Disclaimer: This is an idea I’ve had for quite a long time, and I decided to experiment with it a few summers ago. Surely I’d have a few edits to make and might even change the whole thing altogether if I played out the idea now, but this is how I saw it that fine summer day when I stopped thinking and simply wrote.
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Chapter 1
Julie
Chicago, United States, September 20, 3016
Julie fumbled with the fraying laces of her ratty boots and didn’t bother to check her appearance in the mirror as she ran along the corridor looking for her younger sister.
“Lucy,” she sighed when she saw the young girl sliding the tube of dark lipstick across her lips. “Come on, there’s no one you need to impress.”
She knew her sister would try to look her best, as would a lot of them. But Julie was one of the many who were too stubborn to see the good in any of this. Yes, our cities are overpopulated. But how is marrying off anyone between the ages of 15-30 going to do anything?
Julie grabbed her sister by the arm and pulled her along as she headed out the door and to city hall.
Cedric
Strasbourg, France, September 19, 3016
Cedric watched as the plate rolled off the table and shattered into a billion fragments of what it once was. Kind of like my life, he sighed, and rolled another one. Why not? Sure plates were hard to come by these days but hell he could manage without any.
“Ha, idiots,” he laughed to himself as he glanced at the television screen just in time to see the news update about America’s courting ceremony tomorrow morning. He knew his own country wasn’t particularly in its best shape, but it seemed better than that. For the last century, most of the major cities in the world had struggled with overcrowding due to overpopulation, and current times saw desperate efforts to remedy the situation. For America, it was courting people off into what Cedric could best describe marriage-type units. In other words, they were resorting to the ways of the history books and setting up arranged marriages in order to ensure at least two people inhabited any living space. They saw it as a way of saving room.
For France, and almost every major city, it was building upwards.
Sincerely, a bookworm. 