A Blue House for Blue People

Gaby Zabar (bio)

Knuckles tapped on the plexiglass encasing Janice. It was a chrysalis built for truckers in stasis, which meant she wasn’t on her craft. She had retired, finally, and she was at the blue house. Every trucker had the same choice in retirement packages: a generous pension with the freedom to settle on any extraterrestrial outpost, or, a perpetual all-inclusive stay at a blue house on Earth with room and board covered for the rest of their lives. Every trucker Janice knew, herself included, chose the blue house to see Earth’s legendary blue skies. The packages were generous to make up for the cost of being a trucker, the years spent in stasis compounded with an unknown amount of time dilation. For Janice, this wasn’t a cost but a bonus. She wanted to be flung as far away from here and now as possible, and there was no better way to do that than to travel at near lightspeed. From within the plexiglass, she dreamt of her new life on Earth under blue skies.

The tapping continued. Janice opened one eye to an annoyed young woman in scrubs.

“Congratulations!” The woman’s voice as sing-song, rehearsed. She eyed Janice in the pod with a flat smile. “Welcome to Earth.”

Janice’s bones felt heavy in a way they hadn’t since she had enlisted as a trucker. The weight wasn’t the pull of a craft accelerating and decelerating from ports of call: this was the gut punch of gravity.

Without much room to move, Janice burrowed her chin into her chest. She examined her large hands and her famous short, stubby fingers, which lay still at her sides. Her legs remained mottled with varicose veins. Her overall shape and presence remained the same as always, solid, compact, built to be a trucker. “We’re in a blue house?” she asked.

The woman, an aide of some kind, nodded.

A sea of questions rose in Janice’s throat, but she held back. Her need to ask too many questions is what had gotten her into trouble, what had cornered her into trucking. She let out a grunt.

“You all right, Buttons?”

Buttons was Janice’s trucker handle. She was retired, so Janice figured her trucking handle should be retired as well. The nickname wasn’t one she had chosen. “My name is Janice.”

“Okay, Buttons.” The aide scrolled at a projection of text the way a musician would play a theremin. “You’re almost ready for our one-on-one orientation in about fifteen minutes.”

Janice squinted at rows of curtains that obscured her view of the room. A few things were blue, but not all of them. Janice allowed herself to ask one question, for now. “Is the house actually blue?”

The aide sighed. “It’s a blue house, Buttons. Of course it’s blue.”

Content as she could be without seeing for herself, Janice breathed in deep, fighting the heaviness of the air on her chest. She closed her eyes. She had come dozens or hundreds of years. She could wait fifteen minutes. The time passed, marked by the hissing of the top of the pod lifting up. Janice rose with it, and she twisted her back from side to side.

“You just got assigned a room.” The aide tilted her head in a trained portrayal of compassion. “You’re the first one assigned to your floor, so you get the corner unit, farthest from the elevator. Lucky.” She handed Janice a lanyard with a plastic card dangling from it. The card’s heft hinted at new, unfamiliar technology embedded within.

Janice hung the lanyard around her neck and grasped the card, thumbing its curved corners and rounded edges. She splayed her legs out and down and stood on them. Taking her first steps since stasis felt like a sensation between wading through quicksand or kicking at gelatin. As the aide led Janice out of the curtained-off area where her pod was situated, she spotted another pod holding a new arrival. The aide waved at the far wall, and a portion of it disappeared. Janice stepped through, right behind the aide. She was in a hallway, wide and open. She stopped. The aide tilted her head again and goaded her to walk several more paces to a faint outline traced into another wall, one in the middle of the hallway. A small panel was situated beside the outline.

The aide nodded at the plastic card around Janice’s neck and then at the panel. “Hold up your key.”

Janice leaned close to the panel and did so. It lit up, and the lines on the wall opened into an elevator car. Stepping inside, Janice hesitated at the threshold, her body blocking the doors from sliding shut. Compared to the hallway, the elevator was too small and too dark. Janice didn’t want to be closed in again.

“Come on,” the aide said. Her voice was sharper than the key’s edge. Her face had distorted into a grimace but smoothed itself back into serenity. Her smile returned. “Sorry. Long day.” She pointed at the elevator buttons, which were flat and not really buttons at all. Some of them were lit up. “This is the top floor. Well, it’s the top floor if they don’t build on top of it. But here is where you can find the med bay and admin offices. We’re going down to your assigned floor. Floor 44. For now, you can go back up from there, but you can’t go further down.”

Janice blinked.

“Oh, you just need to request access to go to the lower floors.”

“Why?” Janice hovered her hand over the unlit buttons.

The aide ran her hands over her hair, tied back and already taut with gel. “I know it doesn’t make sense at first. The whole thing is a holdover from when we used to assign you to floors by your home time. The past was up, the future down. It used to be that you would have to study the future to go down, so you wouldn’t get too much futureshock.”

Janice, still in the threshold of the elevator, raised her unruly eyebrows. “Seems like a decent system to me.”

“It was.” The aide gave that head tilt again. “But you truckers kept coming in, so they kept adding floors in each blue house, and then the whole system got so overwhelmed that data about your home times stopped coming in at all.”

Janice’s gut sank, but the gravity hadn’t changed, and the elevator hadn’t moved.

“We try to do what’s best for you. We spread you out onto the floors. I mean, you deserve a little personal space after all that time cooped up. The elevator blocks stayed, though. They help with controlling inter-floor traffic, knowing where everyone is, security, that kind of thing.” The aide pointed to the bright 44. “Want to push the button, Buttons?”

Janice held her short index finger out. The numbers 44 to 60 were bright, while 43 and below, including a barely visible L at the bottom, were only hinted at in the metal, ghosts. She twitched her finger and pushed the dark 43. She would ask another question. “How do I go lower?”

“You request access on your key. Tap it, go to the menu, and the access options are right there. It might quiz you or ask open-ended questions about what your home time was like. Almost everyone gets all the access they want.” The aide lost her composure again and sagged against the railing inside the elevator. “It’s been a day, Buttons, it’s been a day.”

Janice pushed. “What year is it?”

“There aren’t years here.”

“We didn’t have years on the craft, either.” Janice’s finger was still jammed against the 43.

“That’s what you all keep telling me.” The elevator chimed, and the aide motioned for Janice to come all the way inside.

Janice didn’t budge.

The aide sagged even more against the railing. “What a day. The other blue houses, you know? Dozens of them, and each one has 60 floors now. All filling up with truckers, new ones arriving all the time. Looking and acting just like you. There are a lot of you.”

Janice peered out into the hallway. She hoped that her room was big and that her bed was soft. “Uh-huh.”

The aide winced and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I should not have said that, I should not have said that. Don’t tell anyone else what I told you, okay? I’m so sorry. It has been a day.”

“I won’t tell.” Janice waved her hands in a gesture of goodwill. She waited as long as she could before whispering, in a tone reserved for trucker-to-trucker gossip, “How many blue houses are there?”

The elevator chimed again, a warning, and the aide reached to grab Janice’s forearm. “You’re keeping the doors open too long. Step back. Press 44.”

Janice acquiesced, stepping further into the elevator car and trailing her finger up to the lit 44. After Janice applied pressure to the number, the elevator produced a happier chime. She repeated, louder, “How many—?”

The aide shook her head and laughed as the elevator accelerated. It stopped and opened into an even bigger, brighter hallway than the one on the top floor. Constellations of recessed lighting embedded into the walls and ceiling shone down on them. The aide led Janice to another faint outline of a doorway and an adjacent wall panel at the far end of the hallway, which projected the word BUTTONS in wobbling, colorful letters into the air. Catching on, Janice waved the key in front of the wall panel, and an opening appeared where the outline had been.

“Everything you need to know about life in a blue house is on the key.” She scanned Janice up and down and smiled. “You’ll be fine, Buttons.”

“Janice. My name is Janice.”

The aide left Janice without saying anything. The thick carpet muffled her footsteps as she stopped several paces away. Without turning back around to face Janice, she said, “I know. But use the handle. People like it.” She took one additional step and added, “Consider this a tip from me to you.”

Janice winced. She was stuck with her handle, a constant reminder of her poor dexterity. Buttons, her crew called her, as she couldn’t get the knobs to turn right. Buttons, as she broke a switch clean off the wall. There was no escape from it. She called out to the aide. “What can I call you?”

“It doesn’t matter. You won’t see me again.” The aide stepped back into the elevator.

Janice never did see that aide again. She never saw any aide more than once. It didn’t take long for her to stop trying to make friendly conversation with anyone in scrubs. No aide had been as talkative as the woman who had guided her to her room that first night. Janice relied on going to the upper floors to interact with other truckers, but she hadn’t made any of the easy friendships they enjoyed. She wondered if any former members of her crew had arrived at this particular blue house, as Janice hadn’t been the first to retire and get jettisoned off the craft.

The emptiness of Floor 44 gave Janice some room to breathe. Her bed was bigger, and, yes, softer than the craft’s bunks. The walls were thick and quiet. She spent the nights swiping and poking at the key’s projected holograms, eating up hints of all the things that had happened so quickly after she started hurtling through space so fast that time got slower.

Requesting access to lower floors was easy. The key allowed her to request one floor a day. She navigated through projected menus and workflows to watch short historical documentaries and answer questions about her daily life before she became a trucker: what she ate, what she bought, what she remembered. Sometimes the key would ask her how she was feeling. Janice spread out her access requests, skipping some days so as not to seem too eager.

The blue house may not have had ways to measure the weeks, months, or years, but clocks and their hours were always there. Janice’s life shaped into a routine. Every morning at eight, she’d check the weather on her key, which told her there were bright and sunny blue skies outside, every day. Meals were left outside her room at nine, one, and six. Before bed at ten, she’d check the key for any scheduled events.

One night, something different popped up. A group of truckers, not aides, would host a breakfast social on Floor 57. Janice hummed at the description as she sank into the plush recliner angled towards her bed. She sent an RSVP by tapping on letters that shimmered inches away from her hands. After triple-checking that her place had been saved, she hoisted herself up from the recliner and took the three heavy steps to her bed. The bed’s softness didn’t guarantee sleep, but sleep did come, it always did.

The key’s chime woke her with an alert that the breakfast social would start in ten minutes. Janice felt light, giddy, and she shuffled to her closet filled with the clothes provided for her. She picked out a plain pair of pants and a shirt that had started to feel lucky. Shoving her feet into her slippers, she emerged into the hallway and waved the key at the elevator panel.

The elevator no longer felt claustrophobic. Its steel walls, brushed to mask stray fingerprints, resembled her old craft. This little car was Janice’s way of slipping through time. As she pressed the lit 57 and bounced on her feet, she went up to the past. While she remembered the floors were no longer populated by time, the upper floors did feel more dated.

Like the other floors with more than one occupant, Floor 57 was lively. Paper decorations and string lights adorned their hallway. Janice read the trucking handles projected onto the wall: “Essen’s Revenge,” “Dodger,” “Toe Jam.”

A man, red, round, and bearded, stepped forward from where the last handle had been. “Looking for me?” he asked.

Janice stammered. “Oh, no, I was just—”

“Admiring my name, as many are wont to do.” The man stuck his hand out in introduction. “Toe Jam.”

Janice shook the extended hand. Toe Jam’s grip was strong and a little too warm. “Buttons,” she responded.

“You here for breakfast, Buttons?” Toe Jam clapped Janice on her bad shoulder and then pointed to the buffet. “Get some before it’s gone. I’ll catch up with you.” He merged into the gathering’s mess of limbs and laughter.

Janice joined the line for the self-serve breakfast and acknowledged the truckers around her with quick nods. The line moved fast, so Janice grabbed what she saw first. Silver-dollar pancakes plopped onto her plate and were drenched in syrup. A fork with tines worn down to non-threatening nubs was nestled onto her plate. She pumped out a mug of black coffee suspecting that it was decaf.

The other truckers wove around her, and Janice became a stationary point by settling on a sofa in the corner. Balancing her plate on her lap, she cut the pancakes into little triangles with the dull edge of the fork. As she ate, someone coughed. Toe Jam and a stranger stood above her.

“Mind if we join you?” Toe Jam asked.

Janice shook her head and scooted to the edge of the sofa, making room for the stranger to sit down.

The stranger spoke. “I’m Moonbaby from Floor 23.”

She looked young. Janice looked from her to the remains of her silver-dollar pancakes. “Buttons, Floor 44.”

Moonbaby clapped. “I’ve never met anyone from Floor 44 before.”

“I’m the only one so far,” Janice explained.

“Lucky, lucky.” Toe Jam crossed his arms. “They gave you the corner room, right? Trust me, you’ll miss the quiet once your floor fills up.”

“Toe Jam’s ancient. He knows everything,” Moonbaby said.

Janice thought of all her questions left unanswered by the aides but only asked the safest one. “If you know everything, then what’s for dinner?”

Toe Jam and Moonbaby laughed. “Nobody knows that,” they answered, together.

“Same as the craft. They keep us guessing.”

Moonbaby smiled. “The beds in the blue house are nicer, though.”

Janice agreed.

While Janice appreciated the quiet emptiness of Floor 44, there wasn’t much to do there beyond playing with the key. The piece of plastic let her watch things that had happened while she was on the craft. Controversial, society-changing events were distilled, censored, into thirty-second videos and easy-to-parse strings of text. At a certain point, catching up on all the history she had missed required a sense of empathy she couldn’t summon, a connection to lives on faraway planets without names. She wondered if she’d ever get futureshock, if futureshock was even real. It was something her old crew would whisper about when discussing the inevitability of stopping.

Other truckers had said that futureshock was nothing but scaremongering, and, now that Janice had stopped here in the blue house, she knew they were right. When she did interact with another trucker, she couldn’t tell when or where they were from. Different accents floated around, but they were all understandable, and whether they came from a time or a place didn’t matter. Besides the anonymous, interchangeable aides, everyone in the blue house shared a culture from spending years away in tight, windowless quarters, which lent itself to an automatic, if distant, camaraderie.

When Janice wandered the different floors’ hallways and worked her way down into the future, she occasionally ran into Toe Jam and Moonbaby. On Floor 22, they invited her to join them in playing old board games from Earth. These were solid, tactile games made up of objects. One game for two players had marbles and a wooden board with rows of divots. Without words, Moonbaby demonstrated how to play. She placed a marble in each divot, then scooped a marble up and placed it in another divot with another marble. She then scooped up the two marbles and repeated placing them one-by-one into the divots until she reached an empty one, placing the marble there by itself.

Toe Jam, looking on, broke the silence. “And then it’s your turn, Buttons.”

“I was explaining,” Moonbaby said.

Janice attempted to pick up a marble, but they were too small and slippery for her stiff fingers, and she kept dropping it. She dropped it into the wrong divot, and when she attempted to pick it back up from the divot, she flipped over the wooden board, sending marbles rolling out in all directions. “I’m sorry, I’m not good with my hands,” Janice offered.

Moonbaby cooed. “It’s all right, we can play something else.” She pulled out a box filled with cardboard squares and pieces of paper. “What about this one? It’s about businesses.”

“I’d have an unfair advantage.” Toe Jam puffed up. “I was a salesman before I was a trucker.”

It wasn’t common for truckers to talk about their lives before trucking. Janice waited for Toe Jam to say more, but Moonbaby shook her head.

“I wouldn’t say you were a ‘real’ salesman,” Moonbaby said, without any malice. She said this as if she was stating the sky was blue.

“I sold things. Why would you say that wasn’t ‘real’?”

“You sold counterfeit goods.” Moonbaby spoke in a whisper.

Toe Jam grunted and opened the box to the game about businesses. “Lots of people sell counterfeit goods.”

Janice sat back and watched as Toe Jam and Moonbaby played the game, inching their pieces forward on a convoluted path.

Growing tired with the key’s projections and having no interest in manipulating tiny pieces inherent to board games, Janice developed a new hobby of looking for windows. She kept looking for blue skies. Going outside the blue house was never presented as an option, and exterior windows were hard to find. Asking aides where she could find a window, any opening, resulted in shrugs and gestures pointing in obscure directions. Determined to find a window herself, Janice roamed assorted floors, each with its own layout and color scheme. And in the way the upper floors felt older, the lower floors felt newer, even futuristic in some cases. The effect was a product of wallpaper and strategic upholstery.

One day, Janice found herself across from a window in a corner on Floor 36. It was a foot-by-foot square of blue with white, fluffy clouds, bright and absolutely perfect just like the photographs and illustrations she had seen as a child. She approached the window from different angles, and all she could see was the sky. Looking down didn’t lead to a view of the ground, and looking from the left or right didn’t reveal vegetation, other buildings, or even the blue house’s exterior. It was all skies. She wondered if the house she was in was actually blue, or if it was just a way of speaking. Afraid the window would fade like a dream if she looked away, Janice stayed and stared at it for hours. The blue changed to pink and orange and purple, darkening to ink. She stood closer to it, careful not to touch the glass in case she would leave a smudge, and she made out a speckle of stars. While the window was now dark, it seemed to emit its own light. Almost as if—

“Buttons!” Toe Jam’s voice boomed from the elevator.

Janice jumped as if she had been caught doing something wrong. She pried herself away from the window. “Hi.”

Toe Jam strolled up to the window, unimpressed by the view. “What are you doing? Moonbaby told me you’ve been staring at this thing for hours.”

Janice couldn’t remember if or when Moonbaby had passed by. Flushing while wondering how many people had seen her obsess over this little bright square, she swallowed. “There aren’t many windows here,” she said.

“There aren’t.” Toe Jam frowned and whistled. “Go to bed, Buttons. I am.” He stretched and walked back down the hallway, waving at Janice as he disappeared into the elevator.

Once the elevator’s hum had gone, Janice relaxed. No longer worried about smudges as she had already been caught, she pressed her face against the glass. Instead of stars, she saw an array of diodes, the tiniest she had ever seen. Millions of them made up the window, a screen.

The wasted hours settled over her chest and made the lanyard and key feel heavy. Janice trudged back to her familiar elevator, her empty floor, her messy room, her soft bed. She flipped through the key’s future history throughout the night, requesting access to Floor 8. Janice didn’t sleep. Breakfast was placed outside her door while she took a quiz on another unnumbered year she never experienced. Feeling stiff, she wrested herself from her bed, walked past her cold breakfast, and took the elevator down to Floor 8. There, in the floor’s lounge, she ignored the congregation of other truckers and fell back onto an overstuffed couch, hesitating before propping her legs up on a pristine ottoman. She closed her eyes.

“Buttons.” Moonbaby had sat next to her at some point. “Are you okay?”

Janice rubbed her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

Moonbaby stood up and examined Janice head to toe. “I have access to the whole building, lobby included.” She glanced at the elevator. “Toe Jam does too. That’s why he’s everywhere.”

“You’re keeping an eye on me?” Janice turned her face away from Moonbaby’s.

“Maybe.” Moonbaby kept her lips pressed together for a second before bursting out in laughter.

Janice waited for Moonbaby to stop laughing and to catch her breath before whispering in that tone reserved for trucker gossip, “How do you get to the lobby?”

“Would it make you feel better, Buttons?”

Janice jerked her head to the side to crack her neck. “Couldn’t make me feel worse.”

“You don’t know that,” Moonbaby said.

Janice held the key against her heart, a plastic treasure. “If you go to the lobby, can you go outside?”

“No.” Moonbaby stopped smiling. “The air’s bad.”

“It’s the same as the craft.”

“You signed the contract, I signed the contract, everybody here signed the contract.” Moonbaby waved at another trucker passing them and put her smaller feet up on the ottoman, too close to Janice’s slippered feet. “I don’t regret it.”

Janice didn’t respond.

Moonbaby continued, her voice soft but sharp. “The whole industry is for people with nowhere to go. It was good for me and good for the settlements. Troublemakers got turned into truckers. The system could make us go away very, very fast, and we would be someone else’s problem, a few hundred years later.”

Janice hummed as she tried to remember details from her life before signing that contract and boarding the craft. Everything aside from images of blue skies felt slippery and unformed. All she had was the overwhelming urge to push, to ask too many questions. “So how do you get to the lobby?”

Moonbaby rolled her eyes. “If you really want to know, it’s easy.” She smoothed back wisps of hair. “After you get access to Floor 2, the lobby’s after that. Besides an aide giving you an in-person interview, it’s the same as requesting access to any other floor. There’s a quiz on the key too. It asks about how you’re sleeping.”

Janice hadn’t checked her own appearance, but her sleepless night must have been obvious. “An interview?” she asked.

“It’s not hard. I think the in-person aspect is to scare people off. They can’t have everyone in the lobby at once. You give a reason why you’d like to access the whole building. The lobby has a cafeteria for the aides, storage, and a delivery bay.” Moonbaby removed her feet from the ottoman and sat up straight. “Did you know the crafts come here too? Me or you, we might have delivered something here without even knowing.”

Janice tapped the key. “And you just use the key, like on the other floors?”

“Sure. But you don’t need to. It’s all biometrics, Buttons.”

Janice didn’t understand.

“You’ve never lost your key?”

“This? Never.”

Moonbaby patted Janice’s knee. “Try to get on the elevator without your key.”

Janice tightened her grip around the key. “I’m not going to give the key to you.”

“I’m not asking for it.” Moonbaby raised her hands in a show of surrender. “Put it in your pocket. Or on the floor while you stand in front of the elevator. The elevator will come, and the right numbers will be lit up for you.”

Janice eyed her path to the elevator. “Really?”

“It will work. I promise.” Moonbaby beamed.

Heaving herself up off the couch, Janice walked to the elevator and placed her lanyard and the key attached to it a few feet away, within a lunge’s reach if she really needed it. She stood in front of the elevator and waited. It arrived, and when Janice peeked inside, the right numbers were lit. Janice picked the key back up, but she never used it to call the elevator or open the door to her room again.

_____

Janice wanted to go to the lobby. If there was a window or a door or anything that would show blue skies, real skies, it would be in the lobby. No one was allowed on the roof. Even if anyone could get up there, Janice avoided the top floor out of habit since that was where most of the aides were. Janice had no desire to climb ladders, anyway. No, she would go to the lobby and look for doors, pushing herself to the edge of what was allowed. That was the nature of Buttons: push, push, push.

While getting closer to requesting access to the lobby, Janice explored new, lower floors, continuing downward. Reaching Floor 2 was fast, even as she paced herself, skipping a few nightly requests before scheduling the interview for lobby access. She spent time on other floors in no particular order. On Floor 7, Toe Jam caught up with her, and they had congenial, if shallow chats that veered into sales pitches for items that did not exist. On Floors 5, 4, and 3, Janice ran into Moonbaby, who seemed paler and more distant after their last interaction on Floor 8. Any conversation with Toe Jam or Moonbaby required Janice to quell any more of her questions about the blue house in order to stave off concern. Toe Jam and Moonbaby could be friends or informants, or friends who happened to be informants.

Janice saw Toe Jam on Floor 2. Other truckers, all happy, surrounded him. Toe Jam saw Janice over the crowd and opened his arms in invitation. Janice merged into the circle.

Toe Jam introduced her to his admirers. “Buttons here is trying to get to the lobby, fast.”

As Janice shrank down, a woman she had never met squinted at her. “The one from 44? She hasn’t even been here all that long.”

“Everybody gets antsy, hun,” someone said from behind Janice. “Nothing to be ashamed about.”

The topic of conversation shifted and settled onto the mystery of what would be for lunch, and Janice excused herself back to her room. She didn’t use the key to enter, but she held it up and poked through its projections to request access to the lobby. The pop-up quiz did ask how she was sleeping, just as Moonbaby warned. Among the icons presented, Janice poked through a holographic smiley face labeled GREAT. The word CONTINUE appeared, a shining lure. Janice pushed on. A very long disclaimer appeared, and she scrolled to the bottom of it, tapping YES, YES, YES, and signing the air with her handle, a cursive BUTTONS. Within ninety seconds—Janice counted each one—a notification arrived. She was scheduled for an interview with an aide who would arrive the next day at ten in the morning.

Janice put down the key and sprawled across her bed. She tried to prepare for the interview, to rationalize her desire to go to the lobby, to make it seem normal. She couldn’t say she wanted to see if the sky was blue or even if the blue house was blue. She decided she would say she wanted to go and tour the delivery bay and maybe shadow its operations. As a trucker, Janice had dedicated everything to supply chain management. If the aide asked her if she wanted to go outside, Janice would not respond with another question. She would say that “rules were rules.” She mouthed the words in rehearsal.

Blue skies appeared in Janice’s dreams that night. Her alarm chimed, and she ate while thinking about the skies. The key chimed at ten in the morning, and Janice stood up. The door to her room opened, and an aide stood at the threshold.

“Buttons,” he said.

“Hi.” Janice extended her hand, looking down at her slippered feet. She wished she still had her boots from the craft. They were more professional.

The aide shook her hand. “You requested lobby access. We like to check in to see how you’re feeling about retirement at this point.”

“Okay.”

“On a scale of one to five, how satisfied are you with your retirement package?”

“Four.”

“Thank you. What can we do to improve your rating?”

Janice searched for an answer that didn’t involve windows. “I’d like to know what’s on the menu each day.”

The aide chuckled. “Don’t’ we all.” He tapped his wrist. “And our last question for this interview: why would you like lobby access?”

Janice’s eloquent, practiced answer dissipated in her mind. She clenched her jaw and managed to say, “I want to see the deliveries. I like supply chain management.” She monitored the aide’s expression for any response, good or bad, and added a question without stopping herself. “Are we allowed to eat in the cafeteria down there?”

The aide relaxed. “Supply chains and your next meal. You really are a trucker.” He smiled, a real smile. “Your lobby access should be live by this time tomorrow. Have fun down there.”

He left. As the wall appeared behind him, Janice perched on the edge of her recliner.

_____

The lobby was brighter than the residential floors. Everything about it was sleek. There were potted plants, real ones so meticulously pruned that they appeared fake. Abstract sculptures, thick and curved, rose from plain columns. Wall-to-wall screens projected blue skies in the manner of floor-to-ceiling windows. Aides flew past Janice in patterns only known to themselves. Janice tried to find the aide from her first night in the blue house, but she wasn’t sure if she would recognize her if she saw her now.

“Hey!” Someone shouted at Janice. “Yeah you, the lost trucker. You here for the delivery bay?” This aide led Janice to a solid gate off the main stretch of the lobby. “Buttons, yeah? We always like it when truckers take an interest in the operations keeping the blue house running.”

Janice nodded and waited for the gate to open, grand and slow. The sounds of robotics and workers merged in whirs and whines. Janice matched her pace to their rhythm, the same way she did on the craft. She had never been inside a planet-side delivery bay. Truckers had to stay on the craft until their retirement, and in retirement, truckers had to stay in the blue house until—

A sliver of light dazzled her as another gate on the far side of the delivery bay opened. The light was gone, a flash. She couldn’t see outside, but that light meant the gate’s timing must have been off. The outer gate didn’t completely close before the interior gate opened. To get outside then, Janice would have to pass through three sets of gates: one at the delivery bay entrance, and then the two here.

“Incoming.” The aide shouted again to be heard over all the noise. A massive box moved towards Janice and the aide on a wide conveyor belt. The box passed to their left. Robotic arms supervised by human ones unfurled it, exposing gallons and gallons of water in a scuffed plexiglass container not unlike the pod Janice had arrived in. One of the robot arms attached a hose to the container and tightened the connection. Water flowed out into the vessels of the blue house.

“Is that where our water comes from?” Janice asked.

“It’s a drought.” The aide herded her out of the delivery bay and back into the main hall of the lobby. Janice stood before the entrance gate, now sealed. Unlike the elevator, it didn’t respond to her presence. She dangled the key from the lanyard in front of the aide, even though she knew the object wasn’t a key in this place. Janice asked another question. “Can I have access to the delivery bay?”

“Bold move, Buttons.” The aide scratched the back of his neck. “Why not. You’re not the first to ask.” He led her to the cafeteria, which served as a place of celebration. The food was the same as what would have been placed on a tray and left outside her room or provided as part of a scheduled event. It tasted different, though. Janice liked dining in the bright lobby with all its echoes.

From that day on, Janice took most of her meals in the lobby cafeteria, eating by herself. When she was done with her meal, she returned to the delivery bay, unchaperoned. She observed the deliveries’ motions for hours. Only when her feet and back ached did she return to the emptiness of Floor 44. In this way, Janice had a new routine. Before falling asleep and dreaming of blue skies, she would remember the following: the orbits of the robotic and human arms, the dance of the two outer gates, and that divine sliver of light from the two gates’ misalignment. In the morning, she would check the key’s display for its promise of perpetual clear and sunny skies. She would then take the elevator, more of a friend than anyone else in the blue house, down to the lobby. In the delivery bay, she’d stay for hours, advancing one step closer to the two outer gates every day.

_____

After several weeks of this cycle, Toe Jam and Moonbaby spotted Janice in the cafeteria. Toe Jam nudged Moonbaby. “Look at us, Moonbaby, we found Buttons.”

“You like the lobby a lot,” Moonbaby said to Buttons.

“I do.”

“We came to find you.” Toe Jam’s face was redder than usual. “We’ve got some good news for you.”

There wasn’t much news in the blue house. “What is it?” Janice asked.

Moonbaby sat down across from Janice, planted her elbows on the cafeteria table, and steepled her fingers. “You know how you’re the only one on 44.”

Toe Jam leaned over Moonbaby. “Someone else just got assigned to your floor.”

“Oh.” Janice appreciated that they told her, but she was more interested in maintaining her new routine at the delivery bay.

Moonbaby frowned. “You’re not excited?”

Toe Jam motioned across the table and clapped Janice on her bad shoulder, leaving his hand there. “You have a floor buddy now. You can spend more time on your floor, not in the delivery bay.”

“I like the delivery bay,” Janice said.

“It will be better for you to have someone else on your floor.” Moonbaby’s soft face became softer. “Let’s go up, Buttons. We can take the elevator together.”

Janice avoided eye contact. “I’d like to stay here a little longer.”

Toe Jam loosened his grip on Janice’s shoulder. “The newbie will arrive in a few hours. It’d be nice if you were there to greet them.”

“It’s tough being the first on your floor. We know.” Moonbaby slid out from the cafeteria table.

The two of them looked down at Janice, who was still planted on the cafeteria bench. They left and joined the crowd of aids swarming through the lobby. Janice waited several agonizing minutes before jogging to the delivery bay’s entrance gate. She crossed the lobby, ducking to dodge aides and the occasional trucker, all moving in now-known choreography.

The outer delivery bay gate recognized Janice, Janice herself and not the key, and it opened for her. After pushing further and further into the delivery bay, step by step, she had situated herself right next to the two outer gates, close enough—

A package came through from outside, the two gates opening and shutting out of sync, letting that gorgeous sliver of light through. Janice glanced at the arms dissecting the package before focusing her full attention on the gates.

There! The inner gate opened again, and Janice slipped through the gap like the light it let out. She hid behind the gates as they closed. The only light in this space between the gates after both sets were closed was the emergency glow-in-the-dark tape on the floor. She heard nothing except her own breath. The air was cold. Beyond the last gate, the sky should be there, sunny and clear and blue. She pushed.

The outer gate opened to another package on the conveyor belt, and Janice ducked under it. She crawled forward, limb by limb, until there was nothing at all above her. She looked up.

The house was blue. The sky was not.

Gaby Zabar is a writer who lives in California. Find her on the internet at www.gabyzabar.com.