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[2] My Limited Options

Given the choice I would always pick the easier one. Anything for a quiet life. It's why my life had been so amazingly low-key all this time.

Don't rock the boat and don't try and reach too far, that was what I'd been told. I had been voted 'most likely to be generic' in my e-learning tier. But then again, so had more than half of everyone else.

I thought this had made the vote a bit pointless, but no-one else had cared. I still had the certificate they'd given me somewhere. Or rather, the one they'd sent me to print for myself. Had had to save up for those printer tokens, but whatever. I'd been rather proud of it at the time, and even finding out it was just a general certificate they gave away for just about anything could not diminish my sense of triumph. For a bit at least.

With e-learning over though I had to go out and find a job like any other honest, hard-working ten year old. My parents had always been paint-strippers given that it was pretty consistent work, but it hadn't worked out that well for them and it seemed a little too complex for someone like me. Having to put on that suit, clamber out onto outer surface of the Arcology, make sure you didn't fall to your death, make sure the radiation didn't kill you; it was a lot to remember. I wasn't the brightest – as my e-learning e-tutor had been e-keen on reminding me - so should stick to something more my speed.

For a few years I'd had a pretty nice – though unofficial – job clearing the sludge from the ducts on our level. The management company had switched over to some very swish new air-purifiers which had had the unintended effect of filling the ducts with, well, sludge. We'd only noticed when the ceiling collapsed during the commute one morning and a couple hundred had drowned. We asked them to clear it but they never got back to us, so we just started doing it ourselves.

As sludge went it wasn't so bad. It was thick and it stunk and it built up faster than any one person could scrape it off, but we'd all seen much worse or at least heard of much worse. For one thing it burned really well, so we used to sell it for winter fuel. That was a plus. Paid fairly well all things considered, but when they found out we were making money out of it the management company and the makers of the purifiers stepped in pretty quickly and created their own new joint sludge-cleaning operation and forbade access to the ducts. We kept doing it from time to time, but they introduced these little spider-robot things to patrol areas and keep us out. A friend of mine – Sally – got her face torn off by one of them and it carved itself out a nest in her skull. Would probably have got me too if it hadn't got caught in her eye-sockets when it tried to jump out at me. I stopped bothering after that. It didn't seem worth it.

I should probably felt a little more grateful, in retrospect. One of the most important lessons – certainly the first – we ever learnt as kids was how lucky we were to be alive in such a golden age. Thanks to the corporate takeover of what few limited aspects of government remained we now lived in a world free from hunger, want, disease and war. They said this, but it had always made me a little bit confused, especially as the day I learnt about it there had been a food riot not two levels down from where I'd been living at the time, I had no money to get anything I needed let alone anything I wanted, my parents both died from a mix of Rotlung and a variety of cancers from all the radiation and I had later decided to join a company whose purpose was to send people to kill other people in what could possibly be called wars. I was probably missing something, really. They wouldn't have put it out there if it hadn't been true. It was probably just me.

All in all, joining up with Dewhurst's was probably one of the better decisions I'd ever made. On the face of it going off and fighting sounded complicated and the sort of thing a dense person like myself would mess up, but when I'd thought about it a little it made perfect sense. At a stroke a huge chunk of my daily worries – food, shelter, clothing and more – would be taken care of and after that all I'd need to do was as I was told. That I'd be given a special chip with all the basic training I'd ever need just made an obvious choice even more obvious. Sensibly, I could only do one thing.

And the girl in the local branch office had smiled at me. That had been nice. She'd even looked me in the eye when she did it, too.