Immortal

02. we continue going forward forever

It wasn't until much later in my life that I came to understand that the jump my sector took that day.
The day of the collision, the day everything shook violently was a ten hundred thousand year jump in one solid go.  The memory, I repressed and buried in the bottom of my mind. Ten hundred thousand years of instability and violent shaking that felt like a flash of a moment. Ten hundred thousand year strain added to my body in an instant. No warning, no announcement just one second everything was still and the next it felt like my world was grabbed by two different ends and something was trying to spilt it right down the middle. The vaccine my mother administered was so that I was assured the ability to survive the jump.

That is only if I survived the vaccine. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'll tell you. The vaccine made me, Immortal. Liquid immortality found in a small plastic vile. The same day we in theory killed death and entered our own self made reckoning.

As it turned out originally the sector I lived in wasn't supposed of have received the injection. Everyone who lived here was originally going to be left behind, severed from our main system to fend for ourselves, our section was deemed unimportant. I also found out our mother, had committed the highest form of treason by stealing two of the injections and administering them to us. I still don't fully know the whole story of what happened with her.

Our sector was mostly used and known for wheat production and making bread in mass quantities. There were other goods that came out of it but the product production rate wasn't the greatest. At the time, I also still hadn't started working at the lab facility to help along side the creation of artificial souls either. So, I had no value to our system. I was dead weight. Just like everyone here had been deemed. The wheat that was grown outside, that stretched as far as the could see was also inedible unless it went through a process that purified the wheat. The purple tint that glowed so vibrantly in it was actually considered extremely poisonous. It got the color and toxicity from the soil. It also encouraged others not to take any of it for themselves.
It grew in long stalks and its vibrant color always made me think of it as some kind of parasitic plant draining the ground dry of its blood. There were times the wheat stalks would completely cover the view of our home. The taste once finished was like none other, it had a rich bitter yeasty tone to it, but also a kind of a sweet nutty aftertaste. Those who harvested the grain immediately had to send it off to be handled and cleaned. The bread needed to be baked with the freshest possible wheat available before being distributed.
Eliam and I once took some raw, without knowing about the cleaning process. It had been almost a week since we'd had a decent meal. He hadn't been able to collect much scraps from anywhere. So we both cut and dug out the wheat. Desperate to fill our stomachs and give ourselves some substance of any kind.

The wheat called to us, as it swayed in the wind. Cutting it and crushing it down to a useable flour stained our hands with its rich colors. We sloppily did the work needed to eat. By the time the baking process rolled around to make a simple loaf we were practically howling like wolves. I wanted to eat the dough raw and not wait a second longer.
Watching bread bake for those moments were torture. My stomach churned painfully, wanting to rip it out of the oven, half baked or not. When it was done we pulled out the black charred looking ball of dough from the oven. Eliam set it on the table and cut into it. The inside was was a vibrant ruby red. Our mouths watered at the sweet fragrance of baked bread. I held the first warm tender slice of bread in my hand admiring it. The air bubbles, felt the soft spongey interior, heard the crunch of the crust, before scarfing it down as quickly as I could.
In the end though, we got gravely sick since the bread was poisonous. We were in more pain than we had been prior to eating, but we had filled the void inside us. We felt the satisfaction of being rightfully full for the first time in awhile. Though we learned our lesson that eating bread like that would only be done in times of serious desperation.

My sector, is still steadily rebuilding itself after the jump. The Beacons that surround our planet flashed dimly red as opposed to their usual emerald green or cool blue. These beacons surrounded our sector and world. It was these massive devices that made the Planetary jump possible. It was also the rebuilding and replacing of the destroyed beacons that took and demanded all hands on deck. A crew would take the time to check each one individually make sure it was fixable or salvageable. If not it would be broken apart repaired and used for spare parts for a new beacon that was being made. The system these beacons operated on was only ever online long enough for the planetary jump. Usually, they're just a defensive shield. The construction of new beacons to replace the ones that were lost and destroyed was already undergo. People were recruited from different sectors to do work, selected at random. Trained. Then put to work. My work was required in the creation of souls, now. Yet, there were times were I was selected to set aside that work and work with crews to secure beacons into place.

These where mostly the only opportunities I was given to travel outside my own sector. Each gate way entry was heavily guarded here by soldiers. Here you couldn't travel outside your own sector for reasons like sightseeing or vacationing.

Those things didn't exist. There were no vacations. No sightseeing. No traveling anywhere to see something new or get a change of pace. There were summons, in which you would have to go to the heart of your sector to meet with an high ranking official who reported back to the main sector where our leaders resided. You'd walk into a pretty plain building no decorations just the basic essentials.

He would inform you what the summons meant and what position you would be taking on for whatever amount of time needed. There would be a few several packs of paper work to read and sign. Once completed you would undergo an access sign in through a device they had. It would scan your wrist, take a blood sample. They would give you an ID which you had to wear at all times and a key card with the your sectors official symbol on both sides. That was what allowed you to cross the gate into a new sector.

Of course, the people on patrol still had the right to turn you away if they wanted too, even if you had all the needed materials to cross. Those moments where mildly infuriating but it was work. To survive you had to work, or you simply wouldn't.