THE PROTAGONIST

Eleazar bowed his head, contemplating the same tunnel he had spent almost thirty years carving. He was a hard man—his square jawline swathed in a curly, graying beard although his head was bare. He sat in a modest, domed room, filled with faint lights and robust machinery jutting from the walls. The dome, built on bedrock, sealed the room off from the swirly graphite rock burying it in solid stone (which was pierced by a single tunnel leading nowhere). Eleazar held the hammer-drill cradled in his lap—a monstrous, cumbersome beast of a machine half the size of the wizened man himself. He finished a minor repair and strode out of the dome, into the tunnel’s darkness.

There was no escaping the darkness. The graphite silver rock extended in all directions for miles. Impenetrable bedrock floor, silver stone for air. It was like crawling beneath a never-ending glacier. The red obsidian above and around him was solid without flaw. There were no crevices, no seams or rivulets. Just implacable, swirl-grained stone. Yet Eleazar reached the end of the tunnel and hefted the hammer drill into place, chipping away as if he had somewhere to go.

The blue light of the hammer-drill’s lamp sparkled off the deep silvery rock and Eleazar’s eyes, vibrant piercing green, glinted in the pale blue lamplight. There were darker stone veins within the silvery, red-black interface. These veins were crimson-cobalt, holographic. And they were impenetrable. Even the powerful hammer-drill splashed sparks and shuddered, threatening to come apart against the bedrock veins.

Eleazar steered his meager tunnel around those juttings of salt-pillar-like bedrock. The crudely hewn tunnel weaved for almost a dozen yards, awkwardly maneuvering, like a child carving his name into a tree, around the cold bedrock which made up the strata beneath his feet. A field of salt. A wind of stone.

So he carved his way through the twisted obsidian, hewing a steady tunnel through the endless rock. Although Eleazar did imagine the solidity ended. He looked up, pausing to wipe the slick from his forehead. The darkness seemed matte, black-silver under the blue light. But Eleazar switched off the light and flipped on his headlamp, scolding himself for wasting power. Surely the vast obsidian ended, faded, became softer—uncertain in content not just in terms of light reflection. Perhaps a mile or two up? Eleazar took a swig of water from his canteen, switched back to the blue lamp on his hammer-drill and returned to his carving. There was no use trying to recall the old science he had learned as a child. Almost thirty years had passed since he had started his life here.

The dome was almost self-sufficient. So long as Eleazar kept up the constant supply of swirly rock strata as fuel, the efficient machine would operate decade after decade. Of course he had carefully pillaged certain aspects of the system to improve the design of the hammer-drill. That had certainly reduced the life-span of the dome.

They had supplied the hammer-drill for Eleazar. How else was he to harvest the silvery stone that powered the resonance converter and kept the dome’s lights on? Keep the air to breathe flowing? Even the warmth to live came from the icey rocks he mined. They had apparently tried automated harvesters but quickly determined it was far better to keep Eleazar busy doing some kind of manual labor. There were plenty of supplies to keep his harvester working. So there was always plenty of work. Plenty of stone and time alone.

The hammer-drill churned on. Where the double diamond Res 2 drill bit struck the rock, a cold vapor formed—ice film on the drill bit. The closer he got to the dark veins of bedrock, the worse it got. Over the years Eleazar had become adept at reading those signs and avoiding the bedrock that way. The soles of his heavy insulated boots kept his feet mostly safe against the insane cold. Eleazar cleared his throat and sniffed. There was no need to think of such things—the cold embrace of death at any moment should he wish—no. He had been at this for far too long to quit now. It was the sunk cost fallacy—and he knew it—but he could not let himself, or Donovan down. Not again. There was no benefit from quitting. There was no honor in apathy.

Eleazar wiped his brow. The further from the dome and its resonance converter furnace, the colder it got. He should really put on the provided air suit, but straining with the heavy hammer-drill kept his body temperature warm enough. There was no time. There was never enough—even here. He must get to Donovan. They must obtain that key. They must open the doors to paradise and free this damned Earth. He knew Donovan was out there. He had seen his dome off in the distance all those years ago.

THE ANTAGONIST

The cracking and thunderous splatter of the air harvesters echoed faintly as the Cobalt Forest Warden sat at his gleaming desk, updating a range of data in the sleek white terminal. Access passages three, forty-nine, and fifteen-99.2 needed minor repairs. He sighed.

Calvin was a broken man. His face was thin and vengeful—that is to say, drained. His love had gone to hate quite quickly—Calvin had found nothing sufficient to fill the aching hole where his family had been. He’d had them replaced of course, but biomechanical recreations were not quite the same. Not the same at all. And yet they were the same—too much so in fact. To replicate is to constrict. To replace is to limit. And to make matters worse, the new ones never understood what you had been through while they were gone. It was possible to include memories explaining their existence but subjecting recreations to the trauma of their original selves’ death rather defeated the purpose of bringing them back to life.

After a long wait, Calvin the Forest Warden would now see justice for those deaths. He turned and gazed out the window at the distant harvesters scattered across the stone plateau, at the center of which lay the grand building: the Forest Ward HQ. But the forest had no trees. Indeed, Calvin Cobalt had patented a reverse combustion mechanism, converting smokey carbon-dioxide filled air back to clean, oxygen rich levels of cleansed air at 4,266% efficiency. It would only be a few centuries before the HAVENs could return to the surface. They could return home and it would be a true return.

It was a shame that there were no trees, aesthetically speaking. But trees took a long time to grow. They were vulnerable to fire, drought, and logging. This harvester system improved things immensely. Calvin Cobalt finished looking over the spreadsheets and signed some papers, handing them to the quiet-faced lawyer.

“Government contracts, corporate sabotage, and treeless forests. We live in an age of Prosperity, do we not, Mr. John?”

“Indeed we do, Mr. Cobalt.”

“Please. Calvin will do.”

“Yes of course, Mr. Calvin,” the lawyer said. His eyes locked with Calvin’s, but the prim lawyer only stared coldly through him.

They walked through a series of corridors past a dozen half-empty holding cells. There were decorations on all the walls, rich and neat murals with painted imitation mahogany frames. They arrived at a immaculate interrogation cell. A young man sat, chained to a table behind a one-way mirror. He looked young against the eco-friendly fluorescent lights. His face was hard, but so smooth and new that even Calvin found it hard to remember that this was the man who had planted the explosives. This was the object of Calvin’s wrath. This young, polite looking man, absently regarding the abstract series of triangular designs on the wall before him. This was the man who had taken Calvin Cobalt’s family from him forever. Calvin let his hand rest on the hilt of his laser gun strapped to his chest under his coat. For security.

Calvin focused on the young man’s face. The shadowy stale lighting almost hid the faint scars under the young man’s angular chin—plastic surgery, Calvin wondered?

“We don’t have his name,” the Lawyer explained. “No ID. His fingerprints came up empty. He gave his name as Razaele, but we think he must be lying.”

“Who do you work for?” Calvin asked, directing his voice through the microphone. The words echoed faintly through the one-way window. The boy blinked his vibrant green eyes a few times but said nothing.

Calvin cranked the volume and gain on the microphone. “Tell us who you work for and maybe I’ll ask who you are.” The feedback pummeled through the interrogation room—a piercing wail honing in on the resonant frequency. The young man startled, pain visible in the tension of his jaw, but otherwise remained motionless. Calvin turned down the gain but not the volume.

“Son,” he said, unsure of how to address the neatly trimmed young man. “This case has been ruled as corporate sabotage. I know you ran free for a while. It wasn’t because we couldn’t find you. We let you run around the city because we hoped you’d lead us to your employer.”

The boy spat on the ground. The action was hateful, but the boy had drained the act of all expression. Calvin cursed under his breath. They had no leverage. They knew nothing about this Razeale, only what he’d done to them, not why, or even how exactly he’d been able to afford five kilos of military grade ammonium nitrate. Let alone how he’d smuggled it under the Cobalt Family Estate Highway and detonated it perfectly as the caravan passed over that section of bridge.

Calvin tried to imagine the young man spitting again—what had that action meant? ‘Tree killer?’ That would give motive—although it would be hopelessly incorrect. Calvin was the Forest Warden. How could he possibly be a tree killer? The notion was preposterous.

“What can we give him?” Calvin asked his lawyer, the quiet-faced Mr. John.

“We can give him 45 years of freedom for manslaughter. Any punishment of higher severity and we’d have to take him to court and prove the case. As it stands with the Vacante HAVEN Conventions we can—”

“I’m familiar with the conventions, Mr. John.”

“Of course, Sir—er—Mr. Calvin.” He adjusted his collar nervously.

“Freedom it is. It will have to do. There isn’t time to mess with the courts,” Calvin said. He sighed. All this suffering for so little satisfaction. So be it.

THE CATALYST

Eleazar pushed onward. It took weeks to go any worthy distance. Not only was it hard work, maneuvering the hammer-drill, but every week or so he had to take a few hours to maintain the existing tunnels. The red silver stone encroached on the tunnels, like molasses threatening to engulf all his hard work. Without the air pressure maintained throughout the tunnel system by the dome’s resonance converter, the tunnels would close within hours. Any sense of progress would be utterly futile. As it was, Eleazar’s resistance to futility was tenuous at best. Every few hours he returned to the dome, consumed a meager ration, and removed the airtight helmet he now had to wear. The cold was unrelenting any further than a dozen meters out.

He panted, deep relieved breaths. It was one thing to live for years in the confines of narrow swirl-stone tunnels. It was another thing entirely to have to wear a helmet through it all. Eleazar closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deep the freshly manufactured air, remembering an early autumn night beneath the stars—the open sky. Some sweet halting music. Eleazar hummed a nonsensical tune to himself as he wrangled the heavy sack of broken rocks and began feeding them into the resonance converter against the far wall of the dome. It was a large machine, built into the wall of the dome and extending somewhat into the floor. But the port—through which Eleazar fed the swirl-grained obsidian—was only about the size of a mailbox. Half the converted obsidian was exported to Res 1, the other half converted to Res 3 and pumped into the dome (and Eleazar’s tunnels) as atmosphere for him to breathe. The resonance converter’s lid was a handle which locked into place. Eleazar unlocked and removed the lid from which a dozen tongs extended, sliding out of the port neatly on preset grooves. The ends of the prongs hooked inward, jagged and perfect for clutching obsidian shards between them. Eleazar pulled a trigger in the steel lid’s handle. The prongs swung outward like a splayed squid about to contract and propel itself forward. He stuck the grabber into the bag, retracted the trigger and removed the device—a lid which now clutched a loose coalition of obsidian wicks within its metallic limbs. He slid the cylindrical cage of stony harvest into the generator, locked the lid in place, and flipped the switch.

Just like grinding coffee beans, he thought to himself for the millionth time. Like any thought, it felt clever the first few times—a pale relief from the desolate circumstance. Then the thought became a tedious, continual reminder of his quotidian peril. But as the days lumbered on, the years drifting lazily, skyless by, the thought became an altar—the steady reminder of his mission to obtain the Key to Arcadium. To open the portal to Paradise. Just like grinding coffee.

They let him keep his watch. A small mercy. Even his clothes had been replaced with the yellow, reflective gear. They’d tried to take his sense of direction too, spinning him round to make him dizzy before taking him away. Spinning, spinning, spinning. But he’d trained for that too.

A sound shifted the air. Eleazar looked up, alert. It clattered from far down the tunnel. Eleazar donned his helmet and grabbed the hand-held pickaxe he had made out of a pipe, five lengths of wire, and a loose shard of cold shadow-colored bedrock. The resulting pickaxe had a strange balance in his hand, like trying to swing a gyroscope. It had a mind of its own, resisting some movements and accelerating others. Eleazar had had forty-four years to practice though. He still could not explain the rhythm of the axe but he could wield it fiercely and accurately—exhaustion permitting.

His knees felt weak. Eleazar’s time, like so many others, was running out. If he did not succeed soon, he would never succeed at all. His heart thumped and he fought to steady his hands, to remember his training. He had to get to that blasted portal. He had to get his hands on that blasted key. There was only one man with one key. One chance at paradise. His knees must not fail him now.

“Donovan? Donovan, is that you?” Eleazar shouted. His voice felt strange in his throat. It faltered, weak and muffled behind the helmet. More clattering emanated from Eleazar’s obsidian hewn tunnel, as if someone stumbled through the passage half blind. As if their visor were clouded by condensation.

A tall figure stumbled around the corner and into the small clearing in front of Eleazar’s dome. The figure, hidden within a yellow air suit, unlatched their helmet and pitched to the ground. Cold blue sparks flew where the helmet skittered across the glassy bedrock. Eleazar looked up and saw a tall and

THE TURN

stately, gray-haired woman standing before him. He knew not whether she was beautiful or terrifying or horrible but only that he had not seen another soul in forty years and therefore she was both a beautiful and horrid sight to behold.

“I am Donovan,” she said. Eleazar squinted, trying to recall Donovan’s round soft expressions. The memory was more than forty years old—more crystalized in his mind and simultaneously less trustworthy.

“You are not Donovan,” Eleazar said. His words were slow, measured out like the last sugar in the barrel at the dead of winter.

“Probably not,” the woman said. She shrugged. “But I might as well be.” Eleazar tightened his grip on the makeshift pickaxe. This was crazy talk.

“You are not. You are not the Donovan I know.”

She sighed and sat on a hunk of obsidian which Eleazar had carved out just for that purpose.

“You are right. I’m not Donovan. I’m a pathological liar,” she said. “My real name is Razaele.”

Eleazar froze. The blood drained from his cheeks. The woman smiled broadly. “I’m kidding,” she said. “Eleazar is your name, isn’t it? ‘Razaele’ backwards, right?”

“Where. Is. Donovan.” Eleazar asked through gritted teeth, ignoring her quips. “Where. Is. My. Blood. Oath.” His voice was a growl, held back only by the twitching muscles in his jaw that held it shut.

“Donovan died about ten years ago. Pulmonary congestion. Besides. You both had your calculations way off. It would never have worked.”

Eleazar’s shoulder twitched in frustration. He let the pickaxe swing down to a resting position. As he did so, the woman’s calm disposition evaporated—only for a moment—and she flinched at the sudden movement. Eleazar relaxed at that. She may be a pathological liar, he thought. But she is not very good at it.

“Why should I trust you?” Eleazar asked. “You haven’t told me your real name.”

“I’m Maria. I know the plan. Donovan went over it with me a million times on his death-bed.”

“Why should I trust you?” Eleazar repeated.

“Because if I don’t hold my end of...Donovan’s bargain, then we are both doomed. At what point in the entire plan would it benefit either of us to abandon the other?”

Eleazar thought about this a moment. She was right, of course. The nature of the mission was such that they needed each other. To betray would only ever doom them both. A thousand miles away there was a paradise for the lucky few. There was one door. There was one key. There was one man who held that key.

There was only one way to get that key. And two thieves were better than one.

THE INTERLUDE

Upon close inspection, the difference between time passing and temperature becomes nominal. It is no greater a difference than temperature and state of matter. So then, what is “state of matter” but “the passing of time?” Ice is just water but slower—at a molecular level, the molecules move slower. Vapor is just water but faster. Sort of...

In the late 12,000’s a young man by the name Calvin Cobalt Sr. realized that the passage of time is not a random speed. Its consistency relies on the same principle by which planets align to the same plane, by which two bells of equal pitch resound when a congruent note plays nearby. Resonance.

Likewise a cosmic resonance causes almost all life forms to converge upon the same timespeed, the same wave of moments upon which to surf. Calvin Cobalt Sr. called this, what we experience, “Timespeed Resonance 1” or “Res 1” for short. Res 1 is normal. The cosmic standard. He theorized potential faster and slower stable timespeeds and published the baffling maths in a journal with a few outlandish speculations regarding state of matter shifts. Before anyone had the chance to interrogate the amateur physicist further about his mystifying claims, Calvin Sr. calmly disappeared in a tragic cave-diving accident.

His son, Calvin Cobalt II, doubted the existence of slower timespeed resonances, but proved the existence of faster timespeed resonances by inventing a small domed machine that sped up small objects to the next higher timespeed—a speed which was not far off from Calvin Senior’s original predictions. The machine looked much like a vacuum bell, but instead of removing the air from its contents, the Res Converter moved itself and its contents to a higher timespeed resonance.

“The Future of Superspeed,” the headline read following Calvin II’s exhibition wherein he took a pocket watch and placed it in the Res Converter, moving the clock to Res 2. The pocket watch now appeared blue and soft like jelly, but it functioned, twenty-seven times faster than it had before the exhibition began. The crowd of engineers and physicists was astonished. They examined the high speed footage, the data collected from their scientific instruments with morbid fascination.

The Second Timespeed Resonance. Calvin Cobalt II called it Res 2 for convenience. Res 1 is the normal experience of time. Res 2 was twenty-seven seconds worth of existence crammed into each corresponding Res 1 second. But Calvin Cobalt II did not stop there. He had the backing of a multinational conglomerate now. There was no stopping the enthusiastic inventor.

The Third Timespeed Resonance, or Res 3, existed at a much higher speed than either Calvin had anticipated. The frequency that the Res Converter had to move to in order to remain stable existed at a blistering 3,125 seconds per one normal second. The pocket watch sent to Res 3 looked ghostly, a faint smudge in the air. But it was stable. Even with the power source cut off, the converter and its contents still remained at Res 3. Calvin Cobalt II was overjoyed.

Not only was superspeed possible, but super superspeed was too. Calvin Cobalt II immediately began construction of a much larger, human-sized Res Converter. Meanwhile the air quality of Earth’s atmosphere tanked and Calvin’s conglomerate, Cobalt Air began making billions off their diverse array of filtration systems.

The second Calvin never lived to see the final creation of his human-sized Res Converter, or Elevator as he’d started calling it. Calvin Cobalt II died tragically at the young age of 45 in a rock-climbing accident. His son, Calvin Cobalt III took up where he left off. He completed the construction of the first room-sized converter and stepped through the doors for the first human test.

People thought the great Calvin Cobalt’s timespeed converter would grant its users superspeed. The world watched with great anticipation. Could you imagine living on Res 2? Being able to live, think, feel, and walk twenty-seven times faster than any other human? Calvin Sr. had issued an cryptic warning in his original speculations. But his grandson paid no heed. He stepped boldly through those doors and powered up the machine. The world watched the armored dome flicker from existence, becoming blue and jelly-like. Then it returned to solidity once again. The short test flight was complete. The door to the dome burst open and a strange, steaming liquid poured out, carrying Calvin Cobalt III’s shivering, hypothermic body with it. It took him weeks to recover.

“The Res 1 air outside the dome moved so much slower than me, that it was a thin liquid,” he said later in a press conference. “And it was very cold.”

As he recovered, Calvin III looked over his grandfather’s old research. The old crab had actually predicted this—the faster you experience time, the slower the Res 1 surroundings appear to you. So much so that, defying the laws and math of physics, objects around you shifted down one entire state of matter with each shift you made up the timespeed resonances.

At Res 2, the air outside the dome was a thin cold liquid. At Res 3 it was much worse. The “air” around the dome became stone and the ground became impenetrable, freezing bedrock.

THE PARADISE

Stone air meant no superspeed. At least not in any practical, sensational sense. The media lost interest, moving to bigger issues like the skyrocketing air pollution which now wreaked havoc on the globe. Four million souls left Earth in the HAVEN spacecrafts. Another thirty million (and counting) left the world with lungs full of dust-smoke, their bodies filling plastic coffins (no pine to spare).

But Calvin remained strong. He could use this. In the weeks following his test flight recovery, he came up with a plan. His plan revolved around the planet Venus. In Res 1, Venus was hot. Too hot, constantly roasted by the greenhouse effect. But on Res 3, Venus’s thick atmosphere was a solid surface, cool to the touch—moving at 1/3,125th the speed of the Res 3 space-traveler walking along its almost stationary sky. Calvin Cobalt III spent his whole life building the portal to Venus. There is very little to say on the matter since Calvin did this in private, keeping no records of his invention. Once the portal stood complete and operational, Calvin Cobalt III dropped dead, leaving the Key to his son Calvin Cobalt IV, an ambitious little paradise-hungry prick.

The secret of the portal died with Calvin Cobalt III, but his dream did not. It lived on with his son who carried it to fruition. The young man sent automated harvesters through the portal to Venus. They worked incredibly fast in Res 3, consuming and converting the Res 1 stone air into a breathable, warm Res 3 atmosphere. In only five Res 1 days, the harvesters could complete forty years of work. Arcadium was born.

As for Earth? Calvin did not waste his precious automated harvesters on Earth. Instead he employed the cheapest labor he could find—prisoners.

THE QUESTION

“Didn’t it used to be called Venus?” Maria asked.

“What? Arcadium? I think so. We’ll just have to ask when we get there,” he grumbled. His voice was dry.

He was right. The moment Maria had stepped into view of Eleazar’s dome, the clock had begun to tick in earnest. Maria scowled. Had she really spent the last ten years working alone only to find a companion who held silence next to godliness?

Donovan had held Eleazar on a pedestal. Maria couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed. Still, the guy had a point. They only had maybe an hour before the authorities arrived in their slow steel-plated airsuits, Cobalt lasers at the ready.

If she and Eleazar wanted to get that key, they’d have to work swiftly and without error.

They started by destroying Maria’s dome using the hammer-drill and the bedrock pickaxe. The pickaxe proved infinitely more effective against the steel floor than the hammer-drill, and so Maria took the hammer-drill back to Eleazar’s dome to wait.

They had to destroy the dome floor, and therefore Maria’s resonance converter—it was the only way to access the bedrock tunnels below. Eleazar hefted the bedrock pickaxe. Its edge was tougher than any diamond. He swung and it bit into the reinforced steel floor like an ax through soft pine. Splinters of metal bent beneath blow after blow until a small jagged rupture in the floor opened the way into a yawning darkness filled with an even darker oily liquid. Behind him, Maria’s resonance converter sputtered to a halt, irreparably damaged by Eleazar’s pickaxe. There had been a door, a thick trap door leading to the ancient access tunnels which ran through the impenetrable bedrock below. To cut the bedrock—even with the hammer drill—would be like trying to cut steel with nothing but water. Where would you even start?

The only way to enter the bedrock tunnels was through the hatch in the dome’s floor. But it was locked from the inside, thus Eleazar had no choice but to carve his own way through the floor, destroying the machine designed to keep him alive—the resonance converter.

The only reason Eleazar had the bedrock shard was because it had been there waiting for him already hewn, cut from the bedrock by some careless tunnel digger on a higher res. Indeed Eleazar suspected that the shard was Res 1—the surface.

Eleazer lowered himself carefully into the tunnel, his headlamp lighting up the liquid that filled it to the brim. Red alarm lights glimmered faintly in the red darkness. It was a viscous liquid—technically just air at Res 2. But from Eleazer's perspective on Res 3, it moved too slowly to act like air. And even through the thick sealant of his Cobalt air suit, Eleazer could feel the deathly cold—even the vibration of the molecules was relatively slow to Res 3 Eleazar.

For a moment he thought he might not be able to do what needed to be done. It was a sickening thought—all these years wasted because he could not walk through some cold oil tunnel and press a button? He shuddered once but plunged himself into the icy depths before the fear could paralyze him.

Eleazer checked his pressure gauge as he sank towards the bedrock floor. Normal. His feet hit bedrock gently, weighed down by the steel soles meant to protect him from the dreadful, frozen bedrock—even colder than the liquid air. He checked the air tanks. 99%. He checked his watch. Forty minutes, counting down.

Eleazar cursed. How long had he hesitated? No, move forward. Don't think, just walk.

He waded forward, leaning hard against the thick, cold, oily air. There were no guards on Res 3. The deathly cold, liquid Res 2 air was enough to deter any sane escapee. Of course, in a place like this, there was no such thing as a sane escapee—it was a contradiction. A non-truth.

It worked like this—people like Eleazer were on Res 3. If you wanted to get to the bedrock access tunnels, you had to destroy your dome to bypass the invincible bedrock through which the access tunnels reached.

Unfortunately, the tunnels were Res 2, not Res 3, which meant the air was freezing death liquid. The only way to get to Res 2 (where the air would be breathable), was via the dome. But the process by which the domes moved themselves and their Res 3 contents back to Res 2 could only be accessed from the bedrock axis tunnels, which were pumped full of liquid Res 2 air. Hence, you were trapped unless someone let you out.

Without a partner in crime, there was no way. Eleazar scowled. Here he was, reasoning through the logic for the thousandth time. He had things to focus on. Like finding his dome. He mentally envisioned the hewn mining tunnels between his and Maria's domes. At each juncture he chose the path which seemed in the right direction.

His limbs got colder and colder as the minutes passed—so much so that he didn't notice his suit was leaking until it was almost too late. At that same moment he spotted the access hatch to his dome (on the other side of which Maria waited, no doubt frightened and impatient). The cold threatened to overtake him.

If he turned back now there was a slim chance he would make it. He could be sitting by the resonance converter feeding it Res 1 air-rocks and basking in the warmth.

No. Focus. All or nothing, Eleazer. He pushed forward. The lever. He remembered the blueprints all those years ago. Donovan pouring over them, sketching their escape—not just from the domed prisons but from the suffering. The grand escape to Arcadium, the land of wealth and longevity.

Eleazer's hand was on the lever but he could barely feel it. His hands were almost entirely numb. Gripping the lever was like eating food in a dream. It felt faint between his shivering fingers, and even the sensation of shivering was almost obscured by the trickle of death coming into the suit at his shoulder. The lever moved, slowly, resisting his attempts to move it—much like pushing against a stone with water. The lever stuck. No, of course. Eleazer lifted the pickaxe which felt even more gyroscopic in the freezing oil. He hooked the blunt underside of the bedrock shard behind the lever and leaned all his strength against the pipe shaft. After an age and a half, the lever shifted . Eleazer collapsed with exhaustion. Above him the dome’s resonance elevator mechanism whirred patiently. Another set of alarm lights flickered to life, the light strange and silver and oily cold.

His mind clipped in and out of consciousness.

THE ANSWER

Maria bounced her knee impatiently. It had been almost ten minutes. Surely he had gotten lost. Perhaps his suit had sprung a leak and he’d frozen to death, drowning in liquid air. She indulged the thought. Prepare for the worst. Hope for the best. That is the antidote for disappointment. Maria checked her watch and saw there were thirty-one minutes, counting down. She cursed under her breath.

“Come on, Eleazar,” she mumbled. “Impress me, you piece of—”

There was a dull whirring. The air throbbed and shimmered in violent protest. Her head swam and she yanked off her hemet, retching onto the floor. Somewhere deep under the steel plates, a deadbolt shifted and unlocked. She hurried to the access hatch, hauling it open. She let it fall open and the clang echoed through the bedrock tunnels.

Ah, she thought The sweet sound of Res 2. Maria looked down into the red-lit access tunnel and stifled a gasp. Shrouded in the flickering alarm lights was Eleazar, lying pale and ghost-like on the ground, twitching, his body and clothes shimmery and liquid blue. He was still Res 3. He was still Res 3.

Maria wiped her mouth and jumped down into the access tunnel, donning her helmet again. She cursed and climbed back up the ladder, pulling the hatch closed after her. She cranked the lever back, sending the dome and its contents back to Res 3 and opened the hatch again. The hatch did not open. Of course, dummy. The door wouldn’t open while the dome was another res. She looked down, frantic. Eleazar was gone. His liquid Res 3 form, existing 115 times faster than Maria at Res 2, had twitched and disappeared down the access tunnel towards Maria’s dome. Maria took a breath of relief and cranked the lever to move Eleazar’s dome back to Res 2. Hopefully he’d made it inside. She checked her watch. About eight seconds had passed from her exiting and resetting the dome. She did the math in her head in sweeping movements, broad and general like a draftsman's initial motions on the page. Eight Res 2 seconds converted roughly to a thousand seconds in Res 3—about fifteen minutes.

Was that enough time? Enough time for Eleazar to make it back through the liquid filled tunnels into Maria’s destroyed dome, then back again through the Res 3 obsidian tunnels hewn through the stone air, and back into his dome—all before she moved it back to Res 2? She’d left the dome’s outer door unlatched—just as Donovan had insisted.

Would she fail Eleazar just as Donovan had failed her?

There was no time to find out. She turned and tripped over something. It was that crappy shard of bedrock which Eleazar had wired to a pipe. The pipe was liquid in Maria’s Res 2 hands. It melted beneath her touch. She grabbed the tusk-like shard, cold and thrumming in her gloved hands.

It pulled strangely, like its weight was not too concerned with choosing any particular direction. Like it was on a merry-go-round that kept spinning in different directions. She swung it, getting a feel for its awkward arc of momentum. Spin with it, she thought. You are the water. This is your dagger. Old words from an older friend.

The hatch opened and Eleazar jumped down. He looked haggard. His face was pale and blue even behind his tinted visor.

“Let’s move,” he gasped. “We have a maximum of 4 minutes to find the elevators out of this cursed place.”

Or we’re laser-toast, Maria thought. She considered offering Eleazar his bedrock shard back but seeing how his arm hung limp, she decided against it. A pang of guilt tugged at her, and she embraced the shame. This man’s brother had died trying to get her out. Now Eleazar had almost done the same. He had a wild, harrowed look in his piercing green eyes—the look of a man who had not foreseen his own survival. Not a close shave, not a near miss, but rather an unexplainable deflection.

Target locked, lethal strike, and yet here he stood, leaking airjuice—too baffled to feel elated. They hurried through the tunnels, their headlamps glaring red. The alarm lights lit the bedrock tunnel in blue now. A siren yawned, clear and earsplitting. Eleazar tried to remember all those years ago—stumbling through a tunnel with a sack over his head. A man with a soft, pained voice explaining his new life as a ward of the forest. Eleazar focused on that first memory of this place—reverse engineering it to find the way out of this god-forsaken hole. He pushed thoughts (of green open fields and the cool nights, early spring breeze, and Donovan’s curt but joyful laugh) all from his mind like a mother pushing a baby from her womb—to preserve them both.

THE RECKONING

Calvin surveyed the domes, like nodes on a circuit-board. The air crackled and snapped, thunderous and stony as prisoners finished their sentences and their harvest rock tunnels rushed shut behind them. The young man was gone—set free to live among the other prisoners, no doubt digging his own tunnels. Little by little they made Earth better, made its air easier to breathe.

Calvin removed the gleaming, steel-bound-mahogany box from his pocket. The Key to Paradise. He breathed deeply the fresh air. What a thing worth working for. Calvin blinked a few commands and a faint, delicate opera began to engrave the soundscape of his ear. He turned and walked up the short curved marble stairway to the roof. The sun set behind him and his crown jewel rose before him, bright in the dusk. His life’s work, a paradise which paled even Earth’s golden days. An ancient operatic rendition of Rock of Ages from the 21st century pierced the air around him.

Calvin opened the mahogany box and flicked a switch inside. A sleek silver electric dome materialized over the roof of the Forest Warden’s H.Q. The world within the dome shimmered. Calvin smiled, opening a second control panel within the small mahogany box. He adjusted a dial and a doorway rose from the flagstones. The inside of the portal frame held a silver film, suspended in the air. As Calvin walked through it, his smile became almost wistful.

He turned back, waving goodbye to his quiet-faced lawyer who stood on the edge of the roof, implacable and patient as always. This old world had grown so far—it had been through so much, carried so many children from birth to grave. Billions of souls had called its surface home, its suffering life. Not for long, Calvin thought. Perhaps even I, in my mortal state, will live to see that day when Earth becomes new and the land becomes fertile again—its bitter pollutants scourged, cleansed of all sin and unrighteousness. The return of the Havens.

Ah, yes. Already it’s come so far. Still, Calvin felt tired. He was, after all, a broken man. That was decided. He stepped through the portal and into the Arcadium, once known as Venus. Now, on Res 3 it was Zion, Elysium. Heaven on Earth. Or at least not too far away for Calvin, who held the Key.

I’ll be back tomorrow, Calvin thought. And he did not lie. Twelve regular hours later and four and a half years older, Calvin returned at five AM, sharp. He looked grayer around the edges—the Arcadium High Council had needed reprimanding, not once, but twice—but otherwise well rested. His family, or at least their images, had made good company. A part of him wanted to thank that young saboteur. Razaele had, in a strange way, done Calvin a favor. But he had no time to pay such frivolous errands.

Indeed, Calvin had not been idle in Arcadium, but spent the last four years (Arcadium existed solely in Res 3) planning for today. He planned deftly and with the assuredness of a skilled architect asked to design a log cabin. Today he would implement a number of solutions he had devised.

He had tried automated solutions at first—the ones which had transformed Res 3 Venus into the Arcadium—a paradise. But on Earth there were too many… factors at play. It simply wasn’t safe to leave such precious equipment lying about. In the wrong hands—Calvin shuddered at the thought.

His quiet-faced lawyer arrived at six AM with a grand stack of new contracts. Perfect.

“Raise the bid. I want to open at least thirty more facilities this month. Thirty brand new forests. Arrange for—”

“Would you like for me to call in the Project Manager?”

Calvin stared at his lawyer blankly for a moment, wondering what the project manager’s name was. Larry? No. Barry. It was something along those lines.

“Yes. Yes of course. That would be splendid,” Calvin said. “But as I was saying, these people are going to have to work for this. I’m not simply handing out free paradise tickets. I’m an artist, not a vending machine.”

The lawyer blinked at the strange anti-analogy. The lawyer wondered if Warden Calvin Cobalt knew how vending machines worked—they cost good money for precious little. But the lawyer maintained his placid expression. It was not his place to question such things.

“I agree in full,” the lawyer said. He blinked a command series, summoning the project manager from his private estate in northern canada. The message read: Calvin requests your presence. Unknown time slot although by the looks of it he’s about ready for another one of his week long stints.

Calvin took a deep breath and got right back to signing contracts, writing proposals, distributing system controls, and policy drafts to their various correspondents. He worked late, returning to Arcadium only briefly to sleep. He considered having a bed brought up into the roof under the electric dome, but Calvin liked to think he maintained a healthy work-life delineation.

So instead he worked late, returning to Arcadium for eight hour naps whenever needed. To the Res 1 Earth employees it appeared to them that Calvin worked more or less tirelessly for five days and five nights. To the High Council of Arcadium, forty-four years passed. But Calvin was not worried. He ignored the pestering High Council and his family, or at least the recreations of them, sleeping the years away in peaceful stasis.

On the fifth day his work was interrupted by

THE END

the violent and unexpected death of his quiet-faced lawyer at the hands of an old woman with a wicked looking, tusk-like dagger clutched in both hands. Calvin looked up from his desk. The old woman was followed by an even older man, bald and bearded, a gimp arm hanging loose at his side. Oh but his eyes—Calvin was struck by the piercing green. Who was this man? And why had this woman killed the quiet-faced lawyer? They both wore the strange blue-yellow airsuits of harvesters.

Calvin’s instincts overrode his inquisitive mind and he shrieked, terror underscoring the anarchic ballad of Dead Tree which he’d been listening to and which now strummed on in his ears unhindered, unheard. Calvin scrambled up the marble stairs. The two bloody seniors hobbled after like village elders after a particularly troublesome youth.

The old man was fast, surprisingly so considering his deathly pale complexion. He grabbed Calvin’s ankle and tripped him, sending the mahogany box clattering across the marble floor—the roof of the Forest Warden’s HQ.

Calvin saw the old man’s eyes flicker hungrily to the Key, and the seeds of a plan formed in Calvin’s mind. He reached and pulled out his laser gun revolver, discharging it twice at the old man, who groaned and slumped away. Calvin turned towards the woman, but his hand jolted numb and the gun fell to the floor, firing once more. A bullet sprang against stone, sparks flew. No matter, Calvin thought. It was an old, brutish thing anyway. There was a reason he did not allow such foolhardy devices into Arcadium.

The woman held the cold, dark shard of black stone to Calvin’s throat. It was freezing and not the refreshing kind. Bedrock. Nothing else was that cold. It was fading though—returning to Res 1 as all things less than surface-level did—like candy dissolving in one’s mouth, a sharp sliver of its former self.

“Who are you?” Calvin asked, trying not to sputter.

“My name is Eleanor Maria Francesca Cobalt. Years ago you abandoned me in this cesspool. It’s time you earned your pay.”

Calvin’s eyes were wide.

“El?” He was aghast. Was this decrepit thing his sister? “What do you want from me, El? I’m sorry I left you, I had no choice—the council, the High Council of Arca—”

“I don’t want any of your excuses. I want you to take me and the old man to Arcadium. Now. You have the doctors there—real ones—they can save him.”

But the dying man cut her off.

“No,” the old beard whispered, his voice rasping. Maria moved closer, still keeping her eyes on Calvin. The old man labored to speak, blood washing down the front of his torn, yellow air suit. “Don’t go,” he said. His eyes flickered to the mahogany box. And there was a hunger in the look, but an old sort of hunger so deeply entrenched in age that it no longer possessed the same vitality. A hunger which had become a fixture of his mindscape—a solid pillar even as everything bled out onto the marble floor.

Maria leaned forward, catching his last words as they fumbled into the autumn breeze. Calvin did not hear but watched as Maria stood, grabbed the gun and box and went downstairs. Calvin lay beside the dead old man and wondered what would become of him. Would he grow old? Or would he be tragically murdered at the age of fifty by his own sister.

Maria returned. She had written something on a paper and now folded it tightly. The mahogany box emerged from her pocket. It was one of a kind. The key to Arcadium. The one way in. The one way out. She flipped the switch and knelt, steadying herself as the world around her shifted into Res 2. Next she opened the portal. Did Calvin see tears in her eyes? The portal to paradise gleamed silver. She walked towards it, the metal-bound mahogany box closed, the paper nowhere to be found.

“Take me with you, Eleanor,” Calvin said, his voice a pitiful whine. Inwardly he stifled a chuckle. She didn’t know how to work the damn machine. He could tell they were only on Res 2, not Res 3 which meant that the rock upon which Arcadium was built would manifest as a frigid oily ocean. Step through that portal in Res 2 and there was nowhere to go but to a frozen death at the bottom of an atmosphere's worth of ocean.

“Take me with you, please,” he repeated. “Don’t leave me behind. I beg you, Eleanor,” he lied.

Eleanor grimaced, a half-step from the portal. Her gaze drifted to Donovan’s brother, bleeding out, broken. Her eyes stung, but she held back all grief, crushed it beneath the palm of her determination. Just like grinding coffee.

“Sorry. Eleanor died in my arms 40 years ago—heart-broken by her brother who abandoned her to die on Earth of all places. I’m a pathological liar,” the old woman said. “My real name is Eleazar.”

And with that she turned and tossed the metal-bound mahogany box straight through the portal—which remained open only long enough for Calvin to imagine the Key to Paradise sinking into the cold depths of Res 2 Venus—then the portal was gone, the Key having sunk out of range of the signal.

THE NEXT

“What have you done?!” Calvin exclaimed, horror-stricken.

“What I’ve always done—as I pleased,” the old woman, formerly known as Eleanor Maria, and now called Eleazar, said. She walked to the edge of the dome. The control box that could move them to Res 1 was now a million miles away on another planet. “How long do you reckon before someone lets us out?” she asked.

Calvin answered, his voice mechanical with despair:

“A factor of 27 between Time Resonance 1 and 2. So anywhere between 4 and 9 hours depending on how many of my employees you… incapacitated.”

“Good,” Eleazar said. “Then we have plenty of time to plan.”

“Plan for what?” Calvin asked—astonished that anyone besides him had aspirations of any sort.

“It might be fun to plan a way to solve the world’s biggest problems. It might be fun to make a new paradise. Right here, right now. On this Earth. A plan that maybe doesn’t rely so heavily on forced labor camps.” She cleared her throat, brandishing a few signed contracts she had swiped from the desk downstairs. “Did I say ‘forced labor camps’? Sorry. So sorry. I think I meant ‘Forest Wards.’” She gestured to the terminology on the contract, pursing her lips in disappointment.

Calvin deflated a bit. But the old woman was not done yet.

“Maybe also we could consider not leaving everyone behind this time.”