Open Channel

The alarm in the potato room began at 2:13 in the morning, and Lena Voss reached the leaking valve before the first tray lost pressure. She shut the feed, fitted a new gasket, wiped the nutrient solution from the floor, and recorded the repair in a ledger whose last eighty pages contained only her handwriting. By three she had washed the tools and returned them to their outlines on the wall. The potatoes would be fine. The same could not be said for her sleep, so she put on a coat and climbed to the roof to watch the green lights move across the northern sky. Her house had once been the administration building of the Svalbard seed vault. The windows were triple-glazed, the roof carried solar panels and two small turbines, and the old conference room held a stove built from a steel drum. Lena had removed the long meeting table during her second summer aboveground. She cut it into shelves for jars of dried fish, turnips, mustard greens, and the black currants she grew beneath plastic.…