• It’s been eleven years since we closed our doors.

    We always thought we’d die in a flash. Global warming, meteor, pandemic, nuclear destruction, something like that. We never imagined we’d die so slowly.

    It is the year 2046, and our hopes are dead. A report came out almost 50 years ago warning we’d need two planets by this time: turns out, it was right. Global warming’s made most of the world uninhabitable, resources are almost gone thanks to unsustainable agriculture, and you have to force yourself to breathe this awful air. It sickens. Our newborns can’t survive long enough in it, and our population is in steady decline. We gave up on space travel long ago: it wasn’t interesting enough, too expensive, and now we don’t have a chance to make it happen.

    Our scientists never stop working, of course. The great unsung heroes of humanity, it’s only thanks to them we’ve survived this long: they’ve developed biomasks, air filtration systems, something you might call food if you were crazy. It helps, but it isn’t enough. We all live in bunkers now, cut off from the outside. They wanted to reverse everything, bring the life back, renew the soil, clean the air. But it was in studying the air, that they found something unimaginable.

    Homo umbra. The shadow people. Some said they’ve always been here, that our shadows have always been alive, but we all know that isn’t true. Others claim they’re our spirits ready to leave us, demons, angels, you name it. Fact is…they’re a completely new life form. We’re not quite sure how they came to be, and so rapidly. We’ve guessed bacteria in the air and ground gains some sort of advantage when we cast a shadow, and evolved to be able to follow us around, but…we really don’t know. They’re not just thousands of bacteria floating around but real, living, beings latched onto our bodies and our minds, stroking us when we‘re alone and whispering kind things into our thoughts. It’s impossible to even think of. But, it doesn’t matter where they came from or how they work or what they are. What needs to be decided is whether to embrace them, or exterminate them.

    Overseer's Log, June 1 2046 10:22 P.M.

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    Emilia Lee Thomas

    The medical bay’s fluorescent lights had a nasty little habit of flickering just enough to drive most patients mad, but not enough to really interfere with most medical work. It was a fluke, a glitch in the power system, though not necessarily a bad one. A little power was diverted from the lights and into the medical equipment instead of from the power grid, meaning…nothing at all, really. But it gave the eerie impression that the medical equipment could fail at any moment.

    Emilia Lee Thomas, of course, never worried about such things. She had asked a nurse once as a child, when she’d first come to the medical center, but the answer had been clear and satisfactory. She felt no need to continue asking as the other patients did.

    Though, she had to admit as she lifted a silvery-blonde hair strand from her sketchbook, it got rather annoying when one had work to do.

    And indeed she did. She glanced over the paper at the older man in the bed across from her, his face contorted in silent pain and his body arched and stiff. Tetanus. She’d noticed an increase in cases in the last week, it had resulted in quite a few names crossed off in her list of names. Thirty-three refugees left. She felt the words appear in her mind, unbidden, and whispered them as they appeared.

    All considered, they were actually doing pretty well: eleven years spent in a bunker that had been rushed and half-made. They’d only lost sixty-seven, and most of that had been to uncontrollable factors, like the illness that had taken her mother.

    Emilia closed her sketchbook as the man was pushed away on his medical bed, his heart monitor wailing in monotone. She glanced over to the bed next to her, where a somewhat attractive man was sleeping. She leaned over, a dangerous act for someone like herself, and gently brushed his hair from his eyes before being scolded. The nurses had noticed her little crush, though her sister was still oblivious.

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    Rose Thomas

    Oblivious was certainly an apt description of Rose Thomas. Focused entirely on the subject of her microscope’s eye, she hadn’t even noticed her watch begin to beep.

    “Homo umbra”, she whispered. Their existence had stumped the entire scientific team, something Rose was only too happy for: it gave her a chance to unlock the mystery of it’s existence and finally prove her worth to the others. They, of course, thought they were more valuable for having gone to universities and earned degrees. That was all well and fine but there were no universities any longer and she felt she had worked long enough as their damned assistant to be treated as a peer.

    She gave a soft growl and snatched the sample out from under the microscope’s eye, a little too roughly. It was then she finally heard the persistent beep beep beep beep beep of her watch.

    “s**t!”

    The lab was empty, of course, it was half past nine, half past ******** nine! All the lights but the one above her had been dimmed or shut off completely, the other assistants and scientists long since packed their bags. She’d missed dinner by three hours! Rose snatched up her lumpy duffel bag, swung it over her shoulder and bolted out of the laboratory a little unbalanced by the weight. Her stomach was growling something fierce now, even though she hadn’t felt the smallest tinge of hunger since lunch.

    She pushed past the double doors and into the Cafeteria, where a few unlucky insomniacs were chatting and poking at their synthetic snacks. It wasn’t her first time arriving to dinner late, although this was her record, and she reminded herself to thank the poor bastards for keeping the food service open. If it weren’t for them, she’d be going to bed hungry most nights.

    Rose set her duffel bag down just a little too roughly on one of the tables, and jogged towards the empty counter. There were only three choices, of course, all automated, though the “cooks” as they liked to call themselves--they were more technicians than cooks--enjoyed changing the names to try and fool some of the more hopeful types. Sadly, it worked a little too often.

    Placebo effect. Tell someone anything and there’s a good chance they’ll believe you and make it happen.

    Not fooled herself, Rose deliberated a moment before pressing the button for mashed potatoes and corn. A moment later, the usual TV-dinner style package popped out, unlabeled, and she returned to her table. Tearing the thin lid open, she peeked inside. Damn. It’s original designation had been “Inspired By Cabbage”, as if that were to make it seem somehow lovely, and it had been her least favorite meal all of her eleven years here.

    Slurping down the slightly gooey green substance, Rose glanced at her duffel bag and wondered if she should change out of her lab shift. She never had any real desire to dress in anything else, but it tended to get either eyes rolling and heads shaking. Of course she understood their reasons for finding her to be, quite frankly, a joke, but with the population steadily being reduced to those between eighteen and fourty or so, they’d have to get used to it.

    She glanced towards the east door and the MEDICAL BAY sign above it, briefly considering visiting Lee. Going into the medical rooms was risky, of course, you never knew what sort of diseases were floating around. Besides, she reasoned, Lee seems upset with me. Better let her get over whatever it is. She nodded, pleased with her reasoning on the matter as if there had ever been any real desire to go through that door to begin with, and slurped down the rest of her “mashed potatoes and corn”.

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    Roswell Thomas


    “I’ve dyed the homo umbra cells blue, so you can tell them apart more easily from the human cells. You can see how the shadow cells are clear, and much smaller and simpler. They’re an early life form, not very different from the bacteria we once evolved from.”

    Roswell clasped his hands behind him, respectfully standing back as the Overseer’s wife peered into the microscope. She’d approached him in the halls and with the utmost politeness asked to see the shadows she’d been hearing about. The woman had been so incredibly quiet and meek, very much unlike herself, that he had worried she was still sick and should be sent to the medical bay before getting anyone else sick. She had aged immensely since he’d last seen her, and with her back turned he saw how hunched over she was, how weathered her hands had become. Her hair had become salt-and-peppered, just like her husband’s. It was only a week-long sickness. How bad could it have been?

    She adjusted the microscope carefully, lips pressed tightly together. “Where did this sample come from?”

    He frowned and checked the tag on the vial he’d taken the samples from. “Rose Thomas. That’s my daughter.”

    “She’s infected?”

    Roswell nodded, then realized she wouldn’t have seen the motion. “Yes. She was one of our first samples. We aren’t sure how they spread, except that it takes a great deal of contact and time. We noticed it when we were testing air purifiers, and as you know she has asthma, so she was a test subj--”

    “Why do they move so much?”

    He froze a little, then excitedly stepped forward, pressing her carefully to the side. More than likely it was an error of inexperience, people tended to let their hands shake when they were viewing through the lens and that always made things jiggle. But…nevertheless, he snatched his thick old glasses off and pressed one eye to the microscope, careful to keep his hands and eye steady.

    Only yesterday the same sample had consisted of the tiniest dark blue cells, so small even their microscope couldn’t look closely enough. There hadn’t been many, either, only a handful and quite a few dead. Now he had to zoom the microscope out--they still weren’t as large as his daughter’s skin cells, not by a longshot and would probably not be visible to the eye, but they had definitely changed. Blindly he groped along the lab table, pulling open a drawer and fishing around for a spare notebook. He pulled it out, and began scribbling away his observations with one hand.

    They had stretched, so much so that the blue dye had spread thin and faded in certain areas. Adjusting the zoom slightly, he noted thin, almost imperceptible but still faintly blue lines crossing from the homo umbra cells to the homo sapiens. More on that later. The most notable change was the way they moved. Their lack of movement had stumped his team, as one of the simplest signs of life was movement. “What’s changed, you little bastards?” he whispered,.

    “Roswell…my husband wanted to speak to you about your daughter…”

    Annoyed at her interruption, he snapped at her. “Not now! Can’t you see how important this is?” Good god, he was always receiving useless apologies for Emilia’s condition but now was the worst of times. He turned back to the microscope, scribbling away blindly and not noticing her silent departure.

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    Rose Thomas


    Biomasks. They’re about the most useful things in the world, and Rose was proud to say they had been developed by none other than her own father. Well, not quite, she admitted to herself, swinging a duffel bag over her shoulder which contained just the object of her musings. He’d assisted. But there certainly wasn’t anyone more vital to its development than the man who’d said they’d need one in the first place, right? He may as well have made it all himself.

    They were funny looking things, similar for the most part in design to those antique gas masks you’d see in retro art and movies. Rose wasn’t sure what sort of gas might be more dangerous than the air itself, but she supposed people had just been paranoid in the 20th century.

    She gave a soft laugh and rose from her seat, sweeping up her tray and depositing it in a recycling bin. They might have been paranoid back then, but if she’d learned anything by watching her parents’ futile attempts to warn the world, it was that people no longer really cared about anything. Global warming? Meh. Rocket fuel in the water? Meh. Serious possibility of asteroids hitting the earth? Double meh. It was something she could never understand. She spent her entire childhood terrified of every threat there was, and no one else ever cared. Humanity had doomed itself.

    Still, despite their suicide behavior, Rose was one of them, and that meant this had to be done.

    There was a sort of “outer layer” around the bunker, a hall stretching around the refuge which had been temporarily sealed off. It wasn’t forbidden, exactly, but the air there wasn’t filtered and was nearly as dangerous as the air outside. No one wanted to go there, besides girls on suicidal missions.

    Rose stopped just outside the doors and dropped her bag gently on the ground, tugging the zipper open and pulling it open. She pushed an inhaler out of the way and gripped the biomask with two hands, lifting it out slowly and letting out a slow breath. Damn these things are heavy. Careful not to tilt her head back lest she break her neck, she lowered it over her head and tightened the straps around her unkempt red hair and took one of the cleanest breaths she’d taken in years.

    Almost done    . She’d been setting the experiment for months: it had taken two just to acquire the biomask, and three more to acquire the sedatives, and one to acquire the test subject.

    The poor thing was just a few months old, one of the other girls’ litter. She’d had to go through a great deal to get it: first, place a b***h in heat and sire together and wait for the inevitable, then wait a month after she’d ‘adopted’ it for it to get to the correct age. She’d have used swine if any were available, but the only animals that had been allowed into the bunker had been dogs. Specifically, a sweet little family of Labradors.

    Sedating the dear thing had been hard on her, she’d almost abandoned her experiment then and there. After all, if she couldn’t even sedate it, how could she do what she was now about to do? But then like a godsend, or perhaps an angel on her shoulder, her conscious gently nudged her on, reminding her of her solemn duty to mankind.

    Almost as if she’d summoned it, Rose felt that same presence now tugging at her, bidding her to continue. She smiled, encouraged, and slowly opened the large, ventilated metal box. Inside lay the little specimen, fast asleep, his paws kicking and eyes closed. Dreaming. She had already carefully noted it’s weight, gender, breed, dimensions, all the usual measurements. All that was left was to see if her technique had paid off.

    She set the pup on the ground, glanced at her watch--should be waking up any minute now­­--and fished around in her pocket for the prize of two years’ worth of work. She blinked, realizing she hadn’t named it. Ah well, plenty of time once they’re thanking me for it.

    It had been inspired by the common inhaler, something she was all two familiar with, but the point of this modded device was not to make breathing easier, but more difficult. Excursions into the outer layer were only good for one thing: poisoning yourself. Or, more specific to her task, gathering that toxic aerosol mix of pollution, radiation and dust. Such a prize! Once she’d managed to dilute the poisons and with quite a bit of effort, make them usable through inhalers. By slowly releasing small quantities of the poisonous air, she was hoping to build up the pup’s resistance, which theoretically could work on humans--problem was, the dogs built up more resistance than the humans, otherwise she wouldn’t have a puppy in the first place.

    Rose sighed, scratching at her hair, and waited for the dog to finish making a mess in the corner before she scooped him up. If her theory worked on dogs, it might not work on humans--she’d have to test it, first, and convince someone to let her introduce it in a human.

    She smiled, noticing its tail was wagging, then readjusted the straps on her biomask.

    “Don’t get your hopes up, pup.”

    She took a deep breath, then dialed her father’s passcode into the lock. There was a click, then a green light peeked at her before fading out--a good thing, too, since even the tiniest extra use of energy might alert the technicians. With one motion, she pushed the double doors open and stepped into the strange light, the doors closing with a soft thud. Time to prove I’m right.

    Synthetic light is nothing next to the brilliance and crispness of true sunlight, and when you‘ve spent eleven years of your life under the former, you never seize to be surprised by the brilliance of the latter. The outer layer had not been sealed, and so years of acidic rain had taken a toll on the metal shell. Light bled through in bits and pieces, and an entire corner had collapsed a few yards down.

    Within moments of his being carried into the outer layer, the pup began to let loose a god-awful, ear-piercing whine that nearly made her turn back there and then. She kneeled on the metal floor, her motion sending up a cloud of dust, and set him down as gently as she could before readying her notebook.

    She scribbled fast, not looking down at the paper, eyes and ears attentive to the pup.

    Eyes watering. Spots of red appearing at--she checked her watch­­--two minutes and three seconds in. Still breathing, but wheezing and whining. Has not collapsed yet--she glanced down to correct her pen’s position--usual signs not yet present. Two minutes and thirty-four seconds in. No collapse.

    She couldn’t help a grin from spreading across her lips, despite the seriousness of the task. Even if the pup didn’t survive, he’d done so longer than she would have thought possible. The polluted air had taken down grown men within thirty seconds, and here a puppy was surviving several times that. Rose reached out and gave him a little reassuring scratch under the ears. Three minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Beginning to wobble, collapse imminent. Four minutes and seventeen seconds, collapsed. Wheezing louder. Death an eventuality.

    Five minutes and nine seconds, test subject one is deceased. Has surpassed all estimates.     Her eyes watered, and she very gently lifted the limp thing from the ground, running her finger along its soft fur. If sedating and killing the poor thing had been hard, dissecting it and going through its lungs and veins and heart would kill her. She gently tugged a white cloth from her duffel bag, wrapping it around the corpse before easing it into the metal container--now turned coffin.