Dome War
Project 'Second Coming'

In the auto piloted transportation ingenuity, only one button stood out- the ‘Reverse Magnetic Polarity’ button. They needed a way to escape this luxurious kidnapping which only had one exit right under their feet. ‘They have never seen their real world’, Grant sentimentally spoke. Cross legged on the floor, Chuck was contemplating on why they would make an entire technologically advanced civilisation just to make it a people reserve for the surface world. ’They think they are too merciful to upright murder everyone on the surface, the only place they want and value more than our architectural utopia. We had discovered magnetic levitation on a large scale when the surface world still thought the Earth was flat and by the influence of a program called Eon, they realised what they were missing. Feeling the wind in their hair, sand between their toes, organic food and sunshine. The forefathers of the project would soon grow jealous that such primitive, flawed and disorganised creatures had the birthright of fresh air and lush terrains. They noticed those imperfections made them the humans that the forefathers were green eyed for and in admiration of. They realised they wanted the world, but not through holocaust and certainly not to inherit their contagious flaws. They needed to kill two birds with one stone- fixing the surface’s problems while wiping them out hence the perfect compromise- project ‘Second Coming’. ‘I should go back and warn my people’, Chuck the hero said. Grant knew that was far from a solution and said, ’Your people kill each other because of how they look. Such pettiness is what Hollow-E, Dome and Eon stand to rid. They kill only when necessary and because of that ‘sympathy’, they made what you people call UFOs to gather DNA- all of it and cloned your population. They called them mimics- the recovery scheme for what’s coming to your planet. The surface will never know almost half their people are dead because the replacements are perfect replicas. That is all they are to Dome and I sure am lucky to have not been born to the system. My father made a rogue choice, contrasting what his doppelganger did and while that made me it took from me something I swore I’d kill my father for letting happen. I don’t have a counterpart because of it but I make up for that in freewill. Your turn, Harrison…’ Chuck’s turn to confide was interrupted upon the opening of the UFO floor and he dropped into a giant empty vat. Quick thinking Grant had hit the tempting button they had seen and the vessel flew straight out of the tower’s side and was in free fall to whatever force was dragging it away. Chuck was apprehended by another Dome industries deputy who gave him a tour of the mimic incineration program, where if a mimic failed its mimicking job it was to be killed, cloned, cremated and replaced. ’I am making an exception with you because that traitor, your ‘emancipated’ mimic is running amok foiling our plans. Did you know we tried melting part of Antarctica and Harrison used out saucers’ suction tech to suck all the water and spray it over desert regions around the Earth making it look like rain? You are to wear the headset and mimic him so we monitor his every move. It will only work on you since you have the same biometrics. Say no, you die. Lie to us, Eon will tell. Under normal circumstances I would ask you to think about it but every passing second he could be plotting our demise. Gear up.’ And just like that our hero was dragged into this factory and the only person who could save him was in a UFO being rerouted back to the tower by the transport control team. It was empty when it arrived.

Day after day, Lenny was stealing parts and gathering them behind some safe room at Harrison Enterprises Chuck didn’t even know about. It turned out Chuck was a natural at being unoriginal and at retrieving information, as he had uncovered what project ‘Second Coming’ was through the headset. Lenny had recovered the hard drive from the cop, Dmitri who did not have a counterpart in Hollow-E so as awkward as it was to act out an interrogation on a person that wasn’t actually there it was necessary for his survival and making two and two to why some cops had seemed to be talking to nothing in the footage they had seen earlier so Chuck had to mimic every single thing Lenny was up to even if the scene incorporated people that didn’t exist in Hollow-E. After recovering the drive Lenny had seen a video on what the ‘Second Coming’ was. It was a method of analysing humanity’s contingencies to various social, political, economic and environmental crises so when Hollow-E surfaces and experiences similar problems over time these counter measures would be at their beck and call. They had covered a lot of ground too- from whispering little secrets into Hitler’s ear in the World War sequel to rigging explosives in various monuments and even claiming to have an inside man at Harrison Enterprises about to receive a shipment to aid one of the last quests of the project. He intended to foil those of course, if he was to ever get a break from being Lenny’s shadow. He had also began to smell a rat on Lenny; how he had betrayed Hollow-E and why he had committed his whole life into ruining them apart from the obvious being their authoritarian and anti-freedom polices. What was most curious about Lenny was the tech he was making which was beginning to take the shape of a small missile. It was now Thursday night and since Lenny was a perfect insomniac and impervious to hunger Chuck was on the brink of letting these inhuman practises take his life. Eon would if he did not do them anyway so what was the point? Almost as if answering his question, his headset showed Lenny going through his ‘inter-dimensional’ footage of the site he was working on and imagine his bafflement to see not only the device he was making was being replicated but his counterpart, now wearing the headset was the one doing the replication. He went to a mirror, put down the same cigarette lighter he seemed to be fixated on, pointed and laughed. Through Chuck’s headset it seemed he was laughing at him. This put Chuck off guard and the headset beeped and flashed. Dome not being able to eradicate their only hope at figuring out what their loose end was up to, let Chuck take the night off for the first time. His severe, accumulated sleep deprivation did not stop him from speculating what that smug genius, Lenny was up to now that he realised he was being watched and what he was doing now that he wasn’t. Where had Grant gone and what was Eon planning for Dome to do? Probably to turn their surveillance off so Lenny’s very handy lenses would be obsolete. He would wake up to replace his daily routine of letting Lenny be his voodoo doll, with the exception of blood and children’s cadavers pasted on corridors near some server room.