Cloudburn

The countdown started.

Ten. The massive egg-shaped shuttle stood beside the passenger tower like a chrome mountain holding a steel crutch, towering over the charred, dead landscape.

Eight. Dim, dark orange sunlight reflected off the hundreds, thousands of one-way windows that dotted the sides of the shuttle in a grid, like a steel and glass net wrapped around a silver egg. Behind each window sat one, maybe two people, sitting comfortably in mahogany chairs and silk beds.

Six. The tip of the conical shuttle rounded off into a hemisphere. Five boosters spread evenly in a pentagon pattern were attached to the circumference of the egg's flat base base, each as wide as a city block.

Four. Inhabitants a world away stared at the shuttle through the glass in their television screens. A man watched far in the distance atop a hill, through the glass in his gas mask. A pickaxe in his hands.

Two. Absolute silence.

One.



Suddenly, a blinding explosion of light turned everything white, followed by the sonic roar of the boosters coming to life. The base of the shuttle spewed colossal plumes of fire and smoke like the throat of a terrible dragon. The shuttle started its ascent, first slowly, then faster as the hunk of metal and glass picked up momentum. Like an iron owl, it rose, carrying the last of the government officials out of earth, piercing the dense layer of smog and clouds above. The intense heat and force of the shuttle lit the clouds immediately adjacent to it aflame and dispersed the rest of the clouds around it in the shock wave, punching a hole in the sky a mile wide. Black ash fell from the flaming clouds and down to Earth as the shuttle rose higher and higher, followed by a trail of red fire and a column of gray smoke, until it was out of view, eclipsed by the thick pale clouds. Its roar slowly faded and the world was drowned in silence once more.

The man watching in the distance stood as if in a trance, looking up at the tower of smoke and ash that the shuttle left behind, a perfectly straight tower perpendicular to the ground that connected Earth and heaven itself. Then, he looked away, and walked down the hill he stood on, back toward the mine where he worked.



Sweat dripped from the man's coarse dark hair, made even darker by black dust which tightly clung to every individual strand of hair on the man's head. Several factors could have caused the man to perspire. Maybe it was the intense heat caused by the curtains of smog and clouds that trapped the sun's heat in its greed, yet rejected all but darkest shades of red and orange light, dyeing the Earth a bloodshot scarlet. Or maybe it was the hours of backbreaking labor that the man's had to endure, endlessly chipping away at the Earth, searching for black minerals hidden beneath layers of rock and sediment.

The man didn't know why he was being paid by the government to find these. The general theory is that they're used to fuel the massive shuttles that frequently flew out into deep space, the "Silver Eggs" that each carried a hundred, two hundred thousand passengers out of Earth and into a planet thousands of light years away called "Solaris." And as the man slowly chiseled away at the Earth, like the ten, fifteen other men around him, he gradually drifted into the depths of his mind, jumping in and out of consciousness, remembering when the Silver Eggs were first spawned.



It was roughly 20 years ago, the year 2082. Industrialization had increased significantly, to the point where practically everything was made by machines. Fewer and fewer pieces of nature remained, slowly taken over by massive power plants and factories that belched gigantic quantities of smoke and fumes into the atmosphere. Eventually, nature was unable to keep up with the levels of carbon dioxide and species after species went extinct from the air's toxicity, which could kill a full grown man after ten minutes of exposure. Eventually, mankind was the only macroscopic left on the planet. The government of course, had tried solution after solution, but each one seemed to bring even more problems into play. Growing desperate, they handed out gas masks to the population if only to ensure human survival, but it was in no means a permanent nor effective solution.

Simultaneously, space travel technology had steadily improved, reaching a point where man can travel light years in a blink of an eye. Space tourism gained increasingly popular, first with the wealthy, then with the middle class as technology improved. Eventually, the "Silver Eggs" were designed that could carry two hundred thousand people through the farthest reaches of the universe, in other worlds they could only dream about seeing.

It wasn't long before people put two and two together. Mankind found the closest habitable planet, Solaris, and began issuing a mandatory evacuation the the global population. Evacuating all nine billion humans on Earth would be no easy task, and even though the production of the eggs was completely automated and labor was limitless, there was no guarantee that there would be enough resources to send everyone, so the world government decided to divide the population by class. The wealthy, influential, upper class would be sent first, followed by the middle class, then the government officials, and lastly, the poor, working class. Year after year, more and more people were sent to Solaris. Nine billion, six billion, three billion, Earth's population dwindled as Solaris' population increased. As of today, the last of the government had just left, and the only people on Earth were the poor. And resources were becoming scarcer and scarcer.



The man opened his eyes to the sight of a rock, inches from his eyes but gently holding the top of his gas mask. He had been sleeping, with his head against the rock face. For how long, he didn't know. The sun was no indication. Night or day, the sky was a crimson red and the heat was constant and unending.

"Mornin'," a voice said behind the man. The man lifted his head off the rock wall and stood up, facing the aged man behind him. "You were out for about 30 minutes."

"Where's everyone else?"

"They left. Shift's over. Went to get their food pills. I stuck around to see if you'd tip over and break your skull on your pickaxe," the man said, with a snicker. The man simply went by the name "Odi." Nobody knew what his real name was. He was a strange person. With his wild, wire-like hair sticking out from behind his gas mask, his wrinkled, scarred hands, and the same ragged, torn set of clothes that he always wore, he was unappealing to look at. His right leg was prosthetic, a metal pole, having lost his real one years back. He shambled like a zombie wherever he went. Because of his disability, he didn't have to work as hard to earn the same amount of pills as everyone else, a fact that Odi embraced. Incredibly lazy in his job, he would mine for five hours and sit and snicker to himself while others toiled away for eight, nine more hours.

The man shook his head, as if recovering from a daze. His body was drenched in brown sweat, colored from the specks of sand and dirt that floated aimlessly around the open mine. It made the man feel unclean, and the way his yellow, mining clothing clung to his wet skin irritated him. He readjusted his midnight black gas mask and tugged at his shirt collar with a black, sooty glove, inadvertently making the black powder from it rub off and stick to his neck, much to the man's annoyance (and Odi's amusement).

"Well, I already got my five pills. See you around," Odi said, with another snicker as he staggered away.

Dropping his pickaxe on the mine floor and picking up his sack full of black crystals, the man walked out of the mine and followed the trail to the reward dispenser, an iron machine shaped like a rectangle. Roughly 6 feet tall, three feet wide, and two feet deep, the machine had a large hollow space in the middle that acted as a scale, with a monitor above it that gave the weight and the number of pills to be dispensed. To the right of the scale was a small hole about the size of a quarter, designed to dispense the pills.

The man plopped his bag of crystals on the scale. The machine shook to life and the whirs of moving machinery came from deep within the solid iron rectangle. Two bracket-shaped pieces of metal came out from the left and right interior faces of the hollow space that was the scale. The brackets moved synchronously up and down the bag, scanning it to see if a worker had tried to fool the system by placing worthless rocks in his bag to increase the weight. But the man was honest, and every rock in his bag was pure black crystal.

The brackets passed the bag once, twice, three times before the machine was satisfied and the slot from beneath the bag receded into the wall and the bag fell straight down into a collection chute that seems to go down into infinity. The man looked up at the monitor.

41 kilograms of crystal. Three pills were dispensed.

Three? Only three pills? That was ridiculous, he always gave around 40 kilograms of crystal a day, and he always received four pills. Four pills, which barely managed to keep him and his son from starving. But three? Now both of them would go hungry.

Frustrated, the man kicked the soulless machine. He kicked and kicked and kicked with his yellow, steel-toed boots, but the machine wouldn't dent. He grabbed its edges and shook and shook and shook, but the machine didn't budge. The green computer screen just stared at him, expressionless, emotionless. 41 kilograms, 41 kilograms, 41 kilograms taunting him. His efforts were in vain.

He took the two pills and dropped it into his pocket. He kicked the sand and ash beneath his feet, sending a plume of red and black dust into the air, before he started his long walk home.



A small boy, no older than six, or seven, lay on the silver floor of a large silver room. His belly pressed against the warm metal tiling below him. His right arm supported his chin. His left flipping the worn cardboard pages of an old children's book a few inches in front of him, his eyes scanning the pictures and skimming the words. Every so often, the child's eyes would float and drift through the room, observing its emptiness. To his left was a crude wooden bookshelf against the wall with books and various boxes, all in total disarray. Beside the bookshelf, a silver door that led to a small, cramped bedroom with a mediocre shower. In front of him, a small dining table with two mismatched chairs, both looked like they would fall apart at any moment. In the corner of the two walls, a small television set. Behind him, a giant screen of glass. Behind that, a room with large vents, a metal cabinet with rows of gas masks, and a thick metal door that led to the outside world. The rest of the room was devoid of decoration and furniture, save for the piles and piles of old and new books scattered throughout. No windows, the only light being the fluorescent squares on the ceiling.

Suddenly, a muffled click behind him. The child looked back. The metal door unlocked, and was opening. A large, well-built man covered from the neck down in bright yellow mining clothes and a black gas mask stepped into the room behind the glass. He closed the door with a click and the room was filled with the sound of fans whirring, and toxic air and dust particles being sucked out and clean air being blown in. The cacophony of noise made the child cover his ears and shut his eyes. The man behind the glass was used to it.

After a few seconds, the noises stopped, and a gentle electronic ping sounded. The man took off his yellow mining coat as the glass door opened. As he stepped through, he took off the black gas mask that the child was always intimidated by, revealing the tired, wrinkled face of a man in his early 40's. Sweaty, black eyebrows angled in a way that made the man look perpetually distraught, a faint frown on dry, chapped lips, brown, sunken eyes and wide pupils accustomed to the darkness of the outside world, which instinctively squinted under the light of the bright, silver room.

The child grinned and hugged the man's legs, for it was the only part of the body the small kid could reach. The man gave a faint smile in response, but gently nudged the child away from him.

"Not right now, kid. I'm filthy from work. Gotta take a shower," the man said as the child released the man's legs. The man gave the child a pill from his pocket, which the child greedily gobbled up. Then, the man opened the door to the room on his left.

"When you're done, dad, can you read me a story?" said the child with renewed energy from the food pill.

"Of course," the man responded, with a small on his face as he stepped in the room and closed the door.



"So what story?" the father asked his son. The father gently tugged at the cuffs of his red and black striped flannel as the child waddled to a small pile of books and picked one that was titled "Owl Moon," the child's favorite book.

"Again?" said the father. His child nodded happily.

And so the father read the book to the child, even though the child already knew every word of the story. As his father read on, the child looked at the pictures of white snow and green forest, imagining what it would be like to see snow, to feel it, to touch it. His eyelids grew heavier, and heavier, until he finally fell asleep on the cold, white ground, dreaming about experiencing the outside world of pure white snow and tall, green trees, and bright moonlight, about finally leaving the room he'd been in his whole life.

The father gently picked up the child, walked to the bedroom, and laid him on the bed carefully, like a fragile and valuable ornament.

"I love you, son." And with a kiss on the child's forehead, the father closed the door, leaving the child alone.



The man's heart sank as he looked at the television screen. The reporter's lips moved, and the TV speakers worked, but the man's ears muted out the reporter's voice. The man ignored everything in the world and directed all of his nervous attention to the headline on the screen.

"Last shuttle to Solaris leaving in 30 hours."

They had finally run out of resources. The machines had stopped producing the Silver Eggs. This was the last one. This was the last chance he and his son had to leave Earth. And neither of them had a ticket.

The man cursed at everything. At the government, for not giving him a ticket despite his intense labor, at the machines, for not making enough Silver Eggs, at the Earth, for teasing him by providing just enough metal for everyone but him to leave. He kicked the TV with his bare foot in anger and the reporter sparked and shattered and exploded as it hit the corner of the room. Crimson red fluid dripped from cuts in his toes, splashing as it hit the clean, silver floor, staining it. More and more blood flowed from his foot and the man's anger increased from the pain. He picked up the remnants of the TV and threw them across the room, which fragmented into even more pieces of circuitry and black plastic. Hyperventilating, the man looked down at his feet. A small red puddle had collected around his right foot, slowly increasing with each second. The man slowed his breathing, tried to calm down, and made his way to a box in the bookshelf which contained medical tape. He patched his foot up, and cleaned up the blood and TV bits around the room.

Then, as he picked up that last drop of blood, he started crying. Crying because he knew he and his son would never leave this dying planet. They would live an empty, meaningless life here. They would die here and nobody would know, nobody would care. While the rest of society lived in clean, temperate paradise, they would rot in the smoking bowels of hell.

Wiping the tears from his eyes, he grabbed his gas mask and made his way through the airlock and into the outside world.



The man walked down the familiar red trail to the mine where he worked. Around him was absolutely nothing. Nothing but red, sandy Earth, mile after mile after mile. No mountains, for they had all been reduced to small piles of rubble in man's demand for resources. No oceans or lakes, because they had long since been consumed in one of the government's more outrageous attempts at solving the pollution problem. The entire planet was just a red, flat ball of land. Only man-made structures remained, like the Silver Egg ports open mines, and a few residential buildings, but even those were few and far between. Desolate.

Eventually, the man reached the hole where he worked. Why he came here, he did not know. Perhaps because it was the only place he knew that wasn't his own cage of a house. Perhaps he had wanted to earn a few more pills. Or perhaps he wanted to see the last Silver Egg, which docked a few miles away from his mine. Whatever the reason, he was there.

He looked up at the scorched sky. A mosaic of black and orange spots that moved quickly around the Earth. One could look at the sky, look away for five minutes, and look back to see a completely different pattern of orange and black with no traces of the original pattern. The colossal Silver Egg sat at the port, stretching from the flat Earth to the bottom of the cloud layer. Beside it, the passenger tower, with bridges connected to openings in the egg, feeding it people like a sort of metal umbilical cord.

The man envied the people boarding so much. They could leave this wasteland and start a new life on Solaris. But not him. He was stuck here. Anchored. Chained. Cement shoes. In his envy, he balled his hands into tight fists.

He heard a snicker behind him. It was Odi.

"Hey," he said, snickering. "The last egg leaves tomorrow." Odi held up a piece of paper that made the man's eyes widen in surprise.

"You got... a ticket?"

"Mhmm." He snickered. "Government gave me one a long time ago. I waited until now to use it just to see who'd get left behind in this shithole. Where's yours?"

The man was silent and looked away. From behind Odi's gas mask, a grimace spawned.

"Heh. That sucks. I'll see you around. Or not. Probably not" Odi snickered as he pocketed his ticket and stumbled away, towards the passenger tower.

Jealous anger filled the man. His fists balled up so tightly that his nails dug deep into his flesh and found blood. His jealousy and his anger manifested itself into pure hate. Hate for Odi.

"Why him? He was worthless. He was scum. He didn't work, yet he gets a million benefits. Meanwhile, I toil away hour after hour, an honest worker, and I get nothing, not even crumbs. He doesn't deserve it. I do. I do, damn it, I DO."

The man grabbed a pickaxe on the ground and followed Odi, who shambled away slowly ten, fifteen feet in front of the man. He gripped the metal pickaxe tightly in his hands. The man slowly made his way towards Odi, like a lion stalking a wounded gazelle, until he was a foot, two feet behind Odi. Completely silent. Undetected by the old man.

The man swung the pickaxe behind him and drove it into Odi's left calf, piercing his layers of muscle and bone with such force that the tip of the pickaxe, red from the blood, was protruding from the other side of his leg. Odi let out a muffled wail as the pain shot through him and his crimson blood gushed out into the red sand, making it an even darker, almost black shade of red. The man pulled the pickaxe from his leg and swung it into Odi's back, severing even more veins and arteries and puncturing his right lung. Gallons and gallons of blood flowed from his back and his leg and Odi shrieked like a banshee, a shriek of pure pain that would have sent shivers down any sane person that heard it. But no one was around, save for the man, who was in too far a state of rage to have any response to Odi's bloodcurdling screams.

The man kicked Odi onto the ground and Odi rolled over, looking back at his assailant.

"Wh... why?" Odi managed to say in between jagged breaths and shivers of pain. Odi reached his hand out towards the man, as if beckoning for him to stop.

But he didn't. The man wrenched Odi's gas mask off his face and Odi immediately absorbed the lethal fumes of Earth. Coughing and wheezing, Odi, struggled to breathe. A puddle of black-red started surrounding him. The man slashed and slashed at Odi's torso, tearing chunks of flesh and bone and muscle out, until he could see parts of his ribcage sticking out. He hacked at Odi's throat, cutting it wide open and sending blood spurting out in all directions. The man was practically blind from the profuse amounts of blood that splattered on the glass of his gas mask, but still, he blindly swung into Odi, mining away his ribs, his organs, his throat. Black, black blood colored the red, red Earth around them.

The man wiped the blood off his mask and looked down at Odi, who was breathing short, sharp breaths and slower, quieted exhales, almost like he were sniffling. The man pulled back the pickaxe and plunged it deep into Odi's skull, sending fragments of his brain and eyes and skull through the air, as if a bomb made of a human head had just gone off. Odi wasn't just dead, he was eviscerated. Barely recognizable if it weren't for his artificial leg. His face, his throat, his stomach, his chest, all had been sliced and punctured to the point where they were all black red, amorphous blobs of flesh and gore. A deep, dark pool of blood surrounded the corpse.

The man took rapid, exhausted breaths through the filters of his gas mask. He let go of the now maroon pickaxe, leaving it firmly planted in Odi's head, the weight of it making Odi's limp, lifeless head turn to the left until the pickaxe handle touched the ground. The man took Odi's ticket and took a few steps back, as if admiring the destruction he'd brought upon the old man. The charming red circle around the cadaver, dotted by small bits of viscera throughout the puddle. The red pickaxe punctuating the view of it all. It was almost like a piece in a modern art museum.

The man smiled, taking one last look at the remnants, then made his way to the passenger tower.



The way the government mass distributed the tickets meant that the tickets could be used by anyone, not just the person they gave it to. The purpose for this was unknown. It could have been a design flaw overlooked by an engineer, it could be because they knew some families might actually willingly give up their place in the Silver Egg and choose to stay on Earth. Whatever the reason, it was unimportant. It just made the man's entry into the Silver Egg all that much easier.

He didn't bother wipe the blood from his mask or his clothing, since he knew there was no human staff in the passenger tower and the screening areas were completely automated. He casually walked up the tower, through the security checkpoints, the entire time staring at the ticket hypnotically.

"I'm free. I'm free," the man kept telling himself, as if in a brainwashed state.

Soon, he entered the Silver Egg and made his way to his room, which was near the top of the egg. It was a very comfortable room. Against the right wall was a large bed with purple linen sheets that looked like it had never been used. To the left, a large, comfortable-looking, throne-like chair with red cushions and intricate wood carvings on its legs and backrest. The chair faced an equally fancy dressing table with five cabinets, and a mirror, which was attached to the wall. A door beside the dressing table led to a spacious bathroom that looked like it was straight out of a furniture magazine. A bathtub with a gold trim and a porcelain finish, marble sinks, it looked like a hotel room.

But what caught the man's eye the most was the view. He was incredibly high up, and he could more clearly see the bottom of the black cloud layer. From this close, it looked like piles of burnt cotton candy stuck to a ceiling. He looked down at the red planet that he used to call home. He could barely spot the trail that he walked on, the mine that he worked at. He could barely spot... his home, near the very edge of the horizon.

Oh no. His home. His son.

Suddenly, the man felt sick to his stomach. He had been so self-absorbed in his mission to get out of Earth that he forgot about the very child he fathered. He forgot about the life of Odi, who had been one of the mine's most valuable workers until he lost his leg in a tragic accident that both physically and mentally scarred him. He remembered his ravaged body, lying on the side of a dusty trail somewhere, slowly being covered up by sand and sediment. He felt nauseated, disgraced with himself, with what selfish actions he'd done.

A click. His door had just locked, as part of the automated safety protocols of the Silver Egg. Through the PA, the countdown for liftoff started.

Ten. The man banged his fist against the metal door of his room again and again and again, but the thick steel door wouldn't budge.

Eight. He fell to his knees and rested his head against the wall, crying and pleading in desperation.

Six. The man turned and tried to run against the glass, hoping to break it. But it wouldn't. He pressed his palms against the glass as the tears ran down his face.

Four.



The child waited and waited, lying on the silver floor. It had been an entire day since his father had been gone. He was getting hungry. His last food pill was quickly running out.

Every now and then, the boy would glance away from the book and towards the room behind the glass screen. His father had told him to never enter that room. Then again, his father had also told him that he would be here at the end of every day to feed him, but the boy quickly realized that it wouldn't be the case.

The boy stood up and waddled toward the glass screen. He stood on his tip toes and reached out for a button on the frame of the door, making the glass slide open. He entered.

The boy was nervous. He didn't like the noises of the room, but he knew they were coming. He plugged his ears with his small fingers and the cold, muffled wind rushed through him. After a few seconds, it was over, and the boy removed his fingers from his ears.

He always saw his father with a strange black mask on whenever he would enter this room. He didn't like the look of it. It looked scary to him. So he decided not to wear one. He didn't need it for the snow that was outside.

The boy opened the large metal door that led to the outside world and took his first look at the outside world.

It was... red? Much to the boy's surprise, it was hot, and dark orange. The skies were dark, and the Earth was sandy. There were no forests, no anything but flat, desolate orange as far as he could see.

The boy started growing tired. Where... where is the snow?

Suddenly, near the horizon, a blinding explosion of light turned everything white, making the boy's eyes hurt. A sonic roar made the child scream and cover his eyes and ears in fear. When he opened his eyes, he saw a giant silver owl in the distance, flying through the dense clouds, followed by a trail of red fire and a column of gray smoke. The owl burned the clouds around it, creating a giant hole around the sky, sending a strange black powder down into the ground.

The child's eyelids were getting heavier and heavier. As he started drifting into unconsciousness, he managed to muster up enough strength to keep his eyes open and to reach out a single hand to catch the first of the strange black flakes that fell from the sky. Using his fingers, the child made the flake crumble, revealing its white, powdery interior.

"Snow..." the child said, smiling. And the boy fell asleep, on the hot, red ground.





Author's Note: My bad on the late story, I was in Washington, D.C. and I didn't have a chance to write all last week.

I'll admit, this story's not as good as I wanted it to be. A six out of ten at best, in my opinion. Why isn't it as good as I liked? Probably because of time pressure. I know I had two weeks to write this, but you'd be surprised how busy I was. I'm considering rewriting it in the future, if I ever run out of ideas.

Anyway, I've had the basic idea for this story awhile now (about six, seven months?) but I never got around to actually writing it until now. I'll tell you what though, writing the descriptions for the settings was HARD and took the longest time to write, especially since science fiction demands so much detail when describing things that don't exist. If there's two things that I'm bad at writing, it's dialogue and setting. Hopefully, you still had a decent idea of how the world looked like and hopefully, I can do a better job with setting with later stories.

As always, comments are appreciated. What'd you like? What could use improvement? I'm all ears. Err, eyes, technically. I can't really hear you through a screen.