Beyond Perdition by Ken Robinson

Author:Ken Robinson [Robinson, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-13T22:00:00+00:00

In its infancy, it served only as a crude communication device, a means of transmitting binary data but as further software was developed, people could deliver messages in other fonts akin to ‘Courier New’ and before long it was possible to decrypt and upload the data files of scavenged Blu-Ray disks and play them in vid format.

It meant movies once thought lost were being projected in the bunker’s rec rooms during specially allocated screening nights. The original ‘Jurassic Park’ had played last week with a pirated copy of ‘1984’ the week before. Of course, entertainment came in many forms and as a result of those brave souls willing to venture out into the open, the library was constantly replenished. It had begun with non-fiction books on engineering, welding and digging and had progressed to the entire collection of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the pages only slightly seared by the fire in the Louvern Biblioteca. Other salvaged works had included books of fiction, the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and Homer’s ‘The Iliad’. Occasionally, non-classical works would surface such as Mason Philip’s ‘The Takeover’ or ‘The Diaries of Death’ by JR Trihorn.

Kevin had created a small shelving unit for his books mainly those on programming and software engineering. He had a biography of Bill Gates which he kept on its own, a sort of boffin’s bible, now heavily annotated and underlined. The wall adjacent had one of the bunkers only personal freezers, powered by an internal generator. It contained fourteen cans of coke, two unopened boxes of popsicles and a loaf of wholemeal bread which, despite being frozen, was greening around the edges. On a unit to the side of the freezer, was a Tupperware container holding 375 grams of dried apricot and approximately 500 grams of sultanas.

He had recently finished a dairy milk chocolate bar that had lasted him, through careful rationing, two and a half months. It was unlikely he would be getting another one soon. The rest of the room was stocked with powdered protein, dehydrated Raman and concentrated squash which he’d eventually swap out for the kind of orange juice with pulp.

A guitar riff played from the adjacent bunker where three of the Surface Scouts had formed a band to play to those in the canteen when the tannoy wasn’t blaring out warnings and orders like a robotic Overlord.

Kevin stared at the ceiling, tracing the numerous pipes feeding in and out of the bunker. Some were for transporting de-salinized water, others were merely radiator pipes which hissed and groaned with trapped air. A broken AC unit continued to hum despite itself, and bars of neon lights pooled their electronic illumination over the stone slabbed floor. It really wasn’t all that bad when you got used to it, but he could not help but wonder what his world, the world he’d grown up in, looked like now.

He was soon asleep after having read a pamphlet on the order of Intellectualism, a group of humanists whose ideologies were quickly diffusing around the bunker.

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