District Nine

Awaken

Who are you?
I threw the question out there.
WAKE UP!

~

Almost mechanically the boy held the bar code that was inked onto his wrist in the green light of the laser detecting it and waited for the beeping. Exactly five seconds later the irritating noise sounded from the machine and at the same moment, he could watch his personal data being displayed on a small screen. Lee Yongbok, seventeen years old, 171 centimetres tall, blood group AB and so on and so forth. The boy scrunched up his nose. He hadn't really gotten used to his new name yet. It's been only a few weeks since they changed it and he still didn't fully accept it. Before the last adjustment his name had been Felix, but the last reform had ruled out all unusual names. People that used to have a name that was declared too unusual had just been assigned a new one. And so Lee Felix had become Lee Yongbok. He had been told that his new name was a lot easier to pronounce for everyone else now. Accommodating to the group rather than the individual. And within a day everyone in his living unit had gotten used to no longer calling him Felix as if that had never actually been his name to begin with. Almost as if his old name had been erased from their minds overnight. But Felix still clung to his name. At night he kept whispering it to himself over and over again to not forget it. Long enough that the word didn't even really sound like an actual name anymore. He had repeated it to a point where he felt like he was slowly losing his mind. But he clung to his old name as if his life depended on it.

The young woman behind the serving counter had meanwhile found Felix nutritional information within the flood of numbers on her screen. Without a word, she pushed a tray holding a glass of water, a grey mash without any colour or smell to it and a small bowl with pills towards him. There were three pills in total. As a child, he only had to take one but the dose had gotten higher over the years.

"The pills first", the woman muttered, already looking at the person in line behind Felix. She was done with him. Had served him and ended their interaction in the blink of an eye. No smile and enjoy your meal like the man back in the children's quarters had always said. Maybe growing more distant and colder is just part of growing up. Felix nodded at the woman quickly, picked up his tray and then got moving to find a free seat somewhere in the cantine. His daily schedule allowed him exactly an hour for his lunch break. The time that was wasted walking to the cantine, standing in line and looking for some place to sit had probably been ignored when coming up with that plan. By the time Felix finally found a place to sit down he had roughly half an hour left until his afternoon orientation course began. Since Felix was turning eighteen soon it was time to decide where he would be put to work later. The orientation courses were mostly there to test his abilities to make sure he got a job that best fit his strengths. Probably they would put him in one of the production units, something that didn't require him to think much and just follow orders. Maybe even the farming one. He had been told that the people belonging to this workers unit were put to work in the highest levels of the facility, even though their work was regarded as one of the lowest. But apparently, the conditions for the plants were best up there. Closest to the sky that Felix had never seen. District Nine was built mostly underground, except for the glass dome surrounding the highest levels, the atmosphere outside toxic and no longer inhabitable. Whoever would dare to step outside would probably die in a matter of seconds from the poisoned air filling up their lungs. But silent voices in the back of Felix mind kept whispering that it was all lies. And lately, the voices were growing louder and louder.

The highest level was reserved for the organisers and programmers that made sure everything in District Nine was running smoothly. The people planning and watching over the lives of everyone else. On the lower levels, they called them the dictators but only when there was no one close enough to hear them utter the disapproving words. Students that were considered for a position somewhere higher up usually got special training from their early childhood on. Felix had never received any sort of special teaching. Rather on the contrary. He had always just barely made it through his education. Just a tad above being labelled as flawed. Not an error in the system on his papers but the glances that others threw at him were enough to let him know that just barely was never good enough. They expect perfection. And Lee Felix was not perfect.