic process, these specific frozen eggs took twenty-three days to incubate. Master Eagler, an older man who had never fully lost his reliance on time-keeping, logged incubations according to the time on the Big Clock. Accounting for the time it took Master Eagler to walk between locations, and assuming his note-taking over the course of ten years was correct, Victor estimated that a twenty-three-day incubation time was accurate within plus or minus three hours.
Master Eagler’s son, Wedge, explained the process to the rest of their community. “We load an egg into the incubator every day. After twenty-three days, the oldest egg hatches. Then, the next day, another hatches. So long as we replace a hatched egg with a frozen egg every time, we’ll have a day timer.”
Most of the community agreed to the plan, although few understood. Only eighteen-year-old Rio was clever enough to ask how they would know when a full day had passed so that they could place the second egg. At this, Captain Dormie stepped in and said that his Minute Vigil was prepared to send a messenger to the Eagler family every 1,440 marks. He had already confirmed with Victor that the time between the Eagler incubators and the Minute Vigil was a three-and-a-half mark sprint, which she added to her calculations.
The third plan was the Internal Biological Plan. This plan was seen as the loosest, and possibly least-wise of the plans, but Iffy, one of the healthcare workers, promised that it would be useful as a tertiary long-term check.
Iffy and her peers worked primarily with the women of Homesweet, taking care of children and helping with the birthing process. Watching the time in terms of hours and days had long fallen out of fashion, but tracking menstruation and birth cycles had become its own sort of measurement. Tracking cycles was extremely important, especially in such a closed society with high demands on nutrition and a population that needed to stay within certain bounds. All of this, Iffy said, is what led her and her peers to believe that they could use the tracking of female cycles as a large-scale measure by which the other systems could be periodically checked.
“Think of us as the largest hand on the clock.”
Yip, a thin-haired twenty-five-year-old cleaner, was the first to notice the weight on Victor’s shoulders. Yip always had a compassionate eye, although he rarely confronted people. He liked to watch and listen. But in watching and listening, he saw that Victor hadn’t had a chance to sleep since the Big Clock broke. She was constantly writing, erasing, shuffling papers, piling pebbles and screws as crude numerical placeholders. It became clear that Victor could collect the data, or she could calculate the data, but she couldn’t do both at the same time.
“I’m your helper now,” Yip said.
Victor rolled her eyes. She could never accept help gracefully. But when Armistice asked Victor to collect Iffy’s Internal Biological notes, Yip marched over to the clinic as if he were Victor’s official delegate. From then on, he was.
The Cultural Plan was built with the same major idea as the Minute Vigil. However, the Minute Vigil was always meant to be a temporary fix. A circle of five people counting silently in their minds was bound to stop working at some point. Indeed, after twelve-thousand marks—well over a week—taking an average of five numbers at any given point to approximate a cycle of twenty minutes was too variable even for Victor’s increasingly adaptive functions. Instead, they would sing.
Life-long musician, Stimp Majors, was E.P. Vardon’s favored source of event entertainment in Homesweet. Stimp Majors fashioned percussive instruments from pots and pans, tightly stretched blue jeans, old cutlery, and anything else he could find. His musical instrument of choice was the Stimphorn, an instrument he had fashioned out of garden house, wine corks, and an orange traffic cone. He had taught many young people how to play and make music in their damp, dark world, and would often accompany the opening of the Big Door with his original song “Promise of Freedom,” which had a march-like rhythm and used all of the same chords as Queen’s “Living On My Own.” It was decided that “Promise of Freedom” would be their new metronome. Everyone in Homesweet knew it by heart. It was an ode to liberty—a comfort granted by Wilhite’s refusal to lock the Big Door from the outside. It had a pleasant, repetitive 120-beats-per-minute tempo. The song could be sung, hummed, strummed, or clapped to, and it could be repeated over and over as needed, from beginning to end, without slowing down for an intro or outro.
For sanity’s sake, the project of continuously singing “Promise of Freedom” was relegated to the court around the Big Clock, where the fewest people slept. The song could still be heard at a distance along almost half of the ring, but for many, it became an ambient hum, like birdsong or rainfall.
Like the Minute Vigil before it, the Singers were composed of multiple people, this time as few as six with no limit on how many people could walk by and join. Sometimes the court would be filled with a hundred passersby who would stop to watch or sing along, or just eat their dinner while slapping a hand against their leg or stomping a boot.
Captain Dormie resented the Singers. He had no part in it, and attempted to maintain the Minute Vigil with his friends and a few volunteers. Eventually the Vigil reduced to four tired kids, then three, and then the marking stopped. It was simply no fun. Why count quietly when they could instead join the marching unit, stepping in syncopated circles for everyone to see and hear?
Being part of the Singers became a point of pride. Of all of the clock-keeping plans Homesweet was attempting, this was the one that appealed to the communities the most. No one could do math like Victor; no one else had equipment like the Eagler farm; but anyone could join the Singers. It gave a sense of unity and purpose.
The first major hiccup occurred on day seventeen. The External Biological Plan, now often called the Egg Timer, had worked well during the first sixteen eggs, but when the seventeenth egg was placed, it was clear that the ninth egg had rotted. To be more secure, Wedge suggested using two eggs per day. This would not only act as a safeguard in case one of the eggs went sour, but also it would provide more accuracy to each egg’s internal incubation timing.
The problem with this was immediately clear to Victor and Yip. The cryogenic eggs provided by the topside were not meant to be an infinite source of food. They were meant to birth chickens who would then lay fresh eggs. In order to have two eggs in the timer for 438 days (the amount of days in Victor’s original 10,512-hour calculation), that would require 876 cryogenic eggs. They did not have 876 cryogenic eggs. Even worse, they did not even have 438. They had 215. The discovery of the first rotten egg revealed both the naivety of using eggs, and the arrogance of assuming, without counting, that they had enough in their cryo-fridge to use every day for over a year. They had to adjust.
Miss Ferret agreed with Wedge in using two eggs per day, but suggested switching to using one egg every two days once the timer was working. After using forty-six more eggs to start the counter again, they would have 169 remaining eggs. If they used one every two days, that could extend to 338 on top of the twenty-three days spent setting it up. That would be 361 days worth of eggs. This plan would not work to the very end, but it was the best they had at the moment. They decided to go through with it and hope that, through all of their other methods, they could establish a more secure clock before the eggs ran out.
At the clinic, Honor was happy to announce her pregnancy. In her mind, it would take exactly nine months to have a child. No one had the heart to tell her that the human body was not that precise, but they agreed that opening the Big Door any time before she had a child would be an obvious mistake. In this way, she felt like a large piece of the community’s future and encouraged her younger sister, Muni, to follow suit. She did.
When word of Honor and Muni’s pregnancies spread, fifteen other women joined in. They had wanted to become mothers eventually, so why not? It seemed to them, following the logic of the Internal Biological Plan, that the more babies being born at the same time could reinforce the other clocks in nine months.
On day thirty-nine, a report came in from a middle-aged woman named Carry Heel. Carry Heel had an admiration for the clock-builders that she never spoke of. In fact, she spoke of very little. Her reputation, if she had any, was of being a wallflower—quiet, but lacking thought. It was a surprise to everyone, then, that after becoming aware of the plans, she took it upon herself to measure the inner circumference of Homesweet.
The walls were not equally accessible. Over time, many plywood huts, sheetmetal shacks, PVC sheds, and other unofficial facilities had been erected, making the outline of Homesweet less like its original donut shape and more like a toothy yawn. Carry Heel, having nothing but time, fashioned a measuring device from an arm-length section of unused cable. Over the course of weeks, she walked along the edges, marking lengths with chalk or debris. She consulted the education chamber’s geometry textbooks, sketched contours onto cardboard, and eventually came to the conclusion that, no matter how inaccurate her methods were, Homesweet must be at least ten percent larger than what the blueprints stated.
This information, when presented, was hard to swallow. Unlike Victor, who was now famous for her math ingenuity, Carry Heel was often thought to be a bit of a dullard. How could anyone trust the math of a woman whose only notability in the last decade was when the sanitation crew discovered her collection of stray golf balls? Leona, who had looked through Homesweet’s blueprints enough to dream about them, was especially resistant to Carry Heel’s assertions.
“I would trust Wilhite’s official papers long before I trust that little rope,” Leona said, a bit of acid betraying her underlying worry that, in the end, nothing would work.
Knickers, a paper recycler, suggested trusting both. “Could be that the outside is smaller than the inside, couldn’t it?”
Head Divot made the final call. They would have Victor look at Carry Heel’s findings, and, depending on what she said, they would have her teach a taskforce how to measure and map the inner circumference accurately. This way, they could trust the final number and re-adjust accordingly.
Carry Heel, unaccustomed to drawn-out interrogations, left before the meeting was over. She threw her measuring cable away and returned to her daydreams.
That would be the last anyone spoke of Homesweet’s circumference.
The next day, data came in a tsunami. The Egg Timer was running on full steam, calibrated alongside the march of the Singers, and set on top of the clinic’s average menstruations of over five-hundred women. Victor crunched the numbers all night. Every deviation, every calculable uncertainty, was her enemy.
The Heads gathered at a table in Secular Reverend Hosel’s chapel near the court, music bubbling in the distance. Yip arrived with a new assistant, Lil Dimples. They unfolded a poster of squares. Each square was a day, and there were as many squares as there were days from when the Big Clock broke to when the Big Door should be opened.
“Victor’s getting some rest,” Yip said. “But here’s what we have so far.”
At the top of the poster, forty-three squares were crossed out in a rusty red. Lil Dimples pointed at the first empty square. “We’re here,” she said.
Then, Yip pointed at the next empty square. “Or here.”
And then, biting her lip, Lil Dimples added softly, “or here,” moving Yip’s finger to the third empty square.
Head Whiff—the youngest Head in Homesweet’s history—leaned forward and toyed with his mustache. He had taken over for Head Sole who, after the stress of the first few weeks, lost so much of her vigor that she was requested immediate replacement. Head Whiff said the first thing that came to mind: “Well, fuck.”
For the next few days, Victor was unresponsive. She had overworked herself. Everyone relied on her in a way that made her feel like a mother. She resented the “idiots,” as she called them, who had refused to take math seriously and were now pretending like she had a special superpower. Numbers no longer amused her. In fact, they scared her a little, each charged with the pressure of responsibility, hungry children begging for milk.
Dogleg, the largest person in Homesweet by far, set guard in front of Victor’s cubby. If anyone came calling, he would push them back with one hand. He was a wall. He had always admired Victor’s magical brain and soft looks, and quickly took the role as bodyguard with the secret hope that this would get her romantic attention.
“With Victor out of the picture, how are we supposed to keep going?”
Lawless, the organizer of the Singer shifts, reminded the Heads that most of the variability would have come from those early days; all they had to rely on back then was a rough approximation of when the clock stopped and the mental fortitude of a few young boys. Now, however, they had an established system. “Let’s just keep it runnin’ smooth-like.”
“This all still falls within the window,” Chef Mudder agreed, serving each of the Heads a large scoop of nutrient mash. “If we keep pressing forward, and making sure the Singers and the Egg Timer don’t fall far out of sync, it doesn’t matter much if we’re a single day ahead or behind.”
There was no need for further discussion. Losing Victor was a big blow, but she had done her part; now it was up to the system.
It wasn’t until they crossed out the eightieth square on the poster that Clarence, a middle-aged medic, thought to ask, “Whatever happened to the Mechanical Plan?”
Candace and her son Ace had spent the first few weeks digging through all of the files and blueprints the Heads had in their care. Many of the files were extremely complex, usually concerning air filtration, electrical generation, and water purification. When she finally found the user manual for the Big Clock, she didn’t know what to make of it.
On the surface, the clock was extremely simple. It had a large, off-white face with grayed-out segments that tracked months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. It was a monolith two-people high. There was nothing ornate about it. It was meant to be unobtrusive, incapable of inspiring awe or worship. The gray casing and the white clock face bled together in the flickering light of the court. The back panel was easy to unscrew, as if it had loosened itself over the years. Inside, wires connected the clock to the central power system. Circuit boards were well beyond Candace’s understanding. To her, they were a series of silver spiderwebs loaded with colorful angled candies. This is where she and Ace got stuck.
They spent every day looking at the schematics and investigating the resistors and capacitors, hoping something would make sense. They counted 158 distinct components, each a composite of chips and wires and screws smaller than a pupil. She knew from her childhood roughly how electricity worked: there were electrons, and they flowed through the paths on the circuit board, and sometimes the resistors made that difficult, and there was voltage? But she simply had no idea how those invisible electrons moved through the green plastic wafers and into the dead screen.
Ace, with a teenager’s shamelessness, told all of his friends that he and his mom were saving Homesweet. He talked about the clock’s innards as if they were talismans and enchantments. Howard, an old-timer with a background in plumbing, asked if his mother had gotten zapped yet.
“What’s zapped?” Ace asked.
It occurred to Candace only then that, no, she hadn’t gotten any sort of electrical shock. And she should have, shouldn’t she? She remembered seeing electrical zaps on cartoons and in movies—the bush-haired thief in Home Alone, skeleton scream, sparks flying. She had taken zero precautions against electricity. She even used her own son as a mole to dig around. They could have died.
“This is going to sound crazy, but... I don’t think the clock is real,” Candace told Nicklaus, her current lover. “From everything I’ve seen, none of the parts do anything.”
Nicklaus, a gossip-y, paranoid sort, was quick to spread this rumor around his community. Head Whiff caught wind and summoned Candace for a conference.
“It’s been five menstruations,” Head Gilligan said, performatively supportive of the Internal Biological Plan. “What’s this we hear about clock complications?”
“I think the components beneath the clock are dummy components,” Candace said. Wires led in circles. Circuit boards weren’t attached to anything. Resistors were attached to flat surfaces with glue. She had never found any electricity, and, moreover, the instructions were a labyrinth, almost as if they were designed to confuse.
“It’s curious,” Lobshot, a tailor, chimed in. “Now that you mention it. I’m old enough to know what it’s like to wear a digital clock on my wrist. Weightless little things with a battery the size of a coin. It does strike me as odd that our Big Clock would need so much to do so little.”
Head Gilligan fingered his curly beard. “It could be a safeguard the Wilhite family put in, in case someone were to attempt to replicate the technology. A bunch of useless parts, complete with fake instructions.”
“If that’s the case, it doesn’t change the fact that the clock certainly worked for us at one point, and now it doesn’t.”
Mrs. Mulligan, who had been knitting in the corner, let out a low whistle. “Rummaging through things we don’t understand—and should leave in the past—sure sounds dangerous.”
By the end of the session it was decided that the Mechanical Plan should be abandoned. It was only through their immediate desperation that they had thought to resuscitate the Big Clock. Now that they had non-technological systems working, the Mechanical Plan felt like an affront to their own history. Clocks had killed the world. Candace was heartbroken. It was the closest thing she had had to an adventure since her days playing computer games. After that, she smiled and talked less.
Ace, however, wasn’t finished. He and his friends spread the loose pages of the Big Clock’s user manual across the metal floor, marveling over its intricate images, pretending each leaf could generate endless sugar snacks or grant super speed. Percival held a diagram between two fingers, claiming it as his own private spell. Page seventy-seven. The image was a simple, small circuit board with a simple small circle in the middle. Ace was familiar with 158 components, yet had never seen that one before. It was the only piece missing. Someone must have taken it.
Muni had her daughter a week earlier than her older sister, Honor. When Honor gave birth, the child didn’t survive. It was a tragedy undermined by a time-keeping controversy: how many weeks had each woman been pregnant. This led to vocalized objections to the Internal Biological Plan, which, as far as the majority of Homesweet was concerned, had always been a farce. The objections had to be addressed. It was decided that the Internal Biological Plan would no longer play a major factor in the time-telling system of Homesweet.
This hurt former “First Mate” Arnica a lot. Like most, she needed to feel a sense of purpose. The Minute Vigil had set this yearning alight, but she had no business with the Egg Timers, nor did she have a good enough sense of rhythm to march with the Singers. At the clinic, fully invested in the Internal Biological Plan, she could, at the very least, accumulate data.
Now she found herself with a binder of useless information. She had toiled many nights perfecting sums and averages, and for what? While the rest of the community was celebrating day 200, she and Dormie regathered the youngest members of the Minute Vigil and decreed that they would return to being official timekeepers, as was their right.
The Egg Timer had, so far, been widely considered the biggest success, although it wasn’t without its issues.
Firstly, more eggs went rotten than they had planned. Even after calibrating to a two-days-per egg incubation cycle, this didn’t stop them from running through eggs much more quickly than they had imagined. On the celebration of day 200, they only had fifty-five eggs still in the cryo-fridge.
Secondly, they now understood why the topsiders had given them so many cryogenic eggs. There was no guarantee that the eggs would hatch into hens. Each egg was a gamble, and before long there were no fewer than fifty aggressive, territorial roosters floating around Homesweet. The roosters were welcome in that they ate bugs and provided nitrogen-rich droppings, but unless they laid eggs, they were a waste of dehydrated cornmeal. Many of the roosters were killed and eaten for the celebration.
But even the hens were taking up too much space and too many resources. Their soft underground ecology had not been designed for population spikes of any animal, beast, bird, or bug. Rake, one of the farmhands under Master Eagler, saw the phasing out of the Egg Timer not as a terrifying problem, but as a much-needed change.
Rake and Ma Bogey had spent the better part of the months working on water clocks: two-meter-tall devices that dripped water at the same exact rate. It took a lot of finesse, drilling, sealing, tightening, and waiting, but they had five ready, each calibrated alongside the others.
“See this?” Ma Bogey asked in a booming voice that surprised anyone who heard it for the first time. She held up a jar of water. “This is seven hours and twelve minutes, almost exactly.”
The Heads were quick to accept this new technology. Each community could watch as the sophisticated metal container dropped water into a jar. As soon as the water overflowed even a little, a watcher would replace the jar with an empty one. If every community did this, they could stay synchronized with very little cross-checking.
The water clock couldn’t have come at a better time, because on day 207, the cryo-fridge broke. The remaining eggs had to be rushed to the incubator.
No one knew how the cryo-fridge worked. There wasn’t even an attempt to read the user manual. It was a disaster. Within a few songs, the Egg Timer was dead.
Master Eagler dropped the title “Master,” saying he was no longer master of anything, and returned to caring for the hens and collecting eggs the way he had done for over a decade. Wedge pretended he was fine with it, having known the Egg Timer would run out of eggs eventually, but everyone knew he would attempt to restart the cryo-fridge before every meal.
Day 300 approached like a sunset. It should have been as big of a celebration as day 200, but the fatigue of monotony had saturated daily life. People handled their tasks, their repairs, their feeding and washing, with the same routine shrug they had before the Big Clock broke. It was getting harder and harder to keep the ranks of the Singers filled. Everyone was tired of the “Promise of Freedom,” and had been for many menstruations. Moreover, the water clocks only got better and better.
Senior Condor had figured out that precision could be increased if, instead of wide jars, each clock used a long, thin tube. They recovered a roll of rubber hose from storage. They cut the hose into equal segments and sent them to each water clock. The tubes could be unplugged on the low end as soon as they were full, removing the need to swap anything below the dripper.
Victor, who had had a long time to recover, reemerged into society. She was not any friendlier than before, but she was noticeably pregnant. No one knew if the father was Dogleg or Yip, and no one asked. Her retinue guided her through Homesweet. She assessed all the water clocks, talked with Wedge about the former Egg Timer, gathered all of the outdated files from the clinic, and even got filled in on the long-forgotten failure of the Mechanical Plan. Then she sat down, unpacked all the paperwork, and did some math.
A week later, she, Yip, Dogleg, and Lil Dimples sat at the Secular Reverend's table with a creased poster filled with squares. Lil Dimples spoke first.
“The last time we were here, there was a possible timing error of one day on either side.”
“We’ve kept the calendar going,” Head Vardon said. He had taken over for Head Whiff, who proved to be incredibly inept. “We have 131 days left.”
“You sound confident.”
“In ignorance, confidence is comfort.”
“Fair enough. But we’ve updated the math. It’s more likely we have 128 days left to go to the center of the window.”
The Heads sucked in their breaths almost as a single unit. They should have been surprised that they had lost track of some time, but three days was more than they had anticipated.
“Plus or minus seven.”
Silence.
Chip, who had taken to listening in on the meetings from just outside, wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She felt a personal obligation to act as a sort of neo-journalist, making sure people knew the truth. None of the Heads attempted to stop her, even though they knew she was always lurking about. But now, she felt the urge to stop herself. With the water clocks, Homesweet had gained a gentle, comfortable optimism. It was as if the worst was behind them. But, if she understood correctly, their margin of error was now outside the acceptable limits. The worst was yet to come. Chip did not want to be responsible for the spreading of this fear, so she went home and played cards with her grandfather instead.
The Heads were obligated to change the calendar. It would do them no good to pretend they had three extra days. They didn’t, however, explain that the margin of error had increased. As far as Homesweet was concerned, they were one day off on either side, and nothing more.
The next day it was decided that they would open the door early by three days. If they opened in the middle of the window, and were too late, they would have to wait another 1.8 years, and that wasn’t feasible. Instead, they would open early, and the worst case scenario would be handling the dirt, water, and debris that fell through. Hopefully the earth near Wilhite Ranch wasn’t deeply contaminated.
A week later, the Minute Vigil struck.
Twelve boys and girls, ages eleven to seventeen, marched into the court of the Big Clock to their own music, “Once Upon a Dream” from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The song was a waltz instead of a march, and was slower than “Promise of Freedom.” The Minute Vigil beat drums, shouted, shrilled, and stomped their way through the music, completely uninterested in keeping appropriate timing or melody or lyrics. The cacophony brought a lot of attention, but few helpers. A silken excitement spread through the area as the nearby dwellers eagerly soaked up a sound different from the one they had been listening to non-stop for a year.
“Promise of Freedom” had lost all meaning. It was originally an anthem meant to celebrate the promise Wilhite made to Homesweet in 1999, shortly before the world ended. He reminded them that the Big Door could only be opened from the inside. They were safe in Homesweet, but they were not trapped. “This is the promise of freedom,” he had said many times. “No matter how terrible it becomes out here on the surface, you will always have the choice to return. I would never take your liberty.”
By the end of the day, the Singers had broken up, and the court was filled with laughter and chaos. It seemed shameful to laugh in the face of their project disbanding, but they couldn’t help it. There was a sense of relief. Even Stimp Majors joined in on the fun, blasting through his long-dusty repertoire of Stimphorn solos.
The Cultural Plan was over.
With fifty days left, it was time to prepare for the opening. Typically, there would be a large exchange. The topsiders would lug down cart after cart of supplies, all while wrapped tight in their rubber, faceless suits, careful not to bring with them any airborne diseases or noxious gases. Then, healthiest young boys and girls would be sent up specifically to live with Wilhite and his family. They would be cared for in a place with far more protection than Homesweet, and given good lives. With any luck, they would become the future scientists and doctors that would cure the world, allowing the people of Homesweet to migrate topside themselves.
The water clocks had been replicated. There were a total of a dozen, all synced together, all refilled multiple times per day. However, it was becoming apparent that they weren’t perfect. Even a small amount of dirt or grime could change the water’s viscosity, altering its drip rate. The metal nozzles, prone to corrosion and mineral accumulation, could also become imperceptibly smaller. None of these discoveries were substantial enough to throw out the efficacy of their system, but each made it more clear how they were walking on thin ice. A single unforeseen issue could knock them back to darkness.
Three weeks before the opening, Head Gilligan passed away. He had had a nasty cough and unshakable chills, but no one knew for sure what sort of illness it really was. Some speculated that it was worry. It didn’t seem contagious, at least, but it was a bad omen nonetheless.
As if to make things worse, the water clock in Head Vardon’s community tipped over. Mister Nassau, a fermentation expert, fixed the nozzle and erected it in place, but no one bothered to haul it to another clock for recalibration. All anyone could think of was Head Gilligan’s stories about how worshipping time was what had doomed the world.
Homesweet was built on fear. Fear of death, fear of disease, fear of technology, fear of time itself. Even when the Big Clock worked as intended, opening the Big Door was a tense affair. Remaining locked away was the same as choosing life. No one knew what awaited them up top. They received supplies, sent a few of their youngest into the care of the Wilhite family’s topside research sanctum, then closed the door with a sigh of relief, hoping beyond hope that no one would show signs of some mysterious cancer from prolonged exposure.
At last, the day arrived. Head Vardon, now forty-one years old, led the way.
The court filled to its maximum. It had been a rough cycle, with more deaths than births, so the population was a withering 600. Even so, the court was fuller than it had ever been. Everyone wanted to see whether they had managed to time it right.
Head Vardon gathered the keys from the four other Heads, placed them into the Big Door, twisted each of them, and then, as if conducting a New Years party, started a countdown with the crowd. Ten! Nine! Eight!
Not everyone cheered along. Victor, Costa, and Yip rested in her cubby, rubbing her swollen stomach. Carry Heel used the distraction to add to her golf ball collection. Eagler stayed in bed, staring blindly at the bunk above him. Stimp Majors, feeling all noised out, was content to watch silently as Head Vardon waved his arms like an orchestra conductor, for once feeling like a real event planner. Three! Two! One!
Homesweet was a chamber of roars. Head Fade pulled a circuit board from his pocket and, at the crescendo of the cheering, threw it down and smashed it with his foot. Only Ace recognized the object.
With that, the door was opened into the next chamber. A small group, led by Head Vardon and Lil Dimples, made their way to the top. Dormie took it upon himself to spin the wheel lever. There was no locking mechanism, just as Wilhite had promised. The latch yawned open.
The crowd pulled in a collective breath. Pure white sunlight flooded in. For some, this was the first sun they had ever seen. For others, it had been twenty-six years. Tears shed. Pale faces pulled away. Stimp Majors laughed out loud. The sky was good news and bad news: it meant there was no risk of cave-in, but also, they were not beneath the safety of the white contamination tent. Maybe the topsiders had left already. Or maybe Homesweet’s timing was so offset that they were miles away from Wilhite Ranch.
Head Vardon looked around helplessly. No action seemed right.
Arnica pushed her way to the front. She was eager to do something, the be something. The last year of her labors were for this moment.
She hugged the metal ladder, taking a rung in both skeleton fists. It was only twenty meters of climbing, but her nerves and weak muscles fought her on every step. Her eyes watered. Her legs burned.
Outside, it was fresh, and green, and blue, and hot. She coughed yellow mucus into the emerald lawn.
“What. The. Hell.” A man’s voice came from not far behind. “There a sewer down there or somethin’? What the hell you doin’ down there, girl?”
As her eyes adjusted, she could make out two older men in white. They were next to a small vehicle. They each had a long metal stick, white visor, and a pair of dark glasses.
“I’ll be damned,” the other guys said. “No one at the club gonna believe the size of the gophers they have on this course.” He walked over and helped Arnica out of the hole, then looked down into it. “Holy hell. You gotsta be kiddin’ me.”
Arnica tumbled onto the fairway. She wiped the wet from her cheeks with a grubby palm. She sobbed. “D-does... anyone know... what time it is?”
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Sources:
Image: Lannie "Merlandese" Neely III
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