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The Bomb Shelter
#1
I'm not a very good writer.

This is just a recurring nightmare, probably from an old Twilight Zone episode my parents and brother were watching after Not One More Peep Out Of You Young Lady Or You'll Be Sorry time.

It was a rabbit trail from one of the first emails I ever wrote because I didn't understand the internet.

The person never replied and I'd spent several days writing the email so I pretended it was a story and put it on the internet because I didn't understand the internet.

It got five stars and I got fans and a death threat because the internet is just like that.

I got used to it. The internet is a huge improvement over the "special" class for emotionally disturbed products of broken homes in an upper middle caste suburb on the planet 1970s.

Feel free to ask me about Linux, online security, and pre-2008 Thinkpads.
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The Bomb Shelter

©2002 by Ashley. All rights reserved. Ashley has granted chronicsuicidesupport.com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.

I got down here before they started falling. This place is set up with food, cigarettes, toilet paper and toothpaste for two hundred people; the generators and air supply systems are working. I will be safe down here for the rest of my life and have everything I could ever need. I am here alone. This transmitter is fully functional; Hello, is there anybody out there?

Is anybody else alive?

Guess I might as well turn off the transmitter now. It's not to save battery power or anything, 'cause I've got plenty of that. Also food, clothes, cigarettes, toilet paper, toothpaste, air, water...more than I could ever use as long as I live. When I look up through the periscopic cameras, I see that nothing Up There has been damaged, so I also have houses, roads, stores, freeways, libraries, museums...4,000+ years of civilization's accomplishments and they all belong to me, I guess, because there's nobody else for them to belong to. The radiation would kill me if I went Up There, but it's nice to look at, anyway.

It's been so long since they started dropping them that I'm starting to forget what life was like before I was down here. I vaguely remember these hokey little things that didn't work very well and never did what you expected them to. They had a mild analgesic effect, but it wore off after awhile and you had to keep taking more and more of them and they never really made the pain go away. What did they call them again?

Oh yea, words.

Guess it doesn't really matter now.

But that's not why I'm turning off the transmitter; I'm turning it off because there's nobody there.

Paper.

They didn't include enough paper. How did they expect this paper to last 200 people for the rest of their lives when it's only me down here, it's only been 20 years, and this is the last sheet I can find?

The transmitter.

I'd forgotten all about it! Why wouldn't I? It's stupid! It takes up so much space that could have been used to store Paper, and it's completely useless because there's no one Out There. Maybe I can remember how to use it and it might possibly work as a substitute for Paper...

It's been thirty years now. My hair is turning gray and my flesh is withering, though I was little more than a child when I came Down Here. I have forgotten my own name. The "time*" seems to pass more slowly now. Sometimes the silence and the stillness press down on me as if they were something alive, although I know there is nothing alive, and I wonder...

I like to keep it as dark as possible now; I don't know why; it's not as if there wasn't plenty of power, there just doesn't seem to be much of a point...

It seems odd to long for oblivion, as my whole "life" has been one neverending stretch of nothingness; I can barely even remember before they fell; I think it's more like remembering a "time*" when I could remember...

And I still keep tapping away on the keys of this transmitter, which is almost more of a nervous habit than the desperate, futile gesture of screaming out into the darkness hoping that someday, somehow, somebody will hear...

Hey, I didn't write those words; now how the bleep did they get on the transmitter screen? They aren't even spelled the way they're supposed to be....

...nothing but those darned HTML codes again...


*still don't know much about it...
"variety, conflict even, is life and... uniformity is death" - Kropotkin
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#2
The SuperHeroAnimals are flying around outside somewhere. Just look for them with your periscope.
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