They stole him from me. Took him straight from my womb and to Boarding School. 

I didn’t even get to hold him.

“Do I at least get to name him?!” I cried. “You have to have some sort of soul! Please!” I cried and yelled, but I knew nothing would change what was destined to happen to my child. It was what happened to every child. It was second nature to the government by now. Take the children, plug them into their pre-designated chambers, and repeat. And the crazy part about it? No one even bothered to question it. The Process. Everyone went along merrily with the whole thing, filling out their birth receipts without a problem. No one bothered to think about what happens in those pods. All they cared about was that their son or daughter would either come out smarter than Einstein, or they won’t make it through The Process at all. Even this doesn’t raise any doubts. Couples will simply try and try again until they get the perfect child. 

Everyone living has gone through The Process themselves, including myself. Of course, the government makes sure that no one remembers anything that happened at Boarding School, except the learning. No one remembers how they know what they know, only that they know it. When children enter their pods, time begins to pass differently than in the real world. The pods are designed so that, if you are hooked up to one, it speeds up time and growth so that, in 10 outside years, people at Boarding School experience 18. 

Those who are Chosen go into the occupation of Teaching. Those people are highly praised.

And extremely foolish.

No one knows where they keep the millions upon millions of pods that must exist to house all of the children in the U.S. You would think that with that many it would be pretty obvious, but the government has their ways. 

At the end of every year, The Officers come to The Highschool and pick out the students who have any B+ 's or lower and “dispose” of them. No one knows exactly where they go or what happens to them, but at the beginning of the next year, they are just gone. One time in Elementary School, one of my friends got Disposed and I never saw him again. Ever since I’ve given up on the whole “friends” thing and decided to focus solely on getting good grades. 

Nothing much scares me anymore apart from getting Disposed. 

As my senior year comes to an end, everyday seems less and less real. Almost like I’m living in a dream. I’m having this “moments”-that’s what I call them- where I’m almost watching things happen from outside of my body. Like I’m a ghost. 

I don’t think I’m the only one, either, because I notice that other people sometimes space out for a couple minutes and then pop back into reality randomly. 

Then, this morning, I didn’t wake up in my bed in my dorm room. Instead, I woke up in a massive room full of pods filled with a greenish-yellowish liquid and there were wires coming out of the back. 

And there were people connected to those wires.

I can only imagine that I was just in one too.

As I took in what was happening, I looked around me and saw that there were other people out of their “pods” that seemed just as confused as me. I recognized some of them from my high school.

I have to be dreaming, I thought. This can’t be real. There was an alarm blaring and a voice telling all of us, “DON’T BE AFRAID. YOU ARE SAFE. FOLLOW THE ARROWS.” There was already a line of people in front of me, so I slipped into line and followed the flow. 

The arrows all pointed to another room, this one smaller than the first, but this room had no pods, but a giant movie-theater sized screen that had “WELCOME” emblazoned on it in big fluorescent green letters. 

Once everyone had filed in, the doors slammed shut automatically and a face appeared on the screen.

“Hello, Class of 2120, welcome to Reality!”