Story draft

[THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL HAS BEEN DEEMED SEDITIOUS BY ORDER OF THE O5 COUNCIL]

It's been 63 years since the outside world as we know it ended. Or at least, that's what they tell us. Nothing left outside the Site-Cities, the only thing keeping us alive is the Council and their arsenal. They keep the cities sealed, and the people afraid. You want the truth?

They're right. Sure, life in here is no picnic. We're jammed in between layers of walls, under tons of steel and stone that "protect" us from the outside. The work is hard, and most of us will die without ever seeing the sun. Hell, I've been outside, and I don't know if there even is a sun anymore. Yeah, you heard me. I've seen the Outside. Don't start with that shit they taught you, about how nobody's left the cities since the End.

About twenty years back, someone on the Council was looking at their estimates, time-survivor graphs and surface station readouts, and got it in their heads that maybe the world had fixed itself by now. So they put together a group to go check things out. Called us "Stalkers," someone on the Council must have read a bit too much of the brothers Strugatsky. So they pull together a group, nobody you'd have ever heard of. I get picked for god-only-knows why, the letter gave me some garbage about "documenting a historic occasion." Yeah, right, more like the sector overseer wanted to get rid of me.