GOAN NUP

Metal. Cold, metal. Shiny, to make the space feel bigger than it was. Tiny lights in the ceiling, glinting off cold metal. Six lights, three were out, three worked. A handrail. A panel of little buttons and a display of numbers. A small hole from where emergency rations were dispensed. Another small hole to throw out waste. A bed made of balled up clothes. There were doors, but they had only opened once when the man had entered - when the man was just a boy. That was it, that was all he had or knew. He didn’t know exactly what he would find when he got to where he was going, but he knew that his tiny box was going up.

Every day he watched the numbers. He didn’t know what they were, but they changed every second and sometimes there would be fewer of them. He had worked out a pattern that when it showed a circle shape, all the shapes changed, sometimes with one less shape. Perhaps all the shapes would go and there would just be a circle and then he would have reached the top.

The man hoped that when he reached the top, he would see the sun. He had never seen the sun. He remembered stories of the sun; he had been told it was eternally warm. He did not understand how, but it sounded good.

The man distantly remembered the mines, although that had been so long ago. Cold, black, dirty. He was born in the mines, but they had been closed by then. Most people left. Up the elevators they went, fast as dynamite. Many stayed. He stayed. Underground was their home, a good home they were told. If it was a good home why did the people keep leaving? There was so little power, so little food. He had hated it. He wanted to see the sun. He was still a boy when he stole some things. They wanted them back but he wasn’t coming back. He ran into the elevator, where they were forbidden to go. “Dosclosin,” it had said. It was a nice sound, to him it had sounded welcoming. His family ran to stop him but the doors slid shut and he never saw them again. “Goan nup.”

The dream of the sun got dimmer every day until eventually, the man wished he had stayed in the mines. In the mines he could roam and wander long tunnels and vast caverns. In the elevator he could wander from corner to corner and back again. When there was more power in the mines, the elevators took you to the surface in minutes. The mines closed, people left and the only power was what could be spared. The elevator on emergency power may well have not moved. It still had miles and miles of shaft through the planet’s crust to travel. If the man had known that a trip from the mines to the surface at this speed would take twenty-four years, he may never have stepped inside. It was too late however; he was in and happily watching the numbers count up and up. A sideways line, a line, two circles, a circle, two circles and two lines: “-18087”. The man smiled. “Lots of circles,” he thought, “Nearly there.”

ANAX