Dome War
Hollow-E

Wake up to a world of zero freewill. Everyone in the streets, at work, in the gym and toilet is wearing a VR headset with ‘Eon’ imprinted on the side. Imagine the closest you can to a highly fictionalised and weaponised Eiffel tower with snipers revolving about it. That is what Chuck woke up to see through his multi-storey hospital ward window. He feels his chest to feel his wound all closed up and turned his head to make eye contact with a kid reading a magazine. ‘H-hey. Can I see the doctor?’ ‘I’m Grant. Nice to meet you too. That is a far as my formalities go’, the kid said. ‘Lenny followed the coordinates you didn’t. How he knew about them, stranger than fiction. Dumped you in the pit he found at the point. Turns out your chest is worth the most expensive medical procedure Hollow E has ever-’ Chuck interrupted to say, ‘I’m in the Hollow Earth? And where is Lenny?’ Then Grant said, ’I’m surprised you haven’t asked why I’m not wearing one of those ridiculous things over my face. I’m an outlaw, a rare case here in the land of ‘mimics’. Those headsets are showing the ‘mimics’ exactly what their counterparts are seeing and the Dome tower sees to it that everyone here perfectly copies what their counterparts are doing. If not… well the snipers give that away.’ Grant cringed, pushing Chuck who was now putting on shorts to inquire more. Grant nudged his head to the door which he opened to reveal a currently empty passage way. Chuck followed the kid that was suspiciously unenthusiastic about en route hospital security and Dome agents getting their clutches on the undischarged patient. They made it to the street, which if one subtracted the VR headset zombies’ vibe from it, it had a nostalgic touch. They were amidst riots and looting over the unfair killing of an untried murderer. Grant encouraged him to do the nigh impossible task of ignoring the flying saucers that were above their heads, abducting a few mimics and replacing them with more in the same spot and scene when their headsets flashed red. He said, ‘Dome tower is omniscient but it has blind spots so step only where I do unless you want a sniper bullet hole shaped souvenir of Hollow-E in your sternum or worse, the dubious honour of being a Dome industries guinea pig when you get caught.’ As they did parkour through the purging central business district, Chuck realised the city was actually on an island off the Carolina Coast; the Bermuda. They neared a river but the hydrophobia Chuck perceived as typical for humans Grant defied, his last words before breaking the water tension being, ‘Underwater bunker!’ Chuck might have blacked out a little, replaceing himself soaking wet, covered by a blanket with a cup of rooibos tea on top of a neat little coaster in front of him. ‘What happened?’ he asked while Grant took a chair and sat astride it with the backrest between his legs. He eerily stared Chuck straight into his pinkeye and asked, ‘You did exactly what I did right? The steps? Even at the river?’ and on that note the bunker’s door popped open. Kudos to the highly effective drainage system the bunker had, Chuck thought, unlike the unsophisticated vault door a couple of marines had just unhinged without batting an eye.

One of them took their helmet off to appeal, ‘I am Director Toler Mr Harrison. Come with us. Your allegiances are misplaced.’ Chuck, who was holding a gun to the unarmed marines then said, ‘You mean Lenny? He committed treason against your puppet world and is the means to your end somehow. What makes you think my objective isn’t just as antifascist as his is?’ Toler answered, ’All of this is to replenish your planet when project ‘Second Coming’ is done with it. The casualties will be replaced by their mimics, the only other people that would have lived their exact same lives, so that the survivors do not face any grievances for when their loved ones die.’ Chuck lowered his gun. This exact copy of Earth and its people was just a buffer for some genocidal experiments being made to the surface planet. ‘They are saying if our counterparts are narcotics addicts, having abortions or committing suicide we should follow them to jail, the abortion clinic and the grave because Hollow-E wants to take over the surface and won’t plainly kill everyone, hence the compromise project; Second Coming. Oh and my bunker’s drainage pipes can hold that much water so who can’t swim?’ Grant, who had anticipated the pipes bursting from the get go of leaving the lid open grabbed a scuba pack and so did Chuck. The wave washed over and engulfed Toler and his men first. With the tide rising, Grant shouted, ‘we won’t survive a wink out there especially with Eon’s Dome tower on high alert for you’, he grabbed a headset and a small teddy bear and said, ‘if you put it on it will think you are a normal mimic. Oh and just keep the bear safe.’ Shoulder deep in wet turbulence, Chuck put the gear on before the water rudely escorted him out of the bunker. He clutched to the coincidentally waterproof VR headset desperately until the fluid’s pressure had taken him half way through to the surface, where he started treading to the top. He felt a minor shock, which he decided to ignore to focus on his aquatics and forgot all about Grant until he got out of the water and put the headset on. He couldn’t see a thing but because he didn’t know whether the tower had a visual on him or not, he had to hope Grant was doing okay and had to act less conspicuous in case the tower was eyeing him. When he made it to shore he realised the headset, which was short circuiting hence flashed red because of the water, was not waterproof after all. His heart dropped and braced his face for the mandatory ‘broken sequence protocol’ of taking a sniper bullet through his head from the Tower which would produce a saucer to pick up the corpse immediately after. The protocol would have been implemented if the other protocol (collecting the mimic with a faulty headset in a saucer) hadn’t saved him. Grant emerged from the river just as a saucer shaped shadow suddenly darkened half an acre of the land around them. The UFO shot a large tube from its underside, enclosed them and subsequently vacuum sucked them into it.