Preliminary note: The following is the start of something, that might lead to numerous stories placed in the future world I try to describe. Or maybe just to the one of which I do present the beginning here. This first little piece contents no violence, not even fighting. For now we just meet a husband on the morning of his wedding ceremony who describes the world he lives in to some point. Further parts of this story will contain heavy violence. No one will get hurt by reading the beginning, but be warned for the parts to follow.
This was written in German, translated with google translator and I made brief adjustments on the translation. I feel it is in readable English now, but I apologize if you should feel different about that while reading.
The Wedding - Part 1
March 3, 3333 was a Tuesday. For the sake of Elaine, my fiancee, it would be my wedding day. Some things never change. I knew from a digitally preserved document that testified to my ancestors who died far in the past that August 8, 1988 had also been a popular date for marriage.
The circumstances were completely different then. At the site of that marriage centuries ago, there was only salt water today. And San Teresa, my birthplace and hometown, whose 500th anniversary had been celebrated a few years ago, was a distant dream of the future. A city of millions on a spacious hill in Greenland was unimaginable at that time.
Also, Conrad Hawkins and Meredith Barbosa may have felt love on their wedding day. As for Elaine Marshall and Nathan Hawkins, which is me, it was completely different. we hated each other. fatal. Therefore, for my taste, there was no need to marry on this special day with its unforgettable date.. For the marriage itself there was. I was full of euphoric anticipation when I got up this morning. My fists tingled pleasantly.
The night before, in a hologram session, we had finalized the text of our vow and decided in rare unity that it was perfect for us.
We were both 18. A perfectly normal age to get married. People didn't get as old as they used to. The planet no longer offered much land area. There were still plenty of people. They no longer lived in large, territorial states like the ones I knew from history class, but in widely scattered mega-cities, often in places that a few hundred years ago were considered completely uninhabitable.
To keep the human population feedable and the planet habitable, a number of measures existed. Some would have been viewed by previous generations as completely uncivilized and devoid of any morals. Today they were accepted. One of them was violence. It was strictly regulated by whom, against whom, where and when it was applicable. Within the framework of these regulations, it hardly experienced any limits.
Elaine and I had been in parallel classes since we were 10 years old. This meant that as we were being prepared for life to mean struggle, we would often try out our new skills on each other's classmates. And more and more often, and with increasing hardness, at each other. That wouldn't have worked like that generations before, we were taught. Back then, people were smaller, their skin was thinner, wounds took a lot longer to heal, and men were usually stronger than women. For the sake of this last point it might not have been wrong after all to have been born 1000 years earlier. I always thought to myself when Elaine or another girl in her class beat me in one way or another. Or my sister Debra when we were training at home.
Which didn't mean that I hadn't given them painful defeats the other way around, often enough. Only the other girls, like the boys in Elaine's class, were just opponents to me. But I was attracted to Elaine in a hostile way. And she returned that hostile devotion to me, hard and brutal.
In the meantime I had gotten ready and looked at myself in the mirror. My oiled, muscular torso shone. Elaine took credit for some of the scars that adorned it. So I was wearing my own skin on top. The legs were in long, shiny black leather trousers. I wore combat boots on my feet. The right fist was armed with solid brass knuckles. That's what we agreed on yesterday. There were wedding rituals where rings were exchanged. These marriages were different than the one we had decided to have. But this kind of reinterpreted ring exchange suited us. It was Elaine's idea. I kind of loved the way she thought.
