Red, Part 5 - Sudden and Pointless Deaths

The rest of the journey was dull. Staring through the safety-Red at the silvery capsule walls. Listening to the low roar of sparse air molecules being displaced as we raced through the incomplete vacuum.

Many hours later I arrived at my interim destination, a place called New Petrograd. It was at 2457 degrees east and for me represented a change over point from one tube to another.

I had an overnight stop so I exited my capsule and went, with my guide Yelena, to the surface.

The huge city, pristine and barely inhabited by humans, weighed down on me. I wasn't familiar with the original, thousands of km west, but this version seemed to me to be a place for fogs and rain. A place for sudden and pointless deaths.

Of course this thought lead naturally back to something that had been plaguing me for months. What was my position in the rigid and unchanging hierarchy that Red had gifted us?

Despite the power Red gave me, the idyllic life granted by being one of only fifty million humans in a population of ten billion servants, I was discontented and a little afraid.

Born to two near puppet parents in the far north of Britain I acted as a reminder of our kinship with the puppets to everyone, including those who did their best to ignore that fact.

I looked, and according to every test I was, fully human, but there were those who denied it. I often wondered if there was someone out there I disturbed sufficiently for them to try and kill me.

I shook these feelings off and allowed Yelena to show me around her beautiful city for the the evening before my next capsule left.

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