The morning after the exotic crash, Zeff wasn’t sure what could be done. He’d spent hours making calls, telling everyone who needed to know. Most of them were asleep, some of them couldn’t even understand.
The sky had turned blue. Which was ridiculous.
He called the engineers over in district 7. “Blue,” he repeated. “Just look outside. It’s a total world crash.”
He listened to the man at the end of the line as he groggily went to a window. There was a yelp of alarm. “Oh my God!”
The line went dead. Zeff sighed. What a disaster. How would they ever save face? Why did it have to be blue? Purple they could have bluffed away as war dust. Yellow could have been fumes from what had been the Atlantic. Green would have been acceptable. The darker the better. Hell, even orange had naturally occurred outside the dome. But blue?
Wait. Zeff’s mind struggled with something. A dim spark had lit up somewhere. Hadn’t the sky actually once been-
Startled, he grabbed a terminal and called the number he’d been putting off. His hated ancient history classes were actually paying off.
Dominic Chett picked up after ten minutes. A record for him. “Be quick,” he hissed.
“Sir, this is Zeff, I work on the orbital grid in district 8-”
“You people just broke the sky!” Chett sounded incensed. “Any minute thousands of people on the east coast are gonna wake to a botch job the scale of an entire horizon-”
“The sky used to be blue, sir.” Zeff got this in at the first possible break.
There was a long silence. “Are you insane?”
“No sir. Before the numb war, before the re-sky, before the e-sky, before all that. The old raw world, the sky was blue.”
“That was the sea, you shitbird.” he sounded disgusted.
“No sir, the sea and the sky. Both were blue. It’s authentic.”
“Auth-” Chett couldn’t even get the word out. “Even if it is, it’s not right. Not- not acceptable.”
“Just spin it.” Zeff knew this was a risk, telling the big man what to do and how to do it; but if he didn’t do something, he knew he’d be off reprogramming rainfall drop by drop in the modem slums.
Across the city, he could hear Chett’s teeth grinding. “So it’s a restoration, of sorts?” He muttered, trying to think it through.
“Sure, an early domeday present. From Chett industries.”
While Chett chewed on this, Zeff called up a screen and checked to see what else had happened. It had been a pure collapse. The whole network was stuttering.
“So what happened anyway?” Chett’s change in demeanour suggested Zeff still had a job.
“Exotic crash, sir.”
“What’s that? I don’t speak bore jaw.”
“Uh, it’s just a phrase sir, means a unique or unusual malfunction. This one’s a doozy. People will be studying it for years.”
The teeth were back to grinding. “One, don’t ever say doozy again. Two, fix the God damn sky. Three, don’t ever let this happen again!”
He hung up.
Zeff wondered what to do next. Outside his office he could hear people talking on the street. A blue sky, how peculiar.
What had happened last night? Zeff went back through the previous cycles data log. There had to be an account. A spike in information, or a flux. Some deviation.
There it was. A freak data purge at 3 AM. It had triggered a cascade, whole streams of information had been misplaced. The entire sky would have to be restarted. That should be easy enough during dome-night. Still, a hassle though.
Zeff shuddered. This might cost him. It wasn’t his fault, but his department had failed to notice the event. He got up and went to the window. He wondered if people would be screaming or rioting? Hell, maybe they’d be happy? Astonished?
Zeff took a deep breath, and looked. Outside, down in the street, people were just standing around, craning their heads, pointing. There was no sound. Nobody spoke. They just studied the sight.
There seemed, if anything, to simply be a palpable sense of sadness. Perhaps a mass sensation, or realisation, of something lost. Lost to an old war that made as little sense as the roof above. A glitch derezzed through a grid, looking like a flutter of birds. A tile that had failed completely, and only rendered white static, looked like a single cloud. Zeff looked up, stunned. This is what it must have been like. Almost.
It wasn’t broken, it was wistful.
The other districts started to call him as the city began to wake. He took calls on his wrist unit, but he didn’t leave his balcony. He couldn’t pull his eyes away. There was panic in the first voices, but he noticed that began to drip away. By mid morning the calls had a different tone entirely.
“What did you guys do?”
“It was an exotic crash,” Zeff murmured.
“It’s…” there was a pause, “it’s beautiful.”
Zeff nodded. “Yeah. Yeah it really is.”
Eventually the calls stopped. Zeff looked to the next block across from his. People were gathering on their balconies, staring. The districts were crowded, with the tall grey towers all lined up like headstones. The dome tried to replicate day cycles, but had never got it right. Nothing had ever felt quite true here, even if it was all anyone had ever known. It was a bubble made of steel, cut off from a world that didn’t seem to exist anymore.
Then suddenly, there was this.
Down on the street, children were skipping. Saying blue sky, blue sky, over and over.
His wrist beeped, and Zeff took a call from Chett.
Chett’s voice was terse, blunt. “Leave it.”
Zeff ended the call, and returned his gaze to the blue horizon his ancestors had dreamed away.
Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, sites and anthologies, including Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling and Popshot Quarterly. He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in The Literary
Hatchet and Space and Time. He has a blog at http://barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk/
