Joseph’s journal – 23 / 02 / 3204

Joseph is a marine, who was just recently accepted into the scout corps, he tells a little about himself

Second entry, I have been recruited on the scouting corps, after years of training and providing civilian protection I finally get to go out in the field, I get to go outside the dome, and explore, I have been waiting for this day my entire life. Ever since I was a little boy I have always been fascinated by what is happening outside of the dome, how the wildlife is, what kind of creatures we might discover, we took a test run to the outside this morning, I was very pleased, the variety of plants, and animals was amazing, and yet only a few hundred meters outside our home, I cannot wait to actually go out on missions, and who knows, maybe we might discover a pre-technologic warship from the times of our ancestors, it would be a dream come true, to be able to walk inside one of those, but the military council says it’s too risky, we don’t know what kind of radiation spills and dangers there might be inside one of those beasts. I read that those machines where huge metal monsters, suspended in the air a few hundred meters above the surface, they were supposed to have guns and firepower to wipe out an entire civilization. Run by a single-core fusion reactor, and could keep the ship running for centuries, I wonder if one of those can still operate today, but those are only stories, I wish they were true, but I have my doubts, since there is nothing in the archives about how we lost our incredible power, I mean there must be an explanation of how we ended up like this, I suspect that the foundation is keeping a whole lot of secrets from the people, and they still don’t explain how all these people keep disappearing, sometimes whole families just vanish into thin air, maybe the foundation is conducting experiments on people, I have absolutely no idea.

I live alone, I have no family or relatives except my father who is soon to take is very last breath. Ever since my father was a child he had problems breathing, and Faints atmosphere only made his condition worse, but that did not stop him from secretly sneaking outside of the dome from time to time, he’d sometimes bring home weird stuff, like stones, crystals, and anything else that would catch his attention, he was fully aware of the extreme risks of doing so, not only did it physically almost kill him a couple of times, but if he was ever found doing this, he would be sentenced to state jail, and I would have ended in an orphanage, but yet he kept going outside, there was a strange satisfying sense of peace that came with him every time he had returned from outside the dome, it would lighten up the house every time, maybe he did it to escape reality for a while, or maybe just to tend his broken heart. You see my mother died when giving birth to me, and it nearly tore his heart in half, I always wondered why he was never angry at me for taking my mother’s life, but he never looked at it like that, every time I asked that question he’d say; “you are a gift, from your mother to me, you are the last thing that remains of her, why would I be mad at you?”.

I don’t know how long he has left to live, I hope he never dies, but I guess everybody must die at some point.

- Halldor Scheving Vidarsson

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