This is a story I wrote for a writing prompt on Reddit that asked “Write a dystopia that turns into a utopia” https://redd.it/4bnld1

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I grew weary of life at a young age.

However, It wasn’t until I had already made my mind to rid myself of this precious gift that I truly understood the meaning of my existence.

I was born to a mother that had buried her previous two children. They were twins. When they were born, my mother was the happiest she had ever been. They were healthy, soft, beautiful babies. Not like most other children born in the wasteland. However, she quickly realized that she wouldn’t be able to provide for them with what she felt they deserved. Food, safety, and shelter.

The bloodshed. Lack of compassion. The world was too vicious at the time. So she did the one thing no mother should ever have to.

It was a cruel, cold reality.

Before all of this, human civilization was in its greatest era. Famine was resolved, crime had been largely extinguished, and astonishing technology had improved life to never before seen heights.

One erroneous mistake in the computer chip of a nuclear missile was all it took.

Humanity launched a missile into outer space in an attempt to shield the earth from an asteroid. Unfortunately, the missile had failed midway and came falling back down onto earth. 30 years later, humanity’s population was reduced to a few million.

I was born during this period.

Growing up was a war. From as young as five, I was constantly battling hunger, sickness, and violence. I learned quicker than others to build a vigilance strong enough to protect myself and my mother, but I could only take so much as outside forces wilted my willpower ever so slowly.

The final blow that broke me was when my mother died.

I went into the forest, using the half broken Geiger counter that I found the other day to carefully evade the paths with too much radiation. My goal was food. There weren’t many animals left in the world, but on a good day I could find a rabbit or deer.

Today was one such day.

I sat high up on a hill, conserving my energy and waiting, when out the corner of my eye I saw a rabbit, quietly chewing on grass behind a tree. It looked a bit deformed, but I didn’t care. Food was food, and finding even one animal raised my spirits immensely.

Even though I was filled with excitement, I didn’t get ahead of myself. I calmed my heart and walked forward silently, closing in on my prey. Crouched a few meters behind the creature, I steadied my body and swiftly placed an arrow into the head of the rabbit with precision.

I took the spoils of my hunt and headed back to the camp where my mother was resting. I was ecstatic. This would be first time we’d be eating meat in a month!

However, once I got back, I realized we wouldn’t be eating rabbit stew after all.

My mother was murdered.

All of our belongings were missing. While I was gone, bandits had raided our campsite and escaped.

That was the final straw.

“Hah.. Ha… hahaha!”

I dropped the rabbit in my right hand that I had so proudly caught earlier.

I couldn’t help but laugh as tears ran down my eyes.

Twenty miserable years spent in this hell, I had weathered everything. I never cried. I never showed weakness. I never gave into brutality that most others turned to in order to live. After all, it was my mother that taught me.

“Find beauty and peace in even the smallest things, and you’ll find meaning in your life.”

I tried, I really tried mother. But I can’t do it. It’s impossible to find peace in this miserable existence.

I don’t want to live…

I was done. The last of the shield I had erected in my heart had been broken.

I’m going to enter the rainzone.

The rainzone is a zone filled with an incredible amount of radiation. Nobody knew why there was so much of it there, but nobody had the courage to investigate why. It was always quite peculiar to me because there was a huge tower in the middle of the zone that stood untouched, a remnant of older civilization. The antithesis to this wasteland.

I figured, if I was going to kill myself, I might as well do it attempting to see the one thing that I always wanted to see.

And so I made my journey.

Using my compass as a guide, after three hours trekking through the forest I had finally reached my destination. There was a large wooden sign in front of me, with a perimeter of copper wire on the ground that extended beyond my field of vision.

WARNING. RAINZONE AHEAD. INTENSE RADIATION DO NOT ENTER

Without any hesitation, I stepped over the copper wiring. After pausing briefly to orient myself in the right direction with the aid of my compass, I walked forward towards the center of the rainzone.

A few kilometres into the rainzone, I had begun to feel a strong pain on the inside of my forehead. I took out the box of anti-radiation pills in my backpack and swallowed one of them. They were considerably rare in the wasteland, and these were the precious pills that my mother and I had found over the years. As I let it settle in my stomach, I remembered the joy that we felt when we found one of these.

As my headache began to subside, I continued walking and pondered about what life was like before the wasteland. My mother told me tales of extraordinary technology that allowed people to communicate from vast distances. Food so savory and abundant that people had to control their desire to engorge themselves. Beautiful architecture and art. Comfortable homes with baths, beds and heating.

I loved hearing them as a child, but as I grew and my hardships became worse, I resented these stories.

Why couldn’t I enjoy life like that?

Why couldn’t I have been born earlier?

I felt bitter. I started to hate life. But I couldn’t give in to these feelings, because hope remained somewhere deep in my heart. That hope was the fuel to my body, a fuel that dissipated earlier today.

The effects of the pill had begun to subside. I could feel a throbbing headache once again surface on my mind. Ignoring the pain, I walked further into the rainzone noticed how the trees and plant life here were different. The trees and grass were reddish-black, and grew in strange shapes and sizes unlike anywhere else in the wasteland. Some were rectangular, and others grew in a perfect crescent shape. They had absolutely no resemblance to any of the trees I’ve seen in my life. In the distance, the tower of the rainzone could also be seen.

Uuck

Out of nowhere, Nausea had sprouted from within my stomach, and I began to vomit uncontrollably. I threw up the last of the food inside me and wiped my mouth, but still felt incredibly uneasy. I wouldn’t make it to my destination at this rate. The radiation is too much.

I took out the box of anti-radiation pills in my backpack and swallowed all of them. Originally, I had planned on taking them slowly, but it seems that the concentration of radiation was getting exponentially stronger.

I didn’t know how much longer I would last.

After taking a few minutes to allow the pills to take effect, I continued to walk. Small flashes of lightning started to appear all around above me in the sky, as if it were raining. This is why this region was called the rainzone. I was at the point of no return.

I was closing in on the tower, my destination. I couldn’t be more than a few kilometres away.

But the closer I got, the more everything hurt. Despite the pills, my body began to tremble and my skin grew redder. The headaches also returned. Pain enveloped every part of my body, and it became difficult to walk.

But the closer I got, the more my heart ached out of curiosity. What was inside the tower? My mind raced. I had to find out. So with a strained stride, I walked even faster.

And then, I had finally reached there.

My entire body was covered in red bubbles and blisters. My mind was incredibly weary and my thoughts were barely coherent. My heart, however, still had direction. It knew what it wanted.

I reached out with my hand and opened the steel door.

What greeted me was a still darkness. A darkness so strong and black that it was deeper than any darkness I had ever seen before. Darker than the darkness of eyes closed at night time.

There’s nothing here…

Nothing. There was nothing here. It seems that my curiosity to see the tower as a child was just that. A childish curiosity. What was my journey for?

I’m going to die here.

Just as I thought that, I felt a presence in the darkness.

At this point, the radiation had almost entirely killed my senses, but I felt this presence strongly. With what was left of my eyesight, I strained my eyes and looked.

There was a faint light at the end of the hallway, that illuminated a door.

Suddenly, I heard a voice.

Enter the door, child…

What was that voice? I had wondered if I became delirious.

However, I didn’t have the mental energy to analyze anything. So my body followed the voice, crawling ever so slowly towards the door.

The pain was agonizing. My skin began to tear off from the friction with the ground, blood spilling everywhere. My mind was completely devoid of all thought. I simply moved with all my energy, disregarding the unbearable pain.

After reaching the door, I summoned all the strength I had left in me to open it.

Then I lost consciousness.

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I woke up with no recognition of where I was. For some reason, I instinctively checked my body for wounds. I was fine.

I was fine?

Then, my memories had slowly came back to me. I was inside the tower, and opened a door after a voice told me to do so. I was probably mere moments away from death.

And now I was completely fine? I had no idea what was going on and couldn’t make sense of the situation.

I looked around me. I was somewhere in the wasteland, but definitely not in the rainzone. Was everything a dream? I opened my backpack and checked its contents. The box of anti-radiation pills were empty, and my mother’s necklace that I had brought with me as a memory of her was also there.

I sat down and placed my hands on the ground. It felt like I just woke up from a long sleep, I was refreshed, but still felt a bit tired.

!

Suddenly, the ground began to glow. In an instant, the barren land around me had started to sprout life. Grass began to grow.

What the hell?

I got up and examined the ground. A few square meters of the land around me was sprouting fresh, beautiful grass. It was the greenest grass I’ve ever seen in my life. Did I just do that?

I walked around to another barren patch of land and placed my hands on the ground. Once again, grass sprouted from the land. I was completely baffled.

I obtained a strange power. A power to heal.

Out of curiosity, I walked towards a tree that was completely devoid of life. The branches were thin, broken, and had no leaves. I placed my hands on the tree.

Suddenly, the dead black tree had began to turn brown, the branches became thicker, and leaves sprouted on the branches. Within a minute, it became a large beautiful tree full of life.

It was then, that I realized it. The meaning of my existence.