Utopia Project: Everyone Must Die

by Billy Dering

  “The girls here obviously aren’t worried about their reputations,” Heidi commented as she stared through the window.

  “Why would they be? The girls report to no parents, and society does not judge and frown upon their behavior. They are not conflicted, nor do they feel ashamed. To the contrary, being promiscuous and better yet, becoming pregnant, is a joy, not an embarrassment. They do not have to worry about struggling to deliver, or take care of, their offspring. Our society takes care of it all. As you can see,” she raised her hands, and her voice sounded sultry, “they are very content and relaxed, and are doing what naturally feels good.”

  “They certainly look like they’re enjoying themselves,” Maria said while pointing at the window.

  “How are you going to prevent cross-breeding when these girls get pregnant, and down the road their… offspring participate in these activities?” Sara asked.

  “We carefully coordinate the composition of participants in our group sexual activities to ensure that will not be a problem.”

  “Without them wearing uniforms, or anything at all for that matter, how can you even tell your people apart?” she asked. “They all look the same.”

  “We manage our member database with thermographic technology.” Elder-76 grabbed a small device from her belt. “We just wave this device over your face and it reads your individual signature through 65,000 temperature points. And our database…” she waved the scanning device over Sara’s face and checked the read-out. “…has recently been updated to include all three of you.”

  “What do your young people do all day around here?” Heidi asked.

  “That depends on the age. Up to three years of age, which is our infant group, all types are commingled together in large rooms. In those rooms, they are constantly cared for by Type B members of our Offspring Conditioning Team who ensure the infants are happy and content 24 hours per day, seven days per week. They feed them, change them, play games with them, and further condition them.”

  “Like daycare,” Maria remarked.

  “What we have here is quite a bit more extensive than that,” she said assuredly.

  “From what the parents expected these days, it couldn’t be much more.”

  Since snapping earlier while discussing special needs children, Maria seemed to be back to her old self. Sara was relieved, but did not want Maria to get out of line either.

  Elder-76 turned away and continued with her soft voice, “Then, from the age of three to 12, they work.”

  “Work? At three years of age?” Sara was astonished. “Y’all are tough.”

  “Our pre-adults, from age three through age 12, have a five-hour work day that is comprised of training and learning,” Elder-76 responded. “They are exposed to just about every task for their type. Their training schedules mirror the adult workday. Of course, teaching them requires much patience since they are easily distracted at the earlier ages. At the age of 13, all members are assigned specific tasks, and begin to actually perform these tasks.”

  “Like graduating from school,” Heidi commented. “What else do people do around here when they’re not working or having group intimacy?”

  “The pre-adults and adults have planned activities every weeknight, and Saturday. Sunday, they have a choice of activities. That is their free day. Within the allowable activities, they are free to do whatever they wish.”

  “That is the extent of their freedom?” Sara asked.

  “Yes, but it is the appropriate level of freedom.”

  “They have activities every day,” Sara started, “but what if your people just want a day to stay in and be alone?”

  “None of them ever do. And even if they did, all of our members have a conditioned anxiety response to being alone.”

  She stared at the elder with raised eyebrows, “How did you accomplish that?”

  “There are several techniques. For example, with the infant group, after being starved for a day, they are put alone in empty rooms. Then 3D images come out of the walls toward them. The images vary, but most are of deformed and scary people and creatures. Just as the images are upon the infant, a loud, blood-curdling scream sounds and the frightened infant is given the most painful electric shock.”

  Sara let out an involuntary gasp, and seemed appalled.

  “Then, the images, noises, and shocks disappear. A large group of offspring is placed in the room, surrounding the terrified infant as peaceful music begins to play. The floor is warmed several degrees and the starving infant is fed. Soon the infant feels safe and content. After repeating this conditioning exercise several times, these responses become ingrained in them. The infant forever associates comfort and peace with being surrounded by people, and they are uncomfortable being alone. That is why activities are all done in groups, and why we have ten people sleeping in each room. If they spent time alone, they would become individuals, and as our motto indicates, here there is…”

  Sara pointed to her pupil.

  Elder-76 nodded and began walking up the hallway.

  “What other kind of recreational activities do you have here?” Sara asked.

  “There are too many for me to list; virtual reality simulations, exercise periods, games of chance…”

  “Like sports?”

  “No, games of chance, whereby the winner or loser is not determined by any player’s skill. We don’t want to foster a spirit of competition based on any member being any better or worse at something than anyone else.”

  “Like picking numbers and just rolling the dice?” Maria asked.

  “We have games just like that.”

  “Doesn’t that get boring?”

  “Keep in mind, here, people don’t need the same intense, and often stressful, stimulation people thrived on in the old society. Our members have stress-free lives, and therefore can be easily stimulated just by playing a simple game.” The elder again sounded like an enchantress.

  “Their people must be easily amused,” Heidi noted.

  “Very much so,” Elder-76 acknowledged. “At some point in the near future, you too will find these simple games stimulating. That is the way reality should be.”

  “With the limited reality these people know, it must be easy to create virtual reality that seems exciting,” Heidi added.

  “They really do enjoy the simulators. The best is probably the roller coaster. It drops your stomach right out, just like the real thing. Then there’s one for sailing, automobiles, water slides, sledding, and the list goes on and on.”

  “Sounds like their lives are all fun and games outside of work,” Sara said.

  Elder-76 stopped at the door at the end of the hallway. “Their lives outside of work are consumed by more than just games. Once a month after they reach the age of 12, each member has a word conditioning session. Then once a week each member attends a mission meeting. There we show them what the world outside looks like, and what we need to do when we begin to inhabit land.”

  Sara noted, “We hope they are not squeamish. It’s pretty disgusting out there.”

  “To that end, we have a decaying corpse in a glass encasement at the front of the meeting room. For that part of the mission meeting, we remove the glass to allow the stench of death to waft through the room. We don’t want them to be surprised when they see and smell death.”

  Going through the door at the end of the hall, they went down a spiral staircase for many floors. As she walked them to their rooms, Elder-76 noted, “Until you are fully conditioned, you will have your own rooms. After that time, you will share a room with nine others like everyone else.”

  Once back in her room, Sara watched the elder’s figure disappear from view out the opaque, frosted glass window. She waved her hand in front of the scanning pad and nothing happened. She attempted to manually pull open the sliding door, but it would not budge. Frustrated, she went over to her bed and sat down. She put her fist under her chin with her elbow on her knee, and thought about how they could get off of
the ships before being impregnated, and before the Ion conditioning took hold. She could think of no viable escape options. The situation seemed dire.

  As she waited for the 9:00 p.m. bedtime tone to sound, her thoughts turned to her father. She recalled the gift he had given her the last time she saw him- a box containing a piece of paper and a watch of some type? Her brow furrowed. Something now seemed odd about him giving her a gift to open the same night as the destruction. Could the timing be a coincidence? Suspicions swirled around in her head, but she did not know and given her hopeless circumstances, she might never know.

  What Sara did know was that she missed her father and seeing the military-like elders only served as a constant reminder of him. Had she known what was coming, she would have been in less of a hurry the last time she saw him and would have hugged and kissed him one more time. It dawned on her that her father seemed to become more affectionate after he went up to Boston a little more than a year ago. She was late picking him up, and thought he was going to be angry. But when she pulled up and got out of her car, he hugged her for a long time—so long that she was worried he had some awful news to share. That happened on November 7, 2043, a date she would never forget because that was also the day she met Kid.

  She recalled getting the call from her father to go to Boston, and being upset, very upset, that she was going to have to cancel a first date that she had been so looking forward to all day. Having snagged an envelope, a piece of paper, and tape from her grandparents’ house, she had written a note to leave on the bench where she was supposed to meet Kid at 8:00 p.m. As she drove through Killington that night, she considered turning around and not leaving the note after all. She had only met this guy once and talked to him for a while on a bench. He could turn out to be just another jerk. Another master of illusion. But there was something genuine about her instant connection with Kid Carlson. Maybe it was chemistry. Maybe it was truly love at first sight. She kept driving because all the way to the bottom of her soul, she knew from moment one that it was something more, something deeper.

  Chapter 18

  December 28, 2044

  Wednesday, Evening

  New Jersey coast, Utopia Project

  Ship Number One

  Two days after the event

  Having heard a noise in the bottom of the ship, Kid stood up behind the propeller engines and peeked around the corner. He spotted two soldiers standing in front of the bank of generators further down the walkway. Ducking back, he bumped into Jess, who had also woken up and was standing behind him. Kid held a finger in front of his mouth. “Shh.”

  For the next few moments, they heard the start and stop of humming machinery. To Kid it sounded like voices in a large chorus dropping in and out but having slightly different pitches. After a moment of baritone harmony, the sound of the collective hum was overridden by the sharp click of a door being shut.

  “Note the time. It seems they come down here on a schedule to cycle the generators,” Kid whispered.

  “The time is… 8:50 p.m.” Moments later a tone sounded and the lights dimmed a few notches. Moving his face closer to his watch, Jess added, “9:00 p.m. on the dot.”

  Alert for soldiers, Kid and Jess again explored the bottom of the ship. They found containers of chemicals and cleaning agents stacked up in a storage closet. They also found a cabinet with tools and spare parts for the engines. After closing the cabinet, Kid again gravitated to the ladder amidships. He climbed into the shaft and opened the hatch with the hand wheel. Jess followed close behind, watching for soldiers below. Climbing rungs which seemed to ascend indefinitely, they came to a second hatch. Opening it, Kid peered into a dimly lit room with various control boards, screens, and machines. Stepping up through the hatch, it appeared they were in the engineer’s room. All of the instruments sparkled like they had never been touched. Straight ahead, they could see the stars in the nighttime sky out a large window. To the side of them, through a smaller window, they could see the ship’s bridge.

  “The ladder must be a quick route down to the engines, in case of an emergency,” Kid whispered.

  His heart sank as Jess jumped to the floor and waved him down. Kid was flat on his stomach in a second. Pointing at the window to the room next door, Jess held up one finger. He crawled to the corner of the room and prompted Kid to follow him down a spiral staircase.

  Going down for several floors, they reached the main deck level. They looked through a window covering the top half of a hallway door and saw a long, dimly lit corridor. There were no soldiers in sight and all appeared quiet.

  Kid turned. “What was that all about up there?”

  “There was someone on the bridge next door. I guess some kind of night watchman.”

  “I’m glad you spotted him before he spotted us.”

  “We’re lucky he was looking straight ahead,” Jess whispered.

  “At least now we know they have someone positioned up there.” Glancing around, he re-focused. “Alright, we know they brought the girls to this ship, but where do we start searching?”

  Peering down the staircase, Jess said, “There has to be more than 20 levels, and that’s just this side of the ship.”

  “How do you want to attack it?” Kid asked. “Talk about a needle in a haystack.”

  “Why don’t we just take a quick peek up every hallway and look for something unusual on that floor, you know, like additional security measures. Anything that might give us a hint that there are captives.”

  “That’s a good start. I have to say, for such a top-secret project they don’t seem too focused on security around here,” Kid noted.

  “That’s because they’ve probably never had to worry about it,” Jess countered.

  “Maybe not, but let’s stay alert and not get any false sense of security. Follow me.”

  They descended the staircase and took a peek up all of the floors, which totaled 31. At each level they would peer through the window of the hall-door for anything unusual, such as guards or any other conspicuous security measure. On the bottom floor, they reconvened behind the staircase. “So much for that. I didn’t see anything unusual,” Jess said.

  “Not a damn thing,” Kid agreed, agitated. “Wait here for a second.”

  He stepped out from behind the staircase, opened the door to the bottom floor hallway and crouched down. Stopping to gaze in the window of the first room, his heart skipped a beat. In the dim light he counted ten bunks, and they were all occupied by sleeping soldiers. Ducking down, he ran to the room across the hall and saw the same setup, so he retreated back through the door to the stairwell. “Listen. Here’s the deal,” Kid started. “The rooms all seem to have windows and low-level lighting, enough to see in once your eyes adjust. So we have to look inside each one and hope we can spot them. Each room seems to have ten bunks.”

  “Ten? How are we supposed to find them among that many people?”

  “Since the girls are captives, I have a hard time believing they would be kept with the masses. I would guess that the girls are being held separately. So let’s take a quick peek in each room until we find rooms that don’t have the same setup with ten bunks.”

  “What if we get spotted, or run into someone?” Jess asked.

  Hesitating, Kid knew what that would mean. Since they were trapped on the ship, they would be done for. But he wasn’t going to say so. Instead, he suggested, “We hustle back down to the bottom of the ship and hide.”

  Jess didn’t appear to be buying it, but Kid kept his focus on what they needed to do next. “We should split up or this is going to take forever. I’ll take this floor, you take the next one up. Run up one side of the hall and come back along the other side, and just take a peek in every window. I’ll meet you behind the stairwell at the end of your floor. Then we’ll tackle the next two floors and keep going until we reach the top, or run out of time.”

  Jess exhaled, and gathered himself. He nodded and hustled up the spiral staircase.

  Pushi
ng open the door, Kid crouched and ran up one side of the long hall, peeking in all of the windows. He reached the end and came back along the other side, moving with haste. Back at his starting point, he slipped through the door and climbed the spiral staircase to the floor above.

  Jess was waiting. “Nothing.”

  “Me neither. Next two,” Kid said. “Go.”

  On the third level from the bottom he stopped and Jess continued up the staircase to the next level. Kid again crouched and started running up the hall and peeking in the windows. Suddenly, he came upon a window where the glass was frosted and looked different from the rest. He stopped and peered in, but saw only blurry shadows. Although expecting to find ten soldiers snoozing in double-stacked bunks, he was able to discern that the room only had one bed. He studied a shadow on the bed, but gasped when it moved. The form was a person sitting upright, so he jumped down and out of view.

  Slowly raising his head, the person was now standing right at the window. His heart stopped and he fell backward on the ground.

  As he went to run, the person started waving his or her hands. Coiled and ready to dash, Kid squinted. It appeared to be a female, and her mannerisms seemed familiar. As her face came almost against the glass, he filled with excitement and took a step closer. He knew it was Maria, despite her hairstyle being different. He put his face almost against the surface. She waved and pointed her finger at the room next to hers. He waved back and kept crawling.

  Staring in the frosted glass of the next room, he could see the outline of a person lying down on a bed. Assuming it had to be Sara or Heidi, he started tapping lightly on the glass. The person got up and walked to the door. His heart started racing with excitement after realizing it was his Sara. Although her hairstyle had also changed, he would know her outline anywhere. She was still alive, and he was overwhelmed by a feeling of relief. With no other way to communicate, Kid used his finger and wrote one letter on the frosted glass at a time. “H E I D I ?”