The Eden Project

“Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains,

at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses

of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean,

at the circular motions of the stars, and yet they

pass by themselves without wondering”

Saint Augustine

Hungover again, damn man, that’s twice this month, your slipping. Sliding. Ryan thinks these things to himself among much darker thoughts about his character. The key to life is being your own best friend, to stop hyper focusing on everything everyone else, but that’s easier said than done when you can also be your own worst enemy. People have made such musings before about the conundrum of human existence. Love thyself. That commandment doesn’t mean to adore or covet oneself. It means something different that most people, including Ryan, could understand plain as the words coming out of their mouths but could not understand entirely. Don't take it to heart, people always try to pull away from themselves, but the danger of all moral platitudes is that they are too open ended. The phrase ought to read: figure out why among billions of things to focus on, you let this one thing penetrate you in such a terrible way.

The year was 2077 and news reporters, T.V stars, and hip-hop artists all agreed that the world was completely fucked. Who cares if you have a billion dollars when you can’t even take a ride in your fancy personal helicopter because global warming has sparked a rise in epically violent storms that could turn up, like an unwanted friend, at any minute. The world was so overcrowded and crawling with people that you could practically see us from outer space. Humans crawled across the Earth’s skin like fleas. Any inch of space that wasn’t being used to jam more people into had to be converted for agriculture. Science worked around the clock to come out with new cures and remedies, laboratory grade giant patches to try and plug up more and more holes appearing on the daily.

Ryan supposed he lives a typical life in comparison to what most people did where he had grown up and currently lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. The city had decades ago vomited out different pieces of itself: Surrey, Mission, Abbotsford…ect. Now they all just formed rolling blobs of lights with no end or edges in sight. Ryan lived so far back away from the water, in a cramped shoebox hovel of an apartment, that it mine as well have been Alberta he resided in. Any inch of room that the water or a distant mountain could be viewed out of was triple the cost. In some buildings, an apartment with a south facing view could be pennies compared to a spot on the north facing side. Humans always have loved to stare at things this is common between all of us, but some people prefer to stare at certain things while some at others.

Every day he did approximately the same thing and followed this routinely, and little chaos that was out of the “norm” went on. At least not much of it. Capitalism and profit always raises its head up where it can, for whatever it can, despite the increasing incidences of natural disasters, crimes, socioeconomic issues, and impending military doom. So, every morning Ryan woke up at five o’clock to the alarm on his smart phone, before the sun rose no matter what time of year, and he lay in his hide-a-bed for a moment listening to the sound of his coffee pot gurgle. Coffee and tea: some things are eternal, don’t ask what it really is though. Ryan knew he had exactly ten minutes to get his morning routine done, fifteen minutes for coffee and to check his electronic devices, five minutes to fumble for his keys, and thirty minutes to make his way in the beat-up Pontiac he drove to the factory he worked in as a shift supervisor. He was good with time and remembering things, naturally. It must be so because he certainly never had a chance to cultivate them in his youth and once he did as an adult he never tried.

Some things just seem to come naturally to certain people, so the saying goes: aces in their places. Ryan supervised, more like organized and managed the social issues of, workers at one of many soy processing plants. Soy was the easiest and cheapest product to cultivate in order to feed all the people of Earth and it was versatile. The plant Ryan worked at was owned by SoyLyfe, and in the area he supervised the workers in the earliest stages of soy processing. In these early stages the raw soybean was subjected to a pre-treatment, preparation for extraction, and then the multi-stage extraction itself. This all sounded quite fancy but it really wasn’t. It did require quite a few steps, though, and so Ryan was one of four supervisors on the team. In different centers of the plant they turned what his team produced, soybean meal, to make a number of different products. Not overly thrilling stuff but the co-worker drama could be quite fascinating. Occasionally, Ryan even found himself amidst some of this drama. Being only twenty-six and not entirely misfortunate looking he attracted the attention of quite a few women.

More men than women. This age-old phenomenon was an increasing feature the also dominated the local and global news because it was sky-rocketing. All over the world. The Asians should have been happy but soon enough we all realized the real consequence of that. The price of pussy went way up. Also, women became a coveted object and also hated for this. Rape incidents sky-rocketed. If you were a woman in this day and age taking a cab alone could be the last time you were ever seen again. Some women cashed in on their notoriety more than ever, however, and at least one silver lining was seeing the happy faces of prevailing call girls. Finally, famous for all the hard work they did and now they could do even less for much more than they ever imagined.

As a handsome young man with one of the “better” jobs for its time, surrounded by many men who all were aggressively horny, Ryan could get into quite a bit of trouble for attracting so many women. As most women were already spoken for, or at some time or another were, even among such crowds, infamy could be achieved. He’d almost been jumped six months ago on his way to his beat-up marron almost red car. Pontiacs making a new line of car only to become the working horse of the lower class: Also a stable thing from the past still remaining. Grime from all of the dust (so few trees) and pollution leaving smeared grease and grime streaks on the glass. Lucky for Ryan when the white no-plate Chevrolet skidding up into the empty parking lot he didn’t think twice. Didn’t fumble the keys or pause. He hopped in that son of a bitch and did a 180 out of the stall like he was playing a video game. Good hand-eye co-ordination and a bit of luck, he had those things too.

Ryan had such good motor movement skills from all of the skateboarding he did at the large concrete bowl the city had built for kids in the cluster of mass project living units he had grown up in. Keep the kids busy and keep them from ripping down the doors of your mansions with state of the art air/water filtration and cool glassy swimming pools. In-door, of course, you don’t want to bathe in something that has been exposed to the air for too long – and that was when he had been a kid. Now it was even worse. He had grown up in a small one-bedroom apartment with his mother and two younger brothers who were now twenty-three and nineteen. His mom was a prostitute but not a very good one. Not that she wasn’t beautiful or smart. Ryan always thought his mother was those things. Unfortunately, Marian, that was her name, would often run up large debts with drug dealers who would force them to pay off her debts through cash or sex. Either way, desperate, out of money, and cut-off, Marian would take the gamble for extra pay-outs and sleep with clients or thugs without a contraceptive. Then she would get pregnant.

That was what made Marian a bad hooker: getting knocked-up all the time. Ryan and probably everyone else knew that and his mother did too. Some of the wealthiest escorts did more drugs than wealthy politicians and raked in just as much dough as them. You couldn’t expect a woman who was out of commission for a good chunk of the year before running back to her client list like a lost puppy to make too much cash or earn a lot of notoriety. Further impairing her was the motherly schedule she had to adopt: children could not be left alone in the wee hours of the morning. They were helpless and dumb. They could roll over the wrong way and die. Often, ends were so tight that Ryan would resort to the risky act of theft in order to obtain food for his brothers. His mom didn’t need much food because the only reason there wasn’t any was because of her ongoing substance use.

Designer drugs now were even scarier and almost anyone would try to cook up something to sell off as the real thing. Worse still was that all drugs were administered subcutaneously, leaching into the blood stream rapidly with the help of added enzymes, by a small topically administered agent. The agent, whatever drug it was, was delivered in varying designs of the similar structure: a tube with very small, almost microscope, fibers at one end that imperceivably penetrated the skin. On the other end a button to push down on which released the fibers, only to be pressed once the correct end was touching the skin. Within minutes you could be walking amongst distant fairy tale lands, watching colours dance in the air, or finding whatever waits on the other side of death. His mother certainly experienced the latter but it was the former that took Marian from him forever.

On his seventeenth birthday Ryan had found his mother dead on their ripped green sofa. She had tried to “jazz it up” as she would say, a tribute of a saying, with various quilts picked from piles in dusty over-stocked pawn shops that littered every street corner. Whatever was in the vial instead of her regular poison of choice literally caused her skin to melt. These animals would maniacally fill up the clear vials with toilet water if it looked roughly the right colours. So many generations of desperate, poor, and sad people that a hundred more would rise up in Marian’s place to hit up any friend of a friend for a fix. A six or eight hour escape from reality. It had taken the over-worked paramedics over a day to show up and remove her dead corpse.

It had been early in the morning, her death, and his younger brothers still slept on their cramped un-framed queen size mattress. At seventeen you understand the world much more than you did even a few years prior, especially in the world Ryan lived in, so he knew that no one would be coming fast. They had the still-living to attend to. He had to take one of their quilts, he tried to choose one of their least favorites for whatever silly reason and positioned it beside the couch. Brutishly, Ryan tried not to look at her as he heaved her heavy weight over and onto the blanket. This made a dull thud and he paused like a cat burglar to hear if his brothers opened the door. Hearing nothing, he quickly folded both sides of the large blanket up around her and gagged at the smell already emitting from her rotting flesh.

Pulling all of their things quietly out of the little closet by the apartment’s door and dragging her body in there, stuffing it in, jamming it shut – it made Ryan felt like he himself had murdered her. Vivid details of that day popped into his mind in recurring random scenes even now. Sometimes it was just the smell of her body or the feeling of her melted flesh when the blanket shifted off of her as he muscled her into closet. Other times it was the picture of her bulging red eyes and forever open-mouthed toothy gape. These were the images, above all of the memories, that Ryan tried to suppress long enough to pass into the illusion of sleep by drinking too much too frequently. There was only so long a man could lay in his bed terrorized by images such as the ones that walked the lonely lit hallways of his mind. He’d had to take care of his brothers after that. Be Mr. Serious. He always had been or had to be.

The day the new great and global leader was announced across all live streaming media pathways, Our World Legacy (OWL), was also the same day the Great Culling was announced. Ryan had to Google the word. Who was this new world leader and where had they come from? Emerging out of nowhere, almost impossible in this day and age, from the mist of something terrible and great. All of this was promptly, as well as gratefully, announced by a robotic gender-neutral voice. No person or video-clip of any masked figures with a major politician at knife point in some darkly lit room with one light bulb. No. In fact, just in case you missed anything, the voice repeated the fifteen-minute message to people. Over and over again.

Ryan had every Sunday off from the busy factory and this was his only day to rest. Still, he had slept in until only seven A.M, much too accustomed to his early schedule, and had done his morning routine in his little apartment like usual. Coffee – check. Shower – check. Social media – wait. All of his Facebook “friends,” most of whom he had never talked to for more than a minute, had terrified prayers calling out to long forgotten Gods for their loved ones. And themselves. Churches were a thing of the past but sayings last the ages, just changing slightly with time. Weirdly, Ryan still poured himself some coffee into a green company mug with his preferred hazelnut CoffeeQuick liquid creamer. He took a sip of the steaming potion while padding barefoot into the living room. These weren’t so much rooms, his apartment only had one real room which was the bedroom. Design allowed this one to sort of feel a bit segregated. Why is it that he longed for that nostalgic floor plan? Maybe it was just the space he craved. Room to breathe.

Electronics were mass-produced and cheap, easy to acquire. His large ultra-thin plasma television set was mounted to the wall, because now anything made out of real wood was something only people with disposable income had. Even the middle class was shrinking now, though. No one left to blame. Now a blank screen flashed before him with nothing but the white outline of Venus flytrap against a pale baby-blue background. Now a monotone inhuman voice said exactly this to all of the world:

“This is the Our World Legacy organization and new free world global leader. There is no need to be afraid, citizens of the world. We are a team of scholars from various academic backgrounds from all of the world that have teamed together with previous independent world leaders to transition into a complete whole. Old world leaders, presidents, prime ministers, and dictators, are no longer relevant terms. Our planet is in great trouble and this is obvious to anyone who has eyes plain for any individual to see. Even our own race is steadily refusing to procreate, our own bodies rebelling against us, we see this in the lowered birth rates and higher number of men to women. We know this. There were some hard choices that had to be made in order to build a better life for the future of the planet and human race itself. So, we did.

Human-beings must be culled back, a thing we have done ourselves to other animals, and while I know this must frighten even the most cold-blooded of men I assure you it will not be done brutally. Furthermore, every individual will be given one chance at taking a universal test in which every member of the world will be ranked against each other on a Bell curve. It is needless to say that those in the bottom 15-20% will be culled. These are not tests of popular culture, mathematical knowledge, or essay-writing. In the coming week every major city will have a centre transitioned into a testing facility. Every city and its surrounding area will be placed into zones and every person under that zone will go in order of birth date to the examinations. Once this process is complete, globally, the Bell curve will be finalized.

Please note that in the following weeks no ongoing work is allowed to continue. No leaving your house. No engaging in business activities or travelling. All Our World Legacy enforcers will be wearing uniforms with the crest you see before you. Please obey them or experience immediate mortality. Please note that all food and water will be supplied by Our World Legacy enforcers in meal packages. All citizens will be accounted for. We appreciate your patience in these uncomfortable times but we assure you that even greater comfort is yet to come. You are all contributing to making a better, more peaceful, stable, and environmentally sustainable world. No one of us is responsible for the state of the Earth but we all must do our share in fixing it. Thank you.”

Ryan listened to the broadcast a second time and then fumbled around for the remote, lost somewhere beside him on his cheesy black loveseat faux leather sofa. Who were these people and where had they come from? The world had plodded along just on the cusp of disaster, threatening too implode at any moment, for so many decades now that no one had really seen this coming. Just end it all ourselves by bowing out? Maybe that was the noble thing to do. Still, Ryan felt a flutter in his heart at the thought of taking these tests. He wasn’t an overly intelligent man by any means. He had grown up in the slums like two thirds of the world’s population. What good would he bring to a future utopia? How to break into a building doesn’t get you into heaven. How to pickpocket from a store with thirty billion cameras doesn’t help you master the subtleties of life. The odds of him somehow maneuvering his way through this one seemed slim. No hiding in the back of the class, so to speak.

He had never gotten a chance to “hide at the back of the class,” duck in late, or any academic related faux paus. At the end of the two thousandth year, A.D of course, Canada’s socialistic regime, founded from weed smoke and acid trips but nonetheless helpful, finally collapsed due to lack of reformation over the years to handle such rapid population growth. Tragic, yes. Try being someone on welfare with diabetes and one leg in the middle of a Northern Ontario winter – good luck. There were images of folks frozen like popsicles back then. Near the coast in British Columbia was one of the few habitable places in Canada, without survival skills that is for the long-lost culture of the First People lived here for many years in the harshest of climates in ancient times, but everything finally caved in on itself. Homeless people used to be annoying? You couldn’t park a car anymore without having to watch out for someone’s feet, all huddled by the curb with their trash wares. Good times.

Anyways, needless to say that by the time he was born anything “public” was in complete and total ruin. You couldn’t be sure if the doctor’s working at the sparse free health clinics were actual certified professionals or just thugs in white coats in a rented space. There was one public school for all of Vancouver and had a waiting list that would take you till beyond the age of even being eligible to go to high school. Elementary school? Forget about it. Reading, writing, and basic arithmetic were the parent’s responsibility to pass on to their offspring. Unless you went with the glowing option of private school. This would cost at minimum ten thousand dollars a year, however, and was far out of his mother’s financial reach. Despite Marian’s use of drugs and liquor, she did attempt to teach all three of her children the basics when each of them was what she deemed “ready for learning.” Ryan’s younger brothers struggled immensely to sit still for even the simplest arithmetic equation but not him. He loved the few uninterrupted, clear-eyed moments, that he got with his mother every morning during his youth. Loved her glowing praise when he excelled at the make-shift homework written shakily on bumpy recycled paper.

Even after mastering all of his mother’s knowledge he continued to sit in on his younger brother’s lessons just to be around her. All of them, together, relatively alright. Unfortunately, once he turned thirteen he was expected to become a man and find ways to make money for himself. Even for his mother, who would often coldly raid his things to find secret stashes of currency chips. Laser printed chips, encrypted with their monetary or item redemption amount, and often just little plain light-weight circular things. As such, his mind was halted from pursuing any intellectual passions, if any beyond his mother were even readily available to him somewhere somehow, and instead he became fixated on another goal: money. Money meant security. There was only so much a man in this scary modern world could do to elevate himself from such a lowly, no matter how common, a position but he had managed to claw himself up a couple inches. Enough to afford a half-decent apartment where the landlord didn’t sell copies of the key FOB for his unit to thugs to steal his things, or worse. Human trafficking for much worse than sex acts took place now: organs, dark experimental research, and living donors. The have-nots did what they could to survive and the haves paid them in crumbs for pieces of their soul. Now all of them were being called on for judgement day.

Today was the day of his testing and for once in human history since the dawn of the internet, he had no inkling of what was to come. He had received the date through a text message, email, and a note that had been slid under his apartment door. As he was banned from leaving the house and all internet worked via restricted access, he was sure to get the message. The day of he wasn’t too sure on what to wear or what to do really. The typed letter, everything about this was designed to limit contact with the citizen, instructed that a government enforcer would arrive no later than 9:45 A.M to take Ryan to the facility for his testing. He would then be returned to wait at his house until all of the testing, for everyone on the planet, was finished. How long would this take? No mention was provided.

Amiss for what to put on Ryan aimed for the practical and took a look at himself in the little bathroom over-the-sink mirror. What he had chosen to wear was black tapered sweat pants (the pair without the hole in the knee), a grey only moderately stained t-shirt, and a pair of running shoes. Ryan was effortlessly in shape and his good physique contributed to what gave him his handsome overall image. An excellent body was nothing without a chiseled jaw-line and good height, both of which he possessed, as well as a medium-sized well arched nose. Hazel eyes shadowed by well-defined thick dark eyebrows. All crowned with a head of buzzed dark thick hair. Good looks and a relatively straight smile wouldn’t save him now, though. Heart beating fast he shut the light off in the bathroom, jumping slightly when he heard a knock at the door, and went to greet the enforcer.

The enforcer wore a matching two-piece suit the same colour as the backdrop for the T.V alert that had broadcasted the new world leader’s message. On the man’s top right-hand breast was a white embroidered Venus fly trap. Unnervingly, the man’s face was hidden behind a thin almost skin-like looking Balaklava with no slits for the eyes or the mouth. The material looked almost like pantyhose but whether Ryan was just scared or not, he wasn’t sure, the material appeared to be moving slightly of its own accord. The man said nothing to Ryan and he said nothing back to the man. Instead, they hopped inside a sleek silver vehicle, make unnoticed at this point, Ryan in the back and the enforcer in the front passenger seat. Another enforcer drove the vehicle. The silence was starting to get to him by the time they finally, after almost twenty minutes of driving through the eerily quiet urban jungle, came to the testing facility.

Not a soul or vehicle out on the open streets, no fighting for parking as they quickly rolled up to the building, and Ryan experience perfect silence for the first time in his life. Another realization struck him suddenly as well: there were no more of the street folk cluttering and loitering around the buildings and curbs. Where did they take them all? Ryan asked himself this as the three of them entered the building, enforcer on either side of him, and said goodbye to the dust in the outside air. The facility they had chosen for all the testing in the city and surrounding area used to be an enormous rice processing and packaging plant. Rice was second to soy in the most consumed and used renewable resource of the year. The company’s slogan was lost to him in the whirlwind of thoughts continuously crossing his mind and his heart pounding almost visibly in his chest. The security all around the place didn’t do much to ease his panic either. All of them seemed to be hulking beasts of men and despite Ryan boasting a tall 6’1”, most of these guys still had a couple inches on him.

To the observer no one would have been able to tell what the factory had been unless they understood the work-related jargon and materials still left carelessly piled around. Despite this, the workers, whoever they were, had done a great job cleaning up the location and it sparkled immaculately. If there had been walls they had been knocked down and the narrow entry way, passing an empty receptionist station on the left longing for a smiling woman to ask for an appointment or employee pass, opened up into an enormous square room with high ceilings. Ryan had poor vision from a distance but it wasn’t entirely hopeless so he could make out what looked to be a number of different slightly segregated stations. People moved about the room doing things he did not understand because he had no clue what exactly was going on. There were other just normal looking people too, like him, and he supposed they must do the test in sort of circuit fashion to maximize time efficiency.

They had everyone line up just where the entry way ended. The enforcers organized the people in some mysterious order that could only make sense to them. Everyone shifted nervously and Ryan could smell all the different cooking smells that always lingered on people’s clothes who lived in small apartments. He also noticed that some people out of the dozen or so folks there looked spectacularly dressed as well. Flamboyantly even. This must be the new style of the rich, powerful, and famous, Ryan thought quietly as he looked around shamelessly, They look like peacocks. Everyone looked pale and tired. A tan woman with a terrified looking child cried in a disturbing manner, wailing occasionally. Sniffling was heard throughout. His head pounded under the bright lights.

“Hello participants, sector 3 group 180, welcome to your testing day!” A strong but light and airy female voice echoed out, getting closer to the group of them huddled in a line by the wall still, “You will go in order from left to right towards each station once it is free. Every station has a ten-minute limitation except for the sixth and final station, where you will have fifteen minutes. There will be no questions asked and no answers given. Good luck and to some of you, OWL welcomes you to our new world.”

With that the masked woman spun on her baby blue heels, tight pencil skirt hugging her well-defined thick hips, and strutted expertly back across the almost gymnasium-like room. She appeared to be headed for a door located at the far right back corner but Ryan couldn’t be sure. Additionally, he lost focus on the woman because the sound of the first person being called, incidentally the black woman, turned Ryan’s attention back to reality. There were only three people ahead of him and he knew it would take less than half an hour for it to be his turn. Half an hour spent leaning against a wall staring at a fairly boring scene shouldn’t be something that turns time into this elusive slippery creature. But it did. Palms sweating and adrenaline racing he felt like time was moving at lightspeed. He watched intently as the first two participants quickly moved on past the first task which took place at a station to the far left. Ryan could see now they had giant blue flags with the number on each station. The third participant had to be forcibly removed from the seated task and pulled on towards the second station, his feet dragging slightly, mouth shouting some obscenities out. The man was among one of the more eloquently dressed.

Ryan recognized that his turn had befallen him and with a gulp, proceeded. It was impossible for him to really try to understand what his judges were looking for with their tests except for the physical examinations. Those were at stations five and six. The fifth station was straight forward: a basic routine of physical performances was demanded of him by the not-so-typical figure in all-blue with a living breathing thing growing on his face for a mask. He was instructed to do as many push-ups, jumping jacks, pull-ups, and crunches as he could. Admittedly, it had been a long time since Ryan had done much physical activity but under these conditions he could perform not entirely terribly. Are thirty push-ups the average amount a male of my age should be able to do? Questions like that circled round inside and he had to try always to push them away and focus on whatever task was coming his way next. The sixth test and the one he had fifteen minutes to complete was really only exactly fifteen minutes because it involved specimen samples: blood, hair – that sort of thing.

The first four tasks he could certainly negate as being intellectual in nature. None of the questions were familiar to him, however, no plain hypotenuse to find. These tests seemed almost pre-historic in nature: recognizing patterns, amounts, and visualization. The fourth task was unique unto itself but definitely involved the mind but seemed geared towards psychological health rather than mental capabilities. What was handed to him at this small station, a medieval desk and chair, was an examination booklet with three questions held together with a paper clip. His name and the date had pre-emptively been applied to each page for him. After every question he was given enough room to fit approximately a paragraph, five to seven sentences, of his sloppy handwriting carved out with a pencil in his left hand. The questions went as follows:

If you could do anything at all, what would you change in the world and why?

What are changes you would like to make in yourself if you had all the time and resources at your disposal and why?

What is your favourite thing to do and why?

They seemed oddly broad questions but Ryan rapidly penciled in his answers as best he could. It was hard to produce legible material under such time constrains but he tried to properly present the contents of his thoughts to whomever would be reviewing this later. He wondered how you could even score such questions and supposed they must have some reasoning, something logical, behind it. To weight a human’s life based on what they liked to do seemed sort of petty or shallow, but was it? Ryan chewed this over not at the time but on his way home, accompanied by two maniacally quiet enforcers (were they the same or different ones? How could you tell?), taking minute to soak up the fact that even if he was a total moron at the very least he was lucky to have worn practical attire to his judgement day. Additionally, the choice of a dark grey shirt had comfortably hidden the buckets of sweat that had been rolling down his back like the former gushing Niagara Falls. His heart settled back down into normal rhythm at some point during their drive, he wasn’t sure when, but he was grateful for the peace.

***

A month or so had passed since the day of Ryan’s visit to the converted rice factory and possibly a week since the results had been finalized. Everyone ranked against their fellow man for not only current physical and mental health but prospective success genetically. The three weeks following his examination, he supposes they must have started with younger people first and then went to old people so his name had come up relatively fast, had been quite the nerve-wracking experience. No access to drugs or liquor to dull the ache because the lock-down was effective until the end of the culling. This the T.V had announced. So, Ryan had to anxiously wake up every morning and check to see if there was anything other than white noise coming from the television set. God how he wished he had bought more books, so cheap and often found in heaps at thrift stores relics of an older and uncared for time when literature was everywhere, when he had the chance to. Money had been tight for Ryan before but he always had a few extra chips to rub together and he should have bought more to read. Something, anything. A hobby.

Just over a month later he finally heard voice instruct all citizens that the testing was complete, thanking them for their patience, and that the results had been achieved. Everything about this was fair, they were assured, even OWL members themselves had to take the test. OWL was just the start of something new, the doorway – at least this is what they said. Not too much of a comfort to a person in the melancholic throws of waiting. Things should always be becoming, living, and being forced to sit and wait stagnantly with no choice should never be imposed on a thing. Ryan of course had practice with this, having spent many hours at work, but by the end of that month he was ready to throw himself out the window if it meant moving forward with something. That same day the voice announced the results had been concluded a piece of paper was slipped under his apartment’s door and his phone buzzed twice with both a text message and a notification. What would it say? Would they even tell you before hand if they were coming to collect you for certain death? Ryan had turned over his fate like a coin multiple times over the past few weeks and doubted that he would even be in the top 70% of the country let alone not in the bottom. Nervously, he approached the note on the floor as if he were a bewildered animal.

Blinking several times to clear his eyes he picked up the note, folded once in half and on rare plain white paper, he opened it up and examined the typed writing before him. How strange a feeling, when looking back on things, to realize when one is holding their entire destiny in their hands. But maybe we all do, at so many points in our lives, and it just remains invisible or unseen. The note said this:

Dear Mr. Ryan Matthews,

We are please to inform you that not only did you succeed in meeting the minimum performance required to pass the test, you excelled! You place in the eighty-sixth percentile of all living human-beings. Congratulations! A number of exciting changes are headed our way and we are happy you will be a part of shaping our new world. Together we will make it better. Please notice that a date had been enclosed for a meeting in your local area where a representative of Our World Legacy will be instructing all citizens on new regulations and plans to come. Feedback is encouraged.

Thank you,

Our World Legacy.

Down the hall a sickening sound of someone causing an uproar over something unknowable to Ryan pulled him away from releasing a full breath of relief. The screaming was coming from a woman and he dropped the note, pressing the button on his viewing screen to the hallway, and watching as several enforcers hauled lifeless and moving bodies out of their cubicles called homes. One person he recognized as his perversely racist neighbor, he knew this because being white many other white men felt the need to share their objectifications to a multi-colored mosaic with him, whose name was escaping him at the moment. Ryan wanted to rush out into the hallway and stop the events taking place before him but that was impossible. This couldn’t have been the only way, Ryan mused to himself, retiring to sit dejectedly in the living room, and resisting the urge to follow the horror-show to his window over-looking the streets below. The sounds were enough.

The SmartTv remote lay on the couch where it normally did and hastily he reached to put on recorded downloaded there. Ryan had always been slightly obsessed with history and had scoured all available portals for a few tracks from a band called Lynard Skynard. Grainy authentic guitar sounds reached out to his soul and helped purge some of the darkness that had grown there, been there forever maybe, and made him feel less alone. There certainly was more to life than what people had limited it to or what they had become. Perhaps now that there would be natural resources again real instruments could be made once more and no longer would synthetic sound be the theme of modern pop on the radio.

He could never have imagined coming up with a plan to kill off a good chunk of the human race to save the planet and themselves, Ryan knew this about himself. The hero archetype, figure, or legend (whatever you want to call it) lives in every person since the dawn of time, and just like Ryan could not imagine taking even one life to save a million some people could not imagine being a person who wouldn’t. Heroes are only capable of sacrificing themselves not others at their expense. Ryan knew these men had given everyone a fair shot, this was true about what they said, but still what had been done would certainly scar this generations psyche and maybe even a generation after to come. There was no one to blame this time but themselves, though. Every single one of them had let the world get this way and now all Ryan could do was keep living. Ryan, shocked at his own success, couldn’t help but wonder if his younger brothers (who had both died last year due to drugs as well) and his mother would have passed the test. He likes to think that they would have. They may have been lost, broken, and condemned by the world but they made him who he was and that had saved what that could be.