The wedding was like any other, dancing, food, speeches. Except this was a wedding in the Community. When two people marry here, instead of feeding each other cake, they feed each other poison. J and B were my two best friends in the world. We came up together in business, in life. Everyone else we once knew was now dead. J and B’s wedding was the last wedding, or at least, the last one we needed. They were soon to be trying to kill each other. Because like I said, we feed each other poison.
This might sound like some Star Wars bullshit, but we all knew that sooner or later it would come down to just one of us. That’s the way our society was set up. We had been addicted to the power we had been taught to strive for since childhood. Despite our familial love for each other, we always knew that only one of us could survive.
The problem with the Community was that it was blind to its surroundings. Completely blind. While we played our bizarre games of procreation and homicide, there was a world outside our walls. A world that was dangerous and beautiful. And suffering. Even at the height of our power, we were never able to keep them out completely. And we couldn’t help them all either. Even if we had wanted to, which we didn’t. But they had always been more alive than we were.
By the time I met Elsa, J and B had done their duty, procreated, set up a family trust, and tried to kill each other. It doesn’t matter who killed who. One of them survived, as was intended, and I killed that person. I am the only one left of the old generation. And now it’s my turn to die. The problem with that is that I don’t want to die. And I want out.
Elsa showed me the world outside in her stories. But she also showed me how life could be inside. She told me that the rest of the world viewed us as freaks, a bizarre off-shoot of humanity. The more she told me, the more I realized it was true. We had succumbed to the will of some radical group of people who believed in a technological utopia. It was all a lie.