Pandora's Walls

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Source

Pandora's Walls

There wasn't much difference between night and day on Pandora. In the depths of Triton's ocean, the scarce exterior lighting came from the luminescence of the material of the domes that covered most of the underwater city.

Waves of blue flashes crossed the translucent material of the dome, that separated the waters of the ocean from those of the interior of the city, they crossed as irregular bands of light the artificial sky, product of the interaction of the magnetic field of the planet with the electrical load of the dome.

Saul watched in rapture, from one of the panoramic walls to the west of the city, as the bands moved slowly from north to south. For him it was his first visit to pandora, he had already been here for three months, he had come as part of his training plan in biology, in an exchange program between academies.

The city seemed charmingly suffocating to him, even though he was surprised by all the luxury and comfort that could be appreciated in every corner, being enclosed in a network of more than sixteen square kilometers of underwater buildings, seemed overwhelming to him.

It was like living in a fish tank, where the water was outside and the fish were the humans of the city. He imagined the dolphins, fish and other inhabitants of the ocean, watching them from outside the dome enchanted by the foolish movements of the strange inhabitants of this bubble.

Wherever it advanced there were gigantic walls or translucent windows, everything depended on how each one interpreted it, that tried to give the inhabitants the sensation of freedom, but they only caused him anguish, outside you could not be outdoors, nor run, take the sun or just breathe fresh air, outside there was only water, an entire ocean and the only thing that kept it out were those walls, suspiciously transparent, as if they were a thin crystal.

To increase his indignation in the midst of his claustrophobia, every time he approached one of these portals to the object of his anguish, he could see hundreds of inhabitants of the city, swimming carefree as if they were campers in a park, without any kind of underwater suit or respiratory system. Most of the original inhabitants of Titan, thanks to centuries of genetic modifications, were endowed with gills that allowed them to live under water, as other humans could do in the open air.

Saul took a sip of his coffee and decided to return to the laboratory, where he would continue with his studies.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, August 2019

Other stories from the Time and Space series

• Trackers
• At the Mercy of the Elements
• Typhon's Great Regatta
• Immersion
• Elias
• Free Fall
• Fleeing from the Cephalopod
• The Depths of Balder
• Pandora's Walls

I can only thank @xpilar for allowing me to use his digital art in my publication and for motivating my creation. Thank you very much @xpilar

Thank you all for visiting my publication, I hope your comments and I appreciate your support, until next time

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