Sharif Gemie is is a happily retired history lecturer who lives in south Wales, United Kingdom. Fourteen of his short stories and two of his flash fictions have been published, and this is his 3rd story published in The Quiet Reader. His first novel, The Displaced, was published in 2024. It’s about a middle-class British couple who volunteer to work with refugees in Germany at the end of the Second World War. You can follow Sharif on www.sharifgemie.com.
I wonder what sunlight feels like. I can see it through the monitor: a warm, yellow light. But what would it feel like on my skin? Like putting my arm too close to a lamp? Can’t it burn? I remember a word in an old book: sunburn.
And rain? Wind? I think a lot about things like this. All I’ve got is pictures from the monitor. I used to be able to move the camera, but now it’s stuck. In summer, leaves grow on the tree in front of it and I can’t see the hill opposite. In spring and autumn I see the hills and one little white house opposite. In the evenings its lights come on, tiny gleaming spots. What sort of people live there? In winter it rains and I don’t see much.
I want to go Outside—at least, I think I do… I’ve got to make up my mind. In three days, I’ll have my chance.
‘Shev!’ Someone calls me from the Big Room. I don’t move.
My mum and dad called me Jasmine, or Jazz. But after they went… After that, I started reading. Shevek was a man in a book my mum liked. I didn’t understand all of it, but I loved this story about a man who travelled between two places. I talked and talked and talked about it to the other children, but most of them don’t read books. To tease me, they called me Shevek.
After the grown-ups went, most of us got new names. There’s Mama Mandy, who’s 19 and isn’t a mother, but she treats us like children. There’s Geek, who says he knows how the programs on the Hub work and there’s Slob… I guess his name is obvious.
My parents were teachers. There used to be two teachers, two nurses, two engineers and a biologist and a technician, and eight families of executives. My dad explained it all to me. 48 people moved here, before I was born. I’ve checked the date on the Hub: 20 April 2025. There was a disease, people died and there were food riots… My dad told me this many times, but I always had questions. If everyone was dying, why did 48 people move here? Who decided who would be saved? Dad would smile and say:
‘Money talks.’
I’d ask, ‘What’s money?’
On the Hub, he’d find pictures of people in somewhere called a supermarket. It was like a long, long room, with shelves, and angry people fought each other to grab food, which came in metal boxes and plastic bags and cardboard cartons.
‘This is what it was like,’ Dad said. ‘We wanted to get away. We wanted to have children—we wanted to have you. This seemed a better place.’
‘Shev!’ someone calls. ‘She—ev!’
‘Coming!’ I call back.
I don’t move. I can remember answering my mum and dad the same way. I still don’t understand what happened to the grown-ups—none of us do. I was only ten years old. I knew about history because of the clock in the Big Room and the annual celebrations for The Saved. That was us, all of us. Each year, there’d be a speech by an executive, telling us how lucky we were to be here, away from the food riots and starvation and disease Outside. I can remember the twentieth birthday of The Saved, when the celebration was bigger than all the other ones.
‘We did the right thing,’ said the Chief Executive, an old man who stood up straight and had white hair. ‘We can be proud of ourselves.’
I thought: why? All we do is live in a big box. Although, back then, it was better. There was the Leisure Sector. A gym we visited every day, to follow the courses set for us by a nice lady with brown skin called Sab. I loved the swimming pool. There was a golf course for the grown-ups, with green crinkly grass—not the real thing, my parents kept telling me. The grown-ups would put on special clothes for golf: sometimes clean white shorts and tops, sometimes trousers with criss-crossed patterns. They’d call to each other.
‘A fine morning, Mr Richardson! But the breeze today is a little cold.’
‘Indeed, a fine morning. That breeze won’t stop me winning.’
They’d laugh, but with a sadness in their voices. I guess the golf course with its yellow light and blue ceiling and green grass reminded them of home.
In that year, the twentieth, it all went wrong. First, there was the Collapse. We all heard it, hell, we all felt it. A great rumble from the Leisure Sector. The doors closed automatically, but a wet, dusty smell floated through. An engineer went to investigate and came back very dirty and sad. The whole Leisure Sector had collapsed. I can remember the Chief Executive’s face.
‘This can’t have happened,’ he kept saying.
But it had. We’d lost the whole Leisure Sector. That seemed bad at the time. But that Collapse led to another collapse, which was worse.
A disease spread among The Saved. I can remember Sab, the nurse, sounding like the Chief Executive:
‘This isn’t possible!’
But it was—first, just some coughing, but it wouldn’t stop. Then the infected person would get hot, maybe be sick and their eyes would go watery. Sometimes they weren’t able to taste or smell anything.
Sab gave them pills and injections, while muttering:
‘But this is a protected environment… The air is purified, the water monitored…’
Something invisible had got in. Whether it was connected to the Collapse, I don’t know. The grown-ups stayed in their pods. My mum and dad were almost the last ones to fall ill. I think my dad realized what was happening and he gave me some lessons on the Hub, pulling up things I’d never seen before. But he spoke too fast and I was only a ten-year-old girl, I couldn’t follow. There was one thing I understood. He explained why one part of the Big Room looked different.
‘It’s a door,’ he told me. ‘It leads to a corridor. That takes you through another door, and then Outside. It’s locked now and can only be opened if the Chief Executive orders it. But in five years that’ll change. Anyone will be able to open it then, if they do this.’
He showed me. Open up this file, choose this option, click here, type in OPEN, put in your pass card. It was linked to the Hub’s clock. In four years, eleven months and a few days, anyone could get out. Then he remembered something else: something special about the date.
‘Remember this, Jazz,’ he said. ‘Remember this!’
I nodded.
Dad kept coughing, he couldn’t stop. Mum lay on the bed, her face red, breathing hard.
‘Go to your room, Jazz. Mum and I need to be alone.’
I went to the door.
‘Don’t close the door!’ he called, but I did.
One month The Saved were 54 people: 46 grown-ups and their children. The next month, they were just 8. All children, all under 14. And while Dad had told me about the door, none of the grown-ups had thought about something else even more important: the controls for the Hub.
‘Shev!’
It’s Mama Mandy. I’ve got to go.
The Big Room’s too big for us. It was meant for fifty grown-ups. We sit in one corner: just eight children. No, seven. Slob isn’t here, he’s even later than me. There are white benches made out of smooth, clean material—maybe not so clean now—and red and green patterns on bits of paper, stuck on the wall. Mandy has been teaching the little ones to draw and their first efforts are these wild, crazy patterns.
‘Pink or blue?’ I ask.
‘Blue,’ replies Mandy, and I scowl.
Blue goo, from the dispenser next to the Big Room. Food used to be more interesting. There was soup, custard, beans, biscuits… After the Collapse, something happened to the Hub. Geek tried again and again to order the food we remembered, but he always got the same message. PARENTAL CONTROL. YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THIS PROGRAMME. Parental control! It controlled our lives now. Some days the dispenser produced blue goo, some days pink goo, and that was it. That and water. Nothing else. I prefer pink goo: it has a soft, sweet taste that reminds me of something—strawberries, I think.
Slob comes in and sees three cartons of goo left. The dispenser always produces ten cartons.
‘Anyone wants those?’ he asks, but picks them up before there’s an answer.
‘Why don’t you stay and talk?’ asks Mama Mandy. ‘Tell us what you’ve been doing.’
‘As if anything ever happens here…’ mutters Slob as he walks back to his pod.
I went in his pod once. It stinks. All round his bed, piled up one on top of another, there are goo-cartons, most with bits of uneaten goo left in them.
Mandy frowns. Slob’s getting out of hand. She worries the little ones will start following him instead of her.
Anyway, Slob’s wrong. Even with PARENTAL CONTROL, there’s still loads on the Hub, far too much for anyone to view it all. Sometimes I remember music that my parents listened to and I get the Hub to search for it. Once, I remembered someone called Bark, who played the piano. Eventually, the Hub found Bach for me: hours and hours of music. But I couldn’t find the song that my parents liked.
My parents liked The Simpsons, which was made for children. Sometimes the three of us would watch it together. They’d laugh out loud and I’d join in, just for show. I mean, I could see it was meant to be funny, but… Why did the children get in that long yellow car with the benches to go to school? Why wasn’t the school next to where they lived? There was so much I didn’t understand. Music makes more sense, especially music without words. Like Kind of Blue, another of my parents’ favorites. That sort of music creates shapes and images in your mind… It doesn’t matter if you never saw a supermarket or a road or a tree, that music still means something.
I eat my goo and look around the table. Mandy is telling one of the little ones to use her spoon properly. Geek is looking at Mandy. Frizz is singing, in her irritating way. Box is saying he doesn’t want to learn to read. Mandy looks at me: I’m the teachers’ child.
‘If you can’t read,’ I tell Box, ‘you won’t be able to use the Hub.’
‘Yes, I will. I just click with the arrow. Easy.’
‘But some things are more difficult. You need to understand what they say.’
He snorts, then throws his carton on the floor. Mandy tuts.
Could I leave these people? Or would they come with me? I’ve got to say something.
‘I found something on the Hub today,’ I say, trying to sound casual.
‘Yes? That’s nice…’ says Mandy.
But Geek looks up.
I walk to the main screen. Geek follows. I tap through the steps my dad showed me. I pretend I’m just talking to him.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘If you follow this—and then there…’
I type in OPEN.
‘…it takes you to a door.’
‘A door?’ says Geek.
I point to the wall on the other side of the Big Room.
‘Over there. That bit. It’s a door.’
‘A door to what?’
‘Outside.’
Frizz stops singing, Mandy stops telling Box to pick up his carton.
‘Outside?’ says Mandy.
‘Yes.’
‘But who’d want to go there?’
Slob’s back. ‘There’s no such place. It was just a story they used to tell us.’
‘But there must be an Outside,’ Geek says. ‘We can see pictures on the Hub. Look…’
His fingers fly on the keyboard, and there’s a picture of tall grey and brown buildings, with water around them. There’s big writing at the top: MORE FLOODING IN LONDON. CONDITION SERIOUS.
‘Go on,’ says Slob. ‘Find out more.’
We all know what will happen. Geek clicks and the message pops up: YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THIS PROGRAMME. Geek’s done this hundreds of times.
‘Hah,’ Slob snorts. ‘Told you so. It’s just a story.’
‘It’s not a story,’ says Mama Mandy. ‘My mum and dad… they told me…’
‘The grown-ups told us lots of things. Look what happened to them!’
Everyone thinks about what Slob’s said.
‘But I can see it…’ I say. ‘Through the monitor…’
People laugh, roll their eyes, sigh… Shev and her monitor: they got bored with that long ago.
‘Just pictures!’ says Slob. ‘Like the Simpsons…’
‘But there are seasons!’ I shout.
‘Oh yeah? What, summer, when it’s hot and spring, when it snows—’
‘No, the snow’s in winter—’
‘Not here, there isn’t. We wear our white peejays all the time.’ He looks round. ‘Anyone too hot? Too cold?’
No one replies.
‘Anyone walked here through some snow?’
Someone giggles.
‘There are no seasons,’ Slob says and glares at me. Then he goes back to his room.
Silence. Then Mama Mandy starts.
‘Well, I think Slob’s wrong.’ She stares at the little ones. ‘We all remember what our parents told us. About streets and cities and cars… Those things are real.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And we can get there. Outside. We can go there!’
Mandy looks at me and switches to her mum voice.
‘Yes, Shev, we could—but would we want to? Remember why our parents came here. Disease, starvation, food riots… It’s dangerous Outside. I’m not sure it’s a good idea.’
Geek knows what to say now. ‘There’s floods and fighting… The people Outside, they might not like us…’
That’s a new idea. I hadn’t thought of that.
‘So what are you going to do?’ I shout. ‘Just sit and eat goo for the next sixty years? Until we’re old?’
Geek and Mandy exchange a strange look and I guess something.
‘What?’ I say. ‘You’re going to do that? Together? Have babies? Here?’
Mandy gives a funny little smile and looks down at the floor.
‘I’m not yet ready to have children,’ she says softly and smiles at Geek. ‘But Shev—Think about it. What’s the most upsetting thing about living here?’
‘PARENTAL CONTROL, of course.’
‘Well, you see, once I had a baby, then I’d be a parent, and then…’
‘Mandy, you idiot! The Hub’s a machine. It won’t know you’re a parent. It just reads your pass card.’
‘You can think that way if you want, Shev. But we don’t think that what you’re suggesting is a good idea. We want somewhere nice and calm for us and our baby. We think it’s best to avoid Outside. In fact—’
She looks at Geek.
‘—in fact, I don’t think we can let you go there.’
‘You can’t stop me!’
‘Yes, we can. Geek and me, we’ll make our beds here, in three days’ time, in front of the door.’
She’s serious. I feel like a little girl, being told what to do by my mum and dad.
‘But, Mandy…’
‘Sorry, Shev, but we can’t let you.’
Back in my pod, I slump on my bed. They’ll stop me. I’d thought they might not want to go, but this! And now I’ve told them everything… If only I’d kept quiet. But—I didn’t tell them about the date.
The next day, I’m particularly good. I don’t spend too long looking at the monitor, I don’t read much. I help Mama Mandy with the little ones, I teach Box to read his name. I call Slob to come out of his room for meals. I help Mandy plan the celebrations for the 25th year of The Saved.
‘I’m sorry we argued, Shev,’ she says the next evening.
I wonder if she’s changed her mind.
‘I’m sorry,’ she continues. ‘But someone has to think about all of us and that someone seems to be me.’
I nod, but think: stop trying to sound like you’re my mum!
‘I know you like looking at the monitor,’ she says, ‘and I can see that it looks—well, pretty. I’d like to touch a tree and see the sky, I would.’
I nod again.
‘But you have to remember what Geek has found. Outside is dangerous. We can’t let you bring it back here.’
Who says I’d want to come back, I think.
‘So let’s just work at making things better here, okay? Not fill our heads with pretty pictures of Outside.’
‘Yes, Mandy,’ I say.
‘And let’s make sure that the twenty-fifth birthday party for The Saved is the best one ever!’
She sounds like she believes what she’s saying. I look at the grey walls and the straight white benches. I see the scratches on the floor, I see the goo marks on the wall, I see the flickering light in the ceiling and I think: it’s this place that’s not real. A pretend mother, pretend food, pretend birthdays for a pretend family…
But I smile and she smiles back, and it’s as if we agree.
‘C’mon, give me a hug,’ she says.
I even do that.
Back in my pod, I think: but they don’t know. There’s a clock in the Big Room and that’s the one that everyone uses to measure the time. But my dad explained on his last day: this place was built in a hurry. The Chief Executive wanted a ceremony to mark the start of The Saved and the clock was put up in the Big Room for that. But all the other things—the Leisure Sector, the Hub—were already working. They have clocks that started the day before the clock in the Big Room. Mama Mandy thinks I can open the door in two days. In fact, I can do it tomorrow.
I turn to the screen in my pod and access the camera. It’s night Outside. The screen shows a thick, blue-black colour. I adjust it and I see the branches of a tree, moving slightly. That must be the wind. And opposite, on the hill, I see two tiny spots of light from the white house. I stare at the shape of the branches, those strange lines and angles, and I realize the pattern is different from everything around me. Everything here is straight and regular, like the benches in the Big Room, or else a mess, like the old goo cartons in Slob’s room. But the pattern of the branches against the night sky is not straight and regular, and not a mess. It’s something else—like the shapes that music makes in my mind. That gives me an idea and I tap in Kind of Blue. I look at the branches moving in the wind. As Kind of Blue ends, I’ve made up my mind. I will go Outside. I think I can come back, though the instructions are a bit complicated. I could ask Geek… No, of course I can’t.
I have to prepare. For the first time in my life, I’m going on a journey.
The alarm wakes me at 7. None of the others will be up: Mama Mandy usually calls us to breakfast at 8.30. I have a bottle of water, a blanket and my pass card. I go through the steps on my screen and press OPEN. It works! It really works. I’ve got five minutes to get to the door. I walk carefully and quietly through the corridors, but there’s no one. I put my card in the door, then wait. Nothing happens. Maybe Slob was right. It’s all just a story. Wasn’t I stupid to believe it! But then: there’s a click, a whirr, a creak and the door opens, showing a grey-white corridor lit by a flickering light.
I run down it. The second door looks the same: I put my pass card in… And I’m through. The door closes behind me.
Oh. Oh my. This… This is amazing. There’s so much… I hadn’t expected… I hadn’t expected the smell. It’s somehow wet and rich and… I don’t know. Like nothing I’ve smelt before. I’d say it smelt like goo, but that’s not it… And I’m seeing sunlight, real sunlight. It’s the pale yellow of the early morning and long shafts of light are shining through dark brown trees. I remember where I am: I must move away from the door.
Beneath my feet is earth. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s soft. It slopes at crazy angles and confuses me. How do you walk on this? I’m wearing smooth grey slippers from the dispenser and I slip as I walk. I look back. The outside of the door looks like rough stone: it merges with the other rocks and trees.
I stop and remember where I am. I checked on the Hub. The home of The Saved is on a hill. If I walk down, I’ll find a small road, running parallel to a river at the bottom of the valley. My plan is to get to that road, then turn left and walk to where there are people.
I learn to be careful after I slip and bang my arm on a tree. It hurts! I move more slowly, stopping now and again to listen and to take in the new sights. It’s cold and I pull the blanket tight around my shoulders. After a few minutes, I spot a sort of line on the ground curving between the trees, and another word comes to me from a book: a track. The ground is firmer there, it’s easier to walk, and I’m still going down.
I see the river running along the valley. My track leads me to something—but it’s not a road. I know what a road should be: black or grey, wide enough to take three or four cars at once and mostly straight. This—this is just another track, but a wider one. My heart’s beating fast from the strain of walking and my excitement. I think I hear something behind me. I look around. Nothing. I wish I had someone with me. For a second, I even miss Mandy. But no: she’d only tell me I was stupid.
There’s a low, flat stone near me and bushes in front of it. If I sit here, anyone coming along the track won’t see me. I sit and my heart slows. I look round and see another track leading up to the little white house on the hill opposite. I watch the sun rise and see the angle of sunlight change, I hear what must be birds calling in the trees, I hear the water running in the river, I enjoy the rich, dark smell of the trees and the earth… Maybe this is enough. I don’t have to be like Shevek, I don’t have to join two civilizations, I can just come here, just walk Outside. I could follow the track down to where I think people live, but… It might be dangerous. Maybe I’ll go back.
But then—on the track from the white house. People, I can’t see them clearly. Where will they go? They disappear behind some trees. Maybe they’ll walk away from me. But no—voices. I listen carefully. Three voices: two women and one man. They’re talking English, they’re disagreeing. I huddle down behind the bushes. Now I see them. They’re walking slowly, concentrating on what they’re saying. The woman nearest me is wearing a long skirt, dark, with bright triangular patterns in it. The man has black trousers and a red shirt, and he’s carrying a top over his shoulder. The second woman is dressed in black trousers and a black top, I can’t make out the details. She’s talking loudest and I can hear her words.
‘But she should’ve known!’ she’s saying. ‘She was a guest in someone else’s house. If you’re in that position, you’ve got to accept the rules.’
‘Okay,’ says the woman in the skirt. ‘But a host has duties. You don’t allow your guests to be insulted.’
‘It’s a shame,’ says the man. ‘They were really good friends. I can’t believe…’
I stare as they walk slowly towards me. Think, Shev, think. I remember what Mum taught me. They disagree, but this isn’t a fight, they’re talking to each other. They care about other people. They think about rules. They don’t look like they’re starving. In fact, they look taller and stronger than most of the people I’ve ever known. I stare, stunned by a new thought: I’ve been taught a lie. The people Outside are healthier than us!
They walk closer. I need to make up my mind. Are they dangerous? Should I wait? See who else comes along this track? Go back and turn my walk into an adventure story? No, no… Now, I want to leave the lie of the Saved. I’ll trust these walkers.
I get up and step towards the track.
‘Who are you?’ says the woman in trousers.
I need to say something. I haven’t prepared a speech. They look at my peejays, my hair, my face. Their eyes go up and down.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I need you to help me.’
I step closer. The woman in the skirt looks me right in the eyes. She has a kind face.
‘Are you lost?’ she asks.
After a second, I say, ‘Yes.’
Without thinking, I step up to her. She opens her arms, I rush to her and we hug. I feel the warmth of her body, I smell her clothes. I’ve been saved.