Beyond the Fallout

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The static crackled through the radio like dry leaves underfoot, filling the cramped underground bunker with white noise that had become as familiar as breathing. Maya Chen adjusted the frequency dial with practiced fingers, her weathered hands moving across the controls with the precision of someone who had performed this ritual thousands of times before. The metal was cold to the touch, as everything was down here in the depths of what had once been the University of Oslo's physics building. Three years, four months, and sixteen days had passed since the last coherent transmission from the outside world. Maya kept count in neat tick marks on the concrete wall beside her workstation, each mark representing another day of silence from the civilization that had once thrived above their heads. The mathematics of survival had become her obsession, calculating rations, monitoring air filtration systems, and maintaining the delicate balance that kept their small community of forty-three souls alive beneath the Norwegian soil. The bunker stretched out behind her in a maze of reinforced corridors and converted laboratories. Emergency lighting cast everything in a perpetual amber glow, creating shadows that danced across the faces of her fellow survivors as they went about their daily routines. Some tended the hydroponic gardens that provided their sustenance, others worked in the machine shop repairing the endless parade of failing equipment, and a few gathered in the common area where they shared stories and tried to maintain some semblance of normal human interaction.