“Somewhere in the White Void” by Domus Vocis

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You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.

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I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,

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and today’s story is

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“Somewhere in the White Void”

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by Domus Vocis, who loves to write furry and regular fiction, and published his debut novel

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“The Adventures of Peter Gray”,

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and you can find more of his stories

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on Patreon or DeviantArt.

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“Somewhere in the White Void”

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by Domus Vocis

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Dressed head to toe in layers of a thermal coat,

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I revved my snowmobile’s engine.

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It purred to life. I shielded my vision from the intense snowfall until it faded with the sunlight.

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Speeding out into the cold, lifeless environment,

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I spotted the excavation site two kilometers away in what used to be London,

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Great Britain. “Armstrong,”

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my coworker, a cougar in every sense of the word named Covell, spoke.

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“I need you to be careful, like always.

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Follow the beacon and report back.”

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“Yessir,” I nodded.

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My fingers grasped the throttle again.

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I glanced in my rearview mirror to see the outpost’s hangar doors close themselves before disappearing into the winter fog.

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Meanwhile, the howling winds barely allowed me to hear my commlink.

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However, I remembered my orders:

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search Site #9

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and report back with any items.

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A sudden gust of nasty frost covered the visors on my arctic mask.

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Annoyed, I wiped them and twisted the throttle,

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cautious of my speed.

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The frozen landscape was untamed and unchecked for thousands of years,

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while the city underneath existed even longer than the ice.

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The glaciers had slowed down in this region,

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allowing for more expeditions than previously planned.

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I could imagine the buildings,

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now carcasses of twisted steel and pillars,

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remain abandoned as skeletons below.

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Now forgotten by their builder’s descendants.

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Save for a determined few. ‘Project

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Atlantis’,

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though not the most original of names,

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revolved around mankind’s surviving efforts to catalogue the Northern Hemisphere’s historical sites.

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If they still lasted through Mother Nature’s wrath.

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“Beacon within eight-hundred meters…”

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The diamond-like ice under my snowmobile had to be over three times as thick,

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but a miracle occurred several days prior.

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An unexplored glacial cave was discovered by an explorer drone.

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Essentially, an air pocket as wide as several city blocks had formed beneath us,

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while both satellites and historic records

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indicated three locations of interests could

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still be intact for excavation.

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Luckily for me, our only exploration drones needed repairs, and they needed a volunteer to traverse the cavern on foot.

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After some time, I finally arrived at the checkpoint.

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Parking the vehicle, I stepped towards the tunnel

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freshly carved through the ice.

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My grip on the zipline tightened while plunging into the glacier’s depths.

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Part of me feared a cave-in,

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but that wasn’t from any human instincts I held.

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Several minutes later however,

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and my journey downward finally slowed to a steady halt.

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The sight alone took my breath away.

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Monoliths of metal ascended like spires,

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some leaning or demolished from centuries of rust,

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while bricks and chunks of the sidewalk brutally littered the icy floor.

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My beam of light could

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barely touch the glacial ceiling above,

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yet sunshine barely managed to glow through the glacier’s crystalline shell.

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Exploring these lost cities,

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it continued to amaze me how archaic,

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yet brilliant humanity’s former civilizations used to be.

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“Unbelievable…” I murmured, slowly soaking everything in.

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I felt like an ant in a model city crushed in half-frozen ruins.

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Carefully, my fingers adjusted the visor camera.

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“Are you all seeing this, guys?”

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“Loud and clear, Armstrong, though there’s some interference.

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Proceed and return to the Outpost within 15:00 hours.”

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I followed the map until finding Location-of-Interest #1,

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the front steps of a library whose walls were battered down from hundreds of years of Mother Nature’s wrath.

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I stepped over decaying books

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embedded into the frozen ground,

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the shelves empty of man’s attempts to preserve the past.

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Evidence of manmade firepits in various parts of the building

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indicated nomads of the North

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might’ve burned the books in order to survive.

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How disgraceful, I thought to myself.

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Couldn’t they have torched the bad romance novels instead?

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It eventually came to finding four pristine textbooks and a couple classical novels.

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Fine, onto the next marker.

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Location-of-Interest #2:

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a courthouse devoid of judges, lawyers, prosecutors and juries.

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I discovered several large paintings lying on the cracked ground.

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Each showed a man or woman of the past

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who no longer gave judgement within its halls.

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Reminds me of the Nairobi Courthouse, I mused.

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Minus the trials involving terrorism.

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Finding Location-of-Interest #3 however, led to an ancient museum nestled

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against the wall of the ice cave.

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After evidence piled up about the incoming new era,

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there were efforts to preserve the history of past civilizations

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through the ration wars and famines affecting the Equatorial Safe Zone.

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Not all artifacts survived, sadly.

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My navigating the walls and exhibits

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only led to finding empty picture frames and relics

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too damaged to be brought back to the Outpost,

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but one item captured my attention.

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Under a layer of solid snow

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stood a stuffed sabretooth tiger on a faux-boulder.

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The other displays had either been ransacked years ago or molted from age,

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but this one hadn’t.

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I stepped closer to feel

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curiosity get the better of me, so I took my mask off.

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Unlike this creature’s teeth that curled over his chin,

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mine had been trimmed for convenience.

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The air felt cool on my facial fur, and I could smell the pure winter

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of age’s past, but what separated me from the stuffed exhibit feature

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was the winter gear I wore and my upright stature.

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“Hey there, cousin,”

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I joked to myself.

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“Didn’t picture finding you here…”

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It was difficult to believe how far their species had come.

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Whether it be enduring the Saharan colonies or Pacific superstorms,

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the biomechanical bodies of an anthroid survived the harshest conditions.

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However, my genetic design as a Sabretooth Class anthroid,

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my body being amalgamated with robotics in

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my limbs and the genetic makeup of a certain long-toothed feline,

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recently changed Northern Hemisphere exploration.

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I’d been made to combat subzero temperatures when my gear failed.

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Now here I was, staring at one of my ancestors like my human employers used to do.

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Before driving back into the Outpost’s hangar with the books in my backpack,

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I squinted back outside to see the skyscrapers.

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More history was out there,

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somewhere in the white void,

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and we were going to find them all.

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I just knew it.This was

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“Somewhere in the White Void” by Domus Vocis, read for you

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by Khaki,

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your faithful fireside companion.

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Thank you for listening to The Voice of Dog