Generation Gem

Graduation

Considering the immense size of the crowd, we walked to our destination in eerie silence. A bubble of anxiety was almost visible, like it was stretching around each one of us and refusing to pop. You would think that such a large volume of people would make a noise. But the silence was deafening.

Thousands of us, focused and all marching with purpose towards our new lives.
Each one of us would be a different person by the time night fell. We would no longer know our own normality. The life we had known for eighteen years would be ripped from us,  gone.

Because today was graduation day.

All these beings who currently surrounded me had turned eighteen in the last ninety days. My eighteenth birthday was the only one for which I had ever received a card. That was true for all of us here. Back in the human world, your day of birth would be celebrated with gifts, cards and most importantly, family. They called it a 'birthday'. It must have been so exciting, counting down the days throughout the year to be able to spend it with loved ones.

I was of the secret opinion that humans took a lot of things for granted. Maybe it was one of the many reasons their world no longer existed.

The card each of us here today received was actually a beige invitation summoning us to The Dome, which is where we were now. It was an offer we couldn't refuse even though most of us probably wanted to.

We had all grown up at Pearl Education. It was an unbearable situation of hating where we grew up, but not wanting to leave the familiarity of it either. It didn't matter how much the authorities at Pearl Eds tried to prepare us, the choice we had to make was daunting.

There were no high, middle or lower schools in our world. Pearl Education was all that existed. It was all we knew.

The minute we were born, we were taken away from our parents and placed here into Pearl Eds to begin the first phase of our life.

Pearl Eds existed entirely to prepare us for when we entered our adult worlds which we would be choosing today.

From the day we were born, we had every detail of the three generations drummed into us.

One of these generations would be our forever world once we picked it. It was a choice that seemed unfathomable.

We were taught basic education such as Maths, English and a few other must know subjects, but we wouldn't be needing any of those things in our next world. The authorities didn't care if we knew our times tables or the great works of Shakespeare. They only wanted us to know how amazing each of the three generations were so we could make the choice. They had spent years making sure these three generations would successfully be sustained and that meant getting each of us interested. They had created these generations so that human life no longer needed to exist and every day was spent preparing for our transition.

As we trudged on, almost robotic like, three huge, stone encrusted banners appeared before my eye line.

This meant that we were nearly there. That it was soon time to choose.

I looked in awe at them, stunned by how impressive they were. Under the banners were doorways. I would be going through one of those later today, forever. I would never be able to come back to Pearl Eds, the place that had been home all of my life.

It didn't upset me as such. I had no attachment to this place.

I didn't have any friends or family here, none of us did.

While growing up, we each had our own space that we lived in, about the size of an average tent in the old human world. They were called The Nets. Nobody knew why our homes were called this, they just were. I had always suspected it was the way you felt trapped when you were inside. This small little shelter with a grey bed, table, small set of drawers and a lamp made me feel closed in. Caught. Like there was no escape. Which was true for the most part. Freedom was a fantasy we all longed for.