Author: Mark Renney
The rumours began some twelve months ago or so and the idea quickly took hold that there was an unseen presence under the Dome, a ghost haunting the Fields of Research. These murmurings were persistent and frequent with everyone telling the same tale, describing how they had felt something or, more accurately, someone brushing against them. Or barging past and forging on ahead, and this always happened when we were using our security passes and entering a restricted area.
We had an intruder. We were shocked by this revelation. It wasn’t so much that the interloper was invisible – we had been aware of this possibility for decades. What really shocked and troubled us was that this individual, the interloper, could go anywhere and see everything, something that no-one else here was able to do.
The Fields of Research are vast and those outside find the Dome intimidating. The Outsiders are wary of us but have accepted that we are of superior intellect, that their own abilities and usefulness lay elsewhere, namely Out There and they envy us from afar. They consider the Fields of Research to be complex and impenetrable and the Outsiders are blissfully unaware that we feel exactly the same.
All of the Selected have limited access and we are assigned to a particular zone and department, working on only one project. The area we inhabit is approximately one kilometer square and we are able to enter the laboratories and offices in our designated zone but not elsewhere. The Selected are permitted to visit the other communal and residential areas but these are identical throughout the Dome and we have no real need, or ultimately the inclination to do so.
The lives we lead are regimented and mundane and the work we do is repetitive and boring. We are tiny cogs in a much, much larger machine and we have no idea how it works or what it does.
Security and safety have become commodities and under the Dome we have these in abundance. But now we have an interloper, somebody with the potential to blow our cover.
The interloper can easily shake the very foundations of this cruel world and pull the comfortable cushion out from under us. We need to stop this interloper, this ticking timebomb, but how?