Kepler One - The Choosing

Chapter 1

My mother coughed all night in the room next to mine as death came to wrap its sticky black claws around her. Death was slow to finish the job, however, too weary and overworked in the pit of depravity that was my home. Such was the nature of Tier Five, so dark, decaying, and cold, that even the Grim Reaper was condemned to an eternity of relentless servitude here.

The sound of her struggling to breathe brought tears to my eyes and a tightness in my chest. I wanted it to stop, so desperately I wanted it to stop, but who was I to do anything about it? I was Zoe Ruthland, a Tier Five and lowlife according to what was left of humanity; not worth the precious oxygen I breathed. Like most things in my life, I was powerless to do anything but wait as the cancer slowly took her.

I listened to her convulsing in wet, unyielding hacks, and I knew each one caused her pain. I worried that the next one would be worse, or wouldn't come at all. It played on my mind, maddening me to near the point of insanity, so I did the only thing I could do. I turned over in my cot and plugged my ears with my fingers, trying to squeeze out the sound. Still I heard her coughing, and I couldn't take it anymore. Anger, fear, frustration, whatever it was that built up inside me, made me want to slam my fists against the thin wall between us and shout at her to "be quiet for five minutes, so I could sleep."

No sound escaped my lips. These might be the last days I had with my mother, and I couldn't have my memories tainted with regret. I lay there my eyes shut tight, listening to her slowly die, and wondered when my time would come. Thirty? Forty? I was only sixteen, but the radiation from above ground had reached us all, seeping into the food, the air, the water, and even our threadbare clothes. People were dying younger and younger every year; my mother was only forty-five.

Despite her deterioration, the radiation counter on my wall reassured me that not much had changed since I looked at it last. There was still not enough to kill me outright, but enough to shorten my life considerably, as it had shortened hers. Not many lived past the age of sixty in Bunker Twelve, if it could be called living. Whenever my time might be, I was resolved that it would not involve any children of my own. Feeling tears run along the side of the oxygen-generating mask which rarely left my face, how could I do this to them?

What remained of the human race lived in an old bunker constructed by an older government. We survived in a tomb of concrete walls stained brown by contaminated groundwater, or at least those were the colours of the walls I saw. Hydroponic gardens sustained us, but rumours spread about how the radiation had wilted and turned our Garden of Eden sour. I wasn't sure the rumours were true, but I suspected they might be from the horrendously rotted taste of our meal bars.

Our scientists made inoculations for the necessary things that couldn't be found beneath the ground, like sunshine. Their main task, however, was to find a cure for the radiation, something that would help our bodies overcome the poison we were all bathed in. They had failed, and no one believed they would succeed. It was for that very reason the lottery was to take place tomorrow, and, unbelievably, I had been selected to be in the running.

The World Confederate Council, WCC, had succumbed to the popular demand that a spaceship must be prepared for the inevitable evacuation of Earth. The WCC had many delusions, the first being that there was a "world" outside of our bunker to council over. The second, that they could undo the damage man and his weapons had done to our Earth.

Reluctant to give up on curing the cancer infecting us all, and with nowhere to send the refugees, the WCC had pushed back on the idea of a spaceship for as long as it could. It wanted to reserve the last resources so the scientists could continue to fail. But like my mother, the Earth was on its deathbed, and we, like rats on a sinking ship, must now clamber to get off, or drown.