Flunked Out
The darkness was thick and suffocating, like a heavy blanket had been thrown over the world. He had to get over the wall, had to get across the border before the collectors found him. The collectors had no jurisdiction in Canada. All Axle had to do was cross the border and he’d be free.
Axle had been so stupid to fail his Exam. He should have studied harder. He should have paid more attention in class. Nowadays, if you weren’t listening when a teacher spoke, you either had a death wish or you were mind-numbingly stupid. Axle was the latter.
The whole world was dealing with overpopulation. For so many centuries, the goal had been to keep humanity surviving; to keep us expanding. Now, the biggest threat to our survival was ourselves. There were too many mouths in the world and not enough food to go around. The young that couldn’t fend for themselves usually wound up dead. If people couldn’t afford their children, they let them starve. Famine had become the leading cause of death in every major country.
Needless to say, each country had different ways of handling this. China did the draft: a fair, unbiased way to diminish their population. The downside to this was that every Chinese citizen knew that their fate was completely out of their hands; all they could do was wait and pray that their number didn’t get picked. In the European Union, they forbid families from having a second child. Mandatory vasectomies were given to all fathers, and if you became pregnant with twins or triplets, all but one child was killed at birth. America also saw a problem with this, because their opinion was that if a family carried good genes, it would be harmful to society to keep them from reproducing.
That’s why the United States went with the Exam: the best way to cull the population. The Exam was considered a fairest way to kill because it was a way to be sure that the smartest would survive. This way, the future generations would get smarter and smarter while keeping the less intelligent from stealing all their resources.
If you failed your Exam, you were taken by the collectors, and sent to the Culling Grounds. And if Axle couldn’t cross that wall unnoticed, that was exactly where he was heading.
The wall was about fifteen feet tall with no hand or foot-holds. Axle would have to break through it. He started desperately pounding at the side of the thick, steel wall, but it wouldn’t budge.
Axle screamed and fought until the collectors finally took him away. No one ever escaped the culling.