Error Code: 2001

You are given a number at birth. A number that will define you for the rest of your life. If you are a third child you are confiscated immediately by the takers.

Takers: They have an official name but no one really cares to use that name.

If when you are born you are affected by the radiation of the land, then you are also seized by the takers.

If when you are born you are both. Well then you must be executed. Immediately.

I was given the name Error Code: 2001.

I was baby girl number 2001, in that month.

I was also an Error Code. A Code is a third Child. An Error is a radiation deficiency.

So they named me Error Code: 2001.

The only problem was they were not allowed to execute me. They could not because I was ¨Important¨

So instead of executing me they stuck me in a room with one window. One window with three bars in front of it.

They raised me there. Keeping me prisoner.

They would come by once a day early in the morning at dawn, and give me three meals. It was my job to divide those meals. Those meals would be what I was to eat that day. Then the next day they would do the same.

I get the same thing to eat every single day.

Every single day my life was repeated.

I grew up like that.

I guess you could say it was better than being executed. I strongly disagree.

My life was anything but interesting.

And then it happened.

I woke up at dawn peering through the tiny window in my room with the three bars in front of it. Glancing at the darkened brick that made up my walls. Once white, but had aged and darkened over the years.

I got up and spread the thin blanket over my bed.

I stood and took the sharp rock from under my bed and walked to the wall. I stood on my tiptoes and screeched another mark into the wall. I stepped back and looked at the wall.

I looked at the six thousand marks I had made.

Counting the days.

Counting the torture.

Counting the loneliness.

Today was my seventeenth birthday.

I sat in the center of the floor with the sharp rock in my hand, and I looked around. The six thousand marks had been displayed on the wall by my bed. I had also scratched some artwork into the other walls. Drawing what I imagined would be outside my cage.

I had been in this room for seventeen years.

For seventeen years I had had no one to talk to, nothing to do. And I had stayed sane, I think.

There was something missing.

I sat criss cross apple sauce in the middle of my prison.

I looked at the door.

Something's wrong.

They had not come to give me food. They were supposed to come an hour ago.

And I was supposed to take my rations and divide them. And then I would scratch a picture into the wall. And then I would tell myself a story and then I would sing a song to myself. I would talk out loud with myself and have a conversation and then I would look out the window and watch the footsteps go by out my window with the three bars in front of it. Then I would run between the walls and then I would pace and then I would think. And then I would eat my lunch. Then I would repeat the cycle and then have dinner. Then I would organize the empty trays that they had brought me and then I would lay down on the thin uncomfortable mattress and I would fall asleep.