The Rule of One (The Rule of One, #1)

by Ashley Saunders

Father isn’t the sort of man whose glare you want aimed in your direction. A high-ranking government official—Director of the Texas Family Planning Division—he

Our father’s status allows us to live in the city’s outer ring, designed for the privileged class. This grants us the luxury of slightly better air quality and the rare advantage of being able to call a piece of land our own. Most of the populace live crammed on top of one another in gigantic billboard-laden skyscrapers, the incessant advertisements from neighboring towers flashing into their windows day and night. Their lives are spent fighting each other for more space, more resources, more everything. Neighbor will kill neighbor over a new pair of shoes. There’s never enough of anything to go around.

It’s old-fashioned and perfectly psychotic to commute to work in a private vehicle. The only reason anyone uses a car in the pedestrian-congested city is to wave their prosperity flag pompously to the masses.

it’s hard to see the sky at all, with tower after looming tower dominating the horizon. A sign of progress, the government says. A sign of power. The sky is not enough—we will have to keep building up, up, up and conquer space itself before we will ever be satisfied.

windless, but the Father of Texas would never be allowed to wave a limp flag, especially in his adoptive capital. Hidden air currents blow underneath the lone-starred cloth, producing elegant red, white, and blue ripples that welcome students onto campus.

When the Family Planning Policy—known to the public for what it really is, the Rule of One—passed into law, the ideology of American society shifted dramatically. No more living for oneself; the American independent spirit is dead. We live now for the family.

Because of this, adolescence has become a cutthroat competition,

I’m surrounded by thousands of students dressed in the same white linen uniform as I am, identical except for the strips of color that identify which placement level each student tested into.

What rank you graduate with determines the rest of your life. A purple diploma lays the world at your feet.

Facial Recognition System scanners.

For the first time in half a century, Strake is reestablishing its choir program. The performing arts were deemed an unessential use of money while millions of people were starving to death and dying from superstorms.

Governor Howard S. Roth, the influential leader of Texas, envisions a grand spectacle for the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Gala commemorating the Rule of One. Our youthful voices raised in unified song will surely lull the people into forgetting we are celebrating that we are controlled to the point we can’t even choose how many children we have.

The Lone Star Network speculates this momentous occasion will culminate in the president announcing his support for Roth’s own presidential bid next year. Roth is the longest-serving governor in Texas history, and he rules his state with an iron fist.

Head down—we always stare at our feet—I

I see the girls move, not to primp their perfect hair, but to place square patches on each other’s chests, just above their cleavage. Tape. The chosen drug of the rich.

I raise my head to see Aden Wallace, clothed in his faded white uniform with its telltale yellow stripe, attempt to scan his wrist again. A student’s color rank curiously tends to correlate with their family’s economic status.

“Please. I’m hungry.” But the machines do not care how empty people’s bellies are. Insufficient credits are insufficient credits.

He’s surrounded by purples and blues, at the center of his personal court, but no one talks to him. He sticks out among his brawny, handsome peers, with their easy, charming laughter and smiles. It’s clear he inherited these so-called friends instead of earning their friendship on his own merit.

She’s a known rank-climber. A thin blue sash cuts across her uniform, and I know all she wants is to turn her blue blood purple. Not by earning better grades, but through marriage. Halton is her ladder.

Façades of the surrounding skyscrapers project a simulated sunset on massive screens, the artificial light casting spectacular oranges and pinks across the broad walkway. My heart instantly lightens. Although I know the images are deliberately designed to manufacture powerful feelings of well-being, they’re still beautiful.

“One Child, One Nation.”

“Thief!” the young man screams at the top of his lungs. The woman rushes through the alarmed mass of people, coming straight at me, but I can’t seem to move. A loud, crushing boom, and the woman drops to the ground, convulsing. Three more violent spasms and her body goes limp. The water bottle lies forgotten a few feet away, its precious contents pooling wastefully on the hot concrete.

Half the evening commuters have stopped to watch the scene play out. Some of them linger for pure entertainment, but others look on with barely concealed rage.

“Disperse immediately, or you will be arrested!” One of the soldiers lifts a sonic weapon into the air and fires without hesitation. Everyone in a hundred-yard radius collapses incapacitated to the ground, hands pressed desperately to their ears.

Microchips not only monitor food rations but also contain everything about you: arrest records, blood type, social security number, addresses, credit card information, insurance. Everything. It took several generations for the public to accept being microchipped, but it happened. It’s not control, they say; it’s for our own safety. Microchips save lives. We’ve all been conditioned to believe this.

It’s impossible to fight back; the government made sure of that long ago. Civilians are not allowed to own weapons—only the Guard has that authority. The people can fight solely with their raised voices, and I’ve only ever heard them silenced. The ones with the guns always win.

We’ve never met someone from outside the United States, of course. And it’s as unaffordable as it is unthinkable for an American citizen to travel to the few countries that still allow foreign visitors. The threat of death—or worse, of being taken captive for a ransom the US government simply can’t afford to pay—is a risk not many take. It’s funny. Just when technology shrank the world, making everywhere and everyone accessible, it’s all never felt more out of reach.

The government takes the war on drugs very seriously. If Tifani gets caught using, she faces a minimum ten years of hard penal labor in a local prison farm.

Thirty years ago, the Isolation Act was imposed, banning all foreign trade, mostly in an effort to keep American-grown food in American-born mouths. It still wasn’t enough. Today, ninety-five percent of our country survives on lab-grown meat and genetically modified crops. Real beef is especially scarce and extremely expensive.

His own grandmother founded Strake, naming the university after a part mounted on aircraft that improves aerodynamic stability. Meaning students are simply parts on a machine to make Texas soar. Not individuals or anything.

The governor has always been envious of my father’s ability to win the praise and hearts of the public. The people may vote for Roth, but they will never love him.

Gluts. Surplus. Those considered the unwanted overflow in our overpopulated world. “And these parasites are not the only filth trying to get in. My State Guard locates and destroys hundreds of tunnels a day dug by Mexican cartels trying to infest our country with their cocaine, meth, and latest dirty drugs. And from the sky, Moscow, Beijing, and Riyadh repeatedly threaten to target Dallas and Washington with their missiles if the US does not open our borders to trade.”

“America can no longer attack our enemies—we can only defend. And what my wall cannot defend, I make damn certain my soldiers and my drones protect, because if the outside world succeeds, they will bring with them disease, starvation, lawlessness, and war.

Desperation is a hard foe to fight against, because the desperate never stop.”

Black-eyed Susans are best known as wildflowers. This is probably the nearest he’s ever been to anything wild in his life. “They are also a pioneer plant,” I continue as he leans in to study them closer, his body bent forward like a broken stem. “If a fire burns down part of a forest, this plant will be one of the first to grow again.”

I’ve seen the creatures roam free through the vast grasslands. I have no sense of what that sort of freedom must feel like. I’ve lived in a congested urban sprawl my entire life.

Father’s words burn past my throat and erupt off my tongue: “Keep quiet. Keep hidden. Don’t stand out; blend in.”

Unlike Roth, most state governors show their dedication in aiding towns like this, asserting their unwavering compassion for the millions of displaced Americans driven from their homes every year by erratic weather and perpetual superstorms. But what can the government really do? This woman’s entire life has been annihilated. Major Disaster Declarations have become the norm, pressuring the government to choose which cities are worth saving with our dwindling resources. Whether people make the choice to move to a big metropolis or take on a nomadic lifestyle drifting through the fringes, one thing is for certain: they are on their own.

Resist much, obey little; Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved; Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty. -Walt Whitman

Water is a fickle bitch. Entire cities—Houston, Miami—flood and sink from too much, while others—Phoenix, Las Vegas—shrivel and diminish from too little. Millions die every year over the world’s most precious resource, from wars waged over lake and river rights, contaminated and depleting aquifers, dwindling crop yields, and the ever-increasing demand of a bloated population that has reached well beyond our planet’s carrying capacity. Rainfall has doubled as we’ve learned to live in a warmer world—it just falls in the wrong places. Our land and people are thirsty.

But unlike in the urban sprawl of my home metroplex, a constant cloud of smog does not veil this city. The clean air offers me a clear view of every skyrise for several blocks, and I see with my own eyes what I’ve only witnessed in videos: the first great American attempt at sustainable urbanism. Soaring thousand-foot skyscrapers boast foliage on every terrace, like giant trunks of steel wrapped in vibrant green moss.

a block of food towers, buildings dedicated solely to feeding the citizens of Denver. Hints of massive vegetable gardens line their roofs, and the tips of immense glass terraces, stacked one hundred stories high, house acres’ worth of organic crops and free-range livestock.

In grief all the little flaws of those we loved are colored over.

No one could tell by looking at my inner wrist that anything is different or special. The room is the same. The air is the same, and I’m sure the outside world is the same. But I press my thumb over the implant, and I know that it is real. I have changed and that is everything.

The moment the first person planted a seed in the earth thousands of years ago—ending the hunter-gatherer way of life—the world changed forever. No one nation is to blame for the climate crisis. This outcome was inevitable.

“Revive the rebellion.”

Our grandmother means to face the hunting patrols, Roth, the government—anyone and everything that stands in our way—head-on. She means to openly resist. To rebel. And so the revival begins.

“We’re running no matter what, Ava. Doesn’t matter if it’s here or in Canada. But if we keep quiet and stay hidden, Father has a chance.”

Glad to see they disagree. Mira wants a life for herself, a chance she had never had before. Nice conundrum - well done, author

“I see a girl who wants to follow yet another person’s idea of what our lives should be,” I answer. “You’re spewing out words that were fed to you. You’re caught up in your own self-importance, actually believing that anything you do matters.”

“You were always the self-anointed tyrant, lording over me, superior about being the firstborn. Ava Goodwin, bearer of our name, owner of our identity and the life-enabling microchip. You made the decision that night in the basement. It was you. You’re the reason we got caught!”