I'm falling, and I can't see anything and all I can think about is Charlie. Is this how it felt? The panic, the endless screaming? I cry out, tears streaming down my face. I hit the side of the tunnel, but I'm falling so fast my hand just bounces off the plastic, in the process giving me friction burn. I clutch my hand to my chest, nursing it. That's going to be a bruise, and I feel liquid. I can't see, but I assume it's blood. I taste it, and sure enough the iron taste confirms exactly what I thought. It's blood. I'm bleeding, falling, and screaming. Great. Finally, I shut up, cross my arms, and attempt to find as comfortable a position to continue falling in as I can. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my voice is going to give out if I continue screaming, and that the screaming isn't doing anything anyway, so I figure I'll just hope I land somewhere comfy. I have no idea where I'm going.
My guess is this is probably going to land me in one of the three livable rings of the Alkina, even though I initially thought I was falling downwards, now that I've thought about it, I could be falling in any direction. It's probably artifical gravity to get me to my new class the fastest. So basically I have no idea where I am. I'm probably not going back to the bronze ring, considering all the extra tests. I might go to Astran, the ring that the silvers and golds live in.
Origonally the silvers lived in Shinrei, but after it flooded, it was abandoned and the Shell was built there for the Assignments. Shinrei was built lower than all the other rings for some reason, and so when a bad storm hit a few generations ago, it completely flooded the ring and nobody left living wanted to live in there again. So the silvers joined the golds, much to their chagrin, in Astran. Of course, Astran, Milyn and Tashclancha could all flood and the diamonds and sapphires would be fine, since they lived in Aitmil, the center ring, a giant mountainous building with rooms built in it, rather than the platforms with buildings on them that the other rings were made of.
There are a lot of design flaws in the Alkina, and over the years there'd been many incidents, but only two anyone ever really remembered or thought of. The fall of Shinrei and Milyn. The fall of Milyn, that was almost as devistating as the fall of Shinrei. Of course, Milyn was left mostly still in tact, so that was something, but a terror attack in the North port caused the collapse of an entire third of the island, all of it going under water. The tunnel that used to connect Milyn and Aitmil was never rerouted to connect to the remaining portion and the North port wasn't rebuilt. Some of the blocked off part of Milyn hadn't sunk though, it was just blasted to hell. Unstable. Nobody was aloud in. Stupid teenagers still went though. Like Charlie and I. Stupid teenagers indeed.
The ranks of the Alkina go as so top to bottom:
Diamond
Sapphire
Gold
Silver
Bronze
The Diamonds are generally revered and seen as all powerful. They're our Sim actors, our writers, our dancers, everything that is entertainment and fun. They're our entertainment. I personally kind of hate them. Mainly it's just a grudge against them for never doing anything about Charlie's death or about Sammy's or any of the other bronzers that have died because of unsafe conditions.
The Sapphires are also entertainers, but more secluded. They aren't as showey offey as the diamonds, and they're almost always at the side of one of them trying to stop them from doing anything stupid. I don't envy them. They may have everything, but they also have to babysit grown people every single day. Honestly sounds like a real shitty job.
The Golds are the buisiness owners, the CEOs. None of them actually own their businesses, the Diamonds own all those, but they have pretty much free reign over it all.
The silvers are the next in line. They work for the Golds in offices and labs and do the pretty things. The kind of jobs where no one gets hurt and you get payed a good amount.
The bronze have it the worse. We're the laborers. The restraunt workers, the waiters, the maids, everything nobody else wants to be.
So that's our society, and at the age of 20, everyone has one chance to change their class through a mix of luck and actual intelligence. It's sort of like a toss of a coin, how they place you. A very strategic toss of a coin, but a toss none the less. The most people tend to move in the Alkina is up or down one or two classes. It's almost always only one class and then occassionally two, so I'm hoping I'm the occassionally.
Based on my tests, I'd say I have a pretty good shot, and from that sim during the tests, I can tell I'd love being a golder. Though I'd have to stop calling them that. The higher classes hate when we call them Golders instead of Goldlings or Slivers instead of Silvers, but frankly they don't have the right to tell us not to call them that when they don't look out for our safety.
The classes are generally civil between eachother, nice or polite even, but there's some resentment about the disregaurd for bronzers health. Some bronzers are even pushing for the other classes to give raises to bronzers. That's part of what the terror attack was about.
The silvers were bringing in a shipment or explosives for demolition of part of the shinrei that were weighing the rest of the Alkina down and causing fractures. The bronzers meant to hold it hostage until their terms were met. Someone must have lit a match and dropped it though, because something went extremely wrong, and instead of getting us all better living conditions, they sunk a sixth of our homes, counting tashclancha bronzers.
A third of the Milyn bronzers. They killed an 8th of our population and reduced that generations number by half. There hasn't been much protest or pushing from bronzers since, but after the recent increase in accidents, I'm happy to hopefully be getting out of Bronze class, because I can only see this going one way, and that's with the rest of Milyn going down.
ns 15.158.61.18da2
