Wednesday

Forty-One

The two sides have divided Rabbah. They began taking hostages just yesterday. I think this will be my last transmission.

Chloe took Abbas back. She and Suharto and Guo came and dragged him out of the water filtration area while we changed filters. She grabbed me and held my arms behind me while they hit him across the skull, knocking him out and causing who knows what kind of brain damage, and dragged him out of the room. Chloe threw me against a wall. I did not black out, but I wish that I had. My jaw has a lump in it almost as big as my fist.

In retaliation, Rusul and Fletcher grabbed Ghadir from the common room while she was trying to plan our meal schedules.

Dagon and Suharto grabbed Vivien at some point during the day; then Payam and Haven nabbed Ihsan, while Rusul and Fletcher grabbed Bulus; and Chloe and Guo grabbed Natsuki. Yvain gave himself up to the anti-unionizers. I have holed myself up in the computer room to write this last communication. I doubt, after all the violence, I will have access to this room again.

We have managed to clean all the dead plants – some of them had survived, amazingly, and we relished every morsel of the strawberries and tiny new lettuce leaves. Over fresh food, Natsuki and Ihsan and I had talked about how we would negotiate this civil war that has been brewing for so long. Natsuki believed we would have to choose sides at some point, but none of us could foresee that we would be forced to choose like this.

The octopuses floated dead into our bay as well. They were discolored and mottled in ways they shouldn’t have been. Vivien thought they had been floating in the still water and bloating, like dead bodies apparently do (I have never seen a dead body other than Vahan, and then not for long), but it could also have been radiation.

I am trying to decide if I regret anything about this voyage. I am sorry, so sorry for the failure, but I would not have made a choice to stay on Earth if I were invited. But I no longer think that we can walk away from our training, or enforced social contracts, so easily. I wanted us to, I had so hoped that we could. Maybe we do deserve to die, because we couldn’t get past our anger at Earth and just survive long enough to create a new way of life.

They are banging on the door. I don’t know who they are, but none of us will be alive for much longer, no matter what Kailash says. I do not regret that I never gave in.  
 


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