Seed

By Rosaline Finn

In a future devoid of beauty, where people live and labor in squalid equality, a seed of hope is uncovered. A woman with a secret in a time where secrets mean death, brings life to a dying society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosaline Finn
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301200221

Book preview

Seed

A Short Story by Rosaline Finn

Copyright 2013 Rosaline Finn

Edited by Renee Williams

Smashwords Edition

She is awakened by the buzzing in her head. Not painful, except insofar as it means work is just moments away. Another day in the heat of the sun.

Baking.

Digging.

She throws her legs off the cot and stands quickly enough to make her head swim. She knew it would, but better that than another of the humming reminders that her time is not her own.

Her life is not her own.

*

Once, her father shared a secret with her. The implants had been introduced sometime in his generation, and when she was small, he had one night complained that he preferred the sound of an external alarm clock. He described with fondness something he called a Snews Button, and she gathered it was some method of controlling the time at which a person was required to rise for labor. She had asked him then how this button could change the time labor began. Did it change the labor time for everyone? What happened if more than one person had the Snews Button? Whose button would win? And his face had darkened as though she had said something terribly wrong.

It wasn’t like that, he had told her. People didn’t all get up at the same time then.

All of the days of her life she could remember, she, her father and mother, her father’s father, and her mother’s parents, had lived and slept in the revitalization room together; and they had all awakened simultaneously to the humming, buzzing, vibration of the implant. Despite the stone set of his face, she had to know more.

How did labor start?

There wasn’t labor, he spat, "At least not like now. Different people did different things. Maybe some had to go to work at different