Chapter 3

HIRO

Hiro was angry.

He and nine other people had dedicated two years to Project Earth. And now it was gone.

He pulled his full face gas mask from his bag and quickly wore it when the elevator got to the fifth floor before checking if it fit properly. He slung his bag over his shoulders after the elevator dinged open and left the institute.

He always left the institute at ten PM but now that Project Earth had been scrapped, he had nothing to do there. He got to the bus stop after a couple of minutes and sat on the bench there to wait for the next bus.

All the shops were opened and there were a lot of people on the street. There were more patrollers present now than there was when he had been going to the institute and they were all stopping people to check their identity cards. There were security guards in front of some shops to control the people in queues waiting to enter the decontamination chamber.

Hiro pulled his phone out of his pocket to text his friend, Maria Rizzo, who was one of the other scientists that had been working on Project Earth.

HIRO, 6:52 AM: PROJECT EARTH IS BEING SCRAPPED???!!!!

The bus was coming down the road and Hiro got up from the bench when he saw it. His phone buzzed with a message and he quickly checked it.

MARIA, 6:52 AM: Yeah, we all got an e-mail from Smith this morning. It was a pretty shitty thing of the government to do. How are you taking it though?

'Of course I was informed last,' he thought. 'He could have just emailed me too instead of letting me waste my time by coming to work.'

The bus came to a stop in front of him and he got into the decontamination chamber before he entered the bus. There were only ten people on the bus since most of the people in the Central that rode it were already at work. His phone buzzed again as he sat in the seat closest to the door.

MARIA, 6:53 AM: Hiro... Are you okay?

He replied with 'I'm fine' before the bus started and he kept the phone back in his pocket.

There were sky towers in the centre of the Central that could be seen from everywhere. It was the headquarters of Aeronautics and Space Management, ASM. Only people that were invited could go there.

Hiro watched the people that were on the streets and heading to different places through the window. Before the particles were released into the air, the city was always moving; cars, buses, trains, bikes, people. There used to be parks filled with trees and grass. Birds were in the air and people had pets.

Now there were no animals and plants were only grown in green houses. There were no trains and bikes, only a limited amount of cars and a lot of buses.

Service in stores were fast, efficient and mechanical but without a smile. There are no street artists, street vendors or brightly covered store fronts.

"They burned down an apartment complex yesterday."

"Wasn't that three days ago? I heard that it was a store they burned down yesterday."

"I think it's both."

The conversation the people behind Hiro were having drifted to him.

They were talking about the outlanders.

A wall had been built around the Central to separate it from the outlands eighteen years ago. The government said they built it because the devastation the particles had caused in the outlands was too much and there was nothing they could do to revive it.

Hiro knew they built it because it was getting difficult to provide uncontaminated food and water for everyone. They built it to provide only for a specific amount of people. People that committed huge crimes were no longer punished with jail time, they were punished by being banished to the outlands.

But three years ago, a section of the wall collapsed and outlanders had entered the Central. The wall had been rebuilt but they were still looking for the people that had snuck in so they could toss them back out.

"Next stop, Fletcher street. Next stop, Fletcher street," the bus conductor called out and Hiro got up from the seat.

He got down from the bus and was about to start walking to his apartment complex when he remembered that he needed to get food. There was a supermarket across the road and he crossed the road to join the queue that had formed outside it.

The decontamination chamber was bigger than the one of the bus and the institute so it could contain three people. After standing in the queue for a while, he finally entered the decontamination chamber, and then the store.

'Why are there so many people today?' he thought as he saw the crowd in the store.

His question was soon answered when a woman pushed her cart past him.

Meat.

More specifically, plant based meat. He had read it on the news but he didn't think it would be in supermarkets this soon. According to the company that produced it and the people that had tasted it, it was almost indistinguishable from real meat.

He grabbed a cart and quickly headed to the aisle which had the words 'MEAT SECTION' written on a board and hanging over it.

After grabbing some packs of plant based meat and other foodstuffs he needed, he headed to the counter to pay. He used his identity card to pay, like everyone else. Everyone's wages were paid to their identity card weekly.

Scientists and astronauts earned five thousand credits weekly. Engineers and doctors earned four thousand, five hundred credits weekly. Farmers earned four thousand credits weekly.

The more important a person's job was, the more they were paid. Scientists and astronauts had the highest paying job while musicians, actors and the likes of those had the lowest paying jobs, earning two hundred credits weekly. That wasn't enough to cover a person's living cost for the week.

He paid for the foodstuffs and headed home after leaving the store.