Compound Zero

The bureaucrat stood in the biometric scanner with his arms outstretched. In the next room, his skeletal and vascular structures were projected in 3D. Alison, who was to chaperone the bureaucrat during his visit, tilted her head and considered the image. To her, the glowing skeleton resembled a black and orange butterfly, something beautiful, and soon she forgot the projection was human at all, let alone her father, a man she hadn’t seen or exchanged a single word with in twelve years.  

The last time Alison saw her father - the bureaucrat - he was in her doorway in the outside world. Alison had just told him she was joining the experimental compound, and he had just called her a damn fool. In the ensuing silence, her father lit a cigarette and a breeze carried the smoke into Alison’s apartment. She complained but he told her not to fret because it was the last breeze she would ever feel. You’re a damn fool. That insult always stuck with Alison, for her father was a man who, above the selfish and deceitful, hated the foolish. You’re a damn fool, Alison. 

But twelve years later her father emerged, a butterfly metamorphosed into a bureaucrat. “Hello, Sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve missed you.” 

Alison stared at her father: grey, fat, old, slow. “This way please, sir,” she said.  

Together they boarded an electric buggy and made for the docking station, the facility where the director instructed them to start the audit. Like most, her father had only seen the dome that covers the entire compound from the outside, so he spent the early portion of the drive staring up at the sheets of reinforced glass. Each panel was transparent with a gold tint except for the blacked-out solar panels that intercepted the sun’s rays. Together, the clear and solar panels created a pattern, a hieroglyphic message from the heavens in a world with a mosaic ceiling instead of a sky, a place with air but no wind. 

Soon, the buggy climbed a rise near the docking station, and a circle of thirty residents dressed in ceremonial white gowns appeared. Alison glanced at her father, who had also seen the circle, and then prepared for his incoming derision.

She would ignore the insult and explain that the residents were engaged in ‘Coordinated Socialising’, a mandatory daily activity which ensures each person is given time to speak on predetermined topics. Her father would ask why. Alison would say, “To avoid unhelpful dialogues, and to stop overbearing people from dominating conversations and skewing the culture.” She might hold his gaze too long, implying she was referring to people like him. 

Her father would understand the implication and say, “So everyone has to listen to the boring people with nothing to contribute?”

To which she would respond, “No one is boring if you let them speak.”

“I know boring people - they exist. I stop them from talking.” 

“I know you do, but if you actually listen…” 

“Well, I guess people here just aren’t as dull as people in the real world,” he would say, goading her.  

But that’s not what happened. Instead, her father twisted in his seat so those in the pristine white gowns remained the recipients of his gaze. He stared at them, wide-eyed, until they were obscured behind a wire fence and the buggy pulled into the docking station car park. 

The docking station is where goods unable to be manufactured or grown in the compound are imported through an extensible mechanical tube. Workers in hazmat suits ride the tube out, tie the goods down, delouse and scan for pests, contagions, and then suck the goods into the compound. Non-organic materials (batteries, vehicles…) often arrive in shipping containers, so armed security forces accompany the workers to check for unwanted immigration. 

Inside, Alison and her father entered the overseer's office. Her father fixed his camera orb to the office outer wall so it could scan the facility, and once the scan commenced, his tablet connected to the local inventory logs and requested his approval. He placed his thumb on the ID scanner and then turned to Alison. 

“So,” he said, as they waited, “where do you work?” 

“When I’m not chaperoning unwelcome guests?” asked Alison. Then she pointed at the hydroponics tower. “There, I oversee produce development.” 

“Well this algo might take a while so why don’t you show me your office?”

Alison ran the audit schedule in her head: start at the docking station, assess distribution capacity, move to the warehousing district, then to wastage. Do not deviate... Do not deviate...  

“No,” she said, “We’ve been instructed to stay here. Director Mitchell told us-”

“Told you,” interrupted her father, but with a wry smile. “C’mon. I just want to see where you work.” 

Before she could answer, her father made for the stairs and began his descent. 

At the hydroponics tower, they rode the glass elevator up 110 floors. Each level flew by in flashes of green plants, buzzing insects. Workers in hazmat suits were blurred behind plastic sheets, and the smell of fertiliser dominated the building. At night, this tower glows like a burning matchstick house due to the fluorescent lights that must run 24/7. It’s this endless light that caused a policy change so all new dwellings are directed away from the tower. So now people sleep facing, in the glass panels of the dome, their own reflection. 

They reached the roof and Alison’s father walked to the caged edge and took in the fresher air. From there he surveyed the entire compound. There were drones flying like gulls, people scurrying like ants, everything slightly darker, more golden, than outside. 

“So this is your world,” he said. 

“Until you strip me of it, I suppose,” replied Alison. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it?” 

Her father left the edge and stood before her. “Are you happy?” he asked.

“We’re not doing this,” she said. “You forced the director’s hand to make me your babysitter and that’s all you’re going to get. Let’s go back now, please.” 

He nodded, as if listening. “You’re what… thirty-eight now-” 

“What did I just say? We’re not fucking doing this. We’re going back.” 

Her father opened his mouth to speak but collapsed to the concrete. He landed on his limp arms and started convulsing. He managed to roll onto his back during the seizure, and when his hips thrust, his spotted tie catapulted over and landed on his face. There it flapped about as his spasming legs kicked an empty bucket, which rolled in a circle, the movement of which like a drumroll of death, as the man spat blood and pleaded with his eyes at his daughter before passing out.   

The next time Alison saw her father he was inside a golden-hued tube with his vitals displayed like a moving mountain range near his heart. For the second time, her father’s skeleton was projected; this time on the wall of the medical chrysalis, where the sick emerge healthy or not at all.

Standing in the  hallway, Alison was gazing into the medical chamber when the doctor approached.

“Complications arising from metabolic syndrome,” said the doctor. “A useful reminder of what we’ve been able to eradicate in here… through measures that make the outside folk sick.” 

Alison ignored the joke. “Is he going to be alright?” she asked. 

The doctor waited for her to turn. “He’s dying, Alison. He’s… he’s quite close,” she said. “In fact, I’m certain he lied on the tests to gain access because his blood, urine, none of it matches his file.”

They both gazed into the medical chamber, silent. 

“Do you think he knew?” asked the doctor. 

Alison understood what she meant: Do you think your father knew that if something viral showed up on his scans then he would have been incinerated. 

“Can I speak to him?” said Alison.  

Robbed of his suit and tie, her father’s large belly and swollen and marked arms were clear to see. Tubes ran from his nose, arms and under his paper gown, each pumping chemicals to keep the seizures, and perhaps death, at bay. When Alison sat down, her father struggled to turn his head and instead his eyes alone moved, like frozen prey. Between them the curved glass glistened with an avalanche of numbers, charts, his rising heartbeat. He put his hand on the glass, but Alison remained still. 

“Are you comfortable?” she asked. 

“I’m fine, Sweetheart,” he said, taking his hand off the glass. 

Alison furrowed her brow, crossed her arms. She thought then of the lifetime of poor decisions that dragged her father to this crisis, decisions that compound residents defer to their leadership: diet, exercise, mental health, leisure, career… Like a Ulysses pact, residents bind themselves to better judgement to remain a colony of healthy, well-adjusted, productive and long-lived people. And this utopia is provided at one small cost: what those outside call freedom. But Alison, staring at her dying father, wondered how anyone can argue that the individual, infirmed through their own recklessness, is any more free than the willfully imprisoned. 

“What you did was reckless,” she said, her tone angry. 

Her father cleared his throat.  

“Director Mitchell was gracious enough to grant the government’s request, and this is-”

“Your mother,” interrupted her father, “has gotten into tai chi.”

“What?” asked Alison. 

She glanced at the window where the doctor was visible assessing her father’s vitals. 

“Every morning,”continued her father, “she’s out on the balcony in her active wear. Now, I know tai chi is supposed to be slow but I think she’s doing it too slow. So slow, in fact, that once I ran I was worried she’d died standing up. She was just frozen there with her arms out in front. I dropped my coffee mug and ran outside already sobbing. But when I grabbed her, to feel her one last time, she started screaming: ‘I’m meditating! I’m meditating, you buffoon!’” 

When her father stopped talking, Alison tried to picture her mother. She was in her seventies, but Alison didn’t know if her hair was still dyed, or if she had let it go grey, white even. Alison didn’t know how the wrinkles of her face had formed, so she lost her smile, and the mention of tai chi cast her entire personality behind doubt. The woman Alison knew would never do tai chi.  

“How is she?” asked Alison. 

“She’s great,” said her father, and his smile was genuine and wide. “Misses you, of course.” 

The machines beeped and a pump wheezed. Alison said nothing.

“You look well, anyway,” he continued. “I guess all that insect paste does wonders.” 

“It’s not as bad as the people outside must think. Tastes a bit like… chicken.” 

“Oh, you remember what that tastes like, do you?” 

Alison didn’t, of course, and she shook her head and conceded a point to her father. 

“Well, I probably know the taste of it too well,” he added, giving the point back. 

The scores were level, and for a moment their eyes met. 

“You must remember the chicken from your aunty’s house,” he said. 

“The raw chicken,” confirmed Alison. “It was pink, and you still made me eat it!” 

Her father laughed against the pain. “Made you, oh no. I let you - quite an important distinction. And it wasn’t raw; it was thigh meat, and I didn’t want to upset your mother. You know what she was like.” 

“Upset her, what about my stomach? I was sick for days.” 

“Okay. It was a little raw, I’ll admit that.” 

“Finally,” she said, ending a twenty-five year disagreement. 

An old image of her father entered her mind. Blonde hair, broad shoulders. He was talking to his sister by an open fire. She was laughing. He was waving his arms, carefree. 

“Dad,” she said, piercing a long silence. 

“Yes, Sweetheart.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Was what worth it?”

“The way you lived your life.”

Her father struggled onto his side and caught his daughter’s stare. As he contemplated her question, a cheeky smile came over his weathered face, a face that had seen more life than ten men.  

“I could ask you the same question,” he said, after some deliberation. 

Alison straightened in her seat. She rubbed her hands on her thighs. “You could,” she said. 

Then she braced because they both knew, through practice, where this conversation leads. 

“If I’m honest with you, Alison,” he began, “I’d rather know something else though.”

“What’s that?” she asked. 

“Do you still paint?” When no answer came, he continued. “Do you still paint those beautiful butterflies like when you were a child?”

Alison’s palms covered her eyes and her head dropped. When she returned her gaze, her father’s face was soft and welcoming. She smiled, nodded and placed her hand on the glass, the two hands mirrored, father and daughter, opposites. She went on to tell him all about the butterflies, and soon the conversation drifted, naturally, to the rest of her life and then to his life and her mother’s life. They spoke late into the night, because they knew that in the morning he would leave, and by some strange and modern opportunity - the ability to inhabit different worlds - they would never see, touch or talk again.

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