The worst thing is not knowing what’s changed up there. The sensors on the surface have been gone for decades now.


A door was breached yesterday. One of the new squads formed when they amalgamated the GSG with the Perimeter Patrol last year repelled the attack with their flash sticks. People whisper about the news in the corridors. The attacks have become more frequent, fiercer. They must be getting desperate.


When I was a kid my class visited the Sensor Room. We jostled round a monitor showing a dismal grey landscape, the sky a grim pewter, sealed by the dust cloud. We were all hoping to get a glimpse of a toplander, but we were disappointed. Nothing moved except the dreamy digital shapes in the fuzz of the monitor.
Even back then that was the last sensor left. There was no way to repair them when the storms hit. And eventually it was gone too, silted over, sucked into the grey mud. So now we don’t know what new horror of darkness and starvation causes the toplanders to clang at the great doors more frequently than ever before.


I bought drinks for a guard from General Section last night and he was soon talking in slurred strings. His hands shook and his eyes were glazed by more than the dregs of whiskey. I remembered accounts in the history database of shell shock victims.
"The noise never stops. Booming and crashing, god knows what they use. Every day it’s one or other of the doors. Sometimes it even sounds like a rhythm, a code."
"And yesterday?"
"A door gave way. A few got through."
"You saw them? What do they look like?" A man who has seen a toplander is a rare thing.
"They look like people. But they aren’t. They’re animals. They talk gibberish."
"They talk to you?" I struggle to imagine.
"They shout at us. The same thing again and again. God knows what it means. Holding out their hands to us. Some of the squad say they’re beckoning, trying to trick us into whatever death there is up there. We push them back and barricade the door."
"They speak a different language?"
"Nothing I understand. Sometimes a word here or there like ours, but it’s coincidence."
"Maybe they’re trying to tell us something."
The guard laughed, his mouth pulling into a thin knot.
"They want what we’ve got. Something must’ve got worse up there. Maybe the clouds got thicker. Maybe whatever the hell it is they eat has finally died. Give it time, they’ll stop. They won’t have the strength. We just need to sit it out."
He closed up after that. Staring into his drink and pulling at his thin beard. I left him to it.


The breach this morning was in my sector. A ventilation shaft. We were woken by the claxon, staggering into the corridor, pale faces shocked out of sleep. And there were my first toplanders, standing in a group by the mouth of the shaft. Around me people pushed children back through doors. The creatures who looked like humans held their hands out to us, beckoning, pointing towards the ruptured shaft, where a strange light shone from somewhere high above. It didn’t look electric. Maybe it was fire.
One of them stepped forward. His long hair and beard were plaited with thick cord. His skin was strange, stained dark brown all over, blue eyes standing out like winking lights. He met my gaze. For a moment I imagined his eyes held pity. He spoke, and his voice was human, thick with a strange accent.
"Come. Come."
Then a squad arrived, pushing people aside, moving forward with their flash sticks. The toplanders backed towards the shaft. The leader with the plaited beard paused, held my gaze.
"Come. Sun."
A flash stick caught him and he jolted back, finally turning to disappear into the shaft. The squad covered the rift with a metal plate, and the light of whatever fire it was up there was replaced by the dingy light of the corridor.


Animals.

The world up there is dead and they want what we have down here. But we are safe again.