Miranda

We were baffled by Hannah’s hostility toward Cathy. The rest of us felt that with Cathy with us our group was now complete, joined by our final member. Cathy remained with us in the cabin and helped us with the chores and nothing felt the least bit out of the ordinary. Hannah felt differently. She was noticeably irritated, grousing and performing her chores with angst fuelled vigour. Did Prospera really mean so much to her that the thought of somebody who wasn’t from Prospera getting to see it was causing her to act this way? If that was the case then it made sense for her to be going back. Cathy and her parents had been too kind to us for us to ever think of her as a nuisance or an invader. I was glad Cathy had followed us, it meant an end to the lies and secrecy that our friendship had been based on since the beginning. I wanted her to see Prospera, to know all about it and to know what she thought about the completely different way of life that existed in the village.

Now that the truth about Prospera was out Cathy really did feel like our sister. She couldn’t wait to start learning about Prospera, at breakfast we were inundated with questions from her about the village we’d grown up in.

“You really knew nothing about the world?” She asked us incredulously over our breakfast of bacon and eggs.

“They told us that the rest of the world had been destroyed by nuclear weapons and that what was left was nothing but wastelands and anarchy; they showed us pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to illustrate the destructive power of nuclear weapons,” Lisa said.

“How long has Prospera been around?”

“Almost one hundred and fifty years. Our great grandparents were the founders of Prospera; Hannah’s grandfather is the current head of the Ethics Committee, the most powerful position in the village,” Kevin said.

“So you’re like royalty then.”

“Things don’t work that way in Prospera; nobody has any social status, we’re all equal,” Hannah responded.

“Maybe officially nobody has any social status but all societies have some form of social hierarchy.”

“Not in Prospera, everybody gets the same as everybody else: same housing, same food, same clothing; it’s all perfectly egalitarian.”

“It’s not egalitarian if everybody doesn’t deserve the same.”

“It ensures social harmony, there’s no arguing that it works.”

“If it’s not entirely fair there must be more than a few people who are disgruntled.”

“Well there aren’t, there’s never been a violent episode in Prospera’s history.”

“What about beneath the surface? How can you be sure there’s no resentment bubbling up from beneath the surface?”

“Like I said, over a hundred years of peace; the way we do things works, not like in your world where you’ve got war, income inequality, pollution and crime.”

“At the cost of keeping people prisoner.”

“People are not being kept prisoner! I told you she wouldn’t understand,” Hannah said to us.

“She’s trying to understand; we need to be patient with her just like she was patient with us,” Kevin said to Hannah, “You’re right,” he said, turning to Cathy, “lying to people about what’s going on in the world is a form of imprisonment, but more importantly it’s a way of keeping people quiescent so the village remains peaceful, which is their ultimate goal.”

“Why is it important for them to keep the truth about the world from you?”

“Because life is very different in Prospera. We have no electricity, no cars, no phones, no TV, no internet; you can imagine people’s shock were they to find out what’s really out there.”

“What’s life like in Prospera?”

“Primitive. We burn wood, oil and candles for light and heat, grow our own food, make our own medicine from plants; we have to be very fastidious about managing our resources.”

“You’re like the Amish then.”

“Not quite. We have an orchestra, which Miranda was a member of, a large library, and we regularly stage theatre productions, so we’re a lot more cultured than they are, but I understand why you’d make the comparison,” Kevin answered. He’d learned about the Amish in one of the many books we’d taken from the library to learn about the world.

“It sounds like an interesting place.”

“To an outsider it would be; you need to remember that we wouldn’t have left it if all we thought of it was that it was interesting. It’s also scary and if you’re not careful, dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“They tried to kill me.”

“We don’t know that for sure, that’s also what I’m going back to find out,” Hannah said.

“There are also mysterious deaths, most of them children,” Kevin said to Cathy.

“I have a theory about that,” Hannah said.

“You do?” Kevin asked.

“I think all of those children were actually secreted out of the village and dropped off in Huntingdale, their deaths faked; I think Morgan was one of them.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked her.

“Cathy told us he just showed up in Huntingdale one morning when he was a child with no idea of where he’d come from; what else could explain that?”

“There was more than one child that died suspiciously in Prospera,” Kevin said.

“There have been other children that have appeared mysteriously in Huntingdale, Morgan wasn’t the only one,” Cathy said.

“I don’t think they would be so cruel in Prospera as to kill children,” Hannah said.

“Dumping them alone in a strange place when they’re small is hardly an act of kindness,” Kevin said.

“It’s better than killing them.”

“Are you saying that when we get to Prospera I’m going to see the place where Morgan was born?” Cathy asked.

“That’s if it’s true,” Kevin said.

“I’m sure it is; we know from what we saw on Goggle Earth that Prospera has some form of contact with the outside world, it’s not hard to imagine them not having a method for secreting children out of the village and getting them to the outside world.”

“Why would they want to get rid of children?” Cathy asked.

“They test us when we’re children to ascertain if we have desirable personalities; they check for selfishness, temper, problems with authority; the children that score too badly on those tests are removed because they’re considered a threat to the stability of the village, at least that’s my theory,” Kevin answered.

“Is that why they tried to kill you?”

“Yes. I was out on the fishing boat and I was struck on the back of my head by an oar, hard enough to be thrown overboard into the sea.”

“It might have been an accident, we don’t know,” Hannah said.

“Others had gone missing at sea, I wasn’t willing to take the chance that it was an accident, so I escaped.”

“And you three escaped with him?”

“I couldn’t leave him to do it on his own,” Hannah said.

“And we were afraid of how they’d react to our relationship, that we would be the next to be removed,” Lisa said.

“But you guys love each other, what you have is so beautiful.”

“There’s nobody else like us in Prospera, they probably consider homosexuality to be another threat to the stability of the village,” I said.