I made my way down the street and found the restaurant with the bright blue tables and chairs out front and went inside. It looked like a high end cafe, with a front counter that displayed all types of food, and when I told the clerk what Ophelia had told me to say, they said my order would be ready in twenty minutes.
I looked around before I decided to go out and sit at the empty tables outside to people watch.
They looked like the people at the colony, but were dressed distinctly different.
I counted at least ten people in five minutes that wore not one, not two, but either three or four belts around their pants, some even made out of regular chains, their pants starting just above their belly button, where there were several rows of belt loops for their many belts. What a strange fashion trend-
But I supposed maybe they would think the fashion trends back in the colony were strange as well. I had yet to see a single girl wear a forearm covered in ‘soul bangles’ that all the young single girls in the colony seemed to wear, nor did the males have the side of their pant legs embroidered like the men wore in the colony.
And the belt thing seemed to be for both men and women, which was interesting, though the men seemed to only wear three max while some girls wore half a dozen.
Very curious. When I stood to peer into the restaurant to check the time, seeing I had another five minutes to go, I went back to take my seat, but upon seeing a book sitting on a different table I went to it, looking around for its owner before I returned my gaze to its glossy yellow cover.
There was a picture of a happy couple on the front, its title reading “The Four Types of Courting Behaviors for Novus Males And How to Use Them”. I felt a smile twitch on my face before I opened the book, flipping through a few pages to read -
‘A summary of the four types are as follows:
The Alpha, the most well-rounded of the four types, relies on the most basic instincts of a Novus as well as Sapien, it’s the more tried and true of the types and requires the lowest effort while still getting a high return. (See more on page 4)
The Big Bad Wolf, who takes the darker side of the Alpha is dangerous and relies almost entirely on sex appeal – tapping into a Sapien’s primal instincts is how the Big Bad Wolf will capture Little Red Riding Hood. (See more on page 21)
The Best Friend, who takes the best of the Alpha and presents themselves as little of a threat as possible and is a source of comfort, stability, and emotional intimacy as the foundation of courtship. This usually works best for Sapien in crisis and those that are generally distrustful of Novus. (See more on page 35)
The Desperate and Eager, who relies on the sympathy of the sapien and they’re nurturing side. This is the most difficult type to master because there is a fine line between being seen as desperate and weak. (See more on page 50)’
I frowned before I slowly closed the book.
It was very surreal, reading such a thing. Talking about Novus, let about reading about them, was just something I never thought I would ever do, and yet here I was...living among them and preparing to not only marry one, but raise one as well.
I looked around and saw a newspaper stand and decided to go and see what it offered, as it might give me a better understanding of the world. I ended up getting one that I was told was national, and then one from Campora as well, since that one seemed to be a bigger publication with much more in it. I brought them back to the tables, but before I could start to read one, my name was called from the restaurant.
I was surprised to find that Ophelia had ordered me two large bags of food. It all went into the fridge, I was told, and all should be eaten in the next five days. I thanked him and carried my two bags back to my apartment, having to set my bags down for a minute to fish out the pamphlet to check the code, pressing in the numbers on the number pad with one hand while I put the paperback in my pocket with the other.
When it unlocked I pushed it forward with my hand, peering inside to see the lights were still on before I took my bags in and closed the door with my foot.
I took out the food and set it on the counter to see everything was in hard cardboard boxes with clear tops, just like the ones that the bigger towns around our own had in their restaurants and I smiled a little. It reminded me of the times my parents took my siblings and me to Riverside for the monthly bazaar, when the smaller towns would all have stalls in the larger Riverside’s outside market. It was a four-hour carriage ride there and my parents always took us somewhere to get food before we headed back so we’d have something to eat…
The containers the food came in always looked like these.
I sorted through the assortment of food and decided to eat the fish sandwich, putting the rest in the fridge. My stomach felt a little sick from the wild ride I had been on over the past twenty-four hours, but I figured I needed to at least get something down before I went to sleep. I needed to have energy for tomorrow when they picked me up, as my fate and possibly Joy’s would be decided shortly thereafter based on the decisions I made.
I carried my sandwich to the couch and sat on it, reading the Victoria newspaper – The Southern Rose – as I ate.
A Novus baby boy in Asia was born yesterday and was hailed as the nine hundred millionth alive on our planet at that moment, the article reflecting that there were just over nine billion alive during the last years of the age of man nearly two thousand years ago, and that since then, the world hadn’t broken one billion. I thought about that for a minute.
That didn’t make sense, did it?
I frowned at that as I chewed, thinking back to a math problem we had done in class once during the last year of my education about five years ago.
It had gone something like - if there were three thousand settlers of the colony, and each were to have a minimum of seven children, and those children were supposed to have seven children and so on and so forth, how many children would be born into the thirteenth generation?
I remember it was something like ten billion.
The teacher then had us figure out how many children were supposed to be in my generation – the fifth generation, and the answer had been close to four hundred and fifty thousand.
I also remember the teacher telling me that, though we were all supposed to have at least seven children each, the current population suggested that people were only having three, and that we needed to ensure we did our duty.
I was still confused by that lesson, as we had moved on before I could figure it out. I also remembered Roy loudly saying during the break that the teacher was in his thirties but only had two children himself.
The math never really added up in the colony. I remember trying to work it out a few times with my Dad, but it always left us both more confused, and it felt like it made even less sense now.
I wondered if there was a book that could help me figure it out and decided to keep the newspaper to remind me.
I turned the page and read about Victoria starting new sanctions against its neighbor, New Haven, which according to the article had developed a new type of medication that could selectively abort Novus fetuses by identifying a distinct chemical a Sapien woman’s body produces when carrying a Novus fetus. Campora was saying that it would be reviewing its water treaty with New Haven and that North Campora’s Matriarch was ‘very disturbed’ by New Haven’s ‘obsession with eliminating Novus at all costs’, with New Haven firing back that Campora used the same medication in the colonies.
I wondered how many Novus babies were born in the colony that we didn’t know about. We had been told Joy had died, and that made me wonder how many other infant deaths were actually just Novus births that had been removed. I knew of maybe sixteen in our town, with four of those having been buried while the others were cremated.
I remember when Roy told us Joy had died, and Mabel’s mother had told us that several of her cousins – male and female - had lost one infant, but that they didn’t lose another after that because they took special vitamins, so this wouldn’t happen again, and that Mabel would be okay after rest.
Mabel’s family, I knew from when Mabel and Roy got married, was incredibly superstitious about firstborn sons. They called them Missing Men, because many of their firstborn sons died very shortly after birth, and if they did, the mothers were started on vitamins to prevent their future babies from being stillborns. Even if they didn’t have any more children, they often took the vitamins daily until they could no longer have children.
We didn’t even know Mabel and Roy had Little Lawrence until about a month after he was born, which they did in secret in the woods between our town and Mabel’s because she was so superstitious. We thought Roy and Mabel had just found a wild animal and were nursing it back to health because Roy spent all his time with her there. Roy had begged me to do his chores for him and to tell our parents he was in bed when he wasn’t, promising me it was important, and I had done so.
After a month of this and I had followed him one day and found out that he and Mabel were taking turns watching their son in a shrine of sorts that Mabel had built out of their favorite things and smeared in lamb's blood, which Mabel had insisted would protect him from the angel of death coming to take him away like it protected the babies in the bible. She insisted that their son had to stay there in his shrine until he was two months old and could be baptized in the church, like it had been done with two of her nephews. She insisted this was how it had to be done because all other firstborn sons in her mother’s family that didn’t enter the world this way died, and that seeing as he was still alive at one-month-old, they were doing the right thing.
It was the first time I really questioned our colony, because children having babies suddenly felt like a very strange, dangerous thing. Little Lawrence, who at the time they just called Little, was healthy, but a hundred things could have gone wrong and I had told them that, but Mabel was insistent and Roy said he was going to ‘support his wife’.
He was fourteen. She was thirteen.
I was sworn to secrecy and Little Lawrence was kept in the woods for another month before Roy finally brought him home. Because it would have caused both families a lot of grief and scrutiny from those outside the colony, Big Blue – whom Roy and his children were all registered under – as well as Mabel’s head of family decided that Little Lawrence would be ‘off the record’ until an opportunity appeared where they could add him. Off the record babies were not entirely unheard of, but usually, they resulted in consequences for one of the parents, as off the record babies were usually the product of an extramarital affair or rape, with the latter resulting in the execution of the offending person. It was usually the father, but not always, as I remembered reading in the paper about a woman being executed in the city for raping her brother-in-law.
Technically, Little Lawrence didn’t even exist, but as his parents were married and had more children, the plan was to insert him back onto the records once Big Blue was able to communicate the issue with the government during the next time he spoke with them. It only happened once every fifteen years when he was required to give an update on his family’s growth and any concerns-
It suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to send a message that way to my family that I was alright and with Joy. I knew that the original settlers didn’t have very in-depth conversations with the outside, but it was enough that one had been told that their records would be sent to a different clan – a huge scandal three years ago when the settlers last spoke with the outside.
If I could track down the contact Big Blue would be talking with, I could maybe send a short message. They wouldn’t likely want me to tell them that Joy was alive since it was clear they wanted it to be known she was dead, but if Mabel did know that Joy had been born a Novus, then maybe she would understand.
Something like…
'Dear Mabel, being here has brought me Royal Joy', since Joy’s name was Joy Royal Mabel?
I had twelve years to figure it out, and I would, just like I would get Joy.
With that as a possibility, I suddenly felt much better about my situation, like maybe this all happened for a reason.
It was a lot easier to eat after that, and I ended up eating half of the pie in the fridge as well while I read the rest of the newspaper and tried to figure out what the heck a hurricane was, and why the paper was saying that current projections showed that Victoria should be another one within the month and to be prepared.
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