A Change of Perception - A Story from a Devoted Future
By ParaGirl
Lori had grown up in New Denver, a medium-sized barter town a few clicks south of New Adeimus, known in the Barter Towns as simply 'The City'. This was where the Citizens lived, far from the dirt and heat and violence of the Barter Towns, in gleaming ivory towers, with new technology and medicine, and good food that supposedly came out of the wall - all you had to do was ask for it. What The City didn't offer its citizens, as Lori had been told all her life, was freedom - they did horrible things to people in there, she was told. Her mother had supposedly escaped being mutilated, turned into a freak, by running away to the border towns on her eighteenth birthday. There, hungry and alone, she had slept with a man for a half a loaf of bread. That was how Lori had come to be.
Over her twenty years in the barter towns, Lori had seen a lot of women, and some men, escape from The City, still in their clean clothes, their neatly trimmed hair, their perfumed skin. Lori didn't know what could be so awful in The City that they would choose the wastes of the Barter Towns, but her mother always forbade her from speaking of it, even commenting about it. It was simply a terrible place, and it was not to be discussed or spoken of.
Lori had seen New Adeimus once, from a distance - she had snuck a ride with a boyfriend at the time, and they rode out there on his donkey. The ride was long and difficult on the smelly animal, but once she saw the gleaming towers of New Adeimus, she knew it had been worth it. She never knew men could build such marvels - it was massive, bigger than her mind could comprehend, with towers reaching the sky and vehicles driving around, shining in the sunlight. She couldn't imagine what could have been so awful in such a wonderful place.
Lori had many loud arguments with her mother about The City. She was curious, she wanted to go there, but her mother just shrieked and yelled about monsters and that she'd never return from that awful place. Better to stay there, in the squalor of New Denver, than risk being caught near The City.
And so it went, and Lori lived her day to day life, tending a small garden and scavenging for technology in a nearby landfill, trying to find a few trinkets that might be of some value. She had no real education - she had learned to read and write and count, but really nothing more - and the more she thought about it, the more she looked at her mother, wasting away, losing her teeth, the more she realized that she had no future, no real future anyway. Two weeks after her twentieth birthday, she made her decision.
