Romy: Book I of the 2250 Saga

by Nirina Stone

  “Why are you surprised I have an actual last name, and not a number?” Eric says, breaking up my thoughts.

  “I—” I’m not sure how to respond, exactly. “I’ve never met a non-Prospo with a family name,” I say honestly.

  He pauses and watches me drink. Finally, he leans back into the chair. “Do you believe only the Prospo have a right to family names?” The question immediately makes my back prick. I am not accustomed to voicing my ‘Beliefs.’

  Beliefs are frowned upon amongst Citizens and the Prospo. We now know Beliefs led to the human population’s near-complete destruction. But it’s also not what I actually said to him. So I frown, trying to work through what he’s really asking me. Do I believe—?

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” I finally say. I’ve never thought or argued about our various rules and regulations back home. They are simply what they are, what they have always been, to make sure we don’t go around destroying each other and the Earth again.

  He smiles, ever so slightly. After a few minutes of watching me enjoy my breakfast, he says, “Tell me, what do you think you know about the Sorens?”

  The question sounds longer than it should be. Why doesn’t he say, “What do you know about the Sorens?” After all, what I know is what I think, isn’t it?

  This Eric Strohm seems to employ some sort of double talk. I have to be more careful around him than I already am.

  I finish chewing and swallow. Then, keeping my eyes on him, I take a quick sip of joe. “You are descendants of the people that destroyed and shaped the Earth into what we live in, today.”

  His smile widens at my reply. “That is indeed what Prospo history books define as the Sorens.”

  He’s right—I dictated the definition, word for word, out of our history archives.

  “And—” he continues, his big blue eyes boring into mine. “Who are the Prospo descendants of? Who are Citizens descendants of?”

  If I had known this would be a history lesson, I would have swiped a tablet more often. But he is waiting for an answer, so I offer him what I know. “The Prospo are descendants of people who invested smartly and purchased land prior to the Great Omni,” I reply obediently, seeing the words run across my vision. “Citizens are a mix of the people who survived the Great Omni, but had to build from scratch. Because of our location in the harsher deserts of the outback, we dug into the Earth and lived largely underground.”

  He watches me. He scratches something on his leg, and I notice that his fingers are long, almost impossibly long. “Interesting,” he says.

  “What is?” I reply, still watching his fingers.

  “You repeat the words out of the history books, nearly verbatim.”

  I have always been a good student, a focused student. It is one of the reasons my parents fully supported my decision to enter Azure. If one can study well, one will thrive in an environment like Azure.

  “But I wonder if that is what you believe. Would you like to share with me what you really truly believe?”

  No, I really wouldn’t, I think. It’s none of his business, and I’m not supposed to talk of such things. so I stay mute. I don’t know this Eric Strohm. I don’t know where I am. I’ve been answering question after question in this place and in the closet. What do they want with me?

  “I think—” I say quietly, then cough out loud, before repeating a little louder, “I think I’d like to know what’s going on. Where am I? Why am I here? Why did you take me? What happened to Isaac. Why—?”

  His laugh interrupts my ramble. It’s not really a laugh though it’s more like a loud, coughing yelp. I’ve really amused him with my questioning.

  “You really are interesting,” he finally says, swiping his index finger under his eye, as if to wipe away a tear. “Isaac is alive. He’s okay,” he says. “We left him in front of the entrance to the Knowledge Hub. The Citizens there took care of him.” Then he stands to take my now empty tray, muttering, “Don’t want a repeat of that—” He takes three strides to the door and walks out.

  The good news is, I haven’t had to fight for my life after all. Not yet, anyway. The bad news is, I haven’t been allowed to leave my room for about fifty nights now, by my calculation. Unless they have an artificial nighttime scheduler going on. The nausea rules my days now, but there are no visible changes on my body, so—even though Eric assured me they don’t use surrogates—I finally begin to doubt pregnancy. It has to be something in the Soren air then. Maybe, I’m allergic to them.

  I haven’t charged at Eric again after my second day here.

  He still walks in carefully, watching me like a caged animal. I decide I may have better luck biding my time, and waiting for another opportunity.

  Besides, there are much worse things than being fed delicious food and chatting with Eric every day. I am growing stronger, physically and mentally. It’s more than I expected in my new prison.

  I have read through most of the books on my table, and they bring me more to go through as I finish each one. I’d love to visit their library—I bet it doesn’t have a single useless, overpriced miniature car on any of its shelves.

  A number of the books are new to me. I’ve never heard of them, though they were published much before the time of the Great Omni. I lose myself in stories called 1984 and Animal Farm by Orwell, and Things Fall Apart by Achebe, and various other novels not mentioned in our archives.

  The Orwell name is not acknowledged in any of the great authors or classic authors we learnt about over the years. I would remember his stories. They are very different, outrageous, compared to most of the work they share. Why does he not exist in our archives?

  “They were all destroyed,” Eric tells me. “Well, not all. We managed to find some copies. There were so so many others that we were not able to retrieve or save.”

  I can’t imagine how many other books, how many stories have been erased from our collective memories, due to whatever fears we have about bacteria in their pages. I’m confused.

  “There are hundreds,” Eric says, “no, thousands of other stories from great authors our people have never heard of. A big part of our purpose as the Soren is to hunt down as many of these as possible.”

  “But—” My mind returns to my stained old copy of The Stand. “What about diseases? I thought that was the reason they were being destroyed in the first place?”

  “Really?” he asks, his normally calm voice louder. “Is this what you believe?” There’s that word again.

  “It’s what I think I know,” I reply steadily, using his exact words from the second time he visited.

  He smiles. “The State of Apex sits on nanotechnology,” he says. I know this. I’ve learnt this, and I’ve seen it work first hand. “What does that mean to you, Romy?”

  I sit back for a moment. “It means our bodies are able to heal from certain wounds on a molecular scale.”

  All of us are born with nanotechnology in our bodies, whether we are Prospo, Citizen, or Soren. There is no way not to, in this day and age. I remember watching Father’s arm after he sliced it on a field machine, after a particularly long day working. He was exhausted, ready for bed, but he had to have his arm lie unmoving on our kitchen table as the little nanobots worked away from within his skin.

  It took hours, from my recollection, but the massive bloody gash eventually looked like nothing more than a long scratch after a couple of hours. Even later, it was faded away and a soft pink and barely noticeable. There was a time, I’ve learnt, when people lived without nanites. I imagine them dying in the streets from their wounds, without any hope in the world.

  I’ve never had a injury like Father’s myself, but I’d sometimes scratch and bruise an arm or a leg as you do when you’re a child. I would sit and watch the little nanobots get busy, fascinated by their abilities. None of my friends shared the same fascination, though.

  The Prospo have the same nanobots in their bodies, but they have additional technology that helps them heal faster.
They apply it to the skin and anything from a cut to a bullet wound can be healed within seconds.

  “That’s right,” Eric replies. “Except it’s not ‘some wounds,’ like you thought. It’s all wounds. It’s all hurts. It’s all diseases and conditions and bad bacteria.”

  What? My eyes grow large as I take in what he has said.

  “The only way nanobots can’t fix us is if we are dying faster than they can heal, from one of these conditions.” I know I’m not dying from my ‘minor’ heart condition, but I wonder.

  “Something like cancer, for example, in its most aggressive form, will barely be noticed by the Prospo. But Citizens? Yeah, they can still die from it when it’s not caught early enough.”

  All wounds, he said. All conditions.

  “I—” I start, my hand lying on my chest as I feel my heart thrum. “I have a heart condition.”

  “See, that’s exactly it,” Eric says, still smiling, “I promise you that you don’t.”

  I lean back, stunned. Why would Prospo doctors tell me I have a heart condition? Why would they lie? Why—why— I’m completely lost, there is no way for me to understand the motivation behind that.

  “It is the reason they tell us they need to destroy thousands of books in their various incinerators around Apex.” He leans back into the chair. “They blame it on ancient bacteria, which simply do not exist. Even if they still exist, they no longer affect us.”

  My mind goes back to the incinerator in the Azure library, and I shiver. Gads of books were destroyed in my time there, and I still shake when I think of Margo’s threat from that first day.

  “Why wouldn’t there be any digital copies, though?” I wonder out loud.

  When digital books were introduced in the twenty first century, our ancestors made a massive push to have all physical books published digitally as well.

  “I expect,” Eric answers, “that the Prospo did not want most of those sorts of books to exist in the State of Apex.”

  I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. It occurs to me that there is so much about my world I’ve assumed to be correct, but I’ve been living some sort of blind faith that it is the way it’s meant to be. I realize I’m no longer completely blind to it. What more is there, I wonder? What else have I believed to be true, that’s completely a lie? How can I trust anything that I know?

  The next day, Eric walks in carrying a dark red helmet. A Virtual Helmet, slightly smaller than the one the Diamonds’ son owned.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “Thought I’d show you something,” he says. He’s annoyingly vague, but I nod and sit at the edge of the bed, curious to know what new thing he could show me. Maybe it’s something about Soren City. Maybe a manifesto of sorts. Maybe something to do with the Pioneers—the people who escaped the Great Omni.

  He places the helmet gently on my head and tells me to relax. The first thing I see is the back of someone’s head as I run behind him. I look up, past the person ahead and see the tall glass buildings of Prospo City. What in the world am I doing in Prospo City?

  Then Eric’s voice is in my head. “Just relax and pay attention to what’s around you. What do you see? Tell me.”

  I describe everything to him. “We’re on the north end of High Park I think. There are three people with me. Sorens. I don’t know, maybe.” They’re wearing black and they run ahead of me. I assume they’re Sorens because Citizens don’t dress like this and the Prospo don’t run. Why would they ever need to run?

  We run through a side door and the Sorens ahead of me shoot at Citizens guarding the facility.

  “What is this place?” I ask Eric.

  “It’s a clothing factory,” he says, and as soon as he speaks, I see it. Machines are lined up on one side of the factory, churning out cloths of all sorts of colours. I hear the clunky clang of the machines at work, over the soft breaths of the Prospo I’m shadowing.

  “Why are they raiding a clothing factory?” I ask.

  “You’re right,” Eric says. “A clothing factory is useless, isn’t it? Not a threat. Nothing worth looking into.”

  Our group runs through another door, down a long hall, and through more doors before I stop in my tracks. Or at least, I want to stop in my tracks but I can’t. The person I’m watching this through continues to run despite my shock. “What—” I say. “What is this place, Eric?” He doesn’t reply, though I know he’s still in the room with me. Does he still want me to relay what I’m looking at? I don’t want to. Because what I see isn’t something I’d ever want to discuss with anyone.

  We’re in a large room—more like a hall, really. It’s stark, white. Sterile. Except for the beige colours, it reminds me of the halls at Azure.

  I can only see small patches of the ceiling as dozens, no hundreds, of drones float like clouds in the air. Each drone is equipped with tubes and wires snaking down like tentacles, their ends not within my view. Under the drones are hundreds of beds facing away from us with hundreds of figures in them. They all lie still.

  Another figure in a lilac uniform approaches us—a Citizen. “What are you doing here?” she asks as she glares at our guns. “You must leave. You will spoil the vessels. You must leave!” She continues her walk, but is already down on the floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound I barely register.

  One bed-ridden figure close to me turns her head and stares up at us. Her green eyes are wide, her eyebrows high on her crumpled forehead. A tear rolls down her cheek as she whimpers. Then it hits me.

  I’ve never seen drones like these, I’ve heard very few details about these facilities, but I know without a doubt these are Ivy Heff drones. The Sorens are conducting a raid on an Ivy Heff Fertility clinic. I thought what I knew was bad enough, but I’d heard that at least the surrogates were kept comatose in private rooms. Not like this. Not awake, aware and crying, like this.

  Before I realize it, I’ve already ripped the helmet off my head and I sit away from it, as if proximity to it will have me committed to the Fertility Clinic. “What in Odin—” I start to say. Eric sits across from me, his eyes unmoving from my face. “That’s—that’s what’s going on in clothing factories?” I ask. He watches me for a moment then asks if I’d like to continue, but I’d really rather not. “I saw enough,” I say.

  “You didn’t see everything,” Eric replies. “There’s more. There’s much much more.” Well, frankly, I’d rather not know.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I ask.

  “Would you rather not know about it?” Eric asks. When I don’t answer, he says, “Hmm.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “It’s such a Citizen way to be. Staying in the dark. Not wanting to know what’s really going on. Wanting to hide from it. Digging deep into the earth, and staying there.”

  Such a Citizen way to be, I think. What’s so wrong with not wanting to know the details about other people’s suffering? What’s wrong with staying ignorant of all that? “What does knowing it do?” I ask. “Other than make you uncomfortable or angry or hopeless?”

  “What did you feel after you saw the clinic?” Eric asks. “Did you feel hopeless?” I think of the woman with the big green eyes. Her whimper echoes in my head. I feel angry. Confused. Most of all, I have a sudden need to run up to her and rip off all the tubes and the wires and carry her out of the room.

  Eric stays silent as he watches me process my thoughts. Then he sits back as I reach over to place the helmet back on my head.

  Eric’s visits are consistently first at breakfast and second before supper, so a knock on my door surprises me, one afternoon. This is new.

  A waif of a woman stands in the doorway, her short hair a clot of white curls that defy gravity. Her large brown eyes and full cheeks don’t fit with the dozens of tiny lines under her eyes but give her an almost feline look. She gives me a quick glance and walks past me to the middle of my room.

  “Hi,” I say, not sure what sort of interview this will be. Eric’s the only person I’
ve seen in a while.

  “Hello, Romy,” she replies. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready for wh—” I start, but I’m already on the ground, my cheek mashed against the thin carpet, my arm crushed behind me. The pressure on my back is intense. Is she sitting on my neck? What just happened? “Hey!” I say as I feel the pressure ease and I jump back on my feet. “What in Odin was that for?” I ask my assailant.

  She stands like a statue in the same stance she was before I was on the ground. Did she even move? Other than a slight wisp of the curls over her brow, she is still. “Need work on surprise attacks,” she answers. Then she moves past me. I don’t see her, but I’m on the ground again, on my back this time.

  “What in the—” I say, but the pain on my forehead is intense. I stop talking and bring my hand up to my head. Did she just kick me? How did she kick me? How did I not see it?

  “Your instincts are shot,” she says, “if you ever had any. You need work on that, and you’re slow. Sluggish. Easy to kill.”

  I want to argue with her, to say there’s no way I’m slow. To say I’ve been cooped up for so long, I’m nauseated, that I just wasn’t ready for her, but I know she’s right. Those are just excuses. So instead I say, “Well, what do we do about it?”

  Her name is Sanaa. She’s seventy years old, and she says she will train me in self-defense. When I ask her why I need training for self-defense, Sanaa says, “So you’re not so easy to kill of course.”

  She rolls her eyes every time I ask her, “Why?” Like why can’t we train outside, maybe under cover of the trees right outside my window. Or why doesn’t she train me with weapons or why I would need any of the stuff she’s teaching me. She doesn’t bother answering any of my questions. She just rolls her eyes and starts on the next part.

  “Here,” she says and she moves to pull my arms in front of me, my palms facing out. “I will run at you and you will slam your palms into me like this.” She demonstrates by doing just that against my chest and I fall backwards, crashing into the closet behind me. I can’t decide what hurts more—my chest or my upper back. She didn’t even take a step forward. Her feet are glued to the ground, but she had enough power and leverage in just her hands to make me fall.