SciFi and Fantasy Stories: The golden dome

The Golden Dome. 

By Sandra Viglione. 

The sky was dark ------ darker than usual. Only the oldest among men could remember the light of the sun upon the trees. The youngest had only seen the gray dimness among smog clouds. How many years of darkness did they weigh on the mankind? 

There were no children... fortunately. The last descendants of men presented tremendous mutations, and the babies died soon. Then we were sterile. But we didn't realize. The mutations were called "evolution" and when the babies died they said "it was a readjustment of nature." And when we became sterile "they are just isolated cases"... 

The trees no longer existed. One by one they were felled, in thousands, in millions, during decades. The green leaves were only good to produce green money... And by the time we begin to take care of them, those that remained were killed by the acid rain. We neither realized. We must "produce, " "invest, " "create a powerful industry" for... for what reason? We didn't understand that first we should live, survive and then produce. 

Only a few among us could remember the grasslands, the forests, the butterflies. They no longer existed. They had gone. And they would not return... 

A cold wind rose. Since we burnt the ozone that protected us, since we flood the atmosphere with carbonic anhydride and combustion gases, the variations of temperature were brutal. At night we froze in the shades, and by day we drowned in a suffocating dimness. 

The quantity of oxygen in the air had also lowered. There was hardly enough to breathe. There was no light to make photosynthesis, neither plants that could make it. There were some bacteria left... that also began to be scare after decimating the population. We were communicated that we had become immune; ------- the truth is that the bacteria didn't survive.  

We were few. And the few ones that we were had met in front of the golden building. There, where the gardens used to be, we sit down on the grass burned by the acid. 

The golden building was a big building, with a central dome, completely recovered in gold. Not criminal vanity; the gold is not oxidized spontaneously, not even under acid rain. There they were gathered (hidden...) in a fortress the biggest scientists in our time. Our last hope. Their mission was to find the form of reverting the situation of our poor planet, and to save the little of remaining humanity. And truly how little it was! Having drained the resources of the earth, we learned how to use you of the sea. And how quickly we finish them! We misappropriate the immense wealth of the Creation that should last us forever. 

Now we were seated on the dead grass looking at our dying hopes. 

Under the Golden Dome the scientists wandered around, busy. They had been chosen and selected; their feeding was high-priority; their air, especially purified. They knew their mission and they abided conscientiously to it. They had preserved some vegetable species and animals under the golden dome, and they took care of them with devotion. However, when the last hothouse flower also died, when the experiments failed one and other, and other, and another time, the hopes of the scientists began to fade. One can work without illusions, or loveless for the work; but one cannot live without hopes... 

And slowly they began to understand. 

In the gardens the people waited sitting. A red ray of sun, violent, murderous, escaped from the clouds and it touched the dome. Some raised the tired look. And then it began to rain. The droplets burned on our skin. It was acid. 

At that moment the doors of the golden building opened up. And the scientists, the big minds of our era, came out, to the rain. The dean of all of them, the oldest stopped. "There is no solution,” he said, and we all understood. "We are doomed," another one added. And they sat down together with us, on the burnt grass.  

The rain intensified. Nobody went to the refuges. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The rain, surely, will continue falling on our spread bones for a long time.