Chapters:

2036

Bette stared down the center of the catcher’s mitt. She was holding the ball loosely in her right hand, which was behind her back, her cap shielding the glare from the sky. 0 and 2, this count should be call to bring out the slider, but the batter had been knocking sliders all over the place all day. Bette shook off the slider call, and the catcher put down one finger, right in the center.

This was the pitch she wanted. A fastball down the center of the plate. A challenge. And one she was sure that the batter would not be able to hit. Bette moved her foot back to the edge of the rubber, gripped the ball tighter, and stood upright. There were runners at the corners, but she wasn’t concerned about them.

Bette brought the ball up to the letters on her chest to meet her glove hand, and then in one motion swung her arm around over the top of her shoulder, putting every bit of her weight and newtonian physics behind it. It was fast, and straight, and right in the middle of the strike zone. The batter came around and Bette watched as the ball flew right under the sweet spot of the bat.

"Strike three!"

And like that, the inning was over. It was only the top of the ninth, though, and being down ten runs, Bette didn’t really think they were going to win this one. Still, she scanned the stands for him, really not expecting to find him. He never left the house these days. Said the sky was wrong and there was nothing he could do about it.

Her father hadn’t always been depressed like that. She knew that he remembered the times before. Her mother had succumbed to the yellow sads soon after she had been born, but her father had been much better until just recently.

Bette had never known a time when the sky was anything other than what it was now. Covered in a high yellow cloud that was cooling the planet, but not suddenly the way a nuclear winter would. Bette was sixteen and the Event had been three years before she was born.

Bette’s team, the Woodstock Centaurs, went down on strikes on three straight batters. She helped get the equipment together and onto the bus to take them back to the high school. The air was still, which was how it often was. Breezes were rare, and wind, when it came, tended to be devastating. Many of the adults found it to be suffocating, so they often had fans running in the classrooms.

The natural light gave everything a yellow cast, which was not visible indoors. Bette picked up a bag of bats, and turned toward the yellow bus.

"Bette!" she heard from behind her. She turned around and saw a short woman, probably in her thirties, well dressed, but also wearing a baseball cap with the Centaur mascot on it. It took a bit for her to recognize the woman.

"Mrs. Hegler?"

"Well, not anymore. Mr. Hegler passed on a few years ago, and I’m going by my maiden name again, Bergeron. But please, call me Claire."

"I’m very sorry. Was it...?" she trailed off, knowing that it probably wasn’t appropriate to ask.

"I’m afraid the yellow was too much for him, yeah. But, that’s not why I’m here. I heard you were pitching and I wanted to see you. It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since I had you in my Kindergarten class."

"Sorry we lost. Badly."

Claire chuckled. "I’ve seen worse. And that last at bat that you pitched was very well done."

"Unlike the forty before it. If the game meant anything, Coach would have pulled me after the first inning."

From behind her, Bette heard a shout of "We’re leaving without you!" and the whistle of the bus starting up.

"Oh, don’t let me hold you up, Bette. It was good to see you again."

"You too, Mrs., um, Claire."

Bette turned and ran to the bus and found her seat after putting the bats in the back. She grabbed her backpack and pulled out a well-worn paperback, one of her mother’s books. Her mother had been a writer before the event, and Bette liked thinking that the books were written specifically to her. She had to sneak the books out of her home, since her father didn’t want them getting lost. Recently, that hasn’t been difficult.

Over the last year, she watched her father’s hair grow long and gray, his beard become bushy with white streaks. He rarely left the house, often watching old 2D vids and avoiding contact with anyone.

They were still getting paid for the work that he’d done leading up to the event, and right after. Bette had taken over the finances when her father stopped going to the grocery store, so she knew how much they were getting. She was able to buy new clothes and food and pay the mortgage and utilities. She had a good sized allowance for herself to have fun with and was able to pay a cleaner to come in once a month to help out.

But it still felt like she was the only surviving member of her family. So reading her mother’s books helped ease that loneliness.

Bette unlocked the front door to the house she shared with her father. It used to feel like her home, but that was before the old scientist had withdrawn into his room.

Unlocking the door meant undoing three deadbolts, an electronic keypad, and placing different RFID chips at different places on the door. It was the only working door, as the others had been covered in plywood and filled in with cement. Bette was certain her father hadn’t seen natural light in the last three years.

He would contend that the light from outside wasn’t natural, being filtered through the clouds as it was.

Five minutes after beginning the process, Bette got the door opened. Seeing Mrs. H--that is, Claire, had been a shock. She usually got through the day without dwelling on things from before her father had been taken with the Sads. He had honestly been down with them for longer than she’d known anyone to survive it. The Yellow Sads were usually the end of it.

Bette’s father had installed special lights in the house years ago, and even though many of them had gone out, there were still some that were capable of showing the full spectrum, something that natural light had long since stopped doing.

None of them were in the first room, though. She flipped on the LED next to the door to provide some light so she could make it through the winding maze of old tech and family history to the hallway. The hallway wasn’t much better, filled with bookcases giving her about a foot to walk between them. It made it especially difficult when she’d been shopping, since the kitchen was down the hall.

They called the room with the front door the "living room", but no living went on there. That room was given over to the dead.

Bette pushed through the clutter (not a mess, it was too ordered to be called a mess) to her bedroom. This room actually belonged to her father before he had retreated into the cellar. Her own room was where she’d set up a sitting room. That is where she would entertain friends if she ever would have brought them by.

Her bedroom was the opposite of the rest of the house. Where the house was cluttered, her room had only a bed, a desk, and a bureau for her clothes. It was brightly lit using bulbs that had been rescued from unused areas of the house.

Her mother’s sewing room no longer had any lights in it. Her father had kept it as a sort of shrine to a woman Bette couldn’t begin to remember. The bathroom had its full spectrum light replaced with a cheap LED, since Bette spent only a few minutes there per day.

Other than keeping her rooms lit, the other bulbs were in the cellar with her father. Light alone clearly wasn’t enough to break him out of the Sads. At this point, it didn’t seem like anything would be, and she wasn’t sure that was such a bad thing.

Bette felt terrible for thinking it, but she had known classmates who had lost both parents, and they were well taken care of by the state. She might even be able to leave this house, and all of its terrible sadness, behind.

But no, there was no getting around the fact of her life. Her father was the only family she had. She’d only ever known one grandparent, her father’s mother, who had passed on from the cancer six years ago. No aunts and uncles, no cousins. Bette was an only child, not by design, but due to the death of her mother.

Bette stared at the tablet on the bed. Black against the crisp whiteness of her blanket. She would need to do her homework at some point, but there would be time for that. She picked up the smooth black glass and it sprang to life at her touch.

"Music, standard mix," she said to the device, and sound came from what felt like a spot about a foot above her head. It was rhythmic, bassy, it pushed through her skull which was how she wanted it.

"Open room, Yellow Overtones." Around her in the room, simple avatars appeared. These were her real friends. She’d known some of them for a decade, from children’s chat rooms and tween vid-chats and hangouts before they went underground. They made a private network that the state didn’t monitor (and let’s face it, the state monitored everything) so they could actually talk freely. The avatars were simple because they didn’t want video feeds of them talking to each other. Their voices were encrypted and unencrypted using a key that Bette had written, a 1024-bit scheme that should be unbreakable to the state if they didn’t get their hands on one of the tablets.

Bette found Marko, her best friend for a long time now.

"Hey, dumdum."

"Hello, b27."

"I really need a better handle," Bette chuckled.

"I’d never recognize you if you did."

"Is there any news?"

"Nothing to write home about."


Next Chapter: 2247