Analogue Sheep : Vol 3 : Pandora

Analogue Sheep : Vol 3 : Pandora

The tundra stretched endlessly before them, a ghost of a world that had long been abandoned. The sky was slate-grey, the wind slicing through the skeletal remains of structures forgotten by time. A wasteland of the old world, buried beneath centuries of progress.

And yet, here they were - six kids from the Scrubs, scavenging for treasure in a place no one cared about anymore.

Jax led the way, his patched-up thermal coat barely holding together. “You sure this is the one?” he called back, hopping over the fractured concrete barrier that had once been a security checkpoint.

Olek, their tech expert, checked the faded markings on his scanner. “Yeah, this is it. An old government bunker. Could be anything in there - gold, pre-Alignment tech, even food stores.”

The others murmured their excitement. Out here, beyond the lush biodomes of the privileged, beyond the floating cities of the elite, beyond everything they were excluded from - this was their world. And if they found something valuable, maybe - just maybe - they could buy their way off this wretched planet.

The facility was eerie, frozen in time. Signs in a language none of them could read covered the walls, the universal symbols for hazard and restricted were faded and rusting.

“Help me with this,” Jax grunted, pushing against the heavy blast door. It wouldn’t budge.

Olek grinned, pulling out a small, palm-sized device with a cracked screen. “I’ve been saving this. Quantum key emulator - old, but powerful.”

It took less than a minute.

The lock clicked, the seals depressurised, and the door creaked open.

Inside, they found nothing.

No gold. No food. No supplies. Just a cavernous vault lined with smooth, polished metal.

“This is it?” Mara scoffed, kicking the ground.

They wandered inside, boots echoing against the floor. Olek ran a scan but picked up no signals. No active tech.

Jax scowled. “Maybe someone got here first.”

“Wasted trip,” one of the younger kids muttered.

Annoyed, they left the vault behind them, trudging back into the cold. The door remained ajar, a wound torn in the facility’s silence.

No one noticed the faint shimmer along the edges of the chamber. No one saw the way the air itself shifted, the way the vault’s metallic lining had begun to react to exposure.

And so, Pandora’s Box was opened.

Days later, the bodies were found.

The Scrubs were no strangers to death—accidents, starvation, sickness. But this was different. No wounds. No signs of struggle. Just cold, still bodies.

Rumors spread. A pathogen? A failed heist? An overdose?

But while the city gossiped, the vault continued to breathe.

The invisible specter of radiation, locked away for centuries, seeped into the air, carried on the wind, sinking into the frozen ground. It reached abandoned pipelines, slipping into the veins of forgotten infrastructure. It spread through unmanned relays, passing unnoticed through ancient systems, creeping silently toward civilization.

By the time the failures started, no one connected the dots.

It began with minor glitches - power fluctuations in Europe’s geothermal grids, strange interference in communications, failing oxygen regulators in the biodomes.

Then, entire regions lost connection. Shipments from the orbital stations were delayed. Crop yields inside controlled environments plummeted.

The dominoes tipped faster.

The planetary grid, built with the assumption of perfect self-regulation, began to choke under the sudden disruptions. Redundancies failed. Earth-1, the linchpin of the human interplanetary network, started crumbling.

No one suspected radiation.

Nuclear power had been obsolete for over a century. After the discovery of Helion reserves beneath Mars’ surface, humanity had transitioned entirely to new fuel sources. The Great Nuclear Alignment had seen every last scrap of radioactive material secured in high-Earth orbit, far from the fragile ecosystem of Earth-1.

No reactors. No fuel rods. No need for Geiger counters.

Which meant no one was looking for radiation.

No one, except Eli.

Dr. Elias Tannen sat in his lab, hunched over flickering readouts. He was a systems specialist, tasked with tracing anomalies in planetary infrastructure.

And what he saw didn’t make sense.

Localized outages. Delayed degradation. A slow, creeping decay.

Not a cyberattack. Not sabotage. Something…else.

He pulled up environmental data. It wasn’t a climate shift. No spike in toxins, no obvious contaminant. The pattern was deliberate, moving outward in waves.

He ran a comparative analysis against historical failures.

The results stopped him cold.

An old radiation decay curve.

He ran it again. The pattern matched. Something was poisoning the planet.

Eli pulled territorial maps. The earliest affected zone was outside the biodome networks, beyond any active population centers. The frozen north.

Scandinavia.

He traced it further. Found the marker.

A forgotten facility. A waste storage site.

A place that should have been emptied during the Great Alignment.

Except it hadn’t been.

Someone had opened it.

Eli sent an immediate report to Central, tagging it Urgent - Critical Infrastructure Threat.

He didn’t get a response.

He checked the live network relay. The signal was lagging. That was impossible - Earth-1’s network was designed for instantaneous interplanetary communication.

His stomach turned. He reran the decay model. If the spread continued at its current rate, infrastructure collapse wasn’t just possible - it was inevitable.

Not in months. Not in weeks.

Days.

He sprinted through the corridors of the biodome, trying every emergency channel. The comms tower was still operational, but the signal was corrupted - static, warping, entire packets of data disappearing.

He reached the control hub. The supervisors barely glanced up.

“Systems are failing,” Eli panted. “We need to initiate planetary emergency protocols.”

A woman at the terminal shook her head. “There’s no active attack. Just a cascading failure. Engineering is handling it.”

Eli slammed his palm on the table. “It’s radiation.”

The room fell silent. The word was ancient, a relic from the time before.

“Not possible,” someone scoffed.

Eli pulled up his findings, his voice breaking. “Look at the pattern. The infrastructure failures - it’s contamination, invisible and slow. We’ve forgotten how to detect it. We need a sweep. We need containment.”

The supervisor shook his head. “We don’t even have detection equipment, Tannen. If this was real, we wouldn’t even know how to fix it.”

Eli’s throat was dry. He knew what this meant.

No backup systems. No redundancies.

No way to stop it.

He turned toward the window, looking out over the vast city beneath the biodome, its towers of glass and steel stretching toward the sky. It still looked untouched, still looked invincible.

But it wasn’t.

He imagined the food production plants shutting down. The water filtration systems failing. The life support grids flickering out, one by one.

A world not meant to sustain itself. A world that had sent its best and brightest away, believing it would always be here to support them.

A world already dead.

Eli staggered back, barely feeling his own weight.

No one understood what had happened.

No one ever would. 

And outside, across the tundra, an ancient vault stood open.

Waiting.

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