Free The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) by Chris Dietzel Page A

minute.
    Would someone have answered her, confirmed her suspicions that she was hated? But she also has the creeping suspicion that she wouldn’t have been able to utter the words she thought to call out. She would have been frozen in place, unable to offer a plea on her own behalf. Instead, her chest would feel like it was weighed down from within. She would be choking on her own silence, helpless.
    And that thought, even though the dream is over, makes her shiver. Pulling the sheets tightly around her does no good. Her heart is racing. Perhaps to defy the feeling she had that she wouldn’t be able to speak, she takes rapid, quick breaths before declaring to everyone in the gym: “The start of another beautiful day!”
    “It’s the middle of the night!” Cindy calls out in response. “Shut up.”
    It turns out that not even a comedian has a sense of humor when everyone should be asleep.
    The sun has not yet risen. The clock tells her it won’t rise for many more hours. But the more she talks, the more she can believe it really is the start of another brand new and cheery day. And with that, she gets out of bed and begins her chores.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    13
     
     
    It doesn’t matter that there is one less Block, Morgan is still nowhere close to finishing before midnight. And every day, she becomes a little slower.
    There is only one thing to be done: another body must go so the rest can survive. One less body to clean and feed and reposition means more time for her to sleep and gather her strength. Without rest, she isn’t healthy. If she isn’t healthy, no one else is either.
    Is this what her life has come to—killing a living, breathing person each time she is overcome, overburdened? If she lets someone die today, how long will it be until she has to let another go? Letting one more person die won’t put her anywhere closer to being able to care for the rest. All it means is that the remainder of her existence will be marked by how frequently she must go through this.
    The thought disgusts her, but at the same time she knows there are no other options. She can refuse to take part in the killings but then every single person in her care begins to suffer. She can sacrifice herself instead of a Block, but it means the rest of the gym’s population, whose health and well-being are tied to her own, die a day or two later anyway.
    This is the only way.
    She looks down at her Jedi, whom she has named Alokin. Although Alokin was Morgan’s idea, the Jedi became Elaine’s favorite Block creation that either of them came up with. He doesn’t have a lightsaber. He doesn’t have control over the Force. In fact, he is nothing but a normal guy. Maybe that is what Elaine loved about their “Jedi Master.”
    For almost as long as Star Wars existed, people thought it was funny to mark their religion in census reports as being a Jedi. In some countries, Jedi made up as much as two percent of the official population. Maybe one or two of these people really thought they could perform Jedi mind tricks, but everyone else simply liked being part of the phenomenon. A census was conducted five years after the Great De-evolution began. Instead of two percent of the population listing themselves as Jedi, seven percent of people marked that box. Ten years later, in the final census ever conducted, twenty percent of the country listed their religion as Jedi.
    Alokin was one of these people.
    Elaine had burst out laughing the first time Morgan declared the body in row 1 of quadrant 4 was a Jedi. She had only seen the Star Wars movies once, at a boy’s birthday party in elementary school, and they hadn’t seemed like anything special, so she wasn’t sure where the inspiration came from for this Block to suddenly become the next Obi-Wan Kenobi. Nevertheless, she had found herself going home and testing whether her outstretched arm could somehow make a pencil fly across the room. She still remembers her embarrassed