Unregistered by Megan Lynch

Author:Megan Lynch [Lynch, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944728564
Publisher: City Owl Press
Published: 2017-10-02T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Denver’s marriage wasn’t going well. No, it was going well, but that was the problem. She was well acquainted with mediocrity, having grown up as a Three, but she’d never quite accepted her lot. When she was ten she was ruined for mediocrity forever, the day she’d become fascinated with an idea long forgotten, in the public library. It was an idea back from a time when there were separate countries, imaginary lines drawn to separate one place from another, and every place had something special about it. In America, it had been the simple idea that people could, through hard work, change their station in life. Even the name of this idea had a stirring, hopeful ring to it: the American Dream.

Such a silly thing, such a thinly veiled tactic to increase productivity, as she well knew from her time at the DA, and yet even in her adulthood, Denver couldn’t let it go. Work hard and change your life. She badly wanted to believe that, somehow, an energy in the world existed that would allow this to happen, and so she began trying harder, and sometimes it would work for her, sometimes not. Threes were all exempt from manual labor, and most of them worked in offices, double-checking that technology was doing its job and reporting or repairing when it did not. Denver found she had a knack for anticipating problems in the systems and genuinely liked doing anything that wasn’t really her job. Talking with people, programming the system to be more efficient, noticing which households could improve their energy use by doing something simple, sending letters to let them know. Sometimes she’d see their rations go up because of her suggestions. All she really had to do was sit there and make sure the computer’s monitoring seemed right and get up to bring coffee and sandwiches to her boss, but something about that task made her feel like a computer herself. Anyone off the street could do that.

And she was beginning to think anyone off the street could also be married to Stephen.

He would arrive home a little earlier than she did, and he would immediately begin playing games on the sofa. He didn’t even have the common courtesy to project a screen so she could watch. He just sat staring at the tiny screen, huffing every now and then, as if he were doing real work. When she came in, he’d say hello and go back to his games. She held out on making dinner for him for as long as she could, but eventually she grew tired of his daily “What’s for dinner?” and he seemed to suspect she knew more about cooking than she was letting on. He’d take his plate back to the sofa to play more games and then leave it there for her to pick up. The little melodies and rings and dings coming from the watch drove her mad. She’d begun waking up earlier than she would have

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