“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”
“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.
“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”
“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her. “What drew you to sci-fi?”
That patch of sky had definitely just flickered. What would it look like if the dome lighting failed? It was a strange thought. She’d always taken the illusion of an atmosphere for granted.
“I’ve been in lockdown for one hundred and nine days,” Olive said. “I think I just wanted to write something set as far away as possible from my apartment.”
“Is that all it is?” the journalist asked. “Physical distance, a way of traveling during lockdown?”
“No, I guess not.” An ambulance siren was approaching, and then the ambulance stopped in front of the building across the street. Olive turned her back to the window. “There’s just…Look,” Olive said, “I don’t mean to be melodramatic, and I know it’s like this in a lot of places now, but there’s just, there is so much death. There’s death all around us. I don’t want to write about anything real.”
The journalist was quiet.
“And I know it’s like this for everyone else too. I know how fortunate I am. I know how much worse it could be. I’m not complaining. But my parents live on Earth, and I don’t know if…” She had to stop and take a breath to compose herself. “I don’t know when I’ll see them again.”
Two ambulances passed, one after the other, then silence. Olive looked over her shoulder. The ambulance across the street was still there.
“Are you there?” Olive asked.
“I’m sorry,” the journalist said. Her voice was choked.
“What’s your situation?” Olive asked softly. It occurred to her that the journalist sounded very young. She glanced at her calendar. The journalist’s name was Annabel Escobar, and she worked in the city of Charlotte, which Olive dimly recalled visiting on a long-ago tour of United Carolina.
“I live alone,” Annabel said. “We’re not supposed to leave our houses, and it’s just…” But she was crying now, truly weeping.
“I’m sorry,” Olive said. “That sounds so lonely.” She was staring out the window. The ambulance hadn’t moved.
“I just haven’t been in a room with anyone in a very long time,” Annabel said.
* * *
—
On another night of searching, a centuries-old academic journal yielded a reference to a Gaspery J. Roberts. The journal had been devoted to prison reform. The hit sent Olive down a rabbit hole, at the end of which she found prison records from Earth: Gaspery J. Roberts had been sentenced to fifty years for a double homicide in Ohio in the late twentieth century. But there was no picture, so Olive couldn’t be sure it was the same man.
* * *
—
“So, Olive,” another journalist said. They were holograms in a silvery holospace room, along with two other authors who’d also written books whose plots involved pandemics. The four of them flickered like ghosts. “How many copies of Marienbad have you sold since the pandemic began?”
“Oh,” Olive said. “I’m not sure. A lot.”
“I know you’ve sold a lot,” he said. “It’s been on bestseller lists in a dozen Earth countries, all three moon colonies, and two of the three colonies on Titan. I’m asking you to be more specific.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have my sales numbers in front of me,” Olive said. All of the holograms were staring at her.
“Really?” the journalist asked.
“It didn’t occur to me to bring my royalty statements to this interview,” Olive said.
An hour later, when the interview was over, she removed her headset and sat for a while with her eyes closed. She’d been home from Earth for long enough that when she opened the window, the night air of the Second Colony seemed fresh again. The air might be filtered, but there were plants, there was running water, there was a world outside her window as real as any world that anyone had ever lived in. Olive found herself thinking of Jessica Marley, for the first time in a while, and Jessica Marley’s insufferable little coming-of-age-on-the-moon novel. Look, she wanted to tell her, there’s no pain in unreality happening here. A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life. A siren wailed and receded. Olive picked up her device, ran a search on Jessica’s name, and discovered that she’d died two months ago in Spain.