• Everything was going down the drain. Emilia couldn't believe that they chose this year to to attack silver city. She couldn't believe that they had actually succeeded in breaking through the barrier. Wasn't that thing supposed to be indestructible. Wasn't it supposed to completely disintegrate anything that came in contact with it. Why did the stupid thing chose this year of all years to malfunction anyways? Didn't they take care of it? She thought that they had hundreds of over qualified people looking after that stupid barrier, so why did it crash? Why did it choose the year that she would get to start working the coms to crash? That was her dream, to work the coms. Lots of people tried out for computer operator but only a few got in each year. They city made sure to put only the best of the best in those few open seats. To get one you had to work at your best from the moment the city decided to chose your field all the way to examination day. To get that seat meant hundreds of hours spent studying and even more competing for top positions in the job you were assigned. That was another thing the city chose your job from the time you turned five until the age of fifty. They gave everyone a test that was supposed to tell them what you were good at. There was no cheating on this test, they made sure of that. There were special wires connected to the sensor everyone had just below their left ear. The sensor could provide readings on all your internal, and some external, functions.

    The sensor was surgically inserted at birth and was small enough that it didn't need to be replaced as you grew like some of the older models. Everyone had their own special file in Com HQ that was constantly being updated. This made the sensor a type of super effective Polygraph, an unbeatable lie detector. Which was why cheating on the test was considered impossible, some said that with the amount of information they had on the Norms the test was nothing but a formality. Nothing but a tradition that was only continued for appearances sake. Overall Emi couldn't care less, the fact was she had just gotten chosen for Com work, some thing that was considered a privilege for people like her. Her family had never had a Com worker, something that made Emi's being chosen somewhat close to a miracle. Usually if your family didn't have any Com workers you weren't even considered for the job. For her to be chosen meant one of two things either her test scores were abnormally high, something Emi would never know because the city didn't give out the test scores or ranks, or they were in a shortage of workers and needed more people but didn't want to alarm the public. She, unlike her parents, wasn't an optimist and decided the latter was the more likely of the two. Emi also decided that she personally didn't care what the reason was, Com worker paid a ton of tech points and that was something her family desperately needed at the moment. Besides, who was she to judge the government when something they did actually worked to her advantage for once. Well what ever the reason was for her getting that job, the fact remained that she wouldn't get to do the it. A rival country decided to attack the city, effectively causing the Barrier to crash. The city officials had decided that for their own safety everyone had to be move to small rural towns while the Barrier was repaired. thus, in effect causing her to lose her job before she actually started it. And she wasn’t happy about it.

    To be continued...