I look at the map and wonder just what it can tell me. Can it tell me what struggles we might face, where our food might come from? And what of danger? There are no signs to direct us around precarious situations. We will simply do what we must and endure the consequences. We do not blame the government. The Global Alliance has its hands full what with former nations trying to exert pressure in every issue to get preferential treatment. Not reacting to these pressures means placing emphasis on other pockets of civilization, which seems like bias, the thing they are most trying to avoid.
Of course, we have plenty of people in Regional Population Center VII who think they are being discriminated against. Our country had been used to getting what it wanted by shoving someone around until the thing came tumbling out of her pockets. They now are not used to standing in long lines for food and water, and they bristle mightily when they are demoted in some way - housing, career, or government status.
I am Syntra Rhyser. My first name did not come from my parents but from the cooperative in which we live. The cooperative, West Building 236, takes up six blocks of the city. There are no single family dwellings here. The people, over 235,00 of them, live in 47 high-rise apartment buildings wedged into our “neighborhood”, Deliverance. It is is one of 36 neighborhoods in RPC VII. I have lived in three of them: Liberty, Spirit and Steadfast before coming here. It was not my family’s choice to move each time but a government edict to make room for families in those regions who had a higher priority, a “more demanding need to be incorporated into the cooperative” read the letter. So we were relocated for the good of the whole. The only thing that can move us out of Deliverance is death, I have heard. There are no opportunities here. Not for a 19-year-old woman like myself with no higher education.
“At the map again I see,” says my father as he fumbles for a coffee cup. “If that map speaks to you someday, please share its wisdom, will you Syntra?”
“Oh, sure,” I say. “So far, it hasn’t shared anything but questions, Father. Where’s Zell?”
Zell is my fifteen-year-old brother. He often stays at his friends’ houses, and I never know where he is, but my father always keeps track of him.
“Zell’s over at Harklin’s apartment. He’s been there since 8 last evening.”
“I would think Harklin’s dad would be getting tired of him by now,” I said.
“No. I think Mr. Pederson welcomes company since, you know— since his wife died,” says father as he stares blankly into his coffee.
There are so many motherless children now—like Zell and me and Harklin. About twelve years ago, the DRM virus ravaged our cooperative when we lived in Liberty. So many people crammed into small spaces. And for some reason, mature women were the main targets and still are. So much so that it is called the “Mother’s Disease”. Though many precautions were taken, it followed us and others to the uninfected neighborhoods. Four years ago, Deliverance was hit hard.
My mother died in Liberty when I was eight. Zell was not quite two. We have been free-falling ever since. Because she held the position of comptroller on the Regional Board, we lived very comfortably then, and I was expected to follow in my mother’s footsteps. But when Mother died, so did my chances for a degree at university. Father, a photographer, holds very little status in society and no clout with the government at all. As the parents go, so go the children except in rare situations involving prodigies and geniuses. Not that I blame Father for my predicament. I believe he thinks I do, but I don’t. I have accepted the fact that I have no future in this cooperative or in this Regional Center. But this is not the only RPC. The closest is the one in what used to be Minnesota, near the western coast.
Father leaves for work and I am alone in the tiny apartment.
“Minnesota,” I say out loud. It feels funny on the tongue. “Minnesota,” I say again a little louder and laugh.
“Who’s Minnesota?” asks Zell, who has returned from the Pedersons.