Lisa

It was dark when Kevin returned. The three of us had had hot baths with the water that we had heated in the metal bucket on a fire outside and we were wearing clothes from the bedroom cupboards that were new to us but were actually more comfortable than the clothes we used to wear in Prospera. The clothes we were wearing (long pants and long sleeve T-shirts) were clearly meant for daywear but unlike what we wore during the day in Prospera they had no dramatic cuts or special colours and patterns indicating one’s station. We preferred these clothes to our Prospera clothes that we had set aside for cleaning and probably wouldn’t be wearing again unless it got so cold that we had no choice but to put on our thick winter robes.

Kevin didn’t return empty handed. He came back carrying a boar across his shoulders, another animal that we had been told lived in the forest that wasn’t nearly as big as they’d told us they were. We were happy that Kevin had returned to us safe and sound and we were especially happy to see the boar. He told us that the only trouble he’d had was finding it; once he’d found it one shot from the gun had killed it and the hunt was over. Miranda and I, looking forward to eating pork, exchanged looks with each other that said that Hannah was wrong to worry so much about the gun and that Kevin was right not to be afraid of using the inventions of the outside world to make our lives easier.

Kevin took a break by sitting outside and drinking some water. We offered to get hot water ready for him to bath in but he declined, saying that he didn’t want us to dirty ourselves having had our own baths. He would skin and carve up the boar, roast the meat for us to eat and heat up his own bathwater; we didn’t need to do anything. It was typical Kevin; he did all of the things he told us not to worry about without complaint having just walked through the forest carrying a big boar. We ate pork chops for dinner and could look forward to bacon for breakfast the next morning. After getting out of the bath and changing into new clean clothes Kevin joined us in the living room where we were discussing what we could expect from the outside world when we reached it.

“We’ll only know when we get there, but judging from everything that we’ve found in this cabin we shouldn’t have too much trouble negotiating our way through it,” Kevin said, taking a seat next to Hannah on the sofa.

“What’ll we do if it really is a wasteland from a nuclear world war?” Miranda asked.

“That’s not what we’re going to find; they’ve been telling that story in Prospera for decades but this cabin has clearly been lived in relatively recently,” Kevin responded.

“Even if what we find is a world not destroyed by nuclear war we’re still going to face a big challenge because of the way they do things in the outside world,” Hannah said.

“What do you mean?” I asked Hannah, curious as to how she could make such a certain statement.

“In the outside world things aren’t provided for you the way they are in Prospera. They have this thing called an ‘economy’ that relies on trade; everything has a cost.”

“And how do you satisfy those costs?” Miranda asked.

“They use something called money; everything has an assigned cost and money has an imbued value; you exchange money for whatever it is that you want.”

“Where do you get money from?” Miranda asked.

“You have to get a job.”

“A job?” Miranda asked, nonplussed.

“Work that you do in exchange for money. In Prospera the work that we did was for the benefit of all of our fellow citizens, that’s how they were able to provide everything for us. But in the outside world it’s different, each individual’s efforts don’t have a direct bearing on everybody else’s lives so they can’t do things the same way we do. Their ‘economy’ method is how they bring about the balance and interdependence that is so visible in Prospera.”

“How do you know all this?” Kevin asked her, looking stupefied by the depth of her knowledge.

“I’ve been learning about the ways of the outside world as part of the preparations I’ve been undergoing to become a member of the Ethics Committee.”

“Why would they teach you this stuff?” He asked her.

“To ensure that we never start doing things the same way in Prospera. The ‘economy’ model of the outside world is considered unfair and inhuman by the elders of Prospera.”

“Was the outside world really destroyed by nuclear war? It sounds as if they know a lot about the outside world, is that something they’ve been lying to us about?” Kevin asked her, his face transformed from stupefaction to seriousness.

“It might not be.”

“What?!” We gasped collectively.

“The founders of Prospera left the outside world when nuclear world war looked inevitable. It might have happened; it might not have happened.”

We had left Prospera with the hope that when we reached the outside world we wouldn’t find it in a state of complete destruction, so it was a relief to hear Hannah saying that there was a strong chance that wasn’t what we’d find when we got there. At the same time her disclosure left us feeling uneasy about her because it reminded us of why we’d left Prospera: to get away from people we couldn’t trust and apparently Hannah was one of them. It was disturbing to think that someone possessing so much knowledge that we didn’t even know existed could be so close to us with us being none the wiser. In that instant Hannah stopped feeling like us and started feeling like one of them, those in Prospera that kept secrets from us and operated in the shadows with such skilfulness that life in Prospera went on day after day without disruption. We wondered what else she knew that she wasn’t telling us and regarded her with suspicion; even Kevin was looking at her with an expression that betrayed his shock at Hannah’s decision not to inform him of any of this earlier.

“Don’t look at me like that; I was sworn to secrecy, if word had gotten out about this stuff they would have known that it was me and I would have had consequences to face, for something this big the consequences would have been serious; I had no choice but to keep all of this to myself.”

“How many people in Prospera know about these things?” Kevin asked her.

“The people on the Education and Ethics Committees and a few others; no more than twenty people.”

“In a village of five thousand; that’s impressive,” Kevin said.

“There are many things they won’t know about the outside world because of how much time has passed since Prospera was founded, that’s what makes what we’re doing so scary.”

“Is there anything you know about the outside world that you haven’t told us that could be helpful?”

“I know that the things in the kitchen that are connected to the wall run on electricity, which we don’t have in Prospera because producing it requires the burning of coal which is terrible for people’s health and the environment and because the invention of electricity led to the invention of other things that weren’t good for society, like television.”

“What’s television?” Miranda asked.

“It’s a box that displays live and recorded performances for people’s entertainment.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“Television became more and more of a distraction; people became less interested in books, theatre, each other and the world around them, preferring to spend increasing amounts of time watching television.”

“It’s probably not as bad as they made it out to be, just like the animals in the forest that weren’t as big as they said they were, and the gun turned out to be more useful than dangerous,” Kevin said.

“I think they were right about guns; I wish you’d put it away and never bring it out again,” Hannah said.

“I didn’t hear you complaining when you were eating the pork chops, or asking what we were going to be having for breakfast,” Kevin said to her, looking at her with incriminating eyes.

The mood among us had lightened. The impact of Hannah’s withholding of truths from us had dissipated and we once again thought of her as one of us. Being privy to all of that information about the outside world and sworn to secrecy had created its own difficulties. Like she said, the possibility of her facing consequences for breaching the secrecy she’d been sworn to was very real and those consequences would most likely have been grave. No matter which way you looked at it all of us in Prospera faced our own difficulties brought on by our inability to place even the slightest amount of trust in our fellow citizens. We couldn’t hold our secrecy against each other; after all, it was how we ensured our safety.