License to Read (aka Between the Lines)

Prompt 69: Corporations dominate the world, stifling creativity with the force of the sterile police to eliminate any source of unauthorized competition.

Alma 751 learned to read and write before the Great Uprising of 2103, when WorldKOR restored order to its territories and began to eliminate literacy after the Lost War and the Punishment.

She works as one of the lowest ranks of Common Tech: scribe, purging lost and secret libraries and other book slums of contamination lest the blessed illiterate are defiled. She ensures the materials are destroyed beyond repair.

Like all scribes, she is watched to ensure she does not teach the blessed to read and write or learn forbidden teachings by hearsay and become irrevocably contaminated. Alma hides from KOR her activities with the underground group, Libre, which rescues books and other forbidden material for the glorious day when their world will read again.

Alma realizes she is closely watched by WorldKOR Tech Police but doesn't know why. WorldKOR does not know her two secrets, kept from everyone, even her husband and family her entire life. Only Alvin, her blind brother taken by WorldKOR to purge Braille readers, knew them, and insisted she keep them secret before he was taken to the Museum of Congress.

The purification level is estimated at eighty-seven percent when WorldKOR announces Project Cleanse, a ten-year plan designed to replace scribes and other low-level readers and writers with communication bots within ten years. Project Cleanse starts on 1/1/18, formerly January 1, 2121.

Alma knows its time to leave WorldKOR North America, if she can escape her watchers and find freedom in Brazil.