The light turned on at roughly 7:45am on December 5th, 1964 — the year after I was born — and it hasn’t turned off since.

My mother says that that first year of my life was the last time she’d known real peace. Says it’s because the screens are always on, that even our dreams are eclipsed by a white, LED glare. She died when I was twenty, smiling.

We sometimes hear of the neighboring, odd colony that follows Earth’s so-called “natural cycles”, claiming to “promote the body’s natural physiological rhythm.” Says that in a perfect world, the sky is meant to turn black every 7-12 hours, and that many biological life forms are conditioned to either sleep or move or hunt in those secret hours.

We’d reply with a scoff that there was black, yes, before the world ended. Before the end of un-extraordinary life forms. That’s why our colony is the one to actually prosper, the reason our light must stay on.

We’d say from birth that our bodies are meant only to thrive without the curse of darkness; that the Shadow-Walkers have it all wrong. The bold text plastered to our windows and doors, opening to nothing but our own underground bunks and cantines and kitchens and boilers, remind us every wake cycle.

“You are perfect.

You are free.

Because you are _seen_.”

I find myself mouthing the words under my bandana, covering my mouth from the fumes of the generator as I sneak across cords and fissures. My footsteps make a squelch on the damp steaming floor, but my hope is that it’s not loud enough to set off a sound alarm, with all the iron pipes and whirring cogs chugging out our power supply.

Nobody usually steps foot inside our boiler rooms except for the occasional engineer. The alarms would already be blaring if I were anybody else. But I know the finicky nature of the generator, and all its blind spots, for turn of phrase, because I am the one who created it.

The light is naturally fed by the working power source. Might I remind you that it is very much alive. Like a living thing, it must eat, too. And the electrical input is most insatiable.

This is my contribution to our community’s salvation: ensuring adequate output with pliers and electrical tape in my hand. I scan my badge before the sliding doors.

The buzz of the screens pulsing ahead, below, and above, give me an emboldened sense of purpose. I sneak my way through the One True Light with a shit eating grin beneath the mask. Acting deathly silent has its perks, really, when another sense is heightened to the ninth degree.

Because for one who sees all, why would one care to notice the other who does not make a sound?

They should add another line.

“You are perfect.

You are free.

Because you are _seen_.

And not _heard_.”

I move with every silent intent to obliterate it all.