Original X-roads-2003

In the Future…
 
    Meeset woke up and stretched. She got out of her makeshift bed and looked around the small compartment that was her home. She sighed and looked at herself in the mirror. She smiled at the reflection.
    Yesterday she had celebrated her seventeenth birthday, thanks to her new family here. Today she was admiring her curves in the mirror, she had aged into a perfect specimen of a healthy, physically fit teenager.
    She laughed when she thought of far she’d come. How she’d had to leave her home at a young age, because her parents both took ill of the Dyge and died. All the orphans in the entire village older than five were left to fend for themselves.
    She glanced at the metal beams that held her compartment together. She never would have believed the things she had seen over the past years. Things she was so acquainted with now, would be foreign on Threshold. No one there knew of electronics. She grabbed a synthetic comb off her dresser and combed through her long dark brown hair. They don’t know how lucky they are.
    Meeset had been taken by Jonothan and set here on this planet. She’d been raised and taught by people the rest of the world called rebels or outlaws.
    They weren’t accepted by the Norms. The rebels lived their own lives, following their own laws and beliefs. They lived off the land and grew their own food. Through self education and passed down knowledge they had achieved far greater successes than the machine world. While no society is perfect or without disagreements or fights, the community here was genuinely happy.
    She’d been to the city before to know the difference. When she turned fourteen they took her to Frigit for her birthday. They showed her the vast wasteland, and explained the many reasons there was no way to sustain life outside the city domes.
    She listened in sadness as she learned they had done it to themselves over the years. Greed and selfishness flourished inside the city walls, it was not like the community where she lived.