Before earth, sea and sky, and before this community, I commit to protect the deep legacy from human disturbance, and to protect the world from the legacy, through the ten thousand years of its danger. I will preserve the records, knowledge and memory of this repository and what is buried here. This is my turn in the turning of life. So help me. So help us all.
Geological Disposal Facility Oath of Long-Term Protection, version 16, 2478
One more tap. One more. The concrete comes loose. Dora wedges the chisel into the gap and twists until the lump drops into her hand. It is the size of a wood pigeon, and her wrist gives a little as she catches it.
She blows off the dust and puts the lump in a bag which hangs from the top of the step ladder. She climbs down and sits on the floor, waiting for the lights to turn themselves off.
There is something deeply restful about the complete dark in the tunnels. Only carvers come down this one, now that the quay it led to has been decommissioned. Radwaste and plastox haven’t arrived by sea for over seventy years. Dora has child’s memories of a shipment being lost – the awful shining anxiety in her stomach, her mother’s appalled face all lines and shadows, the makeshift creche set up inside a ring of tables and chairs with teens looking after the littluns while the grown-ups were off doing who knew what. The bitter sweat smell that was suddenly everywhere. The soft knitted rabbit she had wanted to hug, but some other kid had taken it and she only had something scratchy to comfort, with wonky eyes.
And now she will make something smooth and beautiful for Saff to take with him on his travels. She has in mind a shell. Maybe scallop, like the pilgrim sign. Or a dog whelk. Or a wentletrap. The shape will reveal itself. She will help it just enough, with chisels. She sits with her eyes closed, waiting for it to speak to her. Anxiety interrupts the calm. Sometimes children don’t come home. She can’t let herself think this. Fear will spoil the carving and if the shell doesn’t come out right, maybe he won’t come back.
Dora waves her hand to bring back the light. On the opposite wall, last year’s kepi data stand out crisply, in widely spaced, perfectly aligned columns. Total weight of each level of waste: low, intermediate, high. Becquerels and pico-curies at the seven sampling points. Countdown to the estimated safe radioactivity levels, and the estimated date itself, currently: September 5 , 12050.
Dora rolls up her tool belt and puts it in the bag with the concrete. The tunnel slopes almost imperceptibly upwards, comforting chevrons gouged into the walls, pointing to the entrance. Light follows her back in time, each set of data carved earlier than the last, counting up towards the past.
The tunnel she quarried the concrete from is two floors down from the waste reception area, behind lead-lined steel doors. She passes the entrance to the a side tunnel and there is her first ever wall carving: ‘Food Stores’. The letters are well-formed, but look timid and isolated from each other, like they’ve only just met. She nods at the carving, kinder to her younger self than she used to be. It takes time to learn.
The site has been storing legacy since the beforetimes, but they started putting the data on the walls later. The dates show that carving began around 350 years ago. Data scholars and carvers learn the history: that the rebuilders realised every other form of record – paper, electronic, nursery rhyme – was too vulnerable. As long as the tunnels exist, they reasoned, so will anything carved into them. She stops to look at the nearest table of figures, blows on it to dislodge dust.
The annual kepi data is central to the GDF, the whole reason the community is here. Dora learned the story when she was a child, and so had Saff after her. Children sang about it, played ‘counting down’ and pretended to close doors. The radioactive waste was created hundreds of years before they were born, and will be dangerous for thousands of years to come, but it is buried kilometres deep in the Cumbrian rock. The whole thing was intended to be impenetrable. But the great disintegration had come before the developers had completed their task of collecting up the legacy waste and sealing the doors. So the foreparents took on the job of monitoring and counting down to safe levels, long term. No-one asked for this. No-one who’s alive now, anyway. But you can choose to take the long-term oath, if you’re idealistic, or brave, or a homebody.
Dora isn’t part of the data team, but she has carved their wisdom into these walls for decades, apprenticed to Magnad and now with an apprentice of her own. She will pass on knowledge, records and memory into the future. She has someone to teach.
Fashions in lettering have come and gone, of course. Serif and sans serif, sevens with a waist bar and without. It doesn’t take long to add each year’s new data, and in between the daily work of keeping the site ticking over, harvesting food and purifying water, the first carvers had looked for other things to do. Within a few years, they had added all the past records which the data scholars had salvaged from mould-spotted logbooks and memory sticks found on site. When that was done, they had expanded the languages and scripts. Dora looks at the walls, checking she’s where she expects to be. 2391.
The default script is Roman. The earliest scripts added had been pragmatic, the foreparents’ best guess at the longest-lasting and most widely understood writing systems, out of the ones that they had access to: Hebrew, Mandarin, Arabic. Hebrew is easy, fewer letters and mostly linear. Arabic is the hardest but most beloved, curling like smiling tendrils on the walls.
When she reaches 2305, there is another corner, and the incline becomes steeper. This tunnel is more frequently used and there is a bench beneath a light. She sits for a while, fanning her face. 2203.
The data carved in these early years are too close together for easy additions. The translations climb up the walls and onto the ceiling. Dora blinks as she imagines the dust falling into her eyes. It was only later that carvers decided to leave a lot of room so the far future could add its own scripts and commentary. Who knew what language would be used when the countdown narrowed to 5000 years, let alone in the year 12000? Dora had been told that the foreparents who added Hebrew had debated carving Judaic dates too, but they didn’t understand the system well enough to be certain. They didn’t want to mess it up. So they settled on a simple Anno Mundi conversion table, hoping future scholars would make up for their ignorance. More space efficient. And chisels don’t grow on trees.
Dora’s unique contribution is runic. It is a romantic flourish, which came to her on a rare day trip away from the site. She closes her eyes, remembering the sun on her face. It was the vernal equinox. An oath day. As well as site-born youngsters back from uni time, there were a few incomers who had completed their novitiate and decided to commit long term. Saff’s dad had committed, loving the quiet seriousness of the headland community. After the ceremony, they had taken a picnic to the Giant’s Grave. The standing stones had been ancient even before the banked walls and reinforced steel gates of the site had been built. By the stones, with Saff on her hip, Dora had looked back at the facility. The windswept land it occupies is not quite an island, but the lower land connecting it to the rest of the coast narrows a little each year and from the hill Dora could see where the road had been rerouted away from the sea. When the developers built the facility, they went upwards first, to protect it from rainwater flooding. Then they thought about keeping out people. They raised high banks, drove in double rings of fencing and dug out ditches, laid hawthorn hedging. The compost latrines, food gardens and desalination plant came much later, when the site quarantined its legacy. She had thought it a very small place to choose as your whole world.
A few outsider families had come to the oath day to say goodbye to their sons or daughters. She had watched them cycling back along the road, some slowly, some fast, unable or unwilling to join in any celebration.
Saff was a baby, just walking, and he had tottered between the stones until he lay down in the shade to sleep. Dora had dozed too, leaning against her lover on the warm turf, breathing in the thyme, listening to skylarks. She had woken to his question about marks on the stones and recognised lettering behind the lichen. It had been a long time between inspiration and action, but the memory of the day stayed with her and when she could, she learned enough to add runes in the tunnels.
She opens her eyes but the lights have gone out again.
She thinks about her apprentice and how skilful he is, although sometimes he comes across as a bit of a know it all. He must learn humility and patience. To hear what the rock is telling him, not shout his thoughts onto it. Dora worries that he doesn’t have time to learn everything he needs. His hair is already grey, and not just from concrete dust. Why has he come to it so late? The answer is there somewhere, hidden under sediment, but she can’t unearth it.
She takes out the concrete and turns it over, squinting as the lights spring back on. She had quarried it from a corner, so the lump has one straight edge. The flat sides have been smoothed, but there is a flaw on one plane, like a miniature cave. Dora sticks in her tongue and it bulges a little, filling the space. Where the bubble meets the surface, its concrete skin is so thin she could break it with her tongue. Where the lump’s sides have been forced from the wall there are chaotic tears and hints of folded grain where it keeps the memory of being poured. She will dip it in the sea to better understand it, before bringing metal to it again.
She bags the lump and walks on. The side tunnel where the data is carved meets the main artery a few yards from the massive metal doors which block the way to the deep repository. Behind those doors it doesn’t make sense to talk of floors, as there are none. The shafts and tunnels dive westwards as fast as they can to the rock salt layers in the Mercia Mudstone, ten kilometres offshore, where engineered copper containers sleep, tucked in under blankets of clay. Remote monitors keep track of the gradual decline in radioactivity, overseen by the team of data scholars, who pass the kepi to Dora to carve. No-one opens the doors, except for deposit ceremonies.
‘Dora?’
She starts. It is the disconcertingly old apprentice.
‘I’m finished for the day. It’s no good you arriving when it’s all done, you know. How will you learn that way?’ She is only a bit angry, but the apprentice hangs his head.
‘I’ll be on time tomorrow. Shall I go down for the stepladder?’
She shakes her head, ‘I left it.’
‘What did you work on today?’
It has slipped her mind.
He says, ‘yesterday, you mentioned catching up with the runic translations. Did you work on that?’
‘Yes,’ but Dora can’t feel that work in her hands. Has she been shaping minimalist runes, teasing out their contours with a tiny pick? The man is irritating her with his stupid questions.
They walk up and out, to where the main tunnel becomes more like a warehouse. They stop by the wall where the vision and rules are carved. Dora doesn’t want him to have wasted his day without learning anything, so they read the panels.
‘Deep underground, inside this suitable rock, our highly engineered facility isolates radioactive waste so no harmful quantities ever reach the surface.
It will not be abandoned.
It will be overseen.
Records, knowledge and memory will be preserved as long as possible.‘
On the next panel:
‘We are the long termers.
We protect the facility from outsiders, and the outside from the facility. We monitor and record.
We count down.
We keep the community alive so we can pass on the warnings.
We learn from the outside so they can learn from us.’
Dora taps the wall where a third column has been carved. Her knuckle is swollen, her finger bent.
We receive radwaste and plastox from the outside and add it to the legacy.
‘That was added because people started bringing it to the gates,’ she says.
‘
The Plastox Pilgrims.’
Dora nods, ‘there is still radwaste out there, and this deep geological disposal facility is still the best place for it. And because people decided that deep tunnels in rock are the best place for unburned fossil carbon – coal, oil, plastic – they bring that too. Pilgrims leave offerings of radwaste and plastox at the gates.’ She sounds like a teacher.
When the community had filled the last of the copper barrels, the site council decided to fence off a holding area for the offerings. After that, they built a proper forge and pilgrims brought copper salvage to feed it.
Opening up to the outside is necessary, but Dora knows that it is painful and dangerous. Sometimes people leave and don’t come back. She looks at her hands, first the palms and then the backs. She has a feeling something is missing.
‘I was a girl when they started the midsummer fairs, opened the double gates. Did wonders for the gene pool. Which we need to keep the community alive. Ninth mission statement. Plus outsiders brought gifts. Copper of course, but other things too, along with their wagons of legacy. That perpetual spinach you eat so much of? Better suited to the constant wind. Tougher. That came in from outside. High protein grains.’
‘Climbing soya beans,’ he adds.
‘Have I taught you this before?’
He shakes his head, ‘please carry on.’
‘
And the letters. If anyone chanced by who knew different letters and languages, they sat them down with the translators and checked the meaning of the multi-lingual warning signs and emergency protocol manuals. Updated them if they weren’t obvious enough or wrote entirely new ones if it was a new language. And we still do that today.’
‘You taught yourself runic, from a book.’
‘A book from a uni library. It came in a caravan of scholars, travelling back for the holidays,’ Dora frowns. ‘I wonder how they knew I wanted that book. It’s a long time ago, you know.’
‘That’s such important work,’ he says, ‘thank you for doing it, Dora.’ From his pocket, he takes a thin parcel wrapped in linen.
‘I would like you to tell me about this. We can go to the canteen.’
They sit by a window. The sun is setting into the sea and the sky is alive with colour. The apprentice unwraps the parcel. Inside is a rectangular metal sheet, with holes punched in it. It casts geometric shadows on the table.
Dora takes it and feels around the edges.
‘This is a stencil. Originally it would have been used to burn runes onto treen, but we carvers use it for learning. Because it’s so durable. Long lasting. Last longing, Saff used to say. Do you know my boy Saff? He’s off for his uni time soon.’
‘I’d love to hear about him,’ says the man, with so much enthusiasm that Dora looks at him sideways.
‘He was such a sweet child. Quiet, you know, and liked the outdoors. Butterflies, birds, especially the summer migrants. Didn’t want to come down into the dark with his mother. Wanted the outside world.’
The man is listening carefully, nodding in the right places, answering with his eyes.
‘I hope Saff comes back. That’s why I’m going to carve him a touchstone, to remember, to show that there’s something worth coming back for. I’d crack open and shrivel up if he never came back. I won’t tell him that, of course.’
‘Why not?’
‘Best way to scare him off! I’ll tell him it’s a souvenir. A keepsake to keep safe.’
‘What will you carve, do you think?’
‘A shell, maybe. Do you think he’d like a shell?’
The man nods.
It is hot. Of course, it is always hot, but it even feels hot in the hollow where the track hugs the landward side of the sea wall. Dora leaves her tricycle there and climbs over the massive boulders. Hooded crows fly up from the mussel beds, cackling.
It isn’t easy to balance. Dora crouches. Limpets scratch her hands. When she finds a big enough pool, she swishes the concrete lump through the water, watching closely. Microscopic grains of silt swirl around it. The pale grey becomes the glossy dark of kelp. She holds it up and watches the water drip off, the wetness gradually evaporate. It wants to be whorled and helical.
She works on it in the garden where the light is best. There is a good workbench, and the high banks keep the wind off. She worries about Saff seeing it before it is ready, but he’s not around much these days. Off chasing things with wings, most likely.
Some days it feels like nothing is happening, and she is wary of chiselling. She rolls her tools away and pulls weeds or waters the vegetables with the rest of the gardeners. Then a day will come when the shell sings to her, and all she has to do is get a little closer to it.
Who knows how long it takes, the listening and carving? Fingertips and tongue helping her judge the curves and texture when her eyes can’t. But one day she looks at the lump and it is a perfect shell. It has a smooth, delicate rounded beak at one end, like a porpoise, bending back to reveal a leaf shaped entrance to a tunnel which curls around itself tighter and tighter until it disappears. She lets herself be proud. She goes to look for Saff.
A few people greet her as she crosses the site, but she doesn’t know them. At the canteen they say he is in the back, they’ll go and get him. Dora waits, suppressing the bubble of excitement, imagining seeing her son and handing him her love.
The apprentice appears, taking off an apron as he walks. Dora sees something now in his face and it is as if a crow has dropped a mussel and broken it open.
‘Saff?’
‘Yes Mum, it’s Saff. You look well today.’ The man fumbles with the knot.
Dora frowns, hesitates.
‘I brought you a shell, for when you go away. To remember us by.’
He takes the shell, says ‘thank you, it’s so beautiful. I’ll put it with the others. I still have the first one you made for me when I left for uni time. I brought it back.’
Dora feels her throat tighten painfully. This isn’t what she had hoped for. ‘I remember…’ ‘This is lovely, Mum. Thank you. Let’s have lunch together.’
One more tap. One more. The concrete comes loose. Dora wedges the chisel into the gap and twists until the lump drops into her rough, dusty hand. It is the size of a robin, and her wrist gives a little as she catches it.
PENNY WALKER HAS LIVED IN LONDON FOR 35 YEARS, RAISING HER CHILDREN AND FREELANCING. SHE STARTED WRITING CREATIVELY IN LOCKDOWN, AFTER A CAREER WORKING IN THE ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE, AND SUSTAINABILITY, AS A WAY OF SPENDING TIME IN A BETTER DRAFT OF THE WORLD. HER STORY 4EVER WON THE URBAN TREE FESTIVAL PRIZE FOR FLASH FICTION IN 2023, AND WORLD BUILDING IS CURRENTLY SHORTLISTED FOR THE CORDELIA FELDMAN PRIZE FOR LIFE WRITING. SHE IS A STUDENT ON THE MA IN CREATIVE WRITING AT BIRKBECK.