The Culling Read online

  The two boys were very different. Hector, pale and undernourished, was the polar opposite of Ulysses, with his caramel colored skin and athletic build. While Hector preferred spending his time at one of the never-ending parties that took place among the citizenry, who, unless they supervised a factory in the prole community had little else to do, Benjamin spent his time either studying from the few surviving books that were only permitted west of the river, or playing sports with the few boys who were so inclined. They were, nonetheless, as close as if they shared the same bloodline.

  There were only two areas of real contention between them; while Hector cared little about the plight of the proles, thinking of them only as economic units whose sole purpose was to provide the goods and services that citizens demanded, Ulysses constantly spoke of the need to treat them as human beings entitled to the same things in life as everyone else. He objected to the distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘prole,’ and as he grew older, frequently clashed with the hierarchy over his refusal to use the title citizen when referring to others. The other area of conflict was Junko Miyako, a petite girl of their age, who shared classes with them. Both had fallen madly in love with her, and for a time, she was torn between the two. Hector, she knew, would someday be Chairman, and to be associated with him guaranteed her position at the top of the pyramid of citizenry. Ulysses, on the other hand, was handsome and caring, traits she valued highly.

  In the end, caring won out; which led to a final confrontation between the two men shortly after they turned twenty-one?

  The three were together on the vine-covered terrace at the east side of the large pentagonal building that housed The Committee. The sun was setting in the west, casting long shadows over the foliage-choked area from there to the river, and the pall of smog from the factories to the east, gave an orange cast to the cloud. The smell of methane generators, the sole remaining source of power for New Liberty, was light in the air, thanks to a wind blowing from the east.

  Hector and Ulysses were arguing again about whether or not proles should have the same rights as citizens, while Junko stood silently by watching them, a half smile on her oval face.

  “Not only should they have the same rights,” Ulysses insisted. “But, they are citizens just the same as you and me.”

  Hector laughed harshly.

  “How can you say that, Ulysses? Look at them; they’re ignorant and mostly unclean. You can’t possibly think of a prole as your equal.”

  “They are not ignorant, just uneducated; and that’s because we make it unlawful for them to learn anything but what they need to know to do their assigned jobs. As to being unclean, I’d like to see how clean you’d be if you had to live in such crowded squalor,” Ulysses said. His brown face was contorted in anger. “We don’t ensure they have the same access to clean water that we do, and even though they run the power plant which keeps us well lit and cool with our air circulation units, they live in crowded spaces with only a bare bulb for light – when the current even works in their buildings.”

  “Don’t you understand? They wouldn’t be made happy if their heads were filled with useless information. It would, in fact, only frustrate them. The proles are meant to serve, and as to the crowded squalor, if they were not such prolific procreators, they wouldn’t be so crowded.”

  “They have little else to do for recreation,” Junko said. Both men turned toward her.

  “Junko,” Hector said. “That is hardly the type of language that should be coming from your mouth.”

  Ulysses smiled.

  “She does make a point, though,” he said. “The proles labor from sunup to sundown, and are constantly bombarded with propaganda slogans about working for the good of the community. Yet, they see none of the good from their work for themselves. When the sun goes down, what else is there for them to do? My father used to say, not completely in jest, ‘the rich get richer, while the poor make babies.’ I never understood it until now.”

  Hector’s face reddened. For all his pursuits of debauchery, he was uncomfortable having such a conversation in Junko’s presence, especially so as she’d been the one to broach the subject.

  “So, brother, what would you have us do about it?” he asked, changing the subject. “Maybe we should sterilize them, or make it illegal for proles of different sexes to occupy the same space. Hell, as long as they produce enough future workers, I don’t see why we shouldn’t introduce breeding control programs.”

  Ulysses faced him, staring deeply into his face. He knew Hector wasn’t joking. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to smash his foster brother’s face. Instead, he would smash his inflated ego.

  “You know I’ve spoken of returning to the prole community many times. Well, I’ve decided; now that I’m an adult and can make my own decisions, I will go back and do what I can do to improve living conditions among the proles.”

  Hector, shocked at the vehemence in Ulysses’s voice, stepped back.

  “I always thought that was just so much gas. You can’t be serious.”

  Ulysses placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “I am quite serious. I’m leaving at first light as a matter of fact.”

  While Hector would miss his foster brother, one part of his mind was elated. With Benjamin gone, there would be no more competition for Junko’s attention and affection.

  “You . . . you’ve received The Committee’s permission?”

  “I have. They were reluctant at first, but when they realized that I was adamant, they gave in.”

  “You’re giving up your citizenship? For what? To live in squalor?”

  “What is that slogan? Oh yes, ‘for the good of the community.’ I’ll miss you, Hector.”

  “And, I’ll miss you too, brother.” There was no real sincerity in his voice as Hector moved near to Junko. “I guess you’ll miss him too, eh, Junko?”

  She turned her gaze away from his, looking out over the river.

  “Junko, what is it?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, Hector, but . . . I have decided to go with Ulysses.”

  Hector Cruz paled. His mouth fell open. He stared first at Junko, and then at Ulysses. His mouth snapped shut and turned down in an angry snarl.

  “You . . . you talked her into this craziness, didn’t you?”

  “No, Hector,” Junko said. “It was my idea. I believe in what Ulysses is doing, and I want to help.”

  “You, you can’t do this.”

  She put her hands at her tiny waist and glared up at Hector.

  “I can do what I chose to do, Hector Cruz,” she said. “And, I’ve decided this is what I chose to do.”

  Hector turned on Ulysses, his face now red, tears in his eyes.

  “I’ll never forgive you for this. One day, you’ll pay for this.” He glared at Junko. “One day you’ll both regret this.” He spun on his heels and walked away, his back straight, but with his head averted so they couldn’t see the tears in his eyes.

  “You are a dead man, Ulysses Jackson, foster brother or no.”

  4.

  As the guard vehicle approached the razor-wire barrier in the middle of the north bridge over the forbidden river it slowed.

  A helmeted driver and another helmeted monitor sat in the front. In back, Gravius-One and Leland-27 sat in silence, their visors pulled down.

  Gravius thumbed a number pad worn on a strap around his left wrist. One of the few communications devices left from the time before things crashed, it sent an electronic pulse to a receiver that signaled to the gate that the commander was approaching. Ahead, the guards snapped to attention as the barrier began lifting. The Monitor commander’s vehicle was recognized, and except for any vehicle transporting the Chairman, was the only conveyance in all of New Liberty that was not stopped at checkpoints. Since the Chairman never crossed the river into the prole community, Gravius’s vehicle was the only one accorded such courtesies.

  After passing through the barrier, which was located at the east end of t
he bridge, they turned north toward the border fence some thirty miles distant, driving past factories belching yellow smoke, and then vast pens of cows and pigs. Even with the windows closed, the odor seeped into the vehicle. At each site, there were lines of proles, their grubby, soot-stained faces impassive, bent to their work, seemingly unaware of the passage of the monitor vehicle.

  Gravius had the driver stop the vehicle fifty yards from the sentry post guarding the heavy wrought iron gate. He and Leland-27 got out. Gravius thumbed the control that caused his visor to retract, his subordinate copied the movement.

  The two men walked a few steps, and then Gravius held his hand out signaling a halt.

  “You might be wondering why I intervened when the Chairman wanted you executed,” he said.

  “I . . . yes, citizen,” Leland-27 said. “I thank you, but why did you do it?”

  Gravius rubbed at his chin, regarding the young monitor with a serious expression.

  “You might not understand . . . but, I’m your commander, and am therefore responsible for you. Besides, I saw that idiot . . . I mean, Citizen Robertson, tripped you causing the spill. I couldn’t say anything about that, but I’ll be damned if I was going to let you die for his clumsiness.”

  Leland-27 smiled.

  “Thank you, Citizen Gravius. I owe you my life.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, son. You’ll still have to survive outside patrol duty for a good long while; at least until Citizen Cruz forgets the incident. And, by the way, if you ever repeat this conversation we’re having to anyone, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “What conversation?” Leland-27 said; a blank expression on his face.

  Gravius-One smiled and patted his shoulder.

  “Now, off with you, and keep your eyes open and your head down out there. The others have already been notified of your arrival.”

  Leland-27 saluted and lowered his visor. Turning he marched briskly to the gate to present himself to the duty sentry.

  Gravius-One watched him go, a sad expression on his dark face.

  5.

  Three hours into their work detail in the pig enclosure, Hiroshi and Washington were covered in black muck and reeking of swine urine and feces, a dank, acrid odor that clung to skin and clothing and seemed to penetrate the very tissues of their nasal passages.

  “Man,” Washington said. “You’d think you’d get used to it, but pig shit just smells worse the longer you have to breathe it.”

  “You’re right about that.” Hiroshi nodded. “It’ll take hours washing the dirt off, and I don’t think they have soap strong enough to get the stink out. We’ll have to throw these clothes away.”

  They were assigned to a team that included six other boys, all sixteen to eighteen years old. As the oldest, they were given the heaviest work, which consisted of shoveling the black sludge into large buckets and carrying it to a waiting wagon. The wagon would then go to a nearby agricultural complex where the manure would be spread as fertilizer for the crops, or to the power plant where it was used as fuel.

  “I hope they don’t put any of this stuff on the potato crop,” Washington said.

  “You know they put it on everything.”

  “Aw, man; I’ll never eat another potato.”

  “How will you know?” Hiroshi asked. “They mush everything up into that gray stuff they feed us. For all we know, they probably flavor it with pig shit.”

  Washington made a face.

  “Yeah, now that you mention it, the smell here does remind me of that stuff.”

  They both laughed, which drew the attention of the black-clad monitor assigned to guard the work detail.

  “All right, you two,” he growled. “Stop your talking and get to work.”

  Hiroshi and Washington lowered their voices and bent their backs to moving the heavy, manure-laden containers, but continued to talk quietly.

  “Dickhead,” Washington said under his breath. “Standing around in his shiny black uniform like he’s something special.”

  “Yeah, bet you he’s sweating like a stuck pig in that thing,” Hiroshi added.

  “Sound of his voice, he seems to be about the same age as us.” Washington looked over at the monitor whose attention had been diverted by another prole who had dropped a bucket of manure, sending it splashing in all directions. “I wonder how he got stuck with keeping watch over pig dung.”

  “Maybe he didn’t clean his dart gun.” Hiroshi nodded toward the wicked looking black flechette gun hanging on the monitor’s hip.

  This caused another fit of laughing, which they tried to muffle by putting their hands over their mouths. Unfortunately, their hands were covered with the slick, black manure they’d been handling, which caused both to gag and spit. They found relatively grime-free sections of the sleeves of their singlesuits, with which they wiped their tongues.

  “Yuck,” Washington said. “That does taste like the slop they feed us. I think I might just skip supper tonight.”

  6.

  Octavia Olympus sat at the tiny desk in the tiny cubicle that served as her office at Columbus Heights Crèche. The official indoctrination day was ended, and she was now engaged in the thing most in her profession detested; the paperwork. Assessment reports, student essays done in crabby, hard to read script, and dicta from her headquarters across the river.

  She wanted nothing more than to burn every piece of paper and return to her small apartment on the other side of the river, to sit back with music playing on the sound system and a glass of wine in her hand. The only thing from this side of the river that she found interesting – besides the young prole, Hiroshi Jackson – was the fruit they grew in the fields, a portion of which was converted into flavorful wines, which she often imbibed after work to help erase the depressing scenes of the prole community from her mind.

  But, of course, there was no way should could leave until she’d read and initialed all of the paperwork, so she pulled the first flimsy sheet off the tidy pile of documents and began reading.

  The first dozen or so pages were assessment reports on the children under her care, with recommendations for further assignment; mostly to low-skill laboring jobs; and in one or two cases, recommendations for more advanced study to prepare the individual for one of the few technical jobs within the factories that had been reserved for proles. These were followed by a memorandum from the head of community orientation centers, the official name for the crèches, encouraging all supervisors to conserve power by turning off all lights and other electricity-drawing equipment from mid-morning to mid-afternoon as a means of alleviating brown-outs in the citizens’ community areas.

  It would mean a bit of discomfort for her and the rest of the attendants, but that was preferable to having electrical problems in her residence. It wasn’t as if the prole children needed to get accustomed to having reliable electrical power. Once they left the crèche, they would be consigned to a small cubicle in one of the gray, crumbling high-rise buildings in the prole community, having to share bathing and toilet facilities with ten to fifteen other people. She had little sympathy for the proles, especially those left under her care five days per week. Hundreds of boring little minds that it was her job to fill with a love of community, meaning a love of laboring from dawn to dusk so that she and her fellow citizens could live comfortably.

  Near the bottom of the pile was a paper that she saw only once a year, and one that often caused a cold feeling in her chest. A single sheet with a faint red border, it was the list of those in the crèche reaching the age of nineteen who had, for various reasons, been chosen for the annual culling. While she had little sympathy for the way her charges lived, what was left of basic human feelings inside her was repelled by the cold process of identifying those whose existence was considered of no utility to the community, and who would, therefore, have their existences terminated.

  As usual, the names were alphabetized by surname, so she was near the middle of the page of thirty names before one leapt out at he
r:

  JACKSON, HIROSHI (NMI)

  Her breath caught in her throat, and her heartbeat increased until she felt that she could hear the thumping.

  While Octavia Olympus cared little for her students, there was one exception, and if asked to explain it she would have been at a loss. Young Hiroshi Jackson had first come to her attention more than eleven years earlier when he’d been brought to the crèche, when she’d been an attendant. He’d been screaming and resistant, kicking and biting at the monitors who brought him, and had refused to speak or respond to speech for the first week there, constantly asking for his mother and father. The monitor officer in charge of the detail that had brought him in had given her a brief summary of his history, and she found it fascinating.

  Somehow, his parents had kept his existence a secret for seven years, hidden away in a subterranean chamber in the overgrowth near the great domed building with the strange woman’s statue on top. His history was, fascinating enough for her, but the fact that at seven he could read, write, and understood math almost as well as she really caught her interest; that and his fierce independence.

  She had watched Hiroshi grow from a rambunctious little boy into a precocious adolescent, and finally into a quietly confident young man; self-assured, but still fiercely independent. She would not have called what she felt for him love; this emotion was not one that was discussed or acknowledged among citizens, and most especially not for a prole. She did not, in fact, understand the feeling. So, the hotness in her eyes, followed by the warmth of tears tracking across her cheeks after she’d seen his name came as a surprise to her.

  The standard protocol when the list came out was to post it on the bulletin board at the entrance to the dining facility where the selected, along with everyone else, would be able to see it. It was, therefore, completely not in keeping with protocol when Octavia Olympus thumbed the call button on the communicator on her desk.

  “Yes, headmaster,” came the tinny voice of her assistant. “What can I do for you?”