Chapter 1

Sunlight poured through the trees filtered through the bright green leaves rustled by a warm breeze. There wasn’t a single building around for as far as the eye could see and the only sounds were the songs of the birds and the crickets. Out of the underbrush a young girl walked out into the open followed closely by a large lion whose golden mane glimmered in the sun. the girl despite her size and clearly young age wasn’t afraid of the lion and she knew he was there, because she smiled and turned to say something to him.

        “Peter and Susan should have come it’s beautiful in the woods,” she paused for a beat before saying, “I wish Edmund was here.”

        “Lucy don’t worry I will help you get your brother back,” the lion said as they continued their walk to a nearby stream.

        Behind them the bushes rustled as a half-man half-horse carrying a large stick with a metal point. The creature kept its distance watching the girl and the lion but not advancing on them. As the pair moved out of view the creature followed them down toward the stream.

        “Amaria, Amaria shut off that story and come to supper,” a woman’s voice called from somewhere else.

        From up in one of the trees a girl groaned and swung down from the branch she’d been laying on. She looked longingly in the direction the girl and the lion had gone. She wanted to follow them she even started to before the woman’s voice again called her name. “Bookmark story,” Amaria called out into the empty forest. She then placed her hand on the trunk of the tree and the forest faded into nothingness.

        When the world came into focus again there was no longer a forest instead she was surrounded by plastic and metal. It was the sterile apartment she and her family lived in and despite her best efforts her room still didn’t feel comfortable. She looked briefly around the room before leaving it and joining her parents in the dining room.

        “Well if it isn’t our prodigal daughter,” Amaria’s father said dishing food out onto his plate.

        “Amaria, you have to get out of those stories and go out with your friends,” her mother said.

        “And do what? There aren’t any trees or beaches anymore, there’s nothing to do but go to the shopping center or play the holo-games at the activity center. I don’t like doing those things. They’re boring, they don’t require any imagination.”

        “That’s not the point Amaria, the point is you need to get out and be with kids your own age. You need to socialize. It isn’t natural for kids your age to stay inside and watch stories all day. When I was your age I’d stopped watching stories and I was out playing in the activity center and working on my apprenticeship,” Amaria’s mother said passing Amaria a bowl.

        “Yes I know mother, and you studied under the best chef in all of Martake which helped you  become the amazing chef you are today. You’ve told me that story a hundred times before. But I don’t want to do an apprenticeship, there isn’t anything out there that I want to be doing.”

        “Amaria, you’re almost seventeen now. Almost all of your peers have picked apprenticeship by now and you just sit at home watching your stories. You need to pick an apprenticeship Amaria and you need to do it before your birthday.”

        “Mom, that’s only two weeks away! I can’t find something I want to do with the rest of my life in the next two weeks. You’re being unreasonable!”

        “Enough! Amaria you’ve had plenty of time to decide what you want to do with your life you need to find your apprenticeship so you can get your four years of apprenticeship done before you come of age. You have until your seventeenth birthday to get an apprenticeship. If you don’t select one by them I will pick it for you and that’s final.”

        “I can’t believe you!” Amaria shouted slamming her fists down on the table before storming off to her room.

        “Don’t you think you were being a bit hard on her?” Amaria’s father asked her mother.

        “No, I don’t. She needs to grow up. She spends too much time with those stories of hers. They don’t serve any purpose. If she doesn’t get her apprenticeship she’ll be left to live with the Unwanteds and no child of mine will be an unwanted..”

        “Uggh,” Amaria said slamming her bedroom door. She threw herself down on her bed burying her face in the pillow. After several minutes and a few muffled screams she pulled her face up and looked at the digital images she had on the walls. There were pictures of Amaria with her family and some of her friends but most were stills from the stories she watched.

        She looked at the images on the wall and couldn’t help but think that some of the images didn’t feel right. She’d only ever seen the stories on the DOC, the Data Obtainment Chip. The DOC was something everyone in Martake was given at birth. It was small chip, placed right in the brain,  that allowed everyone to access all the information that Assembly of Martake had. If anyone had a question or needed to watch a story to relax all they needed to do was call up the required information on the DOC and it showed instantly in their mind or on a larger screen if it was needed.

        The DOC had made all written language obsolete and Amaria only knew about it because of the information she found in the DOC but she hadn’t been able to access it again because it was gone. The DOC showed all of the children in Martake was schooling used to be like and how long it took. Instead of sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher, reading large text books, and writing endless essays children sat in their rooms for two hours a day accessing the required lessons through the DOC.

        At age seventeen children were expected to take on apprenticeships that would last four years before they would then take a position in their field. Amaria’s mother was right when she said that most of the kids Amaria’s age had already found apprenticeships with some of the most respected people in their fields. Several of the masters her parents were friends with had offered Amaria apprenticeships with them, but Amaria knew that it was more because of how respected her parents were than it was about Amaria showing any skill in that field.

        Amaria hadn’t found anything she wanted to apprentice in, there was nothing she could see herself doing for the rest of her life and then training someone else in. Amaria couldn’t understand how she was supposed to pick something she wanted to spend the rest of her life doing when she still had so many questions about how things worked that no one answered or even listened when she asked.

        “Access personal file Rebel,” Amaria said and instantly the Doc program activated taking her into a small room she’d constructed. When she made the program she based it on information she found in the DOC about how rooms in houses used to look before the growth of the population had forced everyone into small apartments in an effort to conserve space. The room had wooden floors instead of sterile cold tiles and windows that looked out on trees and grass instead of the hard lines of other buildings. She’d also created shelves that contained representations books for of all her favorite stories and a desk that contained several sheets of paper and a small device called a pen that wrote on the paper.

        Several months ago Amaria had found a reference in the DOC to something called books and written language. She knew from her lessons that there had been a time before the DOC but she, like everyone else, had no idea of how people had lived without it. Curious she had dug deeper in the DOC trying to learn more about how people communicated before the DOC. As she learned more about the past the more interested she became and the more she realized that for some reason the assembly made it hard to learn about this stuff.

        She tried to talk to her friends about what she’d found but they had been more interested the new stores in the mall or the latest videos on the DOC entertainment link. So she’d created an interactive file on the DOC that only she could access so she could explore the mystery of book and the written word.

        After her lessons were done she would spend another several hours in the Rebel program studying written language and slowly but surely teaching herself both how to read and write. She couldn’t find the original texts of her favorite stories probably because the Assembly had deemed the originals unnecessary since people could merely request the desired information from the DOC and have it linked to them. She learned to read and write by studying the alphabet and some basic phonics lessons that hadn’t been removed from the DOC.

        In her exploring of the written word Amaria couldn’t help but wonder what books would be like. She knew how they looked, but wondered what it would feel like, what the words would look like on the page. Today she simply went into the Rebel program to find peace. Here she only had to worry about learning more about written language and not about what her mother had said.

        Amaria settled down at the desk and called up one her phonics programs. She’d already mastered this one several times over but there were only a handful of exercises to do and she’d already done all of them multiple times. She also felt that when she wasn’t in the program and using the DOC she started to lose what little she was learning, redoing the exercises helped her remember.

* * *

        “Interesting, very interesting,” an old man said sitting staring at a small computer screen. “I didn’t think I would ever find anyone.” The old man continued to watching the screen, watching the events play out. Something happened on the screen that caused his face to fall into a frown, “perhaps I was mistaken. This may not be one, she’s not ready, no, no I don’t think she’ll do at all,” the man waited as if listening for a response but no one answered back.

* * *

        Amaria shut down her program for the night calmed by the words she’d seen. The first time she looked at the written language she didn’t think it actually said anything, all she saw were a series of lines and squiggles that didn’t make any sense. Slowly as she learned more about them she was able to see the individual letters and then slowly words. She’d dug through everything the DOC had to try and find more written stories but she couldn’t find more than the basic language instructions that hadn’t been purged. she often wondered why all these things had been done away with even if they weren’t relevant why get rid of them?

        As she lay down to go to sleep Amaria wondered what it would be like to live in a world of stories. She wondered how different it would be to actually read the words coming from the pages instead of seeing the images that the DOC created. Sometimes the stories she watched either fiction or fact that something about the story wasn’t quite right,  character didn’t seem real or an event didn’t have a ring of truth to it.

        Someday she told herself someday I’m going to see a real book and find out what it’s like to read it. Slowly she drifted off to sleep trying to picture what a book would look like and what the paper pages would feel like against her finger tips. Images seemed to float through her mind in much the same way they did when she called up a certain item using the DOC, but this time they didn’t make any sense. Normally when something was called up from the DOC the images progressed in a pattern that she could make sense of while any other data simply flowed into her brain like she’d always known it. But what she was seeing now didn’t make any sense they were images of terrible things happening, wars, disease, and there were more words. She recognized the letters but couldn’t understand what the words were saying. Other images filtered in as well, things she’d come to know as trees and flowers, large expanses of land where there weren’t any buildings. A great big puddle of water that went on further than the eye could see. She clung to everything like it was a precious stone, she knew she had never seen anything like these before and she wanted to remember them because somehow she knew they were important.