The Wall: Part Four

For Part One, click here.
For Part Two, click here. 
For Part Three, click here. 

She sat huddled in a corner. The day's events had drained the life out of her--she laughed sadly. How ironic, she thought, that this thought should occur to her mere hours after being told that she was immortal. 

The boys had asked her to stay with them, and she had agreed wholeheartedly. She couldn't see why she should not have.  She needed friends now that she knew she was going to be stuck here for the rest of her life anyway. 

“Rose," her father had said to her once, when she was smaller, “Be good to everyone you meet, because the countries of the world are taking up arms against each other, and might be at war with each other very soon. By then, it will be too late to apologize for past wrongs.  Be kind." The tears had dried on her cheeks.

And her brother, two years older than her, he was her rock, her guide, she would go to him when she wanted to talk about her troubles at school, or things she thought her parents would not enjoy hearing.  He humoured her even when she could tell he didn't find her words very interesting.  Where was he now? Was he even--no! She would not allow herself to think--she must be strong.

Now she allowed her thoughts to drift towards her present condition. Really, the High Council had no right to change them, much less this fundamentally. Then there was also the off chance that they were lying.

How was she to know? There was no way for her to find out stuck in this stupid bunker.  Of course, there was no other alternative really, now that the Earth was ridden with nuclear radiation from the--oh, yes, there'd been a war, too. She shook her head. After all these years of living peacefully--although they had seen the war coming, given the tension between certain countries--it was still very sad that humans had chosen to end this way.

But her mother had said that after a great fall, there was almost always a great triumph.

She'd been careful to remember the ‘almost'.

Was it possible, however remotely, that they would go home sometime?

Home.

The word stung.  She took a deep breath of the artificially purified air.  Everything was artificial here.  Except intelligence. Humans had learned not to mess with robots after the Fall of 2020, and that was enough to stop them from building advanced humanoids ever again. Now it was just machines--vacuum cleaners, computers, ACs. Innovation in the technological sector had been stalled for years after that, or so the governments said.

Of course, if they had found a way for humans to stay immortal, they wouldn't run around with banners proclaiming it.

Funnily enough, they still hadn't found a cure for cancer. That would have been on the news. 

She tried to stop the morbid thoughts racing through her mind, but there was nothing else she could think about except her family, and where they were, and other questions she had no answers to.

(To be continued...)