It had been a little over three months, and that creature was still prowling around the outside of my sanctuary. Every morning, I awoke to its snarls, snuffles, and howls. Its incessant scratching at the barrier that separated it from my home, my flock.

Even in my dreams I did not escape it, I relived the day that it tore my poor girl to shreds with a brutality I hadn’t seen in my twenty years living on the frontier. Eir was his only friend, the puppy that his father had given to him the same time that he’d inherited his Nanoseed. With nothing but a handful of seeds, the Nanoseed not included, and his six week old dog, he’d set off at the same time as his siblings.

Eir had been a large dog, a genetically improved breed descended from the ancient Saint Bernard line. She wasn’t quite as large as a bear, though she wasn’t far either, but her heart had been several times the size of any bear that had ever lived. Then, on that day, she was taken away from him.

Eir was venturing across the wastelands on her own, as she did most days since she came of size, looking for scrap and biomass for the Nanoseed’s growth. The sweet girl had brought back all sorts of scrap metals, plant mass, and even smaller creatures in her lifetime. That day though, she was lucky to crawl across the threshold of the barrier.

‘Skrrch, skrrch.’

“Have off it, you abominable wolf! Just go!” I couldn’t help it. I tried to ignore it most days but something about thinking about my sweet girl always tended to set me off. The damnable ravager wolf had taken her away from me.

I found her, legs clawed to shreds and most of her fur ripped out. I couldn’t see her breathing and despite my meager strength, I managed to carry her all the way to the Medpod. This was something that would have been a feat for me had she been the size of a normal Saint Bernard, let alone the fact that she was almost as large as I was. 

Even as I got her into the pod, I knew she’d already expired. That was why I was so surprised when the pod dinged away and read that there was not only a lifeform now estivating within the pod, but there were six. 

Pulling up the infographic, I was informed that while my Eir had passed away, she was also somehow now with puppies. The medical pod noted that the creatures now located within its confines would need to incubate for the better part of the summer months. 

Three months, to the day. I looked up at the silvery film that made up the skyscape of my homes as long as I could remember. I’d been born in a Nanodome, and if I was lucky, I’d die in one as well. Thinking about the pilgrimage from my father’s dome still sent shivers up my spine, though I knew that our mission was an important one imparted upon us by our ancestors.

The summer months meant little to me apart from the reduced precipitation but Eir had always loved them. Little grew outside of the confines of the Nanodomes, but the wildlife and plants were always ever so slightly more plentiful after the spring. Eir’s hunts would return better results and we were able to live easier. 

Not for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like if I’d been born back on the home planet. Before it started to die out, of course. I liked to imagine that Eir and myself would have loved playing in the fields of green, within forests filled with actual trees. To enjoy the feeling of rain on our skin. Could you even imagine a tree taller than a man, let alone hundreds located in the same area?

I was letting myself get distracted again, something a howl outside of the dome awoke me to. I knew that the Ravager couldn’t see into my home, I knew that it couldn’t hear me when I yelled at it in grief, and I knew that I was safe from it so long as I stayed inside. Yet for all that I knew, I could feel that it knew that I was in here and that I’d taken its children from it, not that they could have survived without my technology. 

“Incubation ending in fifteen minutes.” The warm chipper voice of my mother, or what I imagine she sounded like (I’d forgotten so much in the many years since I left home), sang out from the Medpod. It had been designed to, as all the technology within the Nanodome, imitate our voices perfectly by the Nanoseed. Yet, while a perfect imitation it was, it had always sent shivers up my spine. 

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“Fifteen minutes to see what survives of you, my poor Eir.” I’d disabled the biometrics months ago, only days after putting her corpse in the pod, unable to look upon the gauge and see the list that always started with ‘Deceased inhabitants: 1”.  Nowadays, I saw a simple ‘Living Occupant(s): Yes.’ and the consumption of water and biomass listed below it. 

I knew that whatever lived within this pod would be my last hope. Without my Eir, my faithful hound, I would have to do the hunting and foraging myself. It was an impossibility, in the long term at least. Without my presence within the Nanodome, it would rapidly deteriorate. Any longer than an hour or two, and I’d likely not have much of a home to return to. It was probably the biggest flaw within the otherwise miraculous invention but without our energy fields, the Nanoseeds and their domes could not function.

I’d need to take risks to train the new puppies, just as I had with Eir. She’d had a head start, having been shown the basics by her mother and father before setting off with me. Most of it should still be in the new puppies instincts, but that was wagering that they inherited more from their mother than the beast that had killed her to sire them.

Five minutes was more than enough time though, to do what I needed to do. I’d let the wolf live for three months, let it haunt me the same way that the failure to protect my dog had. That ended today though, I would need plenty of biomass to raise six puppies.

I grabbed my charge rifle, checking to make sure that its battery displayed as full, and headed out of the Medbay. 

Stepping out of the single room building that I called the Medbay, I surveyed the lay of my land. In the distance, a silvery sheen was seen extending into the sky on all sides, the protective barrier that made up my Nanodome. Four buildings could be located in the center of the circular four-acre plot of land that I’d managed to claim over time. They were made of the same grey-blueish rock that composed the landscape as far as I could see.

Each of the buildings had their own function and were of varying sizes. The smallest of them was the Medbay, which contained only the Medpod that the Nanoseed had grown once Eir and myself gathered sufficient scrap. I supposed that once I had a litter of puppies, it would probably be worth growing a few more medpods after gathering enough copper and iron.

The next largest, or second smallest I suppose, was the Guest house, something built out of tradition rather than necessity. It was, like the Medbay, a single room large. Within it was a nightstand that appeared to have been moulded in the same material of the house, which it had, a singular stone bed frame, and a mattress composed of the ambiguous fluffy material that the Nanoseed produced from the various beast pelts that were fed to it. 

The third building was my home, composed of a few rooms that I either slept in or pursued my hobbies in. Mostly my hobbies consisted of painting using the various inks and paints that the Nanoseed considered waste material, with stone tablets as my canvas. I’d also occasionally do a bit of metal working with scrap metal, though anything I needed could usually be designed and produced by the Nanoseed. I mostly worked with the recovered alloys that the Nanoseed considered irredeemable. 

The last building was the Storehouse. It was large by necessity, the first floor dedicated to foodstuff for myself and nonperishable goods for trade the few times a year that a caravan showed up. In the center of the Storehouse, the Nanoseed rested within the Nanodome’s terminal. Eir and I fed the thing by dragging our contributions into the room with it, where it would dissolve and sort the scrap into its various storage areas. Those were located below the storehouse in a series of chambers. Aluminum was actually the most valuable metal I could find for that, as it frequently made storage containers to contain some of the more volatile elements and such.  

Above the Storehouse, attached to the back of it, was a tower that reached toward the top of the Nanodome. That was where I was headed, my charge rifle slung over my back. Every step I took through the Storehouse felt empty without my dog padding along beside me. The spiral staircase that led to the top of the tower felt overly spacious without her pushing me ahead or aside as I climbed.

When, finally, I reached the apex of my journey, I stopped and listened. There was no breeze within my Nanodome, we hadn’t gotten large enough for our own climate system to really matter. I had no insects, no other animals, and the efficient machinery whirred away almost silently. Eventually, I heard what I was listening for.

A scratching, echoing around my dome from one location. 

I brought the rifle off my back and peered through the vision enhancing sight toward the location of the noise. A massive, lumbering shadow was outside the southside of my dome. With a flick of a switch, I disabled the safety on my rifle. Another switch set the rifle to charged shot rather than semi-automatic. Finally, the last switch, the trigger, charged up the shot over the course of several seconds before discharging the Nanoseed generated bullet surrounded by a glowing beam of energy. 

With a near muted ‘Zap’ the projectile flew at a rapid speed approaching the shadow in with uncanny accuracy. As with all bullets grown by my Nanoseed, this one was attuned to the combination of my own and the Seed’s frequency. I was never an expert in how the technology actually worked, but I’d always appreciated it. The barrier opened up a perfectly sized aperture, the bullet exited, and the scratching stopped. 

Whether my nightmare had finally ended or had just started, I would find out after the seven minute or so walk back to the Medbay.