[Day 179] Eugenia part 3

Read part two here!

Our parents were completely silent. Zia’s parents looked reserved, as though they’d already mentally prepared for this outcome. Mine weren’t so much shocked as they were angry. I could see it in my father’s eyes; all the time he’d spent preparing me for this day was no doubt shuffling through his mind, calculating the wasted time.

Zia and I were led to a room, filled with eleven other children our age. It took me a moment to realize that they much have been taken into custody throughout the year. My friend and I’s birthdays were late in the year; she was the 17^th of December, and mine was the 19^th. We were in the last group to be tested. The last group to be chosen for disposal.

To keep myself calm, I thought about the history of what was going to happen to me, in order to avoid thinking about the actual thing. It was a thing I didn’t want to think about.

Around the year 2040, the world was hit with an economic recession more wrenching than the Great Depression; and it was on a global scale. Familial fortunes were lost in minutes, and self-made millionaires were thrown back to the streets from which they’d come. Money was no longer a source of power or survival, as it had been for so long.

From the depths of the crumbled global economy came the thinking elite, as individual intelligence was now much more valuable. The unintelligent and rash actions of the governing wealthy elite had destroyed almost everything the planet had achieved, so they must be forced out of power. It was time for a new reign.

In such a chaotic time, the new world order was set up rather quickly. Old IQ tests were revised and made more challenging, and then administered to the general public. A 160 was the lowest score allowed, and everyone who fell beneath were executed publicly, to scare citizens into either education or limited reproduction.

It worked. In a mere 50 years, global hunger and poverty levels dropped like watermelons off of dorm room roofs. The lack of overindulgent reproduction evened out the population, and the new breed of super-intelligent humans began taking the world in a new direction.

The old term for the selected reproduction was eugenics, but the world leaders, men and women with over 180 IQs, decided that it was too negative of a word, and instead changed it to Fastidious Fornication, or FF.

In the hundred years that led up to the day I was taken into custody, the practice of FF was honed and perfected. At thirteen, every child was taken to a testing center to decide whether or not they were “worthy” of continuing to live in society. If they were, they went on to lead lives like my parents, but if they weren’t, they were sent away.

My history classes had been particularly vague when describing what happened to the children under the 160 IQ mark. Although it was common knowledge that they were sent to a camp to learn how to do manual labor and reemerged into society years later with practical yet menial education under their wings, adolescents often referred to it as the “Death March.” Of course, it probably wasn’t much of a “march”, but it sounded ominous and pushed younger students to study hard. Now that I was in the small room, however, I renamed it. “The Death Wait.”

Continued in part 4