REBOOT ~ rewrite

2.

'Do you think there's going to be a hottie this time?' Ever asked when I pulled my black shirt over the edge of my pants. 'Didn't you think seventy-two was hot?' I asked, and I turned around so I could look at her. 'He's a bit of an asshole' she said. 'Yes, that's true.' 'I have the feeling that we've been alone for a while.' 

I tied my laces and felt a glimp of amusement coming up. Approximately every six weeks new Reboots arrived, a moment that most of us saw as a change to make the group of singles bigger. We weren't allowed to date, but the birth control chip that was injected in every females arm, indicated that they knew that this was a rule they couldn't maintain. For me, new Reboots meant the beginning of a new training cyclus. I didn't do dating. 

The lock on our door clicked like every morning at seven a.m. and the transparent door opened. Ever stepped outside and while she was waiting she twisted her long brown hair in a knot. She waited every morning, so we could walk to the canteen together. I think this was something friends did. I saw the other girls do the same, so I accepted it. 

I walked outside to Ever and the pale human that was outside our door flinched when she saw me. She pressed the stack of clothing she had with her firmly against her chest and waited until we walked away, before she put the stuff down on our beds. Nobody from the people who worked at HARC wanted to be in a small, closed off room with me. 

Ever and I walked through the hallway with our heads straight. The humans built glass walls so they could see exactly what we were doing. Reboots tried to give each other a little bit of privacy. It was quiet in the hallways in the morning; the only sounds being mumbling and the light hum of the airconditioner. The canteen was one floor down, behind big red doors who warned you for the danger behind them. 

We walked inside the canteen, it was all white, except for the transparent glass that was in the upper half of one of the walls. On the other side of the glass sat HARC officers with their guns pointed at the glass. Most Reboots were already there, sitting on small, round, plastic chairs next to long tables. Rows of glistening eyes and pale skin. The smell of death in the air. Something humans would hate. I didn't even notice anymore. 

Ever and I didn't eat together. After we picked up our food, she walked towards the table of Under-Sixty and I walked towards the table for the Hundred-twenty-and-higher. De only one that came close to my number was Hugo one hundred and fifty. Mary one hundred and thirty-five nodded at me when I sat down. Reboots that had been dead for over one hundred and twenty minutes weren't populair for their social skills. Nobody talked a lot. 

It was noisy in the canteen. When I bit in a piece of bacon, the red doors opened and a guard came in with the greenies. I counted fourteen of them. I heard that the humans were working on a vaccine that should prevent rebooting. It looked like they didn't find it yet. 

There weren't any adults. Reboots that were older than twenty, where killed if they rebooted. If they rebooted. It wasn't common. 'They aren't good,' a teacher told me once when I asked why they shot the adult Reboots. 'The kids change to, but not as much as the adults... they aren't good.'

Even from a distance I could see that some greenies were shaking. They varied from age eleven to older teenagers, but the fear that radiated of them was the same. It hadn't been a month since the rebooting and most of them needed much longer to accept what happend to them. They were put into waiting houses at the hospitals in their residence to get used to the situation until HARC assigned them to a city. We got older like normal people, so Reboots younger than eleven lived in the waiting houses until they reached a good age. 

I had been in a waiting house for a few days, but it was one of the worst parts of rebooting. The building where they kept us was not bad, but the panic was overwhelming. We all knew that the chance of rebooting if you died was big, but the reality was still hard to handle. When the initial shock had decreased and I had passed the training, I realized that I was better of as Reboot.