Humans need 1 gallon of water a day to stay at a baseline hydration. I didn’t know that until the rations were put in place. 1 gallon of water per employee per day. Employee. That’s what they called us. The rich people who bought these stupid underground bunkers turned out to be the lucky ones. Thankfully, people who are rich enough to purchase underground bunkers cosplaying as manors are too lazy to do any “menial” chores. So they hired employees, like me.

We were recruited after Michigan's last winter. The so-called climate haven had finally begun to succumb to the destruction the rest of the world was experiencing. The flooding had caused irreparable damage, and the predicted upcoming summer heat held little mercy for most. The message was clear: go under or suffer in what had literally become hell on earth. It was weird to watch society begin its collapse. Schools started shutting down, the news was on less and less due to a cut in public funding, and almost everything had become a luxury. There were too many people in too little space, and the world was getting too hot for us to keep up.

They love to remind us of those things. How we technically chose to be here, how, if they wanted, they could have us back up on the surface. That we should be grateful.

It works. It’s why they succeeded in getting us down here in the first place. I’d lost my house to the waters; I know most of the other employees had too. We were servants; we got to stay alive at the cost of serving these rich assholes for the rest of our miserable lives. That was the deal. It was also the reason I was shaking in anger as I looked at myself in the shared women's employee bathroom mirror. A cut-off in the employees' water rations, so the snobs could fill up the pool.

1 liter of water per day. 2/3rds of our water supply is being stolen because these people believe they're on a vacation. That’s what it felt like. Serving these people, cleaning up after them, cooking, entertaining, it all felt laughable. We were living like nothing was wrong, like the pixelated screen showing what I can only assume was the Amazon rainforest long before it’d been stripped clean was real. Like the people we were here, slaving away for, weren’t responsible for what happened.

It wasn’t a coincidence that these bunkers were initially marketed towards billionaires; they were extraordinarily expensive to build. It did seem, however, a coincidence that many CEOs and politicians who both denied climate change and profited from it were buying them. Businessmen who sold air conditioners and conspiracy-laden religious leaders were now living in luxury while others suffered on the earth's surface.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that we were underground, and it wasn’t fair that these billionaires got to pretend that life was normal just because they were rich. There’ve been talks of the surface. It had been five years since we’d sealed the doors down here, but other bunkers had gotten curious. They said there were still people above, but the wave of heat was almost unbearable.

“The people…one girl said she talked to one…who was still alive.” Alyssa, my fellow maid, had whispered, almost horrified as she recounted the details she’d heard, and I knew what it all meant: that look, her hushed words. There was no coming back from this. I pray we won’t need to fill another pool

I had a lot of trouble writing this short story, and it really made me reflect on using AI in creative fields. I am currently writing this at 3:00 a.m., the day we’re presenting these stories. I am a competitive procrastinator, and I often find myself facing severe writer's block in the face of assignments. I did consider restarting the project and just using AI to get it over and done with, but I realized that this is what I love about writing. I love the agonizing process of having an idea that you think is brilliant, only for it to take weeks for the words to fully express what you mean. I love having my boyfriend and parents read my work and critique it with their own opinions. I love that I got to watch my cat crawl in and out of her favorite paper bag because she's staying up with me as I write.

Writing is such a personal practice that I can’t imagine feeling as satisfied with AI work because it won’t feel like my writing. It was definitely worth staying up to write it myself and not use AI.