Short Story Fiction Contest May 2014 | Page 106

the bargain, I was guaranteed security and relative comfort. That was all that mattered to me, then.

I was born several years after the Progression, when the old government had been replaced by the geroi and the castes; but I was lucky enough to have been born a patroin, a member of the elite class, as opposed to a common plivoin. I never knew my parents. With the Progression had come the eugenicists, dictating who was allowed to reproduce and when. As with all the other patroi children, I was raised by the collective, not by an individual family.

From an early age, I was groomed to be an Enforcer. Although it was a position of honor and prestige, the plain fact of the matter was that the Enforcers did the geroi’s grunt work. The geroi made the laws, and we ensured that they were followed. We were the tax collectors, the police, the soldiers, all in one. We kept the plivoi in their place, and we kept the geroi’s hands clean.

When I reached adolescence, I was apprenticed to an officer—Ketros—who taught me everything there was to know about the job I’d been assigned. And I was the best he’d seen in a long while. It didn’t take me long to gain quite a reputation among the Enforcers. I was earmarked for an officer position as soon as I completed my training. The geroi were known to lavish wealth and prestige upon those officers that met with their favor, and even as an apprentice, I had that. There was a bright future awaiting me, and I knew it.

I was nearing the end of my apprenticeship the day that Ketros and I were sent out to that farm in the valley. It was not long after I’d been moved from Valos, the town on the Outside where I’d been raised, to the new city the geroi had built in the blue glass dome. They called it Bright