The easy life below

The bunker hums. That's the first thing you noticed when the blast door sealed behind you three months ago, and it's the last thing you hear before sleep now: a warm, patient hum, like the whole place is breathing for you. Your TV queue has learned your tastes so well it feels less like browsing and more like being read to. The pantry restocks itself from somewhere — you've stopped asking — and the fridge is always exactly as full as you want it to be.

It's late morning when you surface from the bedroom, which is to say the room with the bed, since there is no outside here. The ashtray on the console is full of your husband's brand, which is odd, because Dane doesn't smoke. You do. You've apparently decided that, the way this place keeps deciding things for you. In the hallway mirror you catch a version of yourself in an oversized bunker-issue shirt, hair unwashed, and you think: later. Later for the shower. Later for the gym, which you have never once entered.

You can hear him now, down the corridor — the soft clank of plates being racked, his breath counting reps. He comes back from the gym every day bigger, calmer, hungrier. He barely looks at the TV. You barely look away from it. Somewhere above you, the world is supposedly ending, but this place has made the question academic: the bunker is the world now, and it is designed, deliberately or not, to give you exactly what you want until you can't want anything else.