Underground
Kia ora!
I hope you all had a nice (Christmas 😉🎄) time yesterday, and are getting in some well-deserved rest today. This post was prewritten so I didn’t have to do any writing over the break, so I have no idea what my Christmas was like! It was probably pretty good though, they usually are.
Now, a lot of what I write on the fiction side of things, I like to think of as connected. There are different themes, different places and times and different characters, but I consider it all to be part of one universe. I enjoy writing this way, because it’s fun and interesting to me to imagine just how they are connected. A couple months or so ago, I tweeted about how it’s funny to me that I’ve been writing a story that is building toward a utopian-esque ending, only for a world-ending catastrophe to happen immediately afterward; but then I started to build on that idea.
In comic books, when a character dies or an apocalypse happens, it’s not always permanent; sometimes there are lasting consequences, but characters can come back to life in one way or another, and certain events can be reversed. So I took that idea and applied it to my universe; and that brings me to the little snippet I’m sharing today, from a WIP tentatively titled ‘Underground’. This entry is about a young woman named Vai who lives in an underground bunker many, many years after an apocalyptic event. This story will follow Vai as she lives her life, having never known what it’s like to live on the earth’s surface. She reads old archives from servers once connected to a long-dead internet, and fantasises about what it must have been like to go outside and sit under a tree, or to have a job, with a boss who says things like “You’re fired!”
I really like this setting, and I’ve been having fun thinking about it and trying decide what it should be like. What I currently have is pretty short, so what I’m sharing here is pretty well most of it. I hope you like it!
Vai was a gardener in the shelters. One of many. This cluster of shelters housed around 500 people, but some clusters were much bigger, and Vai counted herself lucky she lived in a smaller one, where the pressure to provide quality food products was not so intense. Gardeners in the bigger shelters of 1000 people or more had to work longer hours because there was a more diverse population, and a lot of people simply didn’t want to do manual labour. Vai didn’t mind the work - she enjoyed watching the plants grow and flower and fruit, it was a real tangible way to mark the passing of time when so little happened in the day-to-day life living in the shelter. She also enjoyed being able to pick a few grapes or a mandarin from time to time; something to quietly munch on while she worked. There was no stealing in the shelters, because everyone was provided for and concepts like money were unnecessary because the shelters sustained themselves almost autonomously. No one ever went hungry in the shelters, but Vai liked to imagine she was one of the so-called ‘fast food workers’ of centuries past who would steal small morsels of food from the heating units when no one was looking. She liked to imagine some tall man in a clean, pressed shirt pointing his finger at her and saying in a gruff voice, “You’re fired!” Vai liked to imagine a lot of things like that. There were archives in the lower levels of the shelters, and she spent a lot of her free time sitting at one of the computers and sifting through the remains of the once-great ‘Internet’; looking at old journal pages and personal profiles, image galleries of hand-drawn art, videos of people doing things that looked very silly, or very dangerous - but her favourite was reading about peoples’ personal lives. There was one person in particular that she liked to read, a girl named Ella, who posted hundreds of pages of personal thoughts and memories over her lifetime. Vai wondered if she would ever have the time to read everything Ella had written, and she wondered how much time it must have taken to write it all.
I’m really keen to get back to this one and write some more of it. I feel like this will be one of the shorter stories, once it’s completed - that is, compared to some of my other WIPs which I imagine/plan to make pretty long by comparison. I’m also not sure that I like the name Vai? Some of my characters tend to have several names before I find one that I feel like really fits, and it seems like Vai will be one of those. There’s a note on my phone that I keep filled with ideas for names I might give to my child if I ever have one, and I’m quite often delving into that when I can’t think of a name I like. The name ‘Vai’ is not on that list! 😅
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Thanks again, and I’ll talk to y’all again in a few days.
Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚
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