Generations

It starts- well, technically speaking, it starts the first time Heidi sneaks out of the Dome, the first time she tricks the bracelet round her wrist into thinking she's still inside, the first time she breathes freedom into her lungs and realises with blinding clarity that this is what she was made for.

But for all the important intents and purposes, it starts nearly a decade later, two weeks before Heidi’s eighteenth birthday, because that is when everything starts to go wrong.

Heidi waits until every pulsing dot on her handheld replica of the dormitory monitor has turned purple before slipping out of bed, still fully clothed in the standard skirt and t-shirt all the girls have to wear. She pulls on a pair of thick tights and shrugs on her trench coat, suddenly too warm in the carefully controlled climate, but she knows it’s necessary.

Her footfalls are silent on the carpeted floor as she pads out into the hallway where all the rooms converge. She keeps to the shadows to avoid the eagle eyes of the security cameras, darting out for only a second to get to the unlocked door. Her bracelet beeps, once, only once, and Heidi's breath catches in her lungs. She doesn't exhale until she's outside, and even then only a quick gust of air. She's not safe yet.

The dormitory is right on the edge of the Dome, just one long, narrow street between it and the barrier, which is patrolled by alpha bots. Heidi waits for the nearest one to pass her before she ducks out into the open. She doesn't have to worry about cameras here; the robots are enough to keep the people in and everything else out.

Her bracelet beeps again, but it sounds different this time, and the knot in Heidi's stomach loosens. (It doesn't matter how many times she does this, it never really goes away.)

She hurries past the alpha bots, who don't so much as flicker when she passes them, all the way to the barrier. Its edges shimmer, barely visible in the artificial darkness, unless you’re looking for it, unless you know it’s there. Heidi has to stop again to fiddle with her bracelet in order to change the programming; this close to the barrier, there's a chance it could still activate, and then everything would go to shit. Her bracelet beeps and she moves quickly through the barrier before the alpha bots can register an unauthorised human presence.

The change is as instantaneous and conspicuous as it always is, even after nine and a half years of experiencing it. Heidi gulps in great lungfuls of unsterilised air, leans back against the wall made of genuine brick and mortar, crumbling in places but still mostly stable. She stares up at the sky and wonders how she could ever have believed the fake stars projected on to the ceiling of the Dome were the real thing.

“Ninety seconds, Heidi,” comes a familiar, American-accented voice from behind her. “You're getting slow in your old age.”

Heidi's face splits in a grin as she lowers her head. “Nice to see you too, Tegan,” she says. “But you do realise I’m younger than you, right? I know maths isn’t your strong point, but I would have thought even you could count to four.”

Tegan grins back at her, flicking her hair – she’s dyed it since the last time Heidi saw her; it’s now pure ebony instead of violent purple streaked with green – out of her eyes. “Fuck you,” she says, entirely without malice, and steps forward to pull Heidi into a hug. “Hey,” she murmurs into Heidi's ear, and Heidi tightens her arms around Tegan's back.

(She hasn't been able to sneak out for nearly a month; she was starting to forget what fresh air tastes like, what the night sky looks like, what Tegan smells like.)

Tegan pulls back after a moment, her lips still tugged up at the corners and her eyes still sparkling. “We should get you out of here,” she says, taking Heidi’s hand to help her clamber up the wall, giving her a gentle push to help her get across the other side. When Heidi thumps to the ground, Tegan climbs up and lands on the burnt grass beside her, a lot more nimbly than she had.

“Come on,” Tegan says, taking her hand again. (It took Heidi awhile to get used to it, the way Tegan’s always reaching out for touch, for physical affection, but they’ve known each other for years now and Heidi’s come to expect an arm slung across her shoulder or around her waist, warm fingers tangling with her colder ones.)

Tegan’s motorbike is propped up against the wall, and its lights flicker on as the two of them approach. Tegan straddles the bike, fitting her legs into the linkers on either side, and Heidi swings up behind her with an ease perfected through years of practice.

“Hey Nicki,” Tegan says, casual, as the flicks on the engine and messes with the old-fashioned dashboard. (It’s modded to the nines but it’s still essentially old technology, built to run on now defunct fossil fuels, and Heidi used to wonder why Tegan didn’t just get a new bike instead of constantly upgrading this one. She gets it, now, or at least she thinks she does.)

“Hello, Tegan,” the mechanical voice of the bike replies. Its accent is American, like Tegan’s but not as soft around the edges from years away from the place she grew up. “Hello, Heidi. Where would you like to go this evening?”

“Halcyon, if it’s not too much trouble.” The engine starts to thrum just as the little plastic disk Tegan slipped into one of the slots on the bike starts working, starts projecting music through the speakers mounted on both sides. It’s an old album, one Heidi’s pretty sure Tegan’s played her before as part of her quest to expose Heidi to real music. “Heidi’s got a lot to catch up on.”

The mechanical voice makes a noise that’s something like a laugh in response, and the bike jerks forward without warning like it always does. Heidi lets out a yelp that makes Tegan burst out laughing, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine.

Heidi’s heart is pounding in her chest as she wraps her arms around Tegan’s waist and squeezes tight, ostensibly to keep herself upright. She presses her grin into the soft black leather of Tegan’s jacket but she thinks Tegan sees it anyway, in the reflection of her eyes in the side mirrors.



Heidi met Tegan when she was thirteen. She’d been sneaking out of the Dome for five years already, never straying too far, never daring to go beyond the wall between it and the rest of the city. She used to haul herself up and perch on the side, staring up at the pitch black sky studded with stars, kicking her legs back against the brick, and this night wasn’t any different.

Except, when her gaze wandered from the heavens back down to the earth, she caught sight of a figure dismounting some sort of alpha bot. It was shaped kind of like a mechanical bicycle, and was propped up against a wall some way away from where Heidi had settled herself.

Heidi had never seen someone who wasn’t a child of the Dome before.

This girl (she looked much older than Heidi in her starched white shirt and pleated skirt, dressed from head to foot in form-fitting black leather, but her face was still soft with youth) didn’t look the way the savages had always been described. She looked- well, she looked just like Heidi.

Well, not just like Heidi, because her skin was darker and her eyes were paler and her hair was short and thick and curly and blue, and Heidi was instantly jealous. There were stains on her arms that, as she approached, looked like the tribal markings the savages were supposed to have, but apart from that, the girl looked... normal.

Until she turned her head and blinked, looking straight at Heidi, and Heidi’s eyes flew wide because one of the girl’s eyes was bright, unnatural green. Bionic, Heidi thought, and shivered.

They stared at each other for a few moments, both too shocked to speak.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Heidi said eventually, still staring.

“Neither should you,” the girl pointed out, mildly. Her voice was strange, had an unfamiliar twang to it Heidi had never heard anyone use before. “You’re a Dome kid.”

Heidi wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she just nodded. The girl drew closer, stopped a few paces away from the wall, stared up at her.

“You’re a Dome kid,” she repeated, her voice entirely flat, “and you’re not inside the Dome.” She paused for a moment, as if trying to let that settle in, then continued, “How the actual fuck did you get out of there?”

“Um,” Heidi said, shifting uncomfortably. “I just. Um. I sort of. I walked?”

The girl gave her an incredulous look. Her eyes flicked to the bracelet around Heidi’s wrist, and before Heidi knew what she was doing, before Heidi could stop her from doing it, she grabbed her hand and turned it over to examine the bracelet.

Heidi’s breath caught at the contact; Dome kids never touched, not unless they had to, not unless they needed to.

“It’s still functional,” she said finally, letting Heidi’s hand drop down to her side. Heidi exhaled, slowly. “So you haven’t disabled it.”

“You can’t disable them,” Heidi pointed out.

“Well, you could,” the girl reasoned, matter-of-fact, “if you wanted five thousand volts of electricity coursing through your veins and an army of alphas descending on you to finish the job.” She narrowed her eyes at Heidi. “It’s not disabled, but it’s not transmitting, either. How’d you do it, kid?”

Heidi just shrugged, awkwardly. The girl was staring at her like- like she was the freak here, the girl had never seen anything like her before.

“Better question,” the girl continued, “why did you want to? I thought Dome kids were programmed not to want anything more than what they have.”

Heidi flinched. “We aren’t programmed,” she said. “We’re humans. We’re not robots.”

The girl made a derisive sound in her throat. “Sure,” she said, and Heidi narrowed her eyes.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked, cocking her head to one side. “You’re not a child of the dome. You aren’t a robot, are you?”

The girl gave her a look. Her blue eye was fierce and her green eye was flat, and Heidi fought the urge to withdraw from the girl’s unnerving gaze.

“I’m more human than you are, probably,” she said, but there was something like a smile in her voice, something like a tease, and Heidi gave her an uneasy smile in return. “You’re right about one thing, though. I’m not a Dome kid. I’m one of those awful savages your handlers always warned you about.”

Her lips curled into a grin, a grin that dimpled her cheeks and lit up the corners of her eyes, and for a moment she didn’t look anything like a savage.

“I don’t know,” Heidi mumbled, suddenly shy, “you seem kind of nice to me.”

Tegan’s eyes sparkled and she said, “I think you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me. I’m really not a very nice person, honestly.” She eyed Heidi, half-wary, before she continued, “I’m not exactly here for pleasure.” Her eyes flicked to her bicycle shaped alpha bot, then back to Heidi. “I’m... well, I’m delivering something that’ll make a lot of people very unhappy if it works the way I’m told it should.”

Heidi’s eyes went wide. “You’re a hacker?” she breathed.

“Of sorts, yeah.” The girl grinned at her. “The name’s Tegan, as in Tegan and Sara.”

Heidi slithered off the wall to the ground, then, because it was starting to feel kind of weird being so much higher up. When she straightened, she found herself looking into Tegan’s eyes.

“I’m Heidi,” she replied, biting her lip around a smile. “Who’re Tegan and Sara?”

“Dome kids,” Tegan said, with a mock-mournful shake of her head, “they don’t teach you anything.”

Tegan and Sara, it turned out, were a band. “A fucking awesome band,” Tegan corrected, and Heidi couldn’t help a giggle. (None of the Dome kids swore like Tegan swears, not so frequently and never so colourfully.)

Tegan moved onto ranting about music in general, the way music used to be before everything changed. She’s always so animated when she talks, when she gets worked up about something, waves her hands around with little regard for her surroundings, and back then Heidi had never met anyone like her before.

(She still hasn’t, not really, but the weirdness of it has just about worn off, now.)

She just watched Tegan, fascinated, as she exposited on the various musical genres of the twenty first century, as she ranted and rambled and raved about the golden age of music and how things haven’t been the same since, how people just don’t care about it the same way any more.

“Sorry,” Tegan said, cutting herself off abruptly. She ran a hand through her curls, laughed a laugh that sounded forced even to Heidi’s ears. “Sorry, fuck, I didn’t mean to- it’s not like you actually care about-”

“No, it’s fine,” Heidi said quickly, needing to reassure the other girl somehow, for reasons she didn’t entirely understand. “It was.... it was interesting.”

Tegan smiled, slow, hesitant. “You don’t- fuck, this is going to come out all wrong but you- you don’t act like- you don’t seem like-” She barks a laugh. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Dome kid if I just met you on the street or something,” she says, biting her lip. “And, you know. If I were blind.”

“Thanks?” Heidi says, unsure if that was intended as a compliment or not. It makes something in her chest feel kind of fluttery, though, so she figures it must be at least a little bit of a good thing.

“Hey,” Tegan said, suddenly, “how’d you like to get out of here for real?”

Heidi’s heart nearly thumped out of its chest. “I’d love to,” she whispered, voice hoarse. She cleared her throat abruptly. “I can’t, though, I mean. I have to get back soon before they notice I’ve gone.”

Tegan nods, and her smile doesn’t dim but her eyes fall a little around the corners. “Oh,” she says, “oh, okay, that’s-”

“I’ll probably be around in the next few days, though,” Heidi says, trying for nonchalance and praying she doesn’t just sound pathetically hopeful. “I sneak out as often as I can without them noticing. Are you, um- can I- will I see you again?” she finally manages to get out, cheeks so red she can feel the heat rising off her face.

Tegan just grins, though, throwing an arm around a shoulder to pull her close and chuckle in her ear. “Sure,” she said, “you’ll see me again, Heidi, you can count on that.”

She released Heidi and strolled away, back to the bicycle shaped alpha bot. Heidi watched her go, watched her turn to throw a wave over her shoulder before kicking the alpha bot into gear and hurtling away with a roar that sounded deafening in the utter stillness of the night. She didn’t turn back to the night sky for several minutes after Tegan had gone.