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“They will use you, then discard you. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll post you upcountry first. You won’t even feel it when you’re squeezed out.”
Aside from skyrocketing crime in the few remaining major cities, our mere existence in the real world is dangerous. It’s why they invented upcountry, after all. Half a century ago, it would have been unfathomable to imagine how we have to live now.
Then the seas started to flood the coasts, the very air turned cancerous, and the pandemics mutated at a rate that killed us faster than we could inoculate against them. The factories refused to stop pumping toxins into the clouds, and the megacorporations wouldn’t unplug their machines eating up freshwater. What else were people to do?
“The future is online. The future is digital.”
I don’t like being downcountry. I don’t like the empty white walls, the cold tile floors, and the clinical sterile smell that pervades every corner of the house except for the alcove, never going away no matter how much I try to create ventilation in my room.
Despite being downcountry at the time, he was convinced that nothing was real and he needed to wake up from a simulation.
while Atahuans can take us in, love us, make us a part of their family, we can’t ever shake off the Ward surname, and we’re still mandated
The feed debates all the time whether avatar customization should be allowed, arguing about how harmful it is to our perception of beauty when people can change how they look on a whim.
We stopped trusting sourceless video evidence about twenty years ago. Unless it comes straight from the recording, it’s too easy to doctor faces and people into evidence. Surely these two know that whatever video they have won’t stand up to scrutiny.
Basically the world we live in today
If I was lucky, maybe I’d land a security job at a smaller company, or I could leave the field entirely and live paycheck to paycheck downcountry while paying back the debt of military school. No one does that, of course: I’d need two lifetimes to erase my debt if I worked outside of corporate forces as a Medan, and since the schools lend the money, they also set the time limits before they can hand us off to the parent company for forfeiture. My life would be over the moment I missed a payment.
This is basically slavery
I hadn’t had a choice in this path. By law, wards of the state are yanked out of the foster system at age twelve and into whichever military school will take us. It creates the perfect cycle. The state doesn’t have to keep supporting its orphans, and while we pay back our education, Atahua gains soldiers.
Like every other cadet in Atahua with a Medan face, I was put on assignment to Medaluo for my final exam.
My face is still Medan at the end of the day.
“I thought the answer was obvious.” Nik raises an eyebrow, as though he really is skeptical that I would need to ask. “We broke you out because we put you in there. We framed you.”
It costs more to attend military school as a ward than as an Atahuan. Go figure.
A ward of the state, clinging desperately to the identity he gives me outside of it.
“A white girl in Medaluo probably wants to team up with a Medan cadet—ahem—such as yourself. She’ll look more natural in the cities, like she’s visiting a friend rather than engaging in intelligence collection. Ask Hailey if she wants to combine efforts.”
“No. A ward like you, but otherwise Pyaish.”
“Does the surname Sullivan mean anything to you?”
my orphan file is blank, and I have no real memories prior to the foster homes.
Atahua may not love me, but I am Atahuan all the same. If I had somewhere better to go, I would have gone, but I don’t. The paltry existence I’ve been granted in Atahua is a life that I have worked for, bled for, no matter how corrupt NileCorp is. Being a corporate soldier sucks, but it’s something.
The race to rule the world was, at the end of it, about technology. Atahua wanted to be the most powerful country in the world. Medaluo wanted to be the most powerful country in the world. When our world was virtual, whoever regulated that space won everything.
I wanted a sister for the company, but maybe I just wanted the alternate world where the sister I could have had hadn’t died. In that world, I wasn’t a replacement child, just a second one.
More foreshadowing that Eirale is the original Sullivan daughter
My practice scores in Medan class were shaky during my first few weeks at the academy. I knew full well how to pronounce certain words, but I faked incompetence. I thought it made me more Atahuan.
Most real dogs downcountry are dying out, either from starvation or abandonment.
Most depressing line of this entire story
In Atahua, I have grown up spending every day trying to be the best, and instead… I could have just existed
Maybe I could have existed upcountry happily in Medaluo, attending comedy shows in a crowd without standing out, but most likely I would have been downcountry, inching closer to a premature death with the next climate disaster or virus that attacked my immune system.
Dad and Mallory adopted me in Atahua, not Medaluo. I am dreaming of a life I would have never been afforded.
