Enlightening Eve

Chapter One

December 14, 3045 8:00 AM

"Number and duty?"

The supervisor, Eve 0206, eyes me blankly, requesting confirmation that I'm where I'm supposed to be. I struggle not to roll my eyes. Like she doesn't know. She sees me everyday.

"Eve 0626, Hydration."

She gives me the signal, a quick two-fingered salute, and I walk inside one of the many Hydration centers. I'm greeted by silence, as everyone is still groggy from waking up in the morning. I am no exception, constantly rubbing my eyes to stay alert.

Long rows of pipes carry Community 6's most treasured amenity: water. Workers trail in slowly, filing into the workspaces placed every fifteen or so feet. Everyone wears the approved clothing for our duty: shirt and pants with a blue band around our left arms, representing Hydration. The only thing that separates us women from men is the color of our clothing. Women wear all white, and the men wear all black.

When you reach twelve years of age, here in Community 6, the Administration, our governing body, assigns you one of five duties to perform: Hydration, Nourishment, Reproduction, Development, and Education. Your assignment is chosen based on your physical capabilities. Hydration, my assigned duty, is to filter and ration water to our entire subsection. We also add all necessary vitamins and minerals to the water to help enhance our strength and protect us from infection. I was chosen for hydration because of my "considerable" dexterity. That's their way of saying that I'm pretty much no good anywhere else, but I don't care anyways because a lot of other average people like me are assigned to Hydration.

Those who have above average strength are assigned to Nourishment, where they ration and deliver food to all five subsections. If you were to excel in the sciences, you would be assigned to the duty of Reproduction, where they fertilize embryos and incubate them until they are ready to be sent to Development. This process takes approximately nine months. Those with motherly or fatherly personalities are assigned to Development, where they watch over and tend to the newly born children until they reach age five, which is when they are considered ready to be educated. In Education, those with leadership skills and knowledge of the history of Community 6, teach the children until they reach age twelve, when they are ready to be assigned a duty of their own.

When you reach age forty-eight, you are promoted to the duty of supervision over your previous duty assignment, and at eighty, we are rewarded for our hard work and put to sleep in the Eternal Darkness. No one knows exactly what the Eternal Darkness is. At least, no one I've talked to, but the Administration assures us it is worth it. I'm not sure how much I believe them, but I know better than to question it. This process goes on and on, and it works fairly well, considering it keeps us all healthy and alive.

I am twenty-three years old. It's a surprise I even bother remembering my age, for most people forget sometime after eighteen or nineteen. The Interface has everyone on file, however, so one can always check if they want to make sure or if they just forget altogether. I haven't needed to check yet, and hopefully, will never need to.

I reach my station and wait for the five second beep at precisely 8:15 AM that signals everyone to begin their work. My specific assignment is to monitor the filter pipe, checking for leaks and other possible hindrances to the filtration process. If a problem is noticed, I am to immediately fix it. Talk about boring, but I'm not complaining. There are people in Community 6 that have it much worse than me.

Everything is fair, or at least that's what they say; not one person rules over another, and the policy of "equal opportunity" is taken quite literally. The Administration, in their monthly assembly, tells us that we continue to excel in all that we do, so much that we are the best Community in the entire universe. I don't know how much of the populace actually believes this. It's not that hard to do a mind-numbing job well every single day of your life. Yes, we have food, shelter, education, and everything else that a thriving people needs, yet a lot of times, I'm selfish and wish for more than that.