Fred looked up at me as I came out of the door. He was leaning against the wall opposite the door to my room, fiddling with one of his cuffs.

"You got everything?"

"Yep, I'm good to go."

"Cool, it's a bit of a hike back to alpha, so we're taking the bikes. If you have any questions while we're on the way, feel free to ask."

Having said his part, we started walking down the hallway towards the exit.

"Is this orientation thing common?" I asked. Major said there were only two other humans who had come through the dome.

Fred scoffed, "You must have misheard, two human anomalies maybe, but not two humans."

Seeing the confused look on my face he continued,

"Every few years or so the Dome will disappear and instead of any threats appearing, it will just dump a load of people. We call those refugee cities. Everyone here on Erros is or is related to someone who came through a refugee city.

Whenever the Dome drops like that, governments all over the land will scramble to scoop up the refugees. In New Philadelphia, we take 'em through an orientation before granting them citizenship. Same thing you're about to go through now."

We were outside now and I took a moment to enjoy being in nonfreezing temperatures again. The disparity between the inside of the Dome and outside was night and day. Instead of a frozen wasteland, we were surrounded by lush hillsides, and the temperature was cool, not freezing.

We had come out of the hospital into a tiny little fort that consisted of only a few buildings. A road ran through the middle of the place and continued towards the Dome. The Dome itself sat only a few hundred feet to the right. It was imposing as always, towering over everything in sight.

I turned back towards Fred who was angling us towards a shed near the road.

"Can you explain the Dome to me?"

"Well, what do you wanna know?" Fred asked.

"Everything I guess. Who built? Why? What does it do? How does it do it? Those kinds of things."

Instead of responding he just laughed.

"If I knew the answers to even half of those questions I'd be a lucky man indeed. But I'll tell you what I do know.

The first people arrived here around the early eighteen hundreds; only a few thousand at the time, but things have grown since then.

Each week the dome brings a new threat and with it, new technology. The bigger the threat, the better the tech. You can make a handsome sum if you get lucky enough. Some people have found things more than a decade ago we still can't replicate today."

I glanced down at my watch. Something better than this? That sounded nice, really nice. Maybe I'd look into that after this whole orientation thing.

We had arrived at the shed, inside were four old, beaten down dirtbikes. The rest of the shed was almost barren, consisting of a few tools like shovels and picks.

I couldn't help but wonder at the state of their equipment. Was this it? Surely the military was better equipped than this?

As if reading my thoughts Fred started to speak,

"These were recovered a few years ago from one of the week one cities, nothing really special to 'em, but they work and that's enough."

He moved over to a cabinet in the corner of the shed and started fiddling with something in one of the drawers.

"You guys steal everything from under the Dome?" I asked, only half-serious.

"Actually, that's pretty much the truth. The only thing we mass-produce on the west side of the Dome is food. Everything else is imported either from the Dome itself or our neighbors to the North.

The industrial revolution never really kicked off here like it did back on Earth. Why make it when you can steal it, right? Some of the bigger countries and city-states have a few factories, but that's peanuts compared to the stuff back home."

Done with drawer, he pulled out two pairs of goggles and threw one of them to me.

"Hasn't rained in a few days, with the kind of dust we'll be kicking up you'll be needin' need those. You know how to ride one of these things?"

I nodded. Amnesia is a weird thing, as far as I knew I had never ridden one of these things before, but I knew how they operated. I had a feeling that much like using a gun, this would be second nature to me.

"One on the right's yours then. It's about twenty minutes to Alpha, but the trail's pretty straightforward. If you lose me just remember to stick to the right."

He hopped on the bike and kicked it into gear. Doing the same I followed behind him; it wasn't long before we were out of sight of the buildings.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

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The path followed the dome around its base, occasionally diverging to the left towards what looked like hunting blinds. As we went, I noticed a few other soldiers walking along most heading in the opposite direction from us.

The trail was really more of a footpath, not really meant for vehicles of any kind but more than suitable for our bikes to travel.

The area we went through was only a few hundred feet from the Dome, and from here I could once again see the swirling patterns that moved along its side. On the right, maybe a mile away, trees started to sprinkle the landscape slowly increasing in number before turning into woodland.

Eventually, we peeled off the footpath and onto a dirt road that ran perpendicular to the Dome. We followed this road until it, along with several others, diverged onto one central gravel road.

From there, it was a straight shot to our destination. As we approached, I realized that this place was much more expansive than the outpost I had been at prior.

For starters, the entire fort was surrounded by a log wall. At the base of the wall where the road entered the fort, there was a small gatehouse. Fred and I stopped there, where he said something to someone inside who ended up waving us through.

The buildings inside were much more expansive than the ones at the outpost had been, but none of them were more than two stories. All around, people moved between them like ants scurrying from one place to the other.

We stopped at a garage, where Fred and I left the dirtbikes. Fred went to go take care of something further in the garage while I stepped back outside.

The gravel road we came in on went through the center of the base, until it hit the other wall where it became asphalt and continued in the same direction as far as I could see.

As far as I could tell the only cars in the entire base were in the garage I had just left. Everyone just got around the old fashioned way I guess.

Fred came back out of the garage and we started towards one of the buildings.

"I'll take you through orientation tomorrow," he began, "you've already gone through the worst of it with that information dump I gave you earlier.

Over there's the mess," he gestured to a building across the street, "food's not very good, but it's free. To the right of it is the barracks, that's where I'll be if you need me.

You'll be staying in one of the guest apartments, probably not as nice as whatever you're used to, but it sure as hell beats the tents most refugees get."

He had led to a series of small duplexes that sat near the entrance we had come in earlier. He led me inside one of them before speaking again,

"Feel free to wander around, just make sure not go past any locked doors and you should be good. Dinner's served in about ten minutes, feel free to eat as much as you want. I'll be back here in the morning and we can get this orientation thing over with. If you need me, you know where to find me."

Once the door had shut behind him I took a moment to examine the apartment. It was small, consisting of only the entrance, a bedroom, and a small washroom.

I left my jacket on a chair near the entrance before continuing further inside. The bedroom had a small twin sized bed along with a drawer. On top of the bed, there was a duffle bag containing a few extra sets of clothes as well as various toiletries.

I brought the duffel over to the washroom, where there was a sink, toilet, and shower. I wasted no time turning on the shower; the water was cold but it along with the soap I had been provided succeeded in getting the past few days worth of gunk off me.

Clean for the first time that I could ever remember, I was tempted to enjoy sleeping somewhere comfortable for once, but my stomach urged otherwise.

Eager at the prospect of something other than protein bars I made my way over to the mess hall. I realized I must have spent more time in the shower than I thought because by the time I got there dinner was almost over.

The food wasn't nearly as bad as Fred had made it out to be, but it certainly wasn't gourmet either. I guess anything was better than what I had been eating.

Dinner over with, I went back outside. While I had eaten, the sun had moved behind the fort walls, and I knew it wouldn't be long until it disappeared entirely. That combined with little interest in exploring the rest of the fort sent me back to the apartment.

When I arrived I immediately threw myself onto the bed, eager to sleep on something actually meant for sleeping. The bed was alright, but I cared little for the quality. It was an actual bed after all, that alone made it better than everywhere else I had ever slept.

Sleep wasn't too hard to find, which was a little surprising seeing as I had woken up only a few hours earlier. But by then I was too tired to care.

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I woke up to someone knocking outside my door. It was early in the morning, and I was definitely not ready to get out of bed. Unfortunately for me, the knocking didn't stop.

"I'll be out in a minute" I yelled, hoping that would get the mean person outside to stop. Thankfully, it did. But that also meant I had to get up.

Slowly, I rose out of the bed and rubbed the sleep out my eyes. I had slept well, and if it wasn't for being suddenly awakened at seven in the morning I probably would have been in a good mood.

I threw on one of the spare sets of clothing, grabbed my jacket, and went to the door. Where I saw Fred waiting for me.

"Why'd you wake me up so early?" I questioned in mock anger. "There's barely any light in the sky!"

A stupid grin appeared on his face as he replied,

"Early bird gets the worm, besides the sun is up, you just can't see it because it's behind the Dome.

Honestly, though, we have a lot of stuff to go through today, and I'd like to be done before lunch."

He paused for a moment before adding, "Breakfast started half an hour ago, so you might want to hurry over there before the mess closes."

That woke me up. I pushed past him, not wanting to spend the next few hours both tired and hungry. What kind of people eat breakfast at six in the morning anyway? Lunatics, all of them.

Breakfast was ending right as I entered the mess. Most of the food was gone, but at least I managed to snag a few bites to eat.

Fred sat with me as I ate, but didn't eat anything himself. He'd probably eaten before he went over to wake me up, which is why I almost missed breakfast.

When we were done he led me over to a small building on the opposite side of the base. Fred explained to me that this was usually done a few hundred people at a time and that with only one, a lot of the process could be accelerated.

When we got inside he gave me a desk and a stack of papers to start filling out. A lot of the questions I couldn't answer on account of my amnesia.

When I asked Fred about it he groaned.

"Amnesia is a pretty common side effect of whatever the Dome uses to bring refugees here. Usually, we just tell them to leave it blank and move on, but command told me to be thorough with you so I guess we're going to have to do this the hard way."

He explained that the government used to have everyone with amnesia tested in a variety of skills and subjects to determine their competency, but that had been done away with after the volume of people increased.

He reached into my stack of forms and pulled out most of them, telling me to answer the rest of the questions as best I could. The rest of the questions generally asked about my origin, where I was from, when I was born, what city I had entered in, and things like that. Most of those I had to leave left blank.

I was sitting back in the chair, happy that my workload was relatively small when Fred came back. In his hands was a pile of papers that was almost as tall as my fist. So much for finishing by lunch.