Sphere Lock
Running the daily marathon made sense until one unusual gray day the path suddenly ended abruptly. Not that Aileana did not see it coming, but it came unexpected nonetheless. Donna mentioned on previous occasions that a lockdown was inevitable.
Inevitable was a word the marauders used quite a bit these days. The course events had taken during the past seasons showed no sign of reversing. Donna’s trips into the outer layers made her convinced the situation was hardly sustainable. The Northern parts of High Terrain were slowly crumbling into the vastness of the ice sheet that was rapidly moving south. We read of ice ages in our history classes, but never ever assumed we would experience one ourselves. In the beginning of the last decade we already absorbed awareness of the coming period as the seasonal changes differed less by the year and fertility figures plummeted to one digit percentages.
Not being able to procreate was not even the biggest deal. Losing sense of what time of year you are actually in was. The change of seasons was always the indicator or rather the broadcaster of a change in feelings. The remarkable balance between what is going in the outside world and in your inner being was something to hold on to. Something tangible and something that made a human a human.
“Well to every down side there should be an upside”, the ever optimistic Aileana uttered when the lock was a fact. Running 42.195 meters in the sphere does not even cover one tenth of the circumference of the rescue vessel created by the United Northern States.