Darklandia Read Free Page A

detainees to the Department of Felicity for evaluation. Our class received a tour of a GAT last year and we were allowed to strap each other into the detainee restraints.
    I walked along Broadway Avenue past One Times Square, glancing at another poster on the side of the building. This one depicted a young girl covering her face with her hands. The headline read, “Humility and Felicity go hand in hand.” The few pedestrians I passed on Broadway appeared as gray and blue blurs at the edges of my vision. We learned in Darkling History class two years ago that New York City was once the most densely populated city in the former United States of America. Then came the Civil War of 2072. Most metropolises were decimated and the population dwindled to less than ten percent of what it once was. The government finally defeated the rebels by uniting with Canadian and Central American forces to form a new nation: Atraxia.
    Though I had never been outside Manhattan, our teachers showed us photos of bombed cities with body parts strewn across the streets like fallen leaves in Central Park—when Central Park had trees. Many cities across Atraxia still lay in ruin, still overrun with darklings. The rebels fought bitterly against the mandatory hours in Darklandia and the water rations. They had suffered for so long, they were sick with the idea that misery was a normal part of life.
    The long walk from the apartment building on Broadway to our apartment building on Cedar was my second favorite part of the day. I chose to serve my mandatory hours at the darkroom on Broadway because it had the least pods. I figured fewer pods meant fewer people to notice when I took a moment to compose myself after seeing my father in Darklandia.
    Most people used their hours to do the things darklings once did; to exorcize the urges propagated in their DNA over millions of years of suffering and unsupervised breeding. I used my mandatory hours trying to recreate a world where my father existed as he did two years ago. Though we weren’t supposed to discuss what happened inside Darklandia, my best friend Darla once admitted to me she had killed at least thirty people in her virtual life. She confessed this to me more than a year ago. I wondered what the total was up to now.
    The whirr of a surveillance camera made me look up. Knowing the Guardian Angels were watching us usually made me feel safe, but something felt different today. Like yesterday’s rapture changed everything. I wondered where Commissioner Baron was taken. Of course, he was probably already purified and safely tucked away in a leisure home by now—like my father. Only, my father didn’t murder anyone. My father was just another victim of the darkness.
    As I rounded the corner onto Cedar Street, my mind returned to the civil war and the water rations. I had to tell Darla about yesterday. I had to speak my grandmother’s words aloud before the words infected me with their mystery, with her misery.
    The air on Cedar Street smelled of soot and rubbing alcohol from the lifesaver factory across the street where VITALIS pharmaceuticals filled tiny glass vials with emergency rations. The vials themselves were made from melting down the glass bottles darklings had once tossed into dumps. Darklings were wasteful creatures, so much so the drought of 2031 never ended. If darklings hadn’t wasted so much of the Earth’s natural resources, poisoning the oceans and torching the sky with their toxic waste, we may never have created rations to adapt to this new water conscious environment. Of course, if the humans hadn’t trashed the Earth so thoroughly, the Civil War may never have been fought and Atraxia may never have been formed; we might all still be darklings.
    I shuddered at this thought as I passed the factory. The transparent glass vial with the word VITALIS etched onto the surface hung around my neck tied to a silver chain. One never knew when they would be caught somewhere without access