They give you eighteen years.
It is enough time to learn how to walk, how to talk, to count to ten, twenty, a hundred. It is enough time to understand the mechanics of riding a bike; the way words string together to create sentences and paragraphs on the thin pages of a novel; what food tastes best and it is never, ever the healthiest option. It is enough time to create friendships in bracelets that lace initials around wrists between the letters b and f and f; to play hopscotch and discover that their favourite colour is blue, akin to the endless stretches of sky; to meet their parents so often that they become more like your family than your own. It is enough time to take a liking to scraped knees, bruised elbows, and bad omens that come in a sequence of four numbers that announce a birth year.
The one that will go down in history as the change of a new world. A better one, so they say, at least.
Eighteen years until your life becomes a name printed in black ink on a tiny piece of paper. The defining factor between living for another month, only to be lined up for your death in the next, or the next, until the numbers finally catch up to you, or the world takes you by a more natural cause.
It is not enough time to fall in love. They advise that you do not trip into such a disaster. Well, unless you enjoy your life being a war zone. A field of mine bombs where every single step is uncertain, can be so easily miscalculated. The slightest misjudgement can be the switch that blows your feet from beneath you, ripping you away from their outstretched hand. Their wide and desperate eyes. Love is a pointless battle when you already know the outcome.
Your name is the gun, and the ballot is the trigger.
The World Cleanse Project, shortened rather bluntly to The Culling, was initiated three weeks after her birth in the year of 1988. A cruel joke spat at the feet of her parents, who were so elated to finally be starting a family; creating a new life. It appeared the governments had the same idea of a new life in mind, yet on a much greater scale.
The plan introduced a population control program. Tens of thousands of people per month, throughout each and every continent, were to be blatantly murdered in order to keep humanity in line. To not overstep the body count that would make non-renewable and renewable resources alike decline at an even more drastic rate. All of which was to be determined by a supposedly fair system of a ballot, where—supposedly—each and every name of each and every citizen was to tumble in a cylinder, be drawn from the machine, and then announced in a mint green envelope that nobody hoped to have reside in their letterbox.
Now, it is somewhat akin to enlistment, except you do not even get the chance to fight. You are given a month of notice when your name has been announced. A month of realisation, of goodbyes, of living your final exhalations to the utmost. Then, you stand upon a podium alongside a group of other people, strangers tied together by the ink that runs over those tiny pieces of paper, and rather unceremoniously, you are shot through the heart.
For the greater good the Officials would always say. Unfortunately, that phrase only came about once they ruined the soils they stand upon, when emissions became too great and the oil was almost completely depleted. Humanity became numb to death, as they did with pollution, deforestation, world devastation. Populations were rendered desensitised of emotion when it came to the final streak of a life, no matter if they had known the person since the day they were born, no matter if they were family. Because all of this was for the greater fucking good.
Not a new life, but a new world entirely. A horrible, godawful world.