Short Story

The Year 3053


All of earth's inhabitants live underground as the ozone layer had long been burned away, making surface living impossible. Only short trips to the earth's surface can be tolerated with a fire resistant space suit fitted with ozone remnants trapped into the skin; a design concocted by a Nasa engineer and field scientist 30 years back. The suit can only be worn for 30 minutes at a time due to too much compressed oxygen and can only stand to be in the direct rays of the sun for 10 minute periods.

Underground living proved to not be as difficult as previous years as people adapted. Only about 1 million humans remained on earth... and spread underground on the 3 remaining continents, North America, Africa and Australia. The world, as many remember it no longer exists. No states, no countries. Many people only remember it from stories passed down from elder ancestors. The only written forms of earth's existence, i.e. atlases, and globes, were destroyed in the natural disaster of 2060... taking many of earths inhabitants with it.

Some people tried living on the moon... to no avail. Others still, tried Mars. While life there was more suitable than the moon, the sometimes violent natural phenomenas proved habitation too difficult for the long term... many humans returning to earth after just 10 years on the red planet. The ones that stayed, roughly about 600, sent down to Earth quiet frequently for necessities with a robotic space craft and learned to adapt to the frequent storms. Many believe they will not last another decade and will have to return to the 4th planet soon enough.

Alicia, 16, hates it here. And she has every right to. She does not belong. This is just another one of her lives. After she killed herself again in 2016, she ended up here, with no friends, hardly any family and only a vague memory of where she came from and how she got her, though as each day passes, her memory becomes more clear.

After nearly 6 months underground, she finally pieced together her life story. She was a suicider. Someone who killed themselves to try and relocate to their natural life. The first suicide was an accident, in 2009. The following suicides were all done on purpose as to try and find her way back to her normal life, the one she left behind. So far, she had killed herself 7 times... and each time she ended up in a different time period. Now she had ended up in hell, literally, Living underground in the year 3053.

Sometimes she ended up in the past, but most often, she would catapult herself into the future. This was a future she did not like. Underground, or as the people came to call it 'under-earth', living was not for her. She missed the sun, the beach, the sky. None of that was available to her now. From the stories she had heard, most of earth's surface, about 90% was now covered with water. With no ozone layer, one millisecond on the surface would set you on fire. And as for the sky, it was a brilliant distant memory as it was impossible to even look up and see it anymore. It was as if it didn't exist. No one even dared venture out at night.... the earth had shifted on it's axis 50 years before and so nights were shorter, only lasting 4 hours on a given day.

No one kept good time or record of events, days, years, or time. There were no birthdays, no celebrations, no air of festivity. All there was was survival. And Alicia didn't want to just survive. As soon as she could find the right time, where her passage would be safe, she would kill herself again. Only this time, not so brutally as before. But 6 months underground was long enough.
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Alicia grew up in Boston, right near the Prudential Center, in the heart of Back Bay. Her parents, financial brokers and finance analysts, were always too busy to make much time for Alicia, so she was raised mainly by her loving, but a little kooky, Mexican maid. Her life had been one sad story after another. At her prestigious private school, Windsor Collegiate Preparatory, she was an outcast. Not nearly as pretty as the other girls, nor as fashion forward or trendy. In a school where fashion and sex ruled, she was definitely an outsider.

She was well known, but for all the wrong reasons. She was too short. She was too thin. She had unruly curly hair, almost on the verge of kinky, that was too yellow or her pasty white skin tone. She tried tanning to no avail... she should have been a red head with straight locks, as that would have been a better fit for her.

Her breasts were too small and her nose was too big, but her eyes were doll like with the most brilliant shade of grey. She spoke up in class but never spoke to anyone in school. She came to be known as the "werder".... a smart play on the words weird nerd.

She got laughed at, pranked on, and gossiped about. Her parents were not wealthy enough... her house was not big enough, her money not 'old' enough to belong to any specific group. To make matters worse, she wasn't even all that smart. Yes, she spoke up in class... but usually with all the wrong answers. She was an average C student. And all her after school curriculars consisted of her volunteering her time to do behind the scenes work.

Alicia had no idea why her life was the way it was or why she was cursed with the parents she had, who cared more about their next dollar than about her. But she knew one thing... death was better than living her life, or so she thought.

The night she 'accidentally' killed herself, she was actually thinking of ways to turn her life around. She had just been given her monthly allowance. And instead of stashing it in her savings account like she usually did, she had pocketed the bulk of it. She was thumping through a myriad of fashion magazines to try and find styles that would suit her the best. She had $1500 to 'waste' and she lived in the shopping central for design labels in Massachusetts, if not the whole east coast. She was going to put her money to good use.

She had called her father on his 'family' cell to ask his permission to use the family car.... the car that was always parked in the under ground garage for family use, like family trips, which they never took or emergencies when the family was home, which they never really were. It was a beautiful silver 2008 Range Rover that sat idle in the garage, turned on once a week by the garage attendant to 'open up' the engine. Alicia had her drivers license, something she treasured and something her parents had no idea she had, if they even cared. But this day, she intended to let her father know she was capable and needed the car to do some shopping. She was going to need the spacious trunk to cart her belongings.

She caught him at a bad time, as usual.

"Hello, dad?" She spoke it as a question, tentative and hesitant as if she wasn't sure she had dialed the right number.

He was distracted. After nearly 5 minutes of him barking at someone else, not realizing it was her on the phone and asking her several times to repeat who it was, he finally gave a long loud 'FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK", then hung up.

Alicia heard the soft click of his cell phone and quiet chirp of the dial tone. A tear was caught by her finger before it had a chance to slide down her cheek. She had had it. She would just take the damn car; she knew where the spare key was and it's not like he or her mother would find out... if they even made it home before midnight, they still would have no clue Alicia was home, let alone if the car had been driven.

But something held her back and as if being dragged by force, she marched instead into the bathroom and rummaged through the dozens of prescription pills her mother possessed and snatched up a red bottle with a name she couldn't pronounce, much less know what it was for.

She decided it would help her calm her nerves, since most pills her mother took were to 'calm her nerves'.

She couldn't go shopping with a knot in her stomach, nor could she enjoy herself with her heart racing and her nerves jumping all over the place. Since her mother seemed to calm down after popping one of her pills, she figured this little white pill would soothe her just the same. She took one, and then a few minutes later when she felt worse, she took another. And then another. They must have been dummy pills because after the 5th one, she felt no better. But she did feel like taking a nap, so she did. Alicia never woke up from that nap... and when her parents were called by the Mexican maid in hysterics after the paramedics failed to revive her, her father had only one concern. How the fuck was he going to take time off work for a funeral.


Alicia saw the whole thing unfold. The frantic rush of the EMT's, her maid screaming and crying, tearfully clawing at the paramedics, yelling for them to " do sonting'. She saw her parents arrive, via private chauffeur, 30 minutes later. Her mother looked as if she had been crying, her father a stoic expression on his face. What she hadn't expected was for her mother to reach out for her dead body, flinging herself on top of it and weeping uncontrollably. Her father, still expressionless, gently lifted her mother off, and quietly whispered in her ear, " For God's sakes Petra, get a fucking hold of yourself".

She knew she had thought of death many times before but today was not one of those days. She had wanted to start fresh. But she had no idea how fresh she would start.

Before she knew it and before she had a chance to feel her mother's pain, she was waking up in the 1887. The shock almost gave her a nervous breakdown.

At first she thought she was living her afterlife. But she soon found out she was not dead at all. How could it be, She wondered. She knew she had died. She saw her dead body. She saw everything. Why was she in a different century? Why was she still alive?

She spent almost a year in 1887 before the culture shock was just too much to bear. She had had enough of the backwards way of thinking (something a girl from the new millennium just could not get used to). She had had enough of the straight laced fashion and God awful long skirts. She was done with all the inferior mind set of women and the ill treatment towards them and people of different races.

This time, she wanted to kill herself. This was not a life she wanted to live. She was sure she would die this time around... it must have been pure luck the first time (maybe because it was an accident) why she had started a fresh new life in a new time period instead of as a ghost. But she didn't care where she ended up... she was not going to live this life anymore. And so, timed perfectly for an audience, she gracefully stepped up onto the banister of the second floor landing and threw herself off. She broke her neck and died instantly.

But she didn't really die. She woke up again, just in another time and place, with a new set of parents. Circumstances had changed but she knew things were the same. She quickly figured out that no matter how many times she killed herself, she would never really die. So her mission was to find her way back to her old like, even if it killed her, pun intended.

Alicia soon discovered why her life had been so different. Why she had been so different. She was a suicide traveler. And though she was not sure if the life she lived for 16 years in 2009 was her beginner life, it was the life she wanted back, the life she missed, even though it was far from perfect. So in vain, she tried to get back to it. And each suicide led her down a different path only leading her to start fresh over and over again.
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The last suicide, a fatal shot to the head, left her in 3053. A desolate life. And a life she promised herself she would not be living for long. She wanted to get back to her 'original' life, she wanted to grow up there. Find true love there and come to peace with her true parents.

With her new set of parents, her older sister and two young uncles, she felt at home, at home as she would ever felt. But she had to leave them. She had to find her way back, if she could find her way back. She had no idea that life in 3053 was life as she knew it.