The Forgotten Age: The Ground Crew

Living underground isn’t all that interesting. For someone like Emily, the cramped quarters made her yearn for an escape. Everywhere the walls were the same plain dull white that faded over the years to gray. Emily’s living quarters were standard, with a folding cot that was three feet wide and five feet long and a toilet next to a standing shower. In the walls she had three boxes for her belongings and a single mirror to look at something other than the cold metallic white of the walls. White was the color that dominated her life, from the clothes she wore to the walls that made her feel suffocated. Emily wanted nothing more than an escape from it. That escape comes to only a given few, the Ground Crew.

Most dwellers of what has been commonly referred to as “The Time Capsule” don’t mind the way things are. Things are safe in Time Capsule, or TC, since nobody on the outside knows they exist. TC had nothing you could call beautiful or aesthetic about it. Think of sterile, grey, dimly lit hallways everywhere and bland food and you almost can see in your mind’s eye what TC is. But Emily knew there was better. Out there. In the real world.

In the Unknown.

Everyone in TC learns about the Efficiency Initiative at a young age. The Initiative is a document over a thousand pages long dictating how everything in TC must be conserved and resources should be rationed extremely so everyone can survive on the little resources they have. The Efficiency Initiative is much stricter than even old prison systems. They had timed showers, calorie limits on food, only could use the restrooms three times a day, and only changed clothes twice a week. Nobody was ever allowed to eat more than three meals a day, and the sick were put down instead of treated.

Emily was always considered dead weight in TC. Practically a drop out in any placement program, she was only good in terms of thinking differently and being a thorn in her teacher’s side. Unfortunately, TC had no need of any philosophers, artists, or anyone who had her style of thinking. The way TC worked made it so those who conform are rewarded, and those who don’t fit in want to die.

Of course, that is what Emily thought. And now at the day before her eighteenth birthday, she was eligible to enter the trials to join the Ground Crew.

The little that civilians in TC learn about the Ground Crew is that they go on the surface, and that they are the most important team in all of TC in terms of survival. Emily didn’t pay attention much during her schooling, so she didn’t understand the role of recycling and how the Ground Team was necessary. All she cared about was going to the Unknown. Nobody ever sees the Ground Team when they become official members, most likely to keep knowledge of the Outside hidden.

Emily never understood why, except what she learned in biology. She knew the surface world wasn’t safe, and that’s why they were in the Time Capsule. She never knew what makes the surface unsafe, and nobody else except the Ground Crew. That’s why she wanted to join. Pure curiosity. That, and she didn’t feel like she fit in anywhere else. The idea of exploration intrigued her.

Of course, there are high requirements for being just eligible to apply to the Ground Crew. Every “career” is a field that has requirements in different fields of skill so that the right people are placed into it. An average, uninterested girl like Emily obviously wouldn’t be an Engineer or Scientist. Those are always popular careers. Everyone has a job as they become adults, and Emily wouldn’t qualify for any really important career if she didn’t make it into the Ground Crew.

Being a janitor really would be a letdown.

So, like any determined and driven person, she nearly obsessively trained for this career. Only problem is while all it takes is smarts and scores on tests to be an engineer, Ground Crew tests are completely different. After all, it’s the only career where physical strength and aptitude is a requirement. Being born and raised in the TC, no real job except a very few manual labor jobs require any sort of physicality.

Emily was obviously fit. While others studied for their tests, Emily trained. Obsessively perfectly describes her attitude about it all. Most people would ridicule her for her pinning all her hopes on getting on the Ground Crew. The past recruits were always men, and the stigma was that women aren’t deemed “efficient” for the Ground Crew. Emily knew this wasn’t a sign of sexism from the others. She knew women’s bodies were made biologically different than men. From the origin of homo sapien, the males were the warriors and the women were the gatherers. At least, that was what she was told in history.

Emily was actually much smarter than she let on. When it comes to learning about things, she was brilliant in the subjects she cared about, and couldn’t bother to write an essay on the subjects she couldn’t care less about. The doctors said she had an attention disorder, calling her a Savant when it came to the things she cared about. She knew women were built to be good spotters. She knew women’s eyes can see a greater depth of color than men. She knew women were built to rear children, and so they were less hormonal than the men, who had a near unlimited potential offspring. Women and Men were genetically different, so instead of trying to be better than men in the things they were made for, she would excel in the arts that women were better at.

She was much more confident when she checked the records a year ago, to see that a woman was recruited to the Ground Crew about fifty-seven years ago. What she was attempting to do wasn’t impossible. And if there was even a shred of hope, she wouldn’t give up.

“Will you ever pay attention in my class, Emily?”

Emily was brought out of her reverie by the AI program on her terminal. It took the avatar of a stern caricature of what the records said teachers looked like. This one took on the personality of the annoyed, tired teacher who barely wanted to teach at all. He had a crooked tie hanging low and exposing his neck, with a wrinkled shirt that barely seemed to stay tucked in. He looked about fifty years old, and definitely on the heavier side. Sweat stains under his armpits always made Emily unable to treat it seriously.

“Not unless you teach me more about survival, athletics, or something I’ll actually use.” She retorted to the program.

The teacher snorted, “oh yes, because the Krebs Cycle is so boring! Sorry for teaching you about how the body produces energy! Because it is so unimportant to know how biology works.”

Emily smiled, “exactly!”

Before the Teacher could reply, she turned off the terminal on her desk. She was in her bedroom, like every minor in TC who goes through schooling. Other than her bed and what passed as a restroom, the only thing of interest in her room was the terminal she used to get her lessons. The room was most likely less than a hundred square feet in total, with a ceiling barely high enough for her to stand straight up in. She felt bad for the people who were six feet tall or higher.

Since Emily was athletic, her clothes definitely didn’t fit her comfortably. She was strong and lean, and knew she had the best strength and physical abilities than most men her age. Since their diet was so controlled, the need for exercise was very minute in TC. Obesity is nonexistent in TC, and the thought of being fat doesn’t cross anyone’s mind. There is never enough food for anyone to get to that point.

Emily left her room and walked to the cafeteria. Because of her added muscles, she was permitted more calories than the average minor her age. Every month they would test her metabolism and make sure she was eating enough to maintain her strength. Of course, they would lower it if she didn’t make it into the Ground Crew, and her body would slowly atrophy since she wouldn’t have the energy to continue exercising.

She walked inside the drab, grey room with only featureless tables and a terminal at the entrance to sign in to get her food. There was a chute the food would come down, with a bottle of water to swallow down the “meal”. The room was boring like the rest, with long tables that could seat four people on each side arranged like a spreadsheet with rows and columns.

Emily’s meal slid down the chute, a small plate with two objects on it. A clear water cylinder and another that was shorter, but it wasn’t clear. She opened the solid one from the top and looked inside to see the same reddish, greyish, almost muddy brown substance she had eaten every day, three days a week for her entire teenage life. Everyone had specifically made meals to their diets and calorie usage, and Emily’s was redder than others due to the proteins added. Speaking of others, she noticed the same strange girl that was always in the cafeteria whenever she ate staring at her. Emily never spoke to her, but she didn’t think of her as strange. The girl was an outcast like her, and from her diminutive stature the staring girl was definitely not going into the same field she was. Emily sort of felt sorry for the staring girl, but went on to focus on her meal. She lifted the container and chugged the entire meal down in one go, to try to get past the awful taste. Then she chugged the water to keep it all down and wash out the awful taste and tossed the plate and container into the trash can.

Not even five minutes passed and she was already out, like most civilians in the Time Capsule. Everything in their life was timed so they could get the most out of their day. Emily only got to exercise because she was a hopeful applicant to the Ground Crew. Most people never even use the room, so that is where Emily gets the most privacy outside of her own room.

Privacy was really not the best word to describe Emily’s living arrangements. Nothing she did was truly private, since the Efficiency Initiative has its own psychology department that loves to know everything about you. Another way they get people into their most productive station so they can fit in and be a benefit to society.

Emily often got into these funks when she was reminded of the way things are around the TC. Her days here were soon over as the exam looms closer and closer. Emily was officially an adult in twelve days, so she spent almost every waking hour training where she wasn’t mandatorily required to be in school.

It wasn’t hard to see that Emily wasn’t one to make friends. Almost every youth her age was either intimidated by her or thought of her as dead weight. If Emily was honest to herself, she could see why. If she would fail the test for the Ground Team, she wouldn’t be suited for any other job.

The next following days was more of the same. Studies, eating, exercise, sleep. Rinse, repeat. She had no friends, so no socializing. Nobody else really socialized, there was no free time to go out of your way to see your friends. People only socialized while doing their assigned tasks and happened to see someone they knew. The TC really tried to discourage mingling. When she couldn’t sleep, Emily would read up on survival medicine and homebrewing do it yourself, or DIY, crafts on her tablet. One evening she studied how to make crude oil out of random ingredients. Another evening she studied unarmed fighting styles using improvised weapons. Another evening she studied how to make a fire.

Too bad Emily never knew what a fire really was.

She understood that somehow fire was used to survive and clean food, but it also kept her warm. She had no idea how those three things went together. She knew the materials she read from were censored, but they didn’t remove every reference to things that nobody knows about. Words like fire, knife, gun, and cake made no sense to her.

The next night, Emily tried to use the search function on her tablet to look up words. They used something called a dictionary that had definitions of words, but it was slim. To her disappointment, none of those words had definitions. She couldn’t tell if it was a censor or if she would be able to see it if she had a higher clearance.

Emily’s life was very droll and unexciting. The only real friend she thought she had was the AI and the staring girl. She never knew the girls name, and she just called the AI “teacher.” Friendliness was not Emily’s strong suit, but she just was raised to not waste time on socializing since she would never see these people again when she joined the Ground Team.

Efficiency was how everyone was raised. Friends aren’t efficient. Especially fake friends.

But the staring girl isn’t fake. She is weird, but she is real.