Excerpt: After The Great Devastation

I was at work. It seemed like I was always at work, I had been since I was about 12, although at that time it was hard to tell the training part, which to me was like playing games, from the work part. That was the way they got the young people involved at an early age, when they discovered a specific talent or knack. As soon as the gift was identified, the kid would be swooped up and trained or channeled into the area to hone that gift, to become the best he or she could be. I didn’t like the label they put on us, ‘kidgen’ for a kid-genius, but it was better than some of the alternatives: ‘ordin’ for the ordinaries, ‘crim’ for the criminals, even if they had only been caught one time breaking the law, the runners, and then there were the ‘chairs,’ the huge people who lived in chairs and had the runners get for them what they needed. I worked with other kidgens and the comgens, the computer geniuses. I had a really fun job, although I didn’t like to think of it as a career, something I would be doing all my life, since I was so isolated and I liked to be outside.
Oh, they tried to accommodate us. It seemed like everything we asked for or even mentioned that we desired, they would provide. Like when they first brought me to the complex, I mentioned that I liked ice skating. Well, inside the complex it’s so crowded, or should I say, every space is being efficiently used, so I said it would be nice to be able to skate all the way around, on the outside. I don’t know who made the decisions around there, and I didn’t even know anyone was listening to my conversation, but soon a canal was built, all the way around the outside of the Complex, and in the winter it was frozen so we could ice skate on it. I’m sure it’s a least several miles around the perimeter, and it’s a fun skate, wide enough for several people to skate holding hands. Then it’s flat enough, with just a little incline, so we get to skate up and down, as we go around. So then when spring came and the ice was starting to melt, they decided to make the canal into a swimming channel, and that’s fun, too, in the summer. That summer, when I suggested roller skating, then they built a skating path around the canal. Some people ride their bikes on it, so that’s a good use of the resource, since not everyone loves to skate like I do.
It’s a weird kind of freedom that we have, we who live in the complex. We go to work when we want and we take breaks when we want, just so we get our tasks finished on time. My job is really fun, almost like playing a game. They discovered when I was young that I had a gift for decoding and seeing patterns in codes, so they snatched me up and started giving me all these games to play. I know now that they were training me, but at 8 years old, I thought I was just playing games and working puzzles. And that was what I was still doing, 9 years later, playing games and working puzzles at the Complex.