The Prize of Dysprosium

Chapter I: The Cave of Dionysus

I am Noah Canner, also nicknamed Piece – the source of that despicable series hosted by Mafalda Kase: Secrets of Our Leaders. It only aired a few episodes, but as you probably know, it was the foundation for the uproars in the streets, for the massive amount of people dying. The truth is, those secrets were only half of it. There is much more intrigue than you can possibly imagine – the state is rotten to the core and it has been eating me up inside for years. But now it is not only my knowledge; these words are no longer my problem but everybody else's. It is your turn to deal with my stories. The stories which began a morning in September.

I wake up at the first crack of dawn, the early rays streaming in through the blinds in my room. A headache is pounding against my skull and I have a bad taste in my mouth as if I've been eating decaying metal. Still, I've had worse mornings.

I groan and stretch before throwing the blanket to the side and letting the sunlight shine on my naked body. Soak up its warmth. It takes a good five minutes before I stand up and try out my muscles. They're behaving admirably well considering the work-out they got last night. But then again, they have become used to Old Greg and his methods.

I grab the bathrobe and rubbing alcohol from my closet and walk outside to find most of the others already milling around in the hallway. Most of them are wearing clothes, a few count their dollar bill tips with each other. The customers always pay a fee, but tips are ours to keep and use as we see fit. I turn my head to Sammie and Quills comparing black and yellow bruises. Bruises are taken seriously in the Cave. We don't sell bloodied bodies, we sell fantasies, perfection, sometimes even hope, to the upper class of America and everyone else who has the excess resources to seek us out.

In our world, there are five real classes of socioeconomic standing: In the bottom, the lower class, are the ones who provide entertainment. They are crossbreeders, cage fighters, prostitutes like me, and the ones who sell their bodies to science commonly referred to as hooders. They sell their lungs or kidneys, or let themselves be experimented on for the sake of medicine which can benefit the upper classes. They are the corpses strewn in the streets, the ones nobody acts as if they notice. The ones who die of drug overdoses or because their bodies or minds finally give up on them and their sorry excuse for an existence.

Then there is the middle class which provide food and necessities. They include farmers, mechanics, blacksmiths, interior decorators – everything one might need to live an ordinary life. Some of them live in the middle parts of the cities, like shopkeepers and bakers, while others are settled in smaller communities in the country and import their goods. They stay far away from the part of the cities that belongs to the lower class, and they are right to. They have money enough and food enough to be able to avoid the terrors we deal with; the dead and the damned and the places where children turn into opioid addicts within a fortnight.

There is of course always the exception, like the city Chicago which is a representation city, aka how the Government want us to be viewed: Shiny, new, technologically advanced. There is no lower class in Chicago.

The middle class also mostly have the luxury of avoiding the Pacifiers; an elite force the Government supports and which provides their security. I have no idea who they are or where they come from, but they must either be medically enhanced or stripped of their humanity because they don't care about people overdosing in the streets while having no quarrels shooting others for stealing apples. Yes, that did happen once, and yes, I saw it. I don't think I'll ever forget the little girl's dead eyes, or her younger brother crying over her corpse, shaking her to please wake up, to say his name again. There are rumors the Pacifiers come from some of the hooders after getting their memories removed. There are also rumors they are robots. It's hard to know since they never take off their white insect-like helmets which cover their whole head.