Hannah

Feelings of fear, excitement and curiosity suffused us as we made our way toward the entrance of the ‘Convenience Store’. The girl behind the counter didn’t look at all like someone we needed to wary of. She was around our age, had blonde hair, was wearing a pink T-shirt and was slumped over the counter reading something with her elbow resting on the counter and her hand supporting her chin. Despite her not looking threatening Kevin was adamant that we not take any chances by letting our guard down; we didn’t know these people.

Inside the convenience store was unlike anything we’d ever seen or could have possibly imagined. Shelf after shelf after shelf was packed with things we didn’t have in Prospera, that nothing in Prospera came close to resembling. Upon seeing everything Kevin and I forgot that we’d entered to speak to the girl behind the counter and started exploring the aisles of the ‘Convenience Store’. On closer inspection there were things that we had in Prospera, things like coffee, tea, sugar, flour, rice, bread, soap, juice, oil, salt; they were just all in colourful packaging with lots of pictures and writing on it. The things that we didn’t recognize we were intrigued by. Soda, potato chips, chewing gum, beer, cigarettes, wine, batteries, propane; at some point on every shelf we came across something we knew nothing about. We lifted these items off the shelves and examined them closely to try and gain some understanding of what they were. The soda came in some flavours that we recognized, like grape, orange and pineapple, and others that we didn’t recognize, like cola and cream soda. The wine was made from grapes, which we grew in Prospera but didn’t use to make wine, nor did we use potatoes to make potato chips. We found it curious that there were more things we didn’t recognize than things we recognized and that in Prospera we had survived just fine for so long without them; if these things weren’t essential then what were they for? More distractions, like television?

“Excuse me, can I help you two?” The girl behind the counter asked us, in English, which was a huge relief to me having been worried about the possibility of the people we encountered not speaking the same language as us. She was looking at us with an expression on her face that was entirely quizzical. We had nothing to fear from her; her face indicated nothing at all sinister about her. I walked to the counter to converse with her, it having been decided that with my knowledge about the outside world I was the logical choice to interact with the people here on behalf of our group.

“Yes, you can help us. We’re not from around here, we have no money and we don’t know our way around; is there somewhere we can go to get some help with all of that?”

“Where are you from?” She asked me, looking even more intrigued by us.

“We used to live in a cabin…in the woods.”

“Were you being held captive or something?”

“No, we’ve been living on our own, providing for ourselves by hunting and fishing and growing our own vegetables.”

I wasn’t prepared for her line of questioning; I had to lie while simultaneously trying to avoid saying anything that she would think of as being strange, a difficult task given that I didn’t know what constituted strange in this world.

“I’ve been living here my whole life and I’ve never heard of anyone living in the woods; you must have been pretty far in.”

“It took us two days to walk out of the forest.”

“What made you leave? It sounds like you were pretty self-sufficient in there.”

“Curiosity, we wanted to see what the world was like.”

“You’ve been living in the woods your whole lives?! Who’s been taking care of you?”

“My mother’s been looking after us; she died not long ago, that’s the other reason we decided to leave.”

From the astonished look on her face it was obvious I hadn’t succeeded in not saying anything that would be construed as strange. I waited for a reaction from her to what I’d said knowing that an undesirable reaction could extremely complicate things for us.

“Well, you don’t look like total freaks, I guess I could help you; my name’s Cathy, short for Catherine,” she said, extending her hand for me to shake.

“Thank you so much; I’m Hannah, he’s Kevin, and the two outside by the bus stop are Lisa and Miranda.”

“Oh, there are four of you; are you all siblings?”

“No, we’re not related in any way.”

“And yet you’ve all been living together your whole lives; how does that work?”

“We don’t know; it just worked out that way.”

“Oh, okay.”

I found it peculiar that Cathy would just accept such a non-explanation and my mind instantly started coming up with possible reasons for why she would. The first that entered my mind was that maybe she wasn’t very bright, maybe that was a problem that people in this world had. After a few moments I started thinking something else, that maybe we were being led into a trap. Kevin had warned not to be quick to trust her; perhaps he’d been right. I decided to give Cathy the benefit of the doubt; we had only just started talking and she was the first person we’d met in this world, we still had a lot to learn about this place and its people. Better, I thought, to spend some time getting to know her first.

“You don’t seem very bothered by my answer,” I said to her.

“We get a lot of travellers up here, most of them don’t like to talk about their past, it’s too painful. Of course they’re coming up from the south so it’s a little different than your situation.”

“Why is it too painful for them to talk about their past?” Kevin asked her.

“The war, people have some terrible memories from it.”

“The war? It’s real? And it’s still happening?” I asked her.

“Yes, twelve years now, and it’s showing no signs of ending.”

“Twelve years? Shouldn’t it have been going on longer than that?” I asked her.

“What war are you talking about?” She asked with confusion in her voice.

“The nuclear war; the one that devastated the whole world.”

“Nuclear world war?! No, that never happened; is that what you were told had happened?”

“We were told that most of the world had been destroyed by nuclear weapons and that all that was left was wastelands where there was nothing but chaos.”

“Then you’ve been lied to your whole lives. Are you sure you weren’t being held captive as a part of some sort of cult or something? Because that’s what it sounds like.”

“We already told you it was nothing like that.”

“You say you weren’t being held captive but it sounds like they told you that the world had been destroyed so that you wouldn’t think about leaving; isn’t that kind of the same thing?”

Discovering the truth, although it was what we had expected and were hoping for, was no less jarring. Cathy was right, we had been held captive our entire lives, by our parents and by all of the people whom we had trusted and looked up to. Familiar feelings of betrayal and anger rose up in us that we had to quickly suppress being in the presence of an outsider. My initial theory about Cathy not being very bright turned out not to be true at all; for some reason that I couldn’t grasp she was choosing to overlook things that would otherwise be alarming. We didn’t have much of a choice but to trust Cathy; she seemed sincere enough and we had made something of a connection with her.

“Where are we?” I asked her.

“Huntingdale, a small farming town in northern Canada.”

“Is there work here? We need to find work.”

“Sure, there’s work; what can you do?”

“Kevin can do almost anything, Miranda can play the violin, Lisa has some medical training, and I’m willing to do any work I can get.”

“What kind of things can Kevin do?”

“He can skin and carve animals, if it weren’t for him providing food for us we never would have made it through the forest.”

“My father owns a butcher shop not far from here, he’s been looking for someone for about a week; with Lisa’s medical training, even if it’s limited, she can be useful; I don’t know what I can do for the violinist though.”

“If the three of us are working we should be able to support her, right?”

“Yeah, you should be able to do that; my father pays his workers quite well.”

“And what about shelter?”

“There are hostels run by my father where new arrivals are allowed to stay for free; you’re welcome to stay there until you’ve sorted yourselves out and can find your own place.”

“Your father sounds like he’s very important around here, who is he?” Kevin asked.

“How about I take you to see him and you can ask him yourself, you look like you’re eager to get yourselves going.”

“TOMMY!” she yelled as she grabbed a set of keys off the counter.

“YEAH?”

“Watch the shop for a little, I gotta go somewhere.”

“New arrivals?” said the boy named Tommy, who walked into the front of the store through a door at the back wearing an apron.

“Yeah, four of them, I’m taking them to meet my dad; I’ll be back later, if I come back that is.”

She walked out from behind the counter and gestured for us to follow her outside, which we did.

“Okay, I’m going to go around to the back and get my truck, tell Lisa and Miranda to get ready to go,” she said and walked away.

Everything had moved so fast in the space of one short exchange that there was no time for us to contemplate or discuss the prudence of the path that we were on. Lisa and Miranda were taken aback by the news of what we’d be doing next when we broke it to them. We were only meant to acquire some information from Cathy, not get pulled into something we weren’t prepared for. None of us were ready for such a lightning fast introduction to the outside world but we had gotten swept up in a situation of which we had no control. Cathy had unknowingly usurped Kevin as our leader; we were following her now, which made sense, she was from this world and we weren’t.

An awkward moment ensued when Cathy arrived at the front of the store in her truck. She told us to get inside but not knowing the first thing about how these vehicles worked we all just stood dumbfounded next to the truck.

“Put your fingers under the black handle and pull up,” she said to us.

I went first, and took my place in the seat next to Cathy’s in the front; Kevin, Lisa and Miranda sat behind us in the rear seats after they’d piled all of our things in the storage space at the back of the truck.

“So you guys really weren’t kidding when you said you’ve been living in the woods your whole lives.”

“No, we weren’t kidding,” I responded.

“That’s okay; I’ll get you guys clued up about everything.”

“Thanks, that’s very kind of you.”

“Don’t mention it, besides, it’ll be fun.”

My impression was that Cathy found us a curiosity more than anything else and was eager to help us because she was anticipating that it was going to be an interesting experience. So long as her motives weren’t sinister there was nothing for us to worry about. We were lucky to have found Cathy, who was more kind and helpful than I was expecting anybody in this world to be. My curiosity however wouldn’t allow Cathy’s benevolence to go unquestioned.

“Why are you being so helpful to us?”

“That’s how we are in Canada; they don’t call us the nicest people in the world for nothing.”

I accepted Cathy’s explanation, on the grounds that I had no reason not to.

“How come your truck doesn’t make any noise?” I asked Cathy, finding it odd that the vehicle’s propulsion system was nearly completely silent.

“It’s electric; everybody drives electric cars, except the Americans,” she answered.

As strange as seeing the cars driving past us on the road had been, it was nothing compared to actually being in one. The only transport that we were used to was horses and bicycles, neither of which moved anywhere near as fast as Cathy’s truck. The technology of the outside world and how much more advanced it was than what we had in Prospera was astounding.

On the way to meet Frank, who worked in an office in town, we got to see more of the outside world as it passed us by. Building after building after building, each one looked different and served a different purpose. ‘Pete’s Pizzeria’ the sign on one read, ‘Discount Pharmacy’ the sign on another read, ‘Make Waves Hair Salon’ read another. There were people walking on the street in front of the buildings and popping in and out of them, stationary cars lined the street and the more we drove into the town the more cars there were. The place was vibrant, energetic…terrifying. How were we going to cope here?

“This here is the city centre, it was mostly for servicing the local farmers and their families but there’s been a lot of transformation since people started coming up here to live permanently to get as far away from the fighting as possible.”

“The war, what’s it about?” I asked her.

“Same thing every American war is about: oil.”

Frank worked in a four storey building constructed out of red bricks that was in the very centre of town. We reached it before I could get more information from Cathy about the war. He owned several businesses in Huntingdale including the convenience store where we’d met Cathy, a butcher’s shop and a farm and was the chairman of the town’s Chamber of Commerce, which put him in a unique position to assist with the settling of new arrivals. He used his contacts to ascertain which business owners were in need of what skills and sought to match them with new arrivals that possessed that corresponding skill set. His office was on the third floor. To get there we wouldn’t be walking up the steps, we’d be using something called an elevator, a box that we followed Cathy into after she pushed a button and the doors in front of it slid open. Again, the sheer gulf between what was ordinary for someone of the outside world like Cathy and what we were used to as citizens of Prospera was shocking; we could hardly breathe as we felt ourselves being transported upwards by the elevator. A lot of that was down to fear; if something went up then it also went down and not knowing what was causing the elevator to go up meant not knowing what was stopping it from falling down; until we were out of the elevator we couldn’t feel safe.

When we reached the floor where Frank’s office was located she told us to sit on one of the benches in the hall while she went inside and explained our situation to him. It was the first time the four of us were alone since Kevin and I had gone into the convenience store to talk to Cathy, an exchange that had set in motion a frighteningly rapid progression of events that was still unfolding. Lisa looked furious, Kevin looked as unsure as I’d ever seen him, and Miranda was difficult to get a read on. Ordinarily she was the one who was overly worried and in a panic during situations of uncertainty but of late she had been all but unflappable.

Cathy emerged from her father’s office and returned to us in the hallway after what felt like an uncomfortably long amount of time.

“Sorry guys, my dad’s got people coming for a meeting just now so he can’t see you, but he said it’s okay if I take you to the house, so let’s go,” she said and bounced off toward the elevator.

“I thought you said we’d be staying at the hostels,” I asked her.

“There are hostels not far from where we live, that’s if you even end up living there, sometimes if my father likes someone he’ll make alternate arrangements for them.”

According to Cathy the hostels were quite full. They were located mostly around the farms and housed mostly those who worked on the farms because they didn’t have any notable skills. There were thousands of them, Cathy said, and while the accommodations were perfectly fine there were better ways one could be living. I noticed when we were on our way to Cathy’s house that the reason it felt like we were going so fast in her truck was because Cathy was driving faster than everybody else on the road. Her driving style was a near perfect manifestation of her personality: exuberant and aggressive. We were lucky to have found Cathy. With everything that we had seen if we had had to negotiate this world by ourselves we no doubt would have been completely lost. She was an interesting character. I wondered if the helpfulness that she had shown to us thus far really came from her natural inclination as a Canadian to be helpful or from someplace else, like curiosity or downright boredom; maybe helping refugees was one of the few interesting things she had to do.

“Is there any danger of the war reaching us up here?” I asked her as we were driving.

“No, we don’t do any oil drilling here and there are no pipelines nearby, so we’re okay.”

“I thought that things like oil were simply bought and sold in markets; why is there a war over it?”

“We stopped producing and exporting oil thirty years ago, to send a strong message about how serious we were about dealing with climate change. The Americans weren’t happy about that, especially with all of the political turmoil and carnage in the Middle East from the Iran-Saudi Arabia war making it impossible to get oil from there, and after the coup in Washington there was nothing to stop them from being as belligerent as they wanted to be. Here it is.”

We had arrived at the long driveway that led up to Cathy’s house. The house was at the top of a small hill. As we made our way up the driveway toward it we passed a barn, two silos, and a pen in which there were quite a few sheep. The further up the driveway we got the more we were able to see of the farm. Behind the house were fields that were fallow and in the distance were more farms and farmhouses.

“Why did you bring us here?” I asked Cathy when we arrived at the house and had disembarked from the truck.

“Because there are still a lot of things that I need to tell you and that you need to tell me, and more importantly my father wants to see how Kevin does on a small examination that he’s asked me to administer. You see those sheep?” She turned to Kevin and said, “He wants you to kill, skin and carve one within one hour, if you can do that he’ll give you a job at his butchery. On the other side of the house behind the kitchen are a butcher’s table and a cabinet with all the tools that you’ll need, put the different pieces of meat in separate packets and store them in the freezer when you’re done, but first let me give you all a quick tour of the house.”

Cathy’s house was constructed of wood and rested on a stone base. There were similarities between it and our houses in Prospera that made us feel comfortable about being there, and much like when we first entered the cabin in the woods there wasn’t a whole lot on the inside that was different either. The floor was carpeted, curtains hung by the windows, the furniture was made from wood. She took us from the dining room, which was the room closest to the entrance, and after that to the kitchen, where there were things that were familiar to us from the cabin. The kettle, the freezer, the refrigerator; they were all there along with some others that weren’t in the cabin. Curious about these things that had been a mystery to us when we were in the cabin, Miranda walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door to look inside.

“It’s cold; how is it cold?” She asked Cathy with a look of wonder on her face.

“It’s a fridge, it’s supposed to be cold; are you guys thirsty? If you are you can take anything you want to drink out of the fridge, there’s juice, soda, milkshake…”

“Which ones are the soda and milkshake?” Miranda asked eagerly.

“They’re in the door at the bottom.”

Miranda removed both from the fridge and took two glasses from the rack beside the sink. She filled one with soda and the other with milkshake and drank each one in practically one sip. This world, I realized, was a place of utter fascination to her. She had a creative mind that was naturally stimulated by new and interesting things and this world was full of them. She was childlike in the way that she was acquainting herself with it, and there was danger in that.

“You guys have to try these, especially the milkshake,” she said, filling both glasses with milkshake, “Kevin, get another glass,” she said to him, since he was the closest to the rack.

Kevin did as he was told, Miranda poured three glasses of milkshake and we got our first taste of the luxuries they had in this world that we didn’t have in Prospera. Cathy watched us we savoured every drop as it entered our mouths and descended our throats. The milkshake was delicious; in Prospera all we had to drink was milk, water, juice, tea and coffee, nothing like this. Probably it had been decided that such things, much like television, were frivolities and meaningless distractions. To a degree I could understand their perspective, after finishing my milkshake all I could think about was how much I wanted another glass, no doubt it was the same with all of the other luxuries they had in this world.

“What’s that?” Miranda asked Cathy, pointing to the box with the two openings on top.

“That’s a toaster, it turns bread into toast.”

“Oh, we used to use fire to make toast. How about that?” She asked, pointing to something else.

“That’s an oven; it’s for baking and roasting things.”

“We had an oven too, but it also used fire; this all runs on electricity, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Solar panels, on the roof, they transform sunlight into electricity and emit zero pollution.”

“How do they do that?”

“Miranda, I think you’ve asked Cathy enough questions,” I said to her, concerned that all of her questions were making us look like the freaks that Cathy didn’t think we were.

“It’s okay, the quicker you guys get caught up the better, right? Ask me as many questions as you want.”

There was silence among us as we contemplated whether to expose any more of our ignorance of this world. The silence was broken by Miranda.

“Do you have a TV? Hannah told us about those and I’ve been curious about them ever since.”

“Sure, it’s in the living room, come on I’ll show you.”

Miranda followed Cathy to the living room, affording us the opportunity to have a quick discussion amongst ourselves. I still thought that it was a mistake for us to reveal the extent of our ignorance before we’d learned more about the world we were in. In hushed tones in the kitchen I told Kevin and Lisa that we needed to be more guarded about the truth about us and that under no circumstances were we to say anything about Prospera. One of us was going to have to share this with Miranda later when we had a chance to be alone with her, at present she was too busy being dazzled by all that this world had to offer.

“You guys have to come see this,” she darted into the kitchen and said before darting off again.

We followed her to Cathy’s living room and there got our first sight of television, the device that I had been told had been the bane of this world. Pictures on a screen, that’s all it was, and yet I could immediately see why the founders of Prospera had been so determined to keep it out of the village. The visuals on the television were of scantily clad people in some room where the lights were constantly changing, dancing to some strange music.

“This is MTV; it’s one of the music channels. We get channels that air movies, series, sports, documentaries, news, religion, cartoons; basically anything that you can think of.”

“We don’t know what any of those things are,” Miranda said to her.

“Here’s the remote, you can explore them for yourself, just point the remote at that green light beneath the TV and press these buttons to change either up or down.”

Miranda sat on the sofa facing the TV and began exploring the vast array of programming on offer. Kevin, Lisa and I looked at the TV with curiosity but nothing like the complete enthrallment with which Miranda was staring at it. I was torn as to whether Miranda’s embrace of this world was a good thing because it meant she would adapt to it better or a dangerous thing because it would make her vulnerable to threats from a world she thought she knew.

“I think I should get started,” Kevin said.

“Oh, right, well, you know where everything is,” Cathy responded.

Lisa remained in the living room with Miranda, who looked like nothing could pry her away from the TV. I went outside with Kevin. He took the sheep out of the pen and carried it to the area outside the kitchen where Cathy said he should work. He did everything by himself; he didn’t need my help with anything. He slit the sheep’s throat and let it bleed out into the earth before carrying the carcass onto the balcony and placing it on the butcher’s table. He worked on the sheep’s carcass with the same efficiency with which I’d seen him work on the carcasses in the woods. He was able to move faster on the sheep’s carcass because unlike when we were in the woods he had specialized implements available to him that he was familiar with having watched them being used in the Prospera abattoir.

“Wow! You work fast,” Cathy said when she emerged onto the balcony and saw the amount of progress Kevin had made in the short amount of time he’d been working.

“I told you, Kevin can do anything,” I said to her.

“If that’s true then my father will be really happy that you’re here, he’s got a lot of responsibilities that he’d like to delegate to someone, you could find yourself doing more than just working in the butchery.”

“Where are we going to sleep tonight?” I asked Cathy.

“We’ll sort that out later, it’ll be easy to get you a room in one of the hostels, that’s if you don’t end up sleeping here.”

“Here? When did that become an option?”

“When I realized how much I like you guys and how much fun we could have.”

A short silence prevailed then as Cathy and I watched Kevin’s assiduous cleaving of flesh from bone, then meat from fat.

“I’m surprised you guys have never met anyone from our world before.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“There have been quiet a few people that have passed through this town heading north into the woods on a quest to find some hidden paradise called Prospera.”

My body shuddered at the sound of the name Prospera passing through Cathy’s lips but my reactions were quick enough to conceal my shock from her. Kevin was similarly adroit in his self control.

“We never saw any of those people, and we’ve never heard of this Prospera either,” I said.

“Few people have; it’s supposed to be some isolated village that’s completely separated from the world where people live in peace and harmony; if you ask me the whole story is too far-fetched for it to possibly be true.”

“Did those people ever say if they found anything?”

“That’s the thing, not a single one of them has ever come back. They probably got eaten by wolves or something, the deeper you go into the forest the more dangerous it becomes.”

What had happened to those people? I immediately wondered. Had they been killed by Prospera citizens to keep us from finding out about the outside world and to keep the outside world from finding out about us? I was certain that they’d suffered some kind of fate at the hands of Prospera; the only question was what that fate had been. Kevin knew it too; we shared a look that said as much when he looked up from the table upon finishing his work on the sheep.

“That’s a lot of mutton you’ve got there, my father will be pleased. Give me the chops; I’ll cook them for dinner.”

Cathy took the packet with the chops from Kevin and carried it inside. I walked over to the freezer to have a discrete word with Kevin while he put the rest of the meat away.

“How do people out here know about Prospera?” I asked him softly.

“I don’t know; even when we’re far away from Prospera we’re still learning things about it we’re not supposed to know.”

There was a tap on the side of the house where Kevin washed the blood from the sheep off his hands, after which we were at a bit of a loss for what to do with ourselves.

“Come and see this, quickly,” Lisa ran outside and said to us.

We followed her inside to the living room; what she wanted us to see was on the TV.

“This is CNN; it’s one of the news channels, they’re about to talk about the war, I thought you’d want to see this.”

‘Breaking news this hour, a fragmentium drone strike is being reported in the Canadian town of Scanlon, about twenty miles north of the Alberta-Montana border. It is the second such attack this week after a fragmentium drone strike in the town of Crosshall killed fifteen people and wounded dozens more. The Prime Minister of Canada, Daniel Benfield, has condemned the attack and offered his condolences to the victims and their families. Fragmentium drone strikes are commonly used by the US army to clear out the towns they reach as they continue their campaign for control of Canada’s oil reserves and infrastructure. CNN’s Blake Fields is in the conflict zone and has this report.’

‘It’s become a familiar scene: buildings destroyed, people fleeing, emergency services doing all they can to save as many as they can. The Canadian army had sent troops to this town in an effort to slow the progress of the American troops but like every town where the Americans have encountered resistance from the Canadians, fragmentium drone strikes rained down on the town causing incalculable loss and damage. The town, which has a key oil pipeline control station located within it, was quickly surrendered to the Americans following the fragmentium strike. This woman, whose child lost her leg after a piece of fragmentium shrapnel sheered through most of it, couldn’t make any sense of why this had happened.’

‘WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS?! WHY?! WE NEVER DID ANYTHING TO THEM!’

‘After this latest attack the inhabitants of this town will have a choice to make: stay here and subject themselves to American occupation, or flee north, as hundreds of thousands have already done, Rana.’

‘Thank you Matthew, and now for more on this story I’d like to bring in our military analyst, Retired Lieutenant General…’

I ran around the sofa, grabbed the remote from Miranda and turned the TV off. She’d seen enough. The images that they showed on screen while the woman named Rana and the man named Blake had talked about what was going on were disturbing, provoking feelings in us that we’d never felt before having not known that it was possible for people to do such things to each other. In Prospera they had told us about the various wars that had been fought in this world and our textbooks had contained images of the atrocities committed in those wars but what we were seeing was happening as we were watching it to people whose country we now inhabited; there was no separation between us and what was happening like there had been between us and the pictures in our textbooks of events that had transpired long ago. This was real, viscerally real, and we weren’t prepared for it. Miranda was brought to tears by the images on screen of people staggering through dust from collapsed rubble with blood running down their faces, carrying dead children, screaming wretchedly in painful disbelief.

“Why would people do this to each other?” Miranda asked in shock.

“We have something they want that we won’t give to them, so they’ve come to take it; people have been doing it since the dawn of civilization.”

“But those people are suffering; don’t they care that they’re causing people to suffer?”

“As long as they get what they want they don’t care.”

“Well is anybody helping? Is anybody doing anything?”

“The EU has sent some troops and is selling weapons to a guerrilla group that’s also fighting the Americans but it’s not enough to make a real difference; they’re afraid of the Americans turning their attention to them if they take too strong a stance against them.”

“How can this be allowed to happen? Where we come from…”

“Miranda!” I interrupted her, worried that she was about to mention Prospera, “Why not just give them what they want and bring an end to all of this?” I asked Cathy.

“Because if we give them the oil what’s to stop them from wanting everything? From enslaving us and imprisoning us and executing us?”

“If they win won’t they be able to do all of that anyway? The harder you make it for them to get what they want the harder they’ll make things for you in the end, don’t you think?”

“They’re never going to win, there’ve been so many attacks on pipelines and control stations and oil wells that they’ll never have complete control of our oil; the only reason they’re staying is because they don’t want to admit they can’t win, it’s Vietnam all over again.”

“Things like what we just saw have been going on for twelve years you said; how do you live with it?” Miranda asked.

“You get used to it; like I said, it’s been going on forever.”

We were silent. The reality of this world, as we had just seen it and as Cathy had described it to us, was incomprehensible to us. The cruelty, the killing, the indifferent attitude of Cathy whose country this was happening to, it was all tough to digest. Knowing that in Huntingdale we were far away from the conflict somewhat mitigated what we were feeling; what was inescapable was the fact that nothing like this ever happened in Prospera. Did that mean the methods employed by the governing authorities in Prospera were justified? Had we made a huge mistake by coming to this world where order appeared to have very little value? What we had discovered about this world in the short time we’d been here challenged so much of what we had assumed; the very reasons for which we had left Prospera were thrown into question by the images of the war that we had seen on the television. Cathy couldn’t understand what we were going through; she was a child when this war had started and had grown up with it as a constant in her life.

Our biggest concern, as she always was, was Miranda. In the hours prior to seeing the news story she had been open-minded and embracing of this world. Miranda didn’t process negativity at all well; the more we learned about this war and the other terrible things that happened here the more she was going to need our protection, at a time when each of us would be searching for our own individual place and purpose. Lisa would make sure she was there for her, but in a world we were only just beginning to discover the dangers of keeping Miranda’s mind in a healthy space could prove to be too big a task even for her.

I thought that the most important thing for us was learning as much about this world as possible, starting with the war. I asked Cathy how I could do so and she said that she would take me to the library tomorrow and allow me to use her library card to check out some books. I still didn’t know what to make of her. The extent to which she was making herself available to us, her lack of suspicion or concern about our vague past and sudden appearance in her town; I couldn’t accept that it was all purely out of kindness.

In the meantime we had immediate concerns that required addressing, the most immediate of which was that it was lunchtime and we hadn’t eaten since we’d set off that morning. We had food supplies, the meat and canned vegetables that we’d brought with us from the cabin were in the back of Cathy’s truck, but she had a much simpler lunch solution.

“Just take some bread and some stuff out of the fridge and make sandwiches for yourselves,” she answered when I asked her if there was a place where we could make a fire to cook our meat for lunch.

I couldn’t deny that the conveniences in this world were wonderful; they were able to keep food items in their homes that in Prospera we had to pick up from the food collection points because we didn’t have the refrigeration capacity in our homes. I couldn’t see the harm in these conveniences, except the TV which Miranda had been glued to, and wondered if they hadn’t perhaps gone too far in Prospera in keeping them out.

Kevin and I left Lisa with Miranda and went into the kitchen to make the sandwiches; we used the cheese, lettuce and tomatoes that we found in the fridge. Midway through making the sandwiches Kevin went out to Cathy’s truck to get our meat and put it in the outside freezer. While he was gone, Cathy joined me in the kitchen.

“I just remembered that I need to make lunch for my mother and take it to her.”

“Your mother; where is she?” I asked.

“She’s in hospital; she’s being treated for cancer. She likes me to bring lunch for her and sit and talk with her.”

I had been curious about Cathy’s parental situation; she had talked a lot about her father since almost the moment we’d met her but had said nothing about her mother. I’d thought that her father was her only parent.

“I don’t have time to make something from scratch, last night’s leftovers will have to do,” she said.

She pulled a container out of the fridge and popped it into the box with a door and numbers on the side that we had in the cabin but didn’t know the name of.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a microwave, it heats things up.”

“Without fire; how does it do that?”

“Radiation, I think, I don’t know, I just know how to use it. Anyway, I have got to go; I’ll be back in about an hour. Don’t do any damage to anything while I’m gone, if you do it’ll make it harder for me to convince my father to let you stay with us.”

Cathy took the container of lasagne with her and left us strangers behind in her house. Afforded the opportunity to have a talk we all gathered outside at the table where Kevin had worked on the sheep to air our initial impressions of this world.

“I don’t think we can trust Cathy,” I began the conversation with.

“What do you mean we can’t trust her? She’s been so nice to us,” Miranda said.

“That’s precisely why she worries me; you don’t find it a bit strange that she’s being so helpful to us?”

“She’s just being nice.”

“We don’t know that, when she came outside and talked to me and Kevin she talked about Prospera; we don’t know anything about these people and we don’t know how much they know about us, we have to be careful.”

“How does she know about Prospera?” Lisa asked.

“Some people have come up here trying to find it but they’ve never been seen again, so to the people of this world Prospera remains nothing more than a rumour,” I said.

“We can’t say a thing about Prospera to anyone, people in this world finding out about its existence could mean danger for Prospera,” Kevin said.

“Does anyone else here think it’s odd that as advanced as this world is they haven’t found out about Prospera yet?” Lisa asked.

“I do, I think there’s some sort of connection between this world and Prospera that probably only a handful of people know about,” I said.

“So even here we might not be safe from Prospera?” Lisa asked.

“I think that’s possible, but what I’m more worried about is the war the Americans are waging,” I said.

“Cathy said that we’re safe here because there’s no oil anywhere nearby,” Miranda said.

“That’s assuming the oil is all they want, maybe they want more, in which case nobody is safe anywhere,” I said.

“If they get this far they could keep going north and find Prospera and go after it too; should we go back and warn them?” Lisa asked.

“No, we don’t know enough, and for now we need to focus on establishing ourselves in this place,” Kevin said.

“Your work on the sheep impressed Cathy so you’re going to be okay, but how are the rest of us going to establish ourselves here?” Lisa asked.

“Cathy’s willing to help us, maybe we should just be patient and wait for her to come through with something,” Miranda said.

“I’ve already said that we shouldn’t be too reliant on her; we can’t trust her, not yet at least,” I said to Miranda.

“Without her we’d probably still be walking around on the road completely lost; we owe her the benefit of the doubt at least, don’t we?” Miranda asked me.

“We have to protect ourselves, and Prospera, that means not saying anything that will lead Cathy or anyone else to suspect that we come from Prospera, so choose your words very carefully when talking to anybody from this world.”

“Why are you so worried about protecting Prospera? In case you don’t remember the whole reason we’re here is because they tried to kill Kevin; why should we care about them?” Miranda asked.

“It’s still our home, and all of the people there are still our family, and we may have to go back there someday.”

“Go back? Why would we have to go back?” Miranda asked.

“To escape from the war if it reaches us up here, or in case things don’t work out for us in this world.”

“Us having learned the truth about this world means they probably won’t allow us to return; if we try to go back they’ll stop us somehow,” Lisa said, “Are you regretting leaving? Because that’s what it’s sounding like.”

“We’ve only been here a few hours and already everything we’ve discovered has been so overwhelming; it’s frightening how little we know about this world and how ill-prepared we are to inhabit it.”

“Frightening? The stuff they have here is so cool! Have you seen the cartoons on the TV? It’s amazing that they’re able to do stuff like that here, you should be more excited about it,” Miranda said to me.

“That’s another thing, you shouldn’t be so quick to embrace everything in this world; we don’t know yet what’s dangerous and what’s not.”

“Are you listening to yourself? You’re thinking about everything the way you were taught to think about things in Prospera. They lied to us about everything! There was no nuclear world war and there’s nothing dangerous about television. You need to accept that we’re not in Prospera anymore and start adjusting to this world, because this is our home now.”

Miranda’s words were harsh but necessary. Ever since being dragged along by Cathy on the crazy ride that we’d been on I’d been growing ever more apprehensive. The reality was that this strange new world that we were in was our home now and we had to make the best of it. Miranda’s way of looking at this world and interacting with it would need to be adopted by all of us.

The rest of us following Miranda’s lead was an unexpected change in the dynamic of our friendship; having undergone her transformation into a more curious and adventurous person she was the person who was best equipped to navigate this world. Assimilation meant survival; for all of this world’s flaws, dangers and distractions we needed to familiarize ourselves with all of it as much as possible if we wanted to make it here, for nobody would this be harder than for me.