Never Conquered

Mercury is being settled in large cities made out of Habitat Domes and is flooded with happy immigrants. The Denton’s children, however, are less excited about their new home.

  “I hear they’re building a new Habitat Dome in Toxophile,” Richard said absently as he read the morning news on his tablet. “To accommodate the recent influx of immigrants. Housing is getting a bit sparse over there.”
  “Good thing we settled here in Drystorm Garden,” Matilda replied, setting down the plates of pre-arranged, genetically enhanced, TV-Dinner-inspired meals on the table. Richard picked at the recycled protein brick that was meant to be SPAM. Their children, Bridget, Quinten, and Kimber, sat quietly at the table, eating the less than appetizing “breakfast”. 
  “When is the city gonna fix the gardens?” Bridget asked with a grimace, stabbing at what could be described as yellow lettuce with her fork. “I don’t know how much more of this stuff I can eat.”
  “I miss Earth,” Kimber whined, swirling her spoon around in the ketchup compartment. “We ate good there. We ate real eggs and real salads and real fruit.”
  “Why did we have to come here,” Quinten added, forcing pieces of slimy, oily protein down his throat. “Why couldn’t we have gone to a Gaian world? Gaians terraform. We could’ve been on a planet with an atmosphere! Big wide open spaces�"” 
  “Eat your breakfast,” Matilda commanded, sitting. She set the example for the children, placidly eating from the plate. The food was bland and tasteless, like a muted version of what it was attempting to mimic. Richard barely touched his until a swift kick from Matilda’s boot prompted him to act enthused about the meal. 
  The family ate in melancholy silence, munching and crunching with sadness in their hearts and disappointment in their mouths. 
  Richard went off to work in the Habitat Dome’s Maintenance Facility B while Matilda got the children ready for school. She sent them out the door and prepared herself for work at the construction site for the new Transit Network. 
  Bridget, Quinten, and Kimber started walking. They put their earpieces in to both drown out the noise of the crowded city streets and to hear the synopsis of the day’s lessons. Each child had a different learning style, and the schools had adapted to reflect that. Bridget was a quick study but struggled in math so her instructor took extra time to explain each math lesson to her. 
  Quinten was an avid reader and excelled in math, science, and writing, but struggled with self-expression and art. His teacher encouraged him to experiment with his feelings. 
  Kimber was very athletic and had little patience for reading or math. She liked science for the experiments and she loved art for the chaos. She was the most difficult to teach. Kimber already had to switch instructors once, a rare thing in the modern school system. So much time and effort is expended in pairing students with their teachers that the procedure has a near perfect success rate. 
  The three children walked along the concrete streets, by the tall metallic buildings decorated in an abundance of colorful paint and dangling ribbons. All that was Mercury had been obscured beneath the enormous Habitat Domes that made up Drystorm Garden. They lived in Dome 3, the newest addition to the city. It reeked of hot concrete and fresh pavement and molten metal circulated by stale, recycled air. The natural temperatures on Mercury were extreme and the domes did their best to regulate and utilize the heat of the nearby sun. It was a balmy 89 degrees Fahrenheit on most days, though it was advertised to be 68 to 72 in all the brochures. All three of the Denton children hated living on Mercury. They missed playing in nature, in green valleys and shady forests, climbing rocky hills and sliding down snowy slopes, splashing around in clear rivers and swimming in murky ponds, slipping on frozen lakes and scaling steep cliffs. They missed the sounds, the tweeting of birds and chittering of squirrels and the barking of dogs, the sound of wind through tree limbs; of rustling leaves and creaking wood. The whooshing of distant hovercars and the sound of a breeze through tall grass. They especially missed laying on their backs and watching the clouds, hearing nothing but the whispered breathing of Earth as they whiled the day away. 
  Mercury was noisy and crowded and devoid of any life besides human. No pets, no birds, no bugs, no plants, no trees, no grass! The whole world was steel and stone and concrete and glass and plastic and manufactured. The color was fabricated, unnatural; decorative falsities. The Denton children hated it on Mercury. The people in Drystorm Garden were disillusioned; they were members of a silly cult that was fervently against terraforming. The Lu Ban Brotherhood believed in conservation, ignoring the fact that merely settling a planet in this way, the construction of huge habitats in which people can dwell, is directly opposing their beliefs; in a different, subtler way, they were still changing the planet. 
  Bridget, Quinten, and Kimber arrived at the school; an impressively tall building with architecture built to resemble huge gothic cathedrals, but hidden within was a very utilitarian design; cold white halls that reflected the lifeless LED lights imbedded in the white ceiling, casting not a single shadow on the white floor and windowless silver doors. Little red plaques denoting the room numbers and occupants were the only splashes of color in the world of endless, miserable white. 
  “I miss snow,” Kimber muttered as they walked around the halls, quietly nodding to other students who wandered listlessly before classes began. “I miss winter.”
  “Me, too,” Bridget said with a slight grimace. “I miss flowers.”
  “I miss everything,” Quinten grumbled, glancing at the incremental blood numbers. “I wish we could take a shuttle back home.”
  “What made Mom and Dad even want to come here?” Kimber asked, kicking at the immaculate floor. “It’s so boring!”
  “They came for work,” Bridget said, repeating what their parents had so often told them. “For opportunities they wouldn’t get on Earth.”
  “There’s opportunities on Mars,” Quinten complained, stopping at his door. “And the Gaians made Mars into a paradise. Duncan sent me pictures. It’s a perfect place for kids like us.”
  “Duncan’s lucky.” Kimber sulked, swaying with melancholy. “I wish we lived with Duncan on Mars.”
  “Me, too.” Bridget agreed sadly. She sighed and took Kimber’s hand, leading the younger child towards her classroom. “See you later.”
  “Yeah, later.” 
  The average school day was only about 5 hours, 4 for the younger children with an hour break for play. Snacks or meals were available at any time at the dispensers in every classroom and each classroom only had one student in it for every lesson. There was a voluntary socializing element to school; it stayed open for 4 hours after lessons had completed as a safe place for kids to hang out while their parents worked. Besides school there were the artificial above-ground parks, of course, and the playgrounds covered in rubber tan-bark and the skate rinks and jungle gyms and arcades and libraries that littered the upper layer of Drystorm Garden. Not one inch of space was wasted in Mercury cities and the tall Habitat Domes offered interesting construction conundrums which were answered with some ingenious solutions. Various “enjoyment” areas were built atop buildings or bridging the roofs of skyscrapers. The residents had already built a network of terraces across the higher stories to more easily move around their city, why not build upon that idea? Drystorm Garden was the first city on Mercury to have an artificial park over 300 feet in the air, suspended between four adjacent housing towers. The park had walls, of course, and support beams to keep it steady and safe. People loved it. Well, most people. 
  Quinten went into his small classroom where the hologram projector hummed idly, waiting for his teacher to boot up the twin device on his home-world. When the children moved, they weren’t assigned new teachers; instead, the same teacher would simply continue to teach across the void of space via holograms. Due to the expansive Space Communications Network, there was virtually no lag on the projections and the kids could learn just as well as before. Theoretically, that is. The people who come up with these things never take into account the feelings of the children, much as their parents neglected to think how this artificial environment would impact the mental health of their growing offspring. What might be best for the family might not be best for the individual, as difficult as that is to consider sometimes.
  True, Quinten could attend a social gathering held at the school to make friends or join the other young people in the arcades or rinks to enjoy life, but he was finding it hard to muster up the motivation to leave his house. He wanted nothing at all to do with Mercury or Drystorm Garden or any member of the general populace. 
  Quinten wanted to go home. He wanted to visit Duncan on Mars. He didn’t want to be here, learning for 5 hours from a holographic projection of a teacher 80 million miles away. 
  He sighed and took out his tablet, looking at the Lock Screen picture; a photo of Earth from orbit. 

  Quinten stared up at the sky, squinting. He was in good company that afternoon; almost every body that could fit outside was staring up at the clear dome’s ceiling. People that couldn't get into the streets were standing on rooftops or in the Enjoyment Areas or on terraces or even leaning precariously out their windows. 
  The Dome was cracked. 
  The air was thick with murmured questions, swirling and blowing about like whirlwinds. 
  “When do you suppose that happened?” Matilda asked Richard as she gripped her children’s shoulders tightly, as if to ensure that they wouldn’t float away. Richard had Kimber on his shoulders as they looked up together. 
  “It must’ve happened while we were asleep,” Richard offered, though his confidence was less than inspiring. 
  “What could've done that?” Bridget asked, her voice shaking with a creeping terror. 
  “An asteroid, probably,” Quinten commented. “A really, really big one.”
  “The Dome’s supposed to be reinforced against meteors, isn’t it?” Matilda asked her husband. 
  “Yeah, but space is full of surprises.” Richard shrugged, eliciting a giggle from his youngest daughter. 
  “Do we gotta leave now?” Kimber asked. She gasped excitedly. “Can we go back to the Earth?”
  “We’re not going back to Earth,” Matilda denied sternly. “They’ll probably just… move us to a different part of Drystorm Garden until they get the dome fixed.”
  “What if something else hits the dome while it’s damaged?” Quinten inquired, attempting to push his mother’s fears towards Earth. “What if the crack already has a tiny hole in it?”
  “We’d be dead, exposed to the vacuum of space,” Bridget told him. “But still, he’s got a good point. We don’t know what actually happened; there could be an inherent design flaw in Habitat Dome 3.  It is less than five years old.”
  “There’s nothing wrong with the infrastructure,” Matilda said defensively. Her children couldn't understand why she didn’t want to just go back to Earth. What was so wrong with going home?
  “It’s okay, Tilly,” Richard said gently, resting a hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have to go to Earth.”
  “Yes, we do!” Quinten shouted suddenly, pulling away from his mother and whirling around to face his family. “Do you not see what I see? There is a crack in the giant glass dome that keeps us all alive! How are you still so unwilling to accept that you were wrong, Mom? Life isn’t better here! Mercury is dangerous and deadly and we risk our lives every day by living on it!” 
  “Quinten�"” Matilda began, anger in her eyes.
  “I hate it here!” he shrieked, grabbing the attention of bystanders. “It’s cramped and loud and, and unnatural! Everything sucks! You were wrong, Mom. Admit it! This place is terrible and we are going to die if we stay!”
  “Quinten!” Matilda hissed, glancing at the many eyes that had turned toward her. She lurched forward and grabbed her son before he had a chance to run, to melt into the crowd. “Go to your room, right now!”
  “Look!” someone screamed, pointing. A million heads turned at once, following that foreboding finger. 
  The crack was spreading. 
  Long, wicked, icy tendrils crept along the faraway ceiling, snapping and jerking on their course with haste. The cracks splintered and veered, joining together on their destructive paths further down the dome in a massive, chaotic spiderweb of doom. The Denton family found themselves huddling together, as were most others living in Habitat Dome 3 of Drystorm Garden. 
  “I’m sorry,” Matilda whispered as the thunderous lines above continued downward, cracking and booming and crinkling with malice. She held her children close, Quinten included. Richard stroked her hair as Bridget cried softly. Kimber gazed up at the slowly shattering sky, her young heart stricken with grief and sadness. 
  “I love you, Mom,” Quinten whispered as he hugged her, just before the last cacophonous boom sounded above them as the jagged, angry cracks became too numerous. 
  It happened so fast after that boom. The heat of untamed Mercury exploded into the now exposed city; the stale air was sucked out into the nonexistent atmosphere of the first planet, taking with it a number of citizens and the vast majority of the dome’s components. The heat, so intense, killed what remained instantly, burning without fire the bodies of the innocent and guilty alike, burned to nothingness, less than ash. The city itself likewise was obliterated, the uppermost half of the city was torn asunder and hurled into space at the sudden absence of atmosphere, though much of the ground level remained. These remnants were quickly destroyed by the rapid heating and cooling of Mercury’s surface by it’s daily rotation, so by the third day, nothing was left of Habitat Dome 3. 
  Mercury was immediately evacuated after the tragedy, abandoned by the citizens and resulting in the dissolution of the Lu Ban Brotherhood. In less than one hundred years, all traces of the colonies were gone. 
  Some things are never meant to be conquered.