**CURRENTLY A FEATURED STORY**
highest ranking: #11 in Science fiction
❝true happiness is only achieved without freedom.
There is a girl who wakes to a world that she was supposed to protect. Instead, she fights it.
There is a man who is cursed wit...
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There is so much guilt festering inside me that I wonder wether I still deserve to be a part of the Seven. I am ill, though. Perhaps that is why I feel so disconnected from the council.
Today's date is 032, meaning it is the thirty-second day of the year. We have lost the unnecessary months and have adapted to a more simple system- a better system that will allow itself to be programmed into a simple algorithm for every machine, no matter how small.
I will remember this date, for today is the day I will kill a person.
Jonathan has always chided me for being a humanitarian; I may just prove him wrong today.
Neither Malcolm nor Jonathan have told anyone on the council what is on the file - instead, they had it taken away, place back in someplace far more secure than the archives. Jonathan thanked me, later, for retrieving it - I know not why. My assumption is that the genetic experiments are to be kept a secret - and until we can terminate that girl and anyone who opposes us, they are not to be spoken of. They had all been, supposedly, failures. No wonder that girl was so intent on killing me, I think to myself, as I sink down into my seat.
The walls around me are facades of glass. We sit behind the speech podium once more, encased in this fishbowl, our view the Square. Unsettled by the disorganised movement of grey clothing covering the backs of the people as they make their way into the Square, I look away, thinking about how much nicer it would be if they could all line up neatly. But now is not the time for such petty thoughts.
Now is the time for my execution, and my murder.
A part of me will stay in the Square forever after this.
▿
"Please, no. No, you don't know! You don't know!" The scrape of unwilling boots, dragged against the concrete floor. The huffed breathing of men. The desperate, soulful wails of a man who does not wish to die.
Not today. Not today, he wants to scream. I want to say it too, but I can't, my tongue glued to the dry roof of my mouth, my lips together, mouth a firm line. I can't speak. I can't say anything, I can't breathe a word, since I am ill, and ill people are not supposed to speak.
I watch as they drag him, screaming, onto the podium, and that is when I think: I have murdered a friend with ignorant hand.
"You don't know what I saw!"
His face is on the screen, blown up for everyone to see. He is so terrified, that his humiliation of it has faded. As he speaks, I see the strain in his neck, the spit flying from his lips. "Please." The sound makes me want to cringe. Was this how Julie and Keira felt before they died? Did they know-? I shouldn't think of such things. I shouldn't. This is just my illness.
