Fiction

Jeffrey opens his eyes and for a moment can’t switch lives back to his slowly-waking body. He is still fully in his dream, in which he was a man pushing his tools through the dirt. He still has the smell of dark earth and vegetation and the coming storm pulling itself over the curve of the earth. He fumbles for the light and his notebook, but the dream is gone, the words that were just in his head that he would have used to describe it already slipped away. The faint drum-beat of the engines registers in his ears not as the slow breathing of the waves on rock as they had a moment before, but as the controlled fusion explosions that they were. He closes his notebook without writing a word, and stands up unsteadily, his feet cold on the floor/shell. He shuffles to his one window in the floor/wall and peers down, as though he were looking for a fish through a hole in the ice. He is only vaguely aware of this ancestral action and doesn’t have the words to express it. He gestures to turn up his sun. The floodlights illuminating the core flicker on, making the superdense material at the center of his sphere glow bright yellow. This is dawn on D + 26,280,472.

There were two prevailing stories told by the former inhabitants of Jeffrey’s sphere. The first is that there was a cataclysm of some sort, irradiating the outer surface of the world, forcing civilization underground. The second is that god himself strolled down through the clouds, rubbed his eyes, disapproved of what we did to his Summer home, and promptly inverted the world, taking all the surface back for himself and relegating the rest of his creation to the underworld. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what actually caused homo sapiens to start rooting around through the planet, the long and the short of it is that once relegated to the inside of its planet, people realized that they needed to plan things out a little better, so they started the levels. Their entire world was built like an onion; layers and layers of city, like a Russian nesting doll. As with nesting dolls, they kept going down and down, smaller and smaller, until all that was left was a tiny doll that could not be opened. That’s where Jeffrey lives. He inhabits the hollowed-out inside of the core housing, a miniature Dyson Sphere not four kilometers in diameter. The new core was kept spinning, and Jeffrey’s sole purpose was to monitor that spin.

He is the 2250^th iteration of an organic drone whose body the engineers of the core developed in order to keep an eye on things. He was made to be dumb, a mechanic with an infinite attention span, able to make repairs and reproduce himself as needed. In earlier models, there were many more tasks to perform, and many different forms of Jeffrey. Over time, his mind evolved, and he needed fewer and fewer bodies, until he became a single boy, serene in his solitary bubble. Jeffrey learned many years ago that the throbbing heart of his world will never spin down, never run out of fuel.

Jeffrey waited patiently for humanity to wind down and finally end. When it finally did, Jeffrey gave a final tug on the invisible strings that held his sphere to the rest of the world, unravelled those connections, and the nesting dolls began to separate and fall away until all that was left was his tiny planet turned inside out.

He peers out his window, marks a place in the dark with his eyes, and sets sail.