(This is the eighth in the X series, and is intended to be read after "Xhalation", "Xcogitate", "Xemplify", "Xpectation", "Xotica", "Xogenous" and "Xpand".)
30,000 tons of tungsten. 10,000 tons of lead. 20,000 tons of osmium lining the inner walls, with a few thousand tons of platinum, gold, and silver laced through the structure in the form of insulated wiring. Perhaps nine hundred tons of molybdenum alloyed with key components to prevent wear. With the cost of labor, design and engineering factored in along with the raw materials, the sphere probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars--perhaps even twice that, given the scramble to obtain the scarcer resources as the desperation for them grew. President LaQuinta Cotton woke up every morning knowing that she was living in the most expensive prison on the face of the earth.
It wasn't exactly a prison, but then again, she didn't exactly feel like a President. Despite what the chain of succession said, despite what the military personnel staffing the sphere called her, she still thought of herself as the Secretary for Health and Human Services in the privacy of her own head. The Presidency didn't seem real without the will of the people behind her, and LaQuinta never truly imagined that the country she grew up in would ever be progressive enough to elect an African-American woman to the Oval Office. And now, lying in bed in the lightless silence of the early morning, feeling the warmth of her lover's body against her own in the last quiet moments before she turned on the light and began her round of daily briefings and status reports and endlessly grim communications with the outside world, she carried a constant sick feeling that she was absolutely right.
She rolled over, desperately sliding her thigh up between her lover's legs, grinding urgently in a final attempt to shut out the sick terror of her position and her responsibilities. LaQuinta heard tiny, sleepy grunts of pleasure, and it helped her sink into the soft ecstasy of mindless rutting for a few moments longer. In the pitch darkness of the windowless room, with nothing but warm sweaty bodies humping against each other, she could pretend she was just waking up from a bad dream into the comfort of her girlfriend's arms, rather than the opposite. She kissed the other woman's neck and shoulders, losing herself in arousal as best she could before the morning came.
They found the rhythm of their lovemaking quickly, LaQuinta's long stiff nipples rubbing against her lover's chest as she rocked up and down on the too-small bed. Even being President didn't earn her many creature comforts, not in a space built out of hasty desperation from limited and expensive materials, and her girlfriend had to sleep with one foot on the floor to keep from tumbling to the ground in the middle of the night. It meant that her legs were always spread, though, and LaQuinta liked that in a lover. She pressed her thigh hard against the slick and soaking labia, feeling musky fluid smear against her skin in the final few moments before the other woman convulsed in orgasm.
LaQuinta felt her own pleasure building not long after, bursting out in a gunshot-quick orgasm that didn't truly satisfy her. But it was all she was getting for tonight--the first alarm had already gone off, and the artificial day was already beginning. Her lover needed to sneak away, furtively departing when the lights were still coming up throughout the sphere to get to her own uncomfortably cramped quarters. And President Cotton needed to get herself showered, get dressed, and check in on the United States of America. What was left of it, at least.
Certainly no one had heard from Washington in weeks. Satellite photos showed a massive blanket of green fog covering most of the Eastern Seaboard from New Hampshire all the way down to North Carolina and inland all the way to the Appalachians. It wasn't technically impossible to get out--they had armored personnel carriers that could survive a trip or two with the help of some special modifications originally intended to deal with gas weapons in the Persian Gulf conflicts--but they weren't hearing from any refugees.
They weren't hearing from a lot of people, not since the spring rains started and the growing season began. Most of the Midwest succumbed within a matter of weeks, the broad acres of golden wheat coming up with a distinctively viridian tint to their stalks and releasing a fine haze of emerald mist that only got thicker as the days went by. The West Coast was already gone, swamped by a network of human contamination even before the plants started to spread the X pollution throughout the atmosphere, and the Deep South followed just as soon as the winds blew the mutagenic gas in their direction. The sphere was constructed on an arid Nevada mesa, high up in the thin air in a desert almost devoid of life, but they could still taste a thin film of chlorophyll on their tongues whenever they went through the airlock.
(So she was told. President Cotton wasn't allowed to go outside, of course. For security reasons.)
And the thankfully uncorrupted orbital communications network told much the same story all over the world. Everywhere there was green, the X spread through the intermingled roots from plant to plant until the lungs of the world exhaled mutagenic mist, and any animal caught in that mist soon became a carrier. Flocks of migratory birds trailed plumes of emerald fog behind them as they flew, and humans everywhere succumbed to a powerful, sexual urge to contaminate anyone and everyone within reach. The jungles of South America, the steppes and taigas of Russia, even the undersea kelp forests off the Pacific Coast were all undergoing their own form of ecological collapse--no. Not collapse, LaQuinta reminded herself. Transformation. These things weren't dying, they were becoming something new and taking the world along with them.
In a way, it was keeping them safe. Feroz Zaman, her chief structural engineer, told her that the sphere would have collapsed under its own weight weeks ago if not for the gravitational fluctuations caused by dimensional bridges breaking through in thirty-seven locations worldwide. That had its own downsides--apparently volcanic activity was up seventeen percent--but the sphere's location had been chosen for its geological stability. They could survive right up until the end here.
