Helen remembered her conversations with her father, remembered them clearly as if she was just talking to him and his kind face was right there in front of her. One of the things that made her stay in the compound bearable. Made her less crazy than she would have otherwise become.

Sometimes they could talk for hours on end. That was especially the case when they lost their wind generators, and she felt her father felt an urgency to discuss things with her. Looking back, it’s almost as if he could foresee that he would soon depart her life and try to teach her everything, trying to replace decades of living experiences with mere words.

“From the start, I knew if we depend on others for giving us energy, we’d have problems. Without producing our own, we are now doomed,” he said. “We need to restart it as soon as possible.”

They set at the kitchen table, her mom usually using the time to work around the stove or trim one of the herbs growing around. “How much energy do we really need to keep us warm?” she asked.

“A very little if we live in confined space,” Helen’s father answered. “We are well insulated living in the ground, the earth and snow covering us from above. Even if we were not heating ourselves, the temperature of the air would be stable at thirteen degrees.”

“Like before we turned the heat on?” Helen said, remembering the last summer when they installed the system. “That’s manageable.”

“Yes, and we don’t even need to heat the place every day. Right now we are just firing the heaters now and then for a few hours at a time.”

“Yes, we’ve been very comfortable, training in shirts and shorts while the outside world freezes.”

“I know, but… without light, our plants would die. And we need them for more than just producing fresh produce for us. I mean, we have enough produce and vitamins and minerals to last us for decades. But we need plants to filter enough carbon dioxide out to keep us alive and so we do not need to use an electric air-filtration system.”

“But, if needs be… we could use an air-filtration system, no?”

“Of course. I even turn it on from time to time, just to make sure it works. It’s really not very efficient, the one I was able to get. But it can work. Except, it’s highly mechanical in nature, and eventually it would break down.”

“But then, we could always open the hatch and let in some fresh air, at least during the night.”

“Yes, that’s the third option. The last option. But I prefer to use the plants.”

“Me too,” Helen’s mother added. “It keeps things growing, it’s positive for our psyche, good for our health.”

Helen’s father nodded his head and thought about something, then asked Helen a question. “Do you know, Helen, how much carbon dioxide do we produce on an average?”

“About 2.2 pounds on average per person counting my little brother and sister.”

“That’s right. And that depends on what?”

“When we exercise and work, our muscles need more oxygen, so that’s why we breathe faster, bringing more oxygen to our muscles, and then we breathe out more carbon dioxide, right?”

“How much more?”

“You measured my last boxing workout, and said I burned about ten times more carbon dioxide as if I just set down and meditated.”

“So, now you know, if there is nothing else, if everything else fails, you know what you need to do.”

“Slow down my breathing, relax, and save the oxygen?”

“Until it’s safe to open the hatch. You know how carbon dioxide can be deadly-”

“Yes, you said it was a silent killer. If it builds up too much in the air, it makes you fall asleep, and then you just die. Something like that. But that can’t happen here because you installed a measuring system."

“Yes. But every system can fail. That’s why your mom and I also decided to warm us up here with electricity and not with the wood or coal-burning furnace. What would we do with the potentially deadly gas if suddenly the snow or ice would block the chimney that is supposed to take it out? People are known to die from that”

“Yeah, you guys seem to have thought about a lot. Just something is not very clear to me. One big leafy plant that we have here can filter about 1 percent of carbon dioxide that you produce during the day, right?”

“That’s about right.”

“So, we would need about five hundred plants for all of us then, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not that much. So, why did you, father, construct all that space down here? Not that it’s bad to have all the space, but isn't it too much?”

Helen’s mother chuckled. “He got carried away.”

“Well, yes and no. I did get carried away, but I also expected that if later I wanted to make the compound bigger, it would be more difficult, on account of soil being frozen and other problems that the future construction may entail.”

“You would have needed to tunnel.”

“Yes. We can still do that, but it gets more complicated. And I also wanted to produce as much food as we could, knowing that people out there would need all the help we might be able to give them.”

“But we can’t even get in touch with them.”

“Not now, we can’t. But when the summer comes, things can turn around. People will come out as they always do. And then we can offer them food.”

“But if we don’t have electricity?”

“We can survive. But we can do so much better than just survive.”

“So, don’t tell me, dad, you did consider we could lose the wind turbines, right?”

“Of course. The hydrogen that our surplus electricity was producing was supposed to be a backup. I should have just cranked that up more. We should already have filled five tanks of hydrogen instead of just one. My mistake was to think that we had more time.”

“You did the best you could,” Helen’s mother said.

“Well, my best… I always think about it. The best would have been what I originally desired to do.”

“Oh, here we go,” Helen’s mother said and smiled as she shook her head.”

“What was it?”

“It was to install a small nuclear reactor but-”

“Really? Here?”

“Yes.”

“I thought they were very expensive and complex, and from what I've read-” Helen was eager to ask about it, but then she saw her mother smirking and shaking her head and thought that her mother did not want her to lead her dad on.

Just to confirm that, her mother said, "It’s a dead-end topic, really. Only to make you feel worse.”

“But I still want to know,” Helen insisted.

“You know, your dad’s partner, Joshua, from the firm they both joined. He organized a group of high-net-worth families, about fifty, sixty families in all, and they built a compound that included a small nuclear reactor.”

“He stole my idea,” Helen’s father interrupted her. “Not the only one he stole either,” he continued bitterly, then left the silence to fill in the rest.

“I see,” Helen said. “A bastard.”

“Well, to his credit, he did invite your father and his family to join them.”

Helen was surprised. “And… why we didn’t?”

“I did not like who Joshua became. I could not go to tie our lives with someone I… could not trust.”

“That I completely agree with,” her mom added. “If the only choices we had was to be with people we cannot trust or trying our luck on our own, I think that’s no choice at all.”

“They wanted us mostly because of your mother expertise

“Don’t sell yourself short. He was well aware of your potential. Look what you’ve done here. I bet they are not as comfortable as us here.”

“Yes, but… Our comfort is going to deteriorate very fast if we do not get back to producing the power we need.”

When a few weeks of summer finally arrived, and they heard through the radio signal that the farmer’s market was being organized, Helen pressured her mother to let her go out to see if she can find parts to build a new windmill.

“Just so someone else can take it with them again?”

“No, mom. I would make it retractable. So, we could just put it out at starless night when it was completely dark, so even if someone is flying around, they would not be able to see it. And, I calculate, if I get all the parts, it could give us enough so that we would not need to cut back on food production.”

“Well, your father wanted to grow all that food so that one day we would be able to trade it with others. So, I guess this is meant to be, just be careful.”

“Of course I will be. I’m gonna put on my body armor and a thick black jacket to hide my pistols away. I will be careful. But I need to do this. Need to go and see places, people, see what we are dealing with, mom. If for nothing else, I need to know how is the world turning. Without that information, all we have might be just a fool’s paradise, waiting to be taken down at any second.”

“I know you are right, but that does not make it easier.”

“We’ve already talked about this all for days on end. You know I’m ready.”

“So you will take with you what we agreed on.”

“Yes. Just the very basics. Like a bag of salt and a few jars of honey. Nothing to draw too much attention to myself. Just like my father said we should.”

Her mom nodded her head. “Your first trip there, you are just going to observe. That is the first thing. Look at any detail. How people are reacting, read into every word of theirs, and then read between the words too. Always ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing that can happen. And, don’t consider what people are saying as much as why they are saying it. Do you understand me?”

“I do, mom.”

“And, if you do draw too much attention… just get away fast.”

“I will, mom. Don’t worry.”

“And you know what to do if you see that they are trailing you?”

“Of course. We went over all of this multiple times. I go north and wait for the dark and then shut my lights out and fly back.”

That is how she left, her voice trying to stay cool and relaxed while her heart was beating at triple the rate as she took out the flyer through the snow tunnel and fired it up.