Ground Zero: Prequel to Numbered Series

Numbered Book Zero

Ground Zero

MAGUS TOR

Copyright
© 2015 Magus Tor

All
rights reserved.

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Notes

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DEDICATION

For Aurelia, Nicholas and
Myself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is only made possible with the help of
Jeannie and Emma, a big thank you to both of you.

GROUND ZERO
 

Aurelia stood at the window of her bedroom pod,
looking out at City 01 spread beneath her. Each carefully delineated block
housed thousands, all encapsulated in towering, spiral buildings, just like
hers. She knew that every window she saw looked in upon much the same room as
she was in.
A bed.
A desk.
Storage.
All carefully moulded into the plastic of the pod,
built in with soft, gentle curves.
White.
So much white.
With a sigh, she wondered how many of those
rooms held someone like her: a soon to be graduate. How many bedroom pods were
home to someone as simultaneously happy and nervous as she was?

She leant her head against the thick, cold plastic of
the window, letting the coolness bleed into her skin. Then she shivered a
little. Today she was going to become a fully fledged Med Worker. Just like
that. Her training was over, and now... Now she had to save people.
Or not.
The not saving was a whole lot harder than the
saving. She blinked and swallowed as her mind drifted back. It was only three
days ago that she had been in that room, been alone there with Marnee, and yet
it felt like a lifetime.

“Can you remember the day we met?” Marnee had asked, clutching
her hand, her voice breathy and words slurred.

“Definitely,” Aurelia had said, smiling down at her
best friend. “I can see it in my head right now.
Sitting in
the auditorium, waiting for the Head of the Medical Institute to address us.
Our very first day, and I was terrified. Terrified that
someone,
somewhere had got everything wrong and I wasn't supposed to be there at all.”

“They never get it wrong,” Marnee had said, shaking
her head a little. “They don't make mistakes.”

“No,” Aurelia had said, softly. “No, they don't make
mistakes, do they?”

Marnee had shifted her head slightly on the pillow,
closing her eyes as if the effort of keeping them open and moving at the same
time was too much. And Aurelia had realised that she was moving into dangerous
territory. So she had gripped Marnee's hand tighter,
then
brushed the pale blonde hair away from the girl's forehead.

“I was terrified anyway,” Aurelia had whispered. “But
you were there.
Right next to me.
Holding my hand just
like you
are
now.”

Marnee had given a weak laugh, her green eyes
sparkling a little for a moment. “And it was cold. Just like it is now.”

Head still against the window, Aurelia felt a tear
trickle down her cheek, tickling her skin. She could skip the ceremony. It
would be frowned upon, but she could. But then she'd promised Marnee that she
wouldn't, that she'd be there, that it would be a celebration. And still, even
if she didn't attend, she'd need to go and pick up her job posting. Find out
where she was supposed to spend the rest of her life.

“It's time to go, Aurelia,”
came
her father's voice over the com system.

She swallowed again, scrubbed her face with her hands,
and straightened up.

“Coming, dad.”

For the last time she looked at herself in the mirror
wearing her cadet uniform. The next time she was in here, she'd have a whole
new look. She gave herself a half smile. She'd spent so long dressed as a cadet
that the uniform was more familiar to her than her own skin. A change, she
decided, turning away from the mirror, might be a good thing.

***

The auditorium was huge.
Breathtakingly
huge.
Aurelia's eyes widened as she saw just how many people were in
there. Leaving her home that morning, her parents proudly walking her to the
public transport pod, she'd been confident. No, she corrected
herself,
she'd been scared and confident.
A
strange mixture.
But she'd felt ready.
Ready and sure
that this was the right thing for her.
Out of all the specialisations,
Med Worker was the only one that she'd felt drawn to. Her father was Tech, her
mother Chem, but she'd had no interest in either.

Desperately she scanned her eyes down the aisle,
looking for the number that she had been given. She was about to panic, not
finding the digits, when she finally saw what she was looking for, and taking a
deep breath she turned into the correct row. Pushing past knees and trying not
to step on feet, she found her seat and slid gratefully into it.

What, she thought, was she doing here? What if they'd
made a mistake? Her aptitude had been tested, just like everyone else's, but
maybe the tests had been wrong. Maybe she didn't belong here with all these
serious faces. Her lip began to tremble, so she bit it hard. She didn't want to
cry, not here. She screwed up her hands in her lap, trying to regain control of
herself. And then there was a movement from next to her. Slowly, a thin, white
hand, fingers open, came into view, and without even thinking about it, Aurelia
grasped it, holding on tight. The hand squeezed back.

Looking up, she saw the smile first, then the dancing
green eyes, then the hair so blonde that it was almost white. The girl grinned,
and Aurelia found herself grinning back. And though no words passed between
them, Aurelia knew that she had found her first friend at the Medical
Institute.

The lights began to dim, and she wriggled up a little
in her seat to see
better
. There was a podium on the
stage, a bright spotlight shining down on it. She grew more interested in the
proceedings, the small hand in her own warming her fingers. She wiggled again,
then
schooled herself to keep still. In General Ed she'd
been a good student, but her inability to sit still had earned her more than
one demerit. Now though, now she was eight. And eight years old, as her Gen Ed
Trainer had told her, was more than old enough to sit properly in a chair. From
the corner of her eye she saw her blonde neighbour shift a little in her seat.
Smiling, she wondered what else they had in common.

Whatever whispered conversations had been happening
faded out as a tall, big boned man mounted the stairs to the stage. He wore the
red uniform of a Med Worker, and his footsteps rang out through the echoing
auditorium. There was no other sound as he made his way to the podium, then
stood, facing the hundreds of scared, small students in front of him. His eyes
surveyed each row in silence before he nodded once and began to speak.

“Welcome to the City 01 Medical Institute.”

His voice was deep, authoritative. He kept his hands
on the podium as he spoke.

“You are here because you have aptitude.
Though that guarantees nothing.
Some of you will be the Med
Workers of tomorrow. Some of you will be Failures.”

There was some movement at this. Failures were not a
part of General Ed, at least not as far as Aurelia knew. It wasn't until
specialised training that students could be ejected for not passing a
school
 
year
. No one
knew what happened to Failures, but each and every one of them knew that they
did not want to be one.

“Over the next nine years you will be trained. You
will be trained to be leaders. You will be trained to give life, to save life,
to take life. It will not be easy. And yet, you are all an integral part of our
society. You, along with the Tech Workers, the Chem Workers, the Transport
Workers, the Hospitality Workers, will do your part to make humankind a
thriving and prosperous race, to keep the Lunar Empire running as it should.
You have found your calling, and I urge each of you to follow it.
And to follow it seriously.
We do not tolerate failure at
the Medical Institute. Not in any form.”

Aurelia squeezed her neighbour's hand tightly. This
all sounded like a lot of responsibility. The man looked once more around the
room, nodded again as though satisfied with what he saw, and turned to leave
the stage. Glancing around, Aurelia saw that everyone around her looked as
anxious as she felt. They weren't children any more. Not now.

It wasn't until everyone was streaming out of the
auditorium that Aurelia learnt her new friend's name.

“Marnee,” said the girl, skipping a step to keep up.

They walked together to their first class, Basic Human
Anatomy, and as she settled into her seat, Aurelia suddenly felt like she'd
been in the empty, white classroom her whole life. She'd done her required
reading. She'd done more. And as the Trainer flashed pictures onto the wall,
she carefully recited the names of the things she'd learnt.

“Wow,” said Marnee, over lunch. “You know everything!”

Aurelia picked at her plate of synth meat mixed with
potatoes. Gods she was tired of eating the same meal every day.

“But you read the books too,” she said.

“Sure,” shrugged Marnee. “But you seem to have eaten
them. I think you know every word.”

“It helps the more you read,” Aurelia advised. “If you
want I could send some extra books to your screen so you can read them too.”

Marnee nodded, and pulled out her roll up screen to
add Aurelia's contact.

“Still scared?” she asked, tapping icons.

Aurelia shook her head.
“Nope.
This is easy. Well, it's easy right now.”

Marnee gave a sigh. “I'm sure it's going to get
harder. You know... when....”

Both of them knew what she was referring to, but
neither really wanted to speak of it. It was common knowledge that Med Workers
were the ones that injected. But that didn't mean that they had to like doing
it. For Aurelia, it was the thing that she dreaded most, the thing that had
almost stopped her from Med Training. She had no idea whether she was capable
of injecting or not. In the end it had been her father that had convinced her
to Train.

“Learn more,” he'd told her. “When the time comes,
maybe you'll find that you can do it.”

She'd agreed. But she knew that she was only putting
off the inevitable. At least, she thought, she had a few years before she
needed to deal with the matter. Putting her fork down, she
slid
her plate away.

“Library?”

Marnee nodded.

There was no recreation time now, not like in General
Ed. The days of playing were over. Aurelia was sad about this, she'd enjoyed playing
kick ball, reading books that her parents had given her, having free time. But
she also knew that time was short. After all, most of those around her,
including herself, would be injected at forty. That gave her only another
thirty two years. Time was very short indeed.

***

“Let's go, kiddo.”

Her father was standing by the front door, tapping the
time reader on his wrist.

“I'm coming,” smiled Aurelia.

Graduation was the one day that Workers could be
guaranteed a free afternoon, but Aurelia knew that both her parents would
probably go back to their respective work after the ceremony. Her mother came
up behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“One second,” she said.

Neatly and deftly, she swept Aurelia's hair up and
began to braid it. Aurelia allowed her neck to relax, and wondered briefly if
she'd ever be as good at this as her mom was. She'd have to learn. No one else
was going to do her hair once she was at her job posting. Sure, she could do
the simple pony tail stuff. But she enjoyed the little piece of uniqueness that
it gave her to have one of the elaborate City 03 styles that her mother had
learned to do as a child.

“Nervous?” asked her father.

“A little,” she admitted, as her mother wove a
connector onto the bottom of the braid.

“Don't be. You've done well. We're proud of you,” he
said.

“I feel...” she struggled for the word. “Alone.”

Her mother put her arm around her shoulder, and her
father stroked her head. They knew. Marnee had been like a second daughter to
them, frequently joining their little household in the evenings so that Aurelia
could help her study.

“You have us,” her mother said.

Aurelia smiled. She did. She was luckier than most.
Most Worker parents took little interest in their child, beyond the extra
rations and privileges it gave them once they had bred. Her parents had always
been different though. More
involved,
maybe.
Definitely more supportive, encouraging her to think for herself. She didn't
know what had made them that way, but she was grateful for it. It just felt, well,
strange, strange not to be with Marnee.
Strange not to hold
her hand.

Her mother slipped her hand into hers, as though
reading her thoughts.

“Come on, let's go get you graduated,” she said.

Gripping her mom's hand tight, Aurelia nodded.
Time to find out where life was going to take her.

***