Dead zone — flash fiction

See my notes in this post about the prompted flash fiction pieces on this site about personal drivers and rules I use while writing them.

Plot Elements to Include (all prompts and genre randomly suggested by Gemini AI):

• The Object: A heavy, brass-bound radio that doesn’t receive signals from this decade.
• The Setting: A city perpetually covered in coal-dust fog where sound is regulated by the government.
• The Conflict: The protagonist discovers a “dead zone” where the fog clears, revealing a sky that hasn’t been seen in fifty years.

Genre: Dieselpunk / Alt History

“Gimme your ETA for finishing Delta sector baffler maintenance, Zed-Ought-Three-Stroke-Seven-Ex. We’ve got a situation in Epsilon and you’re needed immediately. Dispatch over.”

Cinder let dispatch stew for a few moments before responding. She’d been done fixing the bafflers ten minutes ago but had quickly learned that being too much of a go-getter in City Maintenance just go-got you more thankless tasks and a fistful of disgruntled coworkers to boot. No one liked a brownnoser, including the bosses because then they had to find more make-work for you and explain to their superiors why that was the case. And if their superiors thought there were inefficiencies in the system, they would reduce the workforce to account for those inefficiencies, keeping only the overachievers, who would then be saddled with more work than they could handle on their own. Let no good deed go unpunished was the unofficial motto of the dome maintenance worker.

It was always best to keep your head down and avoid notice, Cinder discovered.

“Zed-Ought—”

“I heard you, Dispatch. Cool your pistons, willya. Give a girl a shake to wipe the grime off so you don’t cuss at me for getting your comms all sullied. What sector in Epsilon. Gimme the situation readout while your at it. Over.”

White noise filled the airwaves which Dispatch figured out what they should have already figured out before they called her. “Umm, looks like… well, engineering is saying we have some kind of erm… unauthorized ghost resonance amplified by the metal girding and they want it checked out and silenced before it shakes a rivet loose or something.”

Cinder laughed. “A whodawhat?”

“Hey, I didn’t come up with the description. Don’t blame the speaker for the broadcast.”

“Cut the chatter you two,” interrupted a third voice. “As The Founder said: Silence is Golden. Therefore, I expect to hear more gold and less spent coke over the air.”

“Right,” jumped in dispatch. “Your ‘ghost’ is somewhere in the vicinity of…”

Cinder wrote down the location in her service logbook and pointed her personal diesel-powered dirigible to the coordinates she had been given. While metrodome did a good job of keeping the world’s extreme weather event out of the city, it also did an equally good job of keeping the smog from a biofuel economy in, which was not exactly a desirable effect. And, though the Founder had designed the dome enclosure so it would eject the diesel and coal smoke outside, there were almost never enough working vented fans working at any given time to prevent the buildup of smog within.

Sounds from machinery and fans vibrating in the dome would travel from their moorings along the girders, amplifying their noise to an ungodly din by the time it reached the residential areas; a design flaw that everyone avoided public acknowledgement of for fear of insulting the memory of the Founder. It was Cinder’s job to keep everything clean, running and as as silent as possible before the complaints were wired in.

She landed her dirigible on the service landing pad at the coordinates dispatch had given, setting her magnetic anchors before stepping out onto the catwalk swaying high above the metro and then clipped in to the safety rail. The catwalks had become a kind of merchant ship for her in the past few years and she walked with the swagger of a sailor on the high seas as the grated metal flooring moved in waves under her. The movement had made her sick to her stomach first but the extra ration cards that came with the elevated risk made her quickly overcome her hesitations and she could not imagine a time when she was not comfortable in these surroundings.

Close to the interior side of the dome, there was a rusty metal hatchway. According to the coordinates she was given the noise was originating from somewhere inside. She scrapped off the soot from the door identification label so she could call in the unlock code. The process took more effort than typical, meaning that no one had used this access point in quite a long time. No surprise, then, if a fan or a baffler was in need of more than a little tap of her wrench on the gear box.

She keyed her two-way. “Dispatch, this is Zed-Ought-Three-Stroke-Seven-Ex. I have arrived at the access hatch Y2K-LUL2 in sector Epsilon. Can you pop ‘er for me. Over.”

“Got it Cinder. Unlocking access hatch now.”

The servos in the metal walls squealed and crackled, neither of which is a normal sound for them to make, nor the type you wanted to hear.

“Belay that request, dispatch. The door’s gizmos are fragged, I’ll have to cycle it manually. Can you put in a request for someone to come and fix or replace them? I don’t have the replacement parts or I’d do it myself.”

The squealing stopped immediately. “Gotcha. I’ll let them know.”

It would be months before someone had the time to repair the door, but her supervisor would expect her to fix the ‘unauthorized ghost resonance’ all the same. Thankfully, she’d been around long enough to be given her ‘key to the city’, as they called it and she was able to open the manual emergency access panel next to the rusted door.

She swung the panel open, released a couple of levers and disengaged the servos so that she could hand-crank the bolts securing the hatch to the service duct of the dome. She lifted the metal bar keeping the door shuttered and stepped inside.

Cinder had expected almost anything aside from what she found within.

While obviously disused and dusty, the room was more elegant than anything Cinder had ever seen. Straight-backed and comfy chairs upholstered in lush, aged red velvet and trimmed with gold cord. Polished oak, something she had only seen in books from before the dome was in all of the tables as well as the flooring and trim. A fireplace filled with logs ready to light and an overflowing woodbin sat at the far end.

But what shocked her most was the bright blue pouring through a skylight that eclipsed the outer wall and part of the ceiling. For the first time in ages, Cinder felt the movement of the floor under her as her walk turned drunken while she tried to traverse the room.

“All this space,” she aloud, wondering how something like this had escaped the persistent gloam of grime within the dome. She looked outside the skylight, amazed to see lush forests and pristine skies outside. On the ground, animals grazed, bird soared in the sky, and everything seemed either brilliant green or blinding blue.

At the center of the room sat a spike protruding from the floor. Connected was a machine with no noticeable means of powering off or disconnecting from the spike. The machine was visibly shaking at a steady rhythm. Cinder was unsure which was more disturbing, the lack of an ecological disaster beyond the dome that she had been told prevented anyone from exiting, or that the vibrations were in time with the swaying she had always taken for granted when she worked the maintenance halls in the dome.

On a table beside the vibrating machine and spike was an old phonograph decorated with tarnished brass trimmings and playing a wax cylinder. Shortly after she started crossing the room, it abruptly began playing on its own, likely triggered with the opening of the door. She heard a voice speaking from the horn.

“Congratulations. If you are hearing this, it has been a full fifty years since we began our grand experiment to clean up the mess we have made of the earth. If everything went as planned, the air outside the dome has been scrubbed and nature has reclaimed much of what we have left behind.

“If our efforts failed… well, let it be known that we tried our best by gathering you within the domed cities across the world and the statistics of our time suggested that, while the cleanup might have not been a full success, it still should have given the earth time to correct some of our worst excesses. Long may you run, fair humans!

“And in the meantime, it was our great hope that you would find alternate sources of cleaner power so that you could return to earth and be better stewards of your Mother.

“Regardless, it is a time for celebration, as now you will be free to roam the world once more! This device will continue to resonate until the dome unfolds and collapses around you. A warning klaxon will sound an hour before the final disassembly so that you can enter the designated shelters and be safe from the dome fallout. Congratulations, you are soon to be returned to the bosom of your Mother!”

The wax phonograph stopped playing.

Cinder didn’t think, she just acted. She bashed at the apparatus vibrating the spike with her wrench. She hit it again and again, howling with fury with each strike. Without fanfare, the arm vibrating the spike bent and then broke, leaving the apparatus to vibrate in place ineffectively.

While she panted, the call came over her two-way. “Zed-Ought-Three-Stroke-Seven-Ex? This is dispatch. Whatever you did in the maintenance corridors must have worked. The engineers are saying that their unauthorized ghost resonance has stopped. What did you find up there anyway? Over.”

“Nothing much,” she said, trying to steady her breathing. “Just a busted fan vibrating to beat all hell. I’ll replace it in the morning, but it should be good for now. Over.”

“If you say so, Cinder. It’s Saturday tomorrow, so you’ll be working on your own. Over.”

Even better, thought Cinder. It would give her time to find a way to the wilderness outside and leave this mess behind. She had no intention of bringing anyone from the dome with her. She knew already that this dome’s population would just mess up the world outside all over again. Their city’s Founder worshipped diesel even though everyone had been taught that the problems outside were because of human’s love of dirty fuels.

She would not let them sully it all over again.

~1800 words, about 2 hrs writing