We all agreed that’s what we’d heard.
The announcement, which had come from speakers secured in the corners of every room in the building, had said, “All personnel must get to the Weather Room.” We didn’t know where the Weather Room was, let alone what it was, if it was, but we agreed that’s what we’d heard.
We decided to ask around. Everyone else heard it too but was just as lost as we were. Herb Vrain suggested we find Fricer, that’s Polkin Fricer, the Floor Manager, as she usually knew what was up.
Outside, the light had turned night-dark. The wind had picked up, literally taking the head off the scarecrow on the front lawn. Corporate had put it there to scare off the birds. They said they got in the way of the beautiful building, but the building was not beautiful; it was just a concrete cube surrounded by mostly empty parking lot. The scarecrow hadn’t done its job once. All it did was add an uncanny, droop-shouldered figure to the landscape of grazing geese.
We ran into Fricer a few doors from ours. She’d heard the announcement too and thought she knew where the Weather Room was, based on a hazy memory of a meeting-in-motion, during which the CEO herself had nodded toward a door and referred to it as such. We shrugged and said good enough, let’s go look for it.
A few others joined us from different departments, most others shook their heads and groused about their timing being wasted before returning to their screens.
It took a few floors and hallway zig-zags to chance upon the spot Fricer half-remembered. Sure enough, there it was, a forgettable door marked “W. R.”
We flipped on the switch and saw an empty room. I mean, not only was no one there, but there was no furniture in it either — nothing besides the ubiquitous speakers mounted in each corner. Had we made a mistake after all? We all agreed to stay put, for a while anyway, and see if anything new was announced, or anyone else arrived to set things straight.
We’d stood around for just long enough for me to consider sitting on the floor when it happened. The building lurched, then fully shook. Then, all at once, we heard this explosive sound that had me convinced the world was ending.
We all dropped down to our knees or stomachs and covered our heads. The roar of whatever was happening outside that room was deafening.
When the mayhem finally calmed, we slowly got up, checked in with each other. Then one of us tried the door. At first it felt stuck, but a few of us managed to shoulder it open.
What we saw were ruins. Those of a building that had been torn to shreds by a force, natural yet at scales of power beyond our comprehension. All solid matter had been reduced to scraps. It looked as if we’d been the target of an artillery volley from the cosmos.
“It’s a bomb shelter,” I said.
“What?” said Herb.
“The Weather Room. Or something like it.”
After deliberating from inside the Room, the only thing that had survived whatever this was, we decided to step out and get more of a sense of what had happened, check for other survivors, and so on.
We did so cautiously, after making sure the air was in fact breathable. Lord knows how many pollutants were in it. We may have been walking through a radioactive cloud, for all we knew, and wouldn’t discover it until lesions began to form, or our ears fell off. But we felt we had no choice, so out we went.
We’d only gone about halfway down what was once the hall, but was now an indistinguishable pile of material refuse and pulp, when we heard the speakers click back on. The ones in the Weather Room. So we all scrambled back to listen.
“If you are hearing this, then you made it to the Weather Room on time. Please inspect the campus and determine if the business is still functional. If it is, then return to your usual duties. If not, then subsequent announcements will issue further instructions soon.”
The business was not functioning, that much was certain. In fact, it looked as if the storm, if that’s all it had really been, had wiped out the entire town. Looking out over the devastation, it wasn’t difficult to convince yourself the entire world had been wiped clean in a matter of minutes. Is the weather really capable of doing this, I wondered. The weather alone?
We sat and waited to hear more. And when the speakers snapped back on, we listened carefully. Alice had a pen and pad and wrote everything down. We had no idea then how important those pages would become to us. Sacred texts. They told us what to do in the next hours. Then, later, they told us what to do the following day. And the next. And in the weeks after that, the months, the years. How to live. Not just survive, but live again, together. To build something new.
We follow those instructions still. 90 years have passed since the storm that destroyed the world and nearly everyone in it. Yes, 90. And I lived through them.
Some months into the constriction of our new village, an announcement instructed us how to interface with the new world, and the new resources which grew and formed in it, to slow the aging process significantly. We followed them, ate what they told us to ate, performed the exercises they commanded without fail, and all of us, of that original group of survivors, went on living much longer than they ever would have otherwise.
You can understand why these announcements have been a guiding light to us in our new world. Without them, we’d not have survived a week, even if we’d managed to get to the Weather Room on time.
Who had recorded them? How had they known what was coming with advanced enough notice to tape hours worth of dystopian survival instructions? Why should our employers, who never treated us particularly well, share them with us?
These questions soon linger, but most days they do not occupy much thought as our focus shifts first to the tasks necessary to run our fledgling society.
Over time, a town has formed, of our offspring and some travelers who happened to walk by what was once a corporate park on a lonely road that hardly saw any traffic, even when the world was teeming with people. Now, it is the site of the Weather Room, the only salvation from the storms, none of which are as destructive as that first, the world’s last, but still would not be survivable otherwise. These new storms happen more frequently than tornadoes and hurricanes once did.
We’ve built our structures and homes according to the announcements, and they remain standing when we emerge from the Weather Room. However, the construction of the Weather Room has been kept hidden for us, and it seems our employers did not feel it necessary or permissible to build more.
Here we survive, more beholden to our employer than ever, long after concepts like income and employment have lost their meaning. Without their announcements, we would not know what to do other than what we already knew how to do. Thanks to them, and the chamber that keeps us safe, we are permitted to go on.
However, some questions weigh heavily. For example, what will happen when the population exceeds the capacity of the Weather Room, even with people sitting on each other’s shoulders, or otherwise piled on top of one another? Eventually, we will outnumber what the chamber can hold. Those who do not fit will be left to fend for themselves outside of it. They may even wish to venture out into the world in search of new Weather Rooms. That will be there privilege to do, if they wish.
Maybe an announcement will come some day that tells us how to build more Weather Rooms. Then our town will grow and expand beyond running distance of the one we have. Until then, we are grateful for the Weather Room. We thank our employers for this gift, daily. As for the original colonists of the new world, we are and will remain loyal employees, all of us, forever.
…….