This all started a long, long time ago, but for me, I guess it started with the boy in the dump. That was ten years ago now when the cars still flew, and we were still reaching for the stars. The world had already started to fall, not that we knew it.

“If my pa catches you here, again, you’ll be in for it,” the boy said and coughed. It was a horrible chesty cough that came from deep down in his lungs. “Whatcha lookin’ for?”

I looked around to see it was the Dump Master’s son, “Looking for sunshine.”

“I'd love to see the sunshine. I’m seven and ain’t never seen a glint of sunshine!”

No one had since the Smog rolled in about two hundred years ago. The stories say that society woke one morning up to a world cloaked in fog. A fog that never cleared. No one knows where it comes from or why it happened. Some say it was wrath thrown down by God. The Russians thought it was the yanks. The yanks thought it was the Russians. Others thought it was a science experiment gone wrong. Most thought it was the Earth fighting back against all the pollution we kicked into the atmosphere. Doesn’t really matter what caused it, though, does it? The end result is the same.

“You ain’t gonna find any sunshine he-” The boy was cut off by another chesty cough. With this, I knew the poor kid had The Bronch.

After the Smog rolled in, people just accepted it, adapted to life alongside it; after all, it would clear soon enough, they all thought. It wasn’t long until the world realised it had more pressing things to worry about than not being able to see more than twenty yards in front of you. That maybe a little bit of an overreaction, the Smog’s thickness varied; at its worst, it would be twenty yards or even less, but most of the time there was a good couple of hundred yards-worth of visibility. People started dying and fast. The Smog, as people came to call it, had some horrible shit in it that causes The Bronch.  People's lungs to become infected, they fill up with mucus, and if you’re lucky you’ll drown to death. If not, then The Bronch goes to your brain, you become confused, start to lose yourself, before falling into a coma and... that’s all she wrote.

I was lucky; I had a filter mask, an A-shaped suction cup that went over your nose and mouth, they had this filter connected to them by a small cable that sat behind your ear. They were clear, so people could still see your face and your expressions. They cleared the Smog from the air you breathed, made it safe. Everyone wore these, if you could afford them. They were designed and mass-produced soon after the Smog descended. I couldn’t afford one, but at fourteen, I was something of a prodigy, my brain was just wired knowing how to make things work, knowing how to fix things. I found, fixed, and sold these to make a small amount of money. The kid would be dead before the year was out, and even now, I wonder why I didn’t give the kid one. I guess it’s because he already had The Bronch, and no filter would have fixed him.

“I know I’m not gonna find sunshine here,” I said, looking up into the gloomy, grey, “but if I find a working flux gear in all this junk, then my rocket will take me up above the smog and into the sunshine,” I finished, kicking away a broken hoverboard.

“You don’t have no rocket. You just a kid like me.”

The boy was annoying, but I tolerated him. Even knowing he didn’t have long left; the kid was friendly and kind. He'd helped me get away from the Dump Master’s robot guard dogs several times.

“I’m twice your age, kid. I have a rocket built and ready to go. I just need the flux gear and... BLAST-OFF!” I shouted, making the kid jump.

“Hey!” he whined, looking close to tears.

I felt a twinge of conscience. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I'm Cyra, come on, help me look, and maybe I'll take you up with me. There’s a spare seat, you know.” There wasn’t, but I needed all the help I could get.

“Really?”

“We’ll see,” I said.

We both went about poking through the junkyard on the hunt for a working flux gear. There were mountains of junk to pick through; piles of scrap sat atop broken down hovercars. There were rows of disused hydrogen pumps next to walls of dusty refrigerators. It was a dangerous game, and we had to be careful not to cause an avalanche of rubbish as we picked.

“Cyra! I got one,” The kid shouted a while later.

I ran over to the kid, pulling out my universal tester as I went. “Oh, great find,” I said and patted him on the back.

It looked to be in great nick. I set up the tester and grinned at the kid, “Here goes.”

Silence. The all-important buzz of life never came. I tried again and again, but nothing. Forlorn, I threw the flux gear to the floor. “Maybe next t-”

A crash came from behind a huge pile of electrical junk; my eyes widened in knowing horror. The robot guard dogs had found me.

“Cyra, hide!”

My eyes darted around the dump, and within the limited visibility, I spotted an industrial-sized washing machine. I ran to it, climbed inside, and pulled the door to, watching the kid through the dusty, glass door.

“Ace. Bowser. Down.” He shouted. The dogs were built to resemble Dobermanns, but they were completely metallic, except for their feet that had some sort of hardwearing rubber to help them grip the floor as they ran, much like the old tires that cars used to have. The two dogs sat at his command, closing their razor-sharp metal teeth lined jaws and I saw they had had their left ears clipped with v’s indenting their tips; this was a sort of brand to couple them to this yard. They were programmed not to harm him, and he led them away, throwing a wave my way as he went. 

The boy saved me again, I thought from within the machine. I owe him one, and I know just the thing.

It was then that a glinting light caught my attention from the corner of my eye. Light poured down on something metal. I looked up, through the dusty washing machine door to the sky, to the source of the light, only to have it disappear. Was that sunlight?

I climbed out of the washing machine, and wandered to the metal object, quickening my step as I went, hoping it was what I thought it was. Exhilaration and hope filled me all at once; it was another flux gear. Tester at the ready, I pulled it free and whispered a prayer. The buzz confirmed this one worked.

It took me two days to fit the flux gear and finish readying my rocket. It had taken me a year to put together. I lived with my parents on a small farm on the outskirts of Cell City, a sprawling metropolis that reached far into the sky. The cities built up, hoping to climb above the Smog and reach the sky. It never happened, though.

The farm brought in some money; we were in no way rich, but at least we ate well. Since the Smog rolled in, fresh food was hard to come by. The low light meant few crops could grow. We specialised in chard but even managed a few stunted carrots. The main food source for the world now was mushrooms. Mushrooms for breakfast, mushrooms for lunch, mushrooms for dinner, and dessert.

The fact we had the farm meant I had room to have a workshop in one of the massive sheds, and it was in there I built the rocket, a squat thing, but it packed a punch and thanks to a test run I knew it would go high enough to break through the Smog and into the sunshine.

When I finished the rocket, I returned once more to the dump. I climbed the fence in my usual spot where the barbed wire was missing and into the yard. I found the boy in one of the wide paths that the dredgers use; he was playing on the broken hoverboard, pretending he was zooming through the streets and parks of Cell City. He acted like he was going around the loops and the over the jumps of the hover parks, laughing as he did, until he wasn't laughing but instead coughing his guts up, drowning on his own mucus. I don’t mind telling you that that brought a tear to my eye. I composed myself before I went to him.

“Hey!” I shouted to him, “Wanna see some sunshine?” The boy's face lit up, beaming as bright as the sun; that was all the sunshine I needed.

The trip went fine. He went up, he saw the sun, and he came down again. He died two weeks later, and it was that night when things really went to shit.

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