From Peace to Pieces

It was our Utopian bubble, our saving grace from a rotting Earth. Scientists created what was like a thin exoskeleton that surrounded us on the Moon, it absorbed and dissolved all outer dangers, and perceived dangers. We were taught to worship the exoskeleton. We all wore white floor length dresses and kept our hair short. Our leader wanted uniformity, and uniformity he said achieved the Utopia we found ourselves in. We smiled while we farmed synthetic seeds and ate only what Leader told us to. Our greetings were monitored for happiness and generosity was like gold. In simpler terms, and in a simpler time, I would have said niceness was our currency. We we were all chosen from birth, by way of DNA to arrive to this point in history, this man made space Shangri-La.

My personal history is that I had none, really. No family. I went from the foster system straight into the military and I wanted it so desperately to be a way out, somehow, but I found myself deeper in. Deeper into a system I so desperately wanted to escape. I dreamt of secluded farmhouses, gardens so serene. All I wanted was peace, and somehow, by way of just existing, when the world went to a nuclear waste land, I was chosen, by The Leader. The first words Leader ever spoke to me was that it was resilience he found in me, and assigned me to hard labor. He said if I worked, maintained a smile, I would some day be alongside him, making decisions for the others, helping to make Utopia even more peaceful.

After three years on the Moon Utopian base I was finding it more and more difficult to keep my smile. My face grew tired along with my bones but I smiled and I worked because I knew at the end of the day this was our food, our nourishment. I had to work or else we would starve. The farming unit was a strange structure modeled after a sort of Roman arena. Above us were women with elaborate white dresses studded in diamonds with long hair plaited and studded. I remember when accidentally looking up one time and thinking their hair looked like chandeliers. They sat stoic, with their beautiful children all dressed in white suits and white lace dresses while their husbands wore the traditional robes of The Leader, a floor length white garment similar to ours. The lie was that they once worked as hard as we did, and now they get to stand above us.

It was the husbands who would commune together in a room blocked off from women, workers and children. They were discussing us, as I found from a fallen friend who once stood above me, Uma. Uma who once wore a chandelier on her head, who held her children tight, now worked with us while another woman held her child alongside her husband. At times, those tiny slivers of time we had to speak, I begged Uma to tell me what happened. In a Utopia where we were only supposed to advance, why on our new Earth was she now farming alongside us? She never spoke. She only worked, usually refused food and cried herself to sleep in our nightmare of a 50s space modern sleeping quarter. I could hardly stand it, her incessantly wailing and one night after receiving a look, just a look, from a chandelier wife, a sort of "Wouldn't it be nice if you were me" sly grin.. I finally snapped. I grabbed Uma by the face in the darkness of our quarters and I said "Tell me! Tell me now or I swear I'll snap your neck and put you out of your misery right now!"

That is when it happened, the goddess of truth came crawling from her well and whipped me within an inch of my life with every word Uma spoke: "It is a lie. You are not... you are not growing anything! It is worthless. Without nutrients and they feed it to you but.. the higher level, the Leaders coven, they do not eat that food. You do not do anything to support them. It all goes towards declining the population of the farmers. They keep the nutrient rich food in another exoskeletal unit and use workers like you to transport it." I couldn't believe my mind, my lies, another system failing me. "What is it, Uma? The nutrients, how are they are surviving?"

"I can not say! You will kill me right here, right now I will never see my daughter again."

"Tell. Me. I told you I'd snap your next level neck so you tell me right now! WHAT IS IT?!" Uma, drained of color, what color she had left, told me with glazed eyes:

"It's you. They eat you. So never, ever stop smiling. Don't get sad. Don't be depressed. Don't show them anything, or you'll go into the press. They hang you by your head and two massive spiked walls press you like making cider. The blood drains and... please, never stop smiling."

So I didn't. I never, ever stopped smiling. I ate the garbage food we "farmed". I slept next to the hysteric fallen woman. I ate her stories, I drank her tears. Until one day I saw something that I couldn't stomach. Due to Uma I learned to look for things, our setup so clean and simple made it difficult to see the nastiness of our rancid Utopia. Then I saw it. Waiting in the food line, just outside the exoskeleton, a transport truck was heading to where I now knew the "Nutrients" were made, and there it was, a little girls hand with the glistening diamond studded bracelet of a higher level hanging out of the covered back, bouncing helplessly. I broke my smile. I started to become frantic. A long robed man noticed me and came walking towards me, and then I decided to jump ship. I threw myself through the gelatinous exoskeleton and covered in visceral slime and unable to breathe I ran screaming "Not the child! My God! Not..." and I collapsed. I died, suffocated on the ground while Uma screamed from instead the foul exoskeleton: "Not my daughter!"

It was true, Uma had failed and so they sacrificed her daughter. My body lay to rot on the surface of the moon while the leader sipped the little ones blood from a diamond chalice in front of a caged Uma. In the midst of her hysterics he mumbled "If you could have only kept it together, Uma. However, your loss was worth it, and it tastes like the fountain of youth. "