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An overturned drastically deeply rusting car, turning slowly to dust, hides two individuals who are scrutinising the eastern landscape from edge of the roof of Habitat 4-C, at the most eastern side of what might have been the ancient border between the old nations France and Germany of what people now commonly call Old Earth. Though the names of the ancient nations are long forgotten by most of the current generation of humans - the few that remain after a war, an invasion, a colonisation, or something else, something more devastating...
No one is certain of what happened a hundred years ago. Before we knew it, the world was overrun, changed, and creatures they only ever knew as ‘aliens’ had arrived and taken over every square metre of land and sea. Before we know it, we all lived in the Habitats, built by aliens. Governed by their rules, their laws, their edicts, and their culture.
Who or what they are is a mystery, even now. We know they came here. That was what most knew. We don’t even know why they came, or from where.
One of the last calendars that’s still in existence, used by us secretly to measure ‘time’ in the human way, puts the arrival at around a hundred years ago; in what was the last quarter of the ‘twenty-first century’...
“Who else is coming?” Taylor hisses to the boy beside him.
“Kaylee, Sam and Joey all said they’d definitely come with us, too,” Addie answers. “Now that we’ve determined a direct route towards the borderlands they’ve said ‘yes’ to our plan...”
“When will they be here?” Taylor asks.
“Kaylee and Sam are coming with us from Habitat 5-A,” Addie says, pointing south of their location. “That’s the Habitat over there on the horizon. Sam said he could convince one other friend to come too, and their father is apparently a mapmaker.”
“So, I guess that such a person will be the most important person in our group when we leave...” Taylor says. “I presume they’ve also learned the skill of map recall at the same time. If I remember correctly, the dwellers of Habitat 5-A are the ones who compete in the monthly map search sprint...”
“Yeah, you’re correct in that,” Addie responds, “and it’s claimed they found a portion of a movie on one of those old devices and repaired it with spare parts. It shows a group of citizens of Old Earth running to compete for a prize of some sort...”
“So, it’s just us—five ‘overzealous’ guys and a girl—who’ll be going through the fields towards the borderlands when the moon goes dark, right?” Taylor suggests. “It will be hard to convince the aliens that we’re a work detail—”
“If I remember correctly, Sam said his other friend is also a... girl—” Addie says.
“And they use the old ‘they’ pronoun despite the ridiculous laws set by the aliens?” Taylor asks. “How bold of... errr... them, I guess.”
“It shows true courage to go against everything that the aliens set in motion a hundred years ago,” Addie says. “But that’s still not a work detail. We’d need to get someone to distract the aliens so we can succeed...”
“That just leaves us with the dilemma of how we can ensure that it distract the aliens...” Taylor mutters.
“Sam had an idea for that, but I don’t think you’ll like it much,” Addie grunts.
“What idea?”
“We use the dung from the fields to shield us from their bio-scanners,” Addie says, pointing up towards one of the low-hovering objects resembling the images of old planes.
Taylor studies the nearest few of the metallic objects the aliens used to monitor every part of the planet for living creatures. They had, in a matter of weeks, achieved what humans never did. Taylor glances at the display mounted atop of Habitat 4-C. The display would show whenever an animal or human was born or hatched and go down if an animal or human died. The number listed was too great to comprehend. As he watches it goes down by a few digits, then goes up again. Some of the oldest people who’d been children in the earliest days after the aliens came.
Taylor glances around for the possible presence of the elusive aliens who, according to most accounts, lived in their own habitats outside the planet’s atmosphere. Though even that was just an illusion as they terraformed the world, except for the Habitats, or the enclosures for animals. It made the whole situation of the latest rumour a real puzzle. If there was a safe place somewhere and they really retro-fitted one spaceship of the aliens, the usual rebuttal of such ideas was to question how they’d even got hold of it.
One rumour talked of there having been several humans who’d hidden from the arrival and therefore never became dwellers like the rest of us.
And now the talk in all Habitats was that this group of people could save a few younger dwellers by putting them in a ship and sending them into space away from the planet. The rumour was that someone set this plan in motion over two hundred years ago when everything was still Old Earth, and when a spaceship of aliens crashed in what was America, on the other side of the planet, and which was one of the first parts of the planet to get taken over by aliens.
“Do you know when the next downtime is?” Taylor asks.
“The sun is setting so it will be another three hours,” Addie says. “They’ll come here after that. They’ll be here at moonrise...”
“So, another four hours wait time then?” Taylor grunts. “We better go back for now before we’re missed during the roster count...”
Taylor and Addie rush over the roof of Habitat 4-C until they reach a rusting door, which they must pull at a few times until it opens and then each of them slides inside. Here they wait until their eyes adjust to the lower light conditions before they rush down six flights of stairs until reaching the promenade which a person living two centuries earlier might have recognised as a shopping mall. But this place was devoid of such activity. Here it would be where people gather after the sun had fully lowered below the skyline.
It was still devoid of any living beings, humans or aliens alike.
Taylor and Addie sit down on a piece of concrete that someone had hacked away from the side of one room - according to older people it was a shop - and they looked in each direction for others to arrive, which would happen soon.
“Addie, maybe you can sprint to the storeroom and grab us some food,” Taylor whispers. “I’m hungry... You are faster at it than I...”
“Does it matter what I find?”
“Naah, I’m not picky...”
Taylor watches after Addie as he rushes through the shadiest parts of the corridor towards the kitchen. If he was fast enough, he could grab something edible before anyone saw him do this. It would give them extra food.
Taylor frowns for a moment as the thought enters his mind at how sparse most things are, especially food. It was the one thing the aliens hadn’t bothered with when they arrived and reshaped the world in the way they wanted it to look. He guesses it was an indirect reason for fewer kids to be born too.
“Taylor, why are you alone? Are you actually alone...?”
Taylor glances towards his right to see Sam standing near him, hiding from view in the shadow of the next doorway, then he asks, “... where are Kaylee and Joey?”
“They’re on their way here soon,” Sam answers. “They’re with Brianne, and because of some bio-scanners were too close for comfort for Joey, so they bugged out in a hole and then they’ll run here an hour after the sun goes down.”
“So, there’s a risk for them to get spotted?” Addie asks, who’d arrived back with a brown bag containing food, “and I only found the soldier food, so I brought that if that’s okay. I saw the count go down, so it’s not like they’ll miss it...”
“Hmm, it will have to do,” Taylor says. “You should quickly divide it into six portions, and we’ll eat ours now, and then we find a place to hide the portions for the others...”
Sam nods and takes hold of the bag that Addie hands him. “There’s cupboard behind you on the left,” Addie explains, nodding toward where the hiding place is, “but hurry as the dwellers of this Habitat will arrive soon...”
Sam rushes away with the bag and is back only a few minutes later, whispering, “I saw them rushing through the east growing fields when I looked outside...”
Taylor nods once, then he says, “You better sit down behind me, so you’re not easily noticed when they’re here.”
Taylor checks the promenade for arrivals. At the other far end the first few walk closer, stopping momentarily at the storeroom and then walking from it with brown bags like that which Addie had brought, but often much smaller. Each person had a code band on their wrist that would dictate their share of food. And it was mostly too sparse for it to feed people properly.
Taylor flashes a smile when he spots among them his mother. She waves hesitantly for a moment, then points towards the storeroom; a silent way to ask if he’d eaten yet. Taylor recognises the gesture, so he moves his hand and clenches it in a fist for a few seconds. Long enough for his mother to understand his answer. It had been their signal since his childhood; a way for a mother to ask a son a question with no one realising she was his mother.
“Is your mother, okay?” Addie whispers. “She looks like she’s going to fall over...”
“I don’t know, but you know I cannot talk with her in four hours from now,” Taylor whispers back, shielding his mouth with a hand so no one would notice his lip movements. “Once it’s night, I’ll go to her...”
“I just saw my father, and he looks angry,” Addie says.
Taylor glances back and notices his mother and Addie’s father talk for a few seconds before they part ways. If something was going on, he’d hear about it from his mother. He was almost at the ‘worker age,’ making him the oldest of the six of them planning to leave so it already entitled him to be told the things the adults talk about. And most of the time his mother had let him sneak into meetings without telling others he was there. So, he knew more than most kids. More than Addie or the others...
That’s how Taylor had learned about the people in the borderlands outside the perimeter of our Habitat.
People who supposedly weren’t under the control of the aliens.
Or so the story went.
Now these same people were working on saving a portion of the remaining humans, and from the few additional things that Taylor had figured over the last month or so, they planned to send them to a distant planet...
“Stop daydreaming or whatever you’re doing,” Sam grunts. “The others are here. Come and meet Brianne...”
Taylor nods and gets to his feet and follows Sam to the furthest eastern end of the promenade. After about fifteen minutes of them walking hastily, they arrive at a small side room where they find Kaylee and Joey sitting side by side, with a red-haired girl sitting a few metres further...
“This is Brianne,” Kaylee says.
“It’s actually Bree,” the red-haired girl says, “I prefer that name.”
“This is my friend Bree from the same Habitat that Sam and I are from,” Kaylee says, now acknowledging Bree’s preferred name in another attempt to introduce her more properly.