The Line - Prologue

The Line is not what you would call “beautiful,” hence the name. On the inside, merely the opposite. On the outside? It is the eye sore of the world. The material it's built with reflects the desert and the sky, taking away from its unnaturality. Nonetheless, a 1,500 foot-tall structure that lies inward 105 miles will never look like it belongs in the middle of the Arabian Desert. It would be ignorant to say that The Line is not a marvel of human engineering, however, housing nearly twelve-million people and only being as wide as three Boeing 747’s lined up.

The inside, referred to as The Interior (creative, I know), is modern and peaceful and integrated with nature. Winding pathways for pedestrians, infinity waterfalls, vibrant green trees and pink flowers exploding from their buds. Ponds with natural-looking rocks and stones, the chirps of birds in trees in the morning. Given these qualities, living in The Line makes a person forget they are in the middle of a brutally hot desert. And that is exactly what it’s intended to do: add a sense of tranquility to an ever-changing world. 

It began with the heat wave in the year 2022, when the Sun emitted a record-breaking amount of radiation, severely harming a large portion of the Earth’s atmosphere, letting unprecedented global temperatures arise. Different regions of the Earth had different responses: For some, it was the unforgiving heat waves and droughts that drew people out. For others, it was the extreme flooding and heavy rainfall that took houses off their foundations. Some drowned while others died of dehydration. This alone would take out half of the global population. Ice caps began to melt at a rapid pace, and sea levels began to rise. Melting glaciers released frozen diseases, killing millions around the globe. Disaster after disaster, people being displaced and losing loved ones. This lasted for about one year before everything began to settle down. Well-known cities were permanently destroyed, with nothing left but carcasses of steel buildings and charred automobiles. Governments had fallen, and those who remained were scared or paranoid half to death to harm one another. Late 2023 is when the project for The Line began. No, I won't go into how a group of people came up with this idea and started it, but it took a lot of collaboration, resources, time, and technology. 

Thirty years later, The Line, in what-used-to-be Saudi Arabia, was complete. Communication efforts were beginning to be restored for whoever else was left out there in the world. The Line became a symbol of hope and restoration for human civilization. People and families moved in as soon as everything was complete. For people born in The Line, that was all the life they knew. In school, they hardly talked about what remained outside, or as they called it, “The Void.” Even talking about what had happened in that unsuspecting year 2022 was rare for teachers. The truth is, conditions outside The Line were still unpredictable, harsh, and dangerous, and well, unknown by the majority of the population.

The city itself is protected from the Void’s conditions by a large dome, expanding all 105 miles. Temperatures were still raging and weather events were unpredictable, and keeping The Line secure from all of those factors was important. Seventeen-year-old Aaron can not help his curiosity but wonder what lies outside all he has ever known?