Lawrence Bluewell

2009 Years After Novus

River Colony, Joint Province of Campora, Woodlands, and Claymoore

When you were born off the record in the colony, there was a series of things you had to do before you could be registered.

Shit happened. Surprise, surprise, when you hammered home how urgent it was for everyone to pair off and make babies, people had sex, and sometimes they had it early. My parents were really young when they decided to have sex. I mean, it happened, which is why there was a precedent on what to do when it did.

The way the colony was set up, you were suppose to have as many babies as possible, but it was illegal and taboo to have a baby out of wedlock.

If you were married to someone already, there was a whole bunch of bad stuff that would happen to you if your baby was born to someone that wasn’t the person you were married to, but if you and your partner were unmarried, the baby that came about from that union was usually left off the registry (or off the record).

Not forever, but just until the family could speak to their matriarchs.

At that time, the matriarchs would quietly strike a deal between them that was usually figured out before a wedding was approved, and then they would hand write in the clan registry the unregistered baby’s details. When I was born, my Dad, his father and Uncle Laurie eventually took me to speak with Big Blue and let him know I was born. He had his son draw my blood and confirm I was my Dad’s baby, and then he spoke to the head of the Violet Clan, Miss Violet – but the Violet clan rarely took males, so I was officially accepted by Big Blue into the Blue clan, which my Father and his father belonged to (while my Uncle Laurie and my Dad’s Mom belonged to the Black Clan).

That however, didn’t entirely fix the problem.

All babies that were born in the colony had blood drawn at birth and were added to the database, which was a massive registry on the computers that only certain members of the colony had access to.

The matriarchs registry only decided which clan the baby would belong to, but the baby was still missing it’s spot on the computer as well as it’s official blood test, which was required for them to be official residents of the colony.

And until that was added, then there would be no matches made, no big medical procedures, no official anything.

Essentially, the baby didn’t exist outside of the people that knew it.

So while I was a member of my family, a member of the Blue clan, it was an open secret that I didn’t actually exist. Anyone that needed to know, knew. Anyone that didn’t, didn’t.

Once the unregistered baby was out of school at the age of fourteen to fifteen, they would be trained at a medical lab to draw blood, learn skills that were useful in a lab.

Once they were fully trained, the unregistered young adult would be sent to The City to work at the head lab of the colony that processed all the blood tests. Before they went, they would learn how to work the program that would help them insert their details into the registry.

There was a church there in the city that would direct the unregistered baby to where they could volunteer in the head record building in the city, and then the unregistered adult would manually add themselves to the system with their blood by inserting a program into the registry computer that would put them into the registry. The program would then be removed from the computer.

After that, the new addition would be flagged on the system, the matriarch (or in my case, patriarch) would approve it, and finally the unregistered member of the colony would become registered and they could get married and do the whole colony life cycle thing.

I of course knew all of this because I was an unregistered baby and had been prepared early for what I would have to do.

My parents were young, stupid, and in love, and I was the product of all of that, but I was absolutely not the first of my kind on the colony, nor would I be the last. In fact, a cousin on my Dad’s side ended up with an unregistered baby as well, though he wasn’t exactly in love, but he was stupid and young.

There was also a rumor that Big Blue’s favorite great grandson, my cousin Joshua, was an affair baby since he was still unregistered and in his mid twenties, but the only evidence they had with that was the fact that he was the only one in the family that had bright blue eyes and he didn’t move into my Grandpa’s house until he was like ten or something, which was weak evidence.

I was fifteen now and had been done with school for over a year now and had been working at the library while the details of how my path to being registered was forged, but finally people were starting to reach an agreement on that-

I’d go to Riverside to train under our Mayor’s daughter, Marybeth, who was a medical doctor and worked and lived in Riverside at the second largest blood processing lab in the colony, only second to the one in The City. Blood from all over the colony was brought to her lab to be processed, so it was a pretty freaking huge deal that she not only worked there, but was just two positions under the guy who ran the whole thing.

It’d take probably six months to be fully trained, and then I would go to The City and start working at the lab there. The person in charge was always in the know about unregistered citizens coming to work there, but everyone else wasn’t – so I’d go there and start an entry level position and work for a couple months until I could access the computers that allowed me to use the device to add my blood to the database.

While this was all going on, I’d also be volunteering at the city’s record keeping office, where again, the person in charge would be in the know, but everyone else (likely) would be oblivious. On the same day I uploaded my blood to the lab’s registry, I’d insert my file into the computer at the record keeping office as well as a hard copy.

I’d wait in the city until the contact at the church there confirmed my clan had approved of the addition.

And then I’d be an official citizen.

So it was complicated, but I was assured when the time came, I would be ready – the church would also be there to guide me and help me so I couldn’t fuck it up.

To be honest though, I was far less excited about finally joining the registry and then starting the pressure of finding a wife then I was about everything the city had to offer.

Riverside had a lively art scene, but it dimmed in comparison to the city. I was only going to be there for about five months, and I was hoping to save up enough money to be able to see as many plays as I possibly could, maybe take a couple writing classes they offered there.

If I was going to get a chance to develop my skills as a writer outside of reading books and good ol’ writing, then it was going to be in the city.

But before ALL of that happened, I had to go visit Big Blue to get his blessing tonight.

It was one thing to visit Riverside for a couple hours, but to work there?

That was the territory of Big Blue’s sworn enemy, Pastor Vermilion.

I mean, he had a name, but I had no idea what it was.

We were all taught in school the heads of the biggest clans as well as our own and what towns they were all in charge of.

Riverside was founded and operated by Pastor Vermilion and his clan, most of which lived in Riverside and shaped it to be the massively productive city it was today.

Big Blue – Boris – had several towns he started up, all of which he bounced around between, but he lived mainly where most of the blue clan lived in Rocky Mountainside, where my Dad’s Dad – Grandpa Earnest – had been raised with his many, many cousins. It wasn’t that big of a town, but pretty much everyone there was in the blue clan, and so that was where Big Blue conducted most of his business.

And I was going there tonight with my Dad and Grandpa Earnest to get his permission to work in Riverside.

It was a six hour carriage ride so we’d be sleeping there overnight, which would be the first time we had done that in a long while.

The last time I had slept there overnight, Uncle Laurie was with us.

“Ren, I need you for a demonstration!” I heard Janey, the youngest in our family call.

“Yup.” I called back, stabbing the knife I had been using to peel blades of grass into the porch. I stood and swiped the wood bits off my jeans before I turned and went into the house to where Mom was sitting on the couch peeling bright red apples, the really sour type, signaling she was likely going to be making dipped apple candies for the graduation festival.

Janey waved me over where she was standing in front of the couch and I went over, letting her tug me down so I was kneeling before her. “Okay,” She said with an exhale, taking both my hands to have me hold them out. She then went and pulled out a flat item that had me groaning.

“Not the cuffs again,” I groaned.

“It’s just a quick thing,” She insisted as she came over, slapping the flat item against my wrist, triggering the mechanism that had it wrap around both my wrists to keep them locked together. I dropped my chin as she pulled out the stick from behind her ear. “And now, I will make the cuffs – disappear!” she called out, Mom making impressed noises. I sighed and stared down at the brightly colored cuffs as she waved her stick over the cuffs, stopping suddenly. “No, wait – I have to put the covering on first!” She whispered, turning to run off.

I looked to mom and her amused little smile before I rolled my eyes and waited there on my knees. We had done this four times already, and each time she couldn’t get it off like it was supposed to and I’d have to pick the lock.

The problem was that these weren’t trick cuffs – they were real peacekeepers cuffs that one of her school friends had found in a field, Janey having traded them for her lunch one school day.