| Volume 2, Issue 2, May 31, 2007 | |
| In the Company of My Equals by Micheal C. Planck |
"Tell me again why I have to kill this poor village idiot?" My voice was the only sound in the huge, empty arena, but I think the idiot was far enough way that he couldn't hear me. I already knew the official answer - it was the annual Challenge, issued for the last seventeen-hundred years or so - but I still didn't understand why I had to kill the guy. "You are defending your caste's position," the Administrator answered. Her gray uniform was so severe it was hard to think of her as a woman. "If you don't, then we will have to kill you and all of your brothers." You don't talk back to Admin; they're picked, after all, by the most discriminating exams, are educated for a decade, and wield complete control over the Republic. And any Admin was considered a superior officer, even above the generals we soldiers elected from our ranks every five years. But I talked back to this one. "You can't be serious. They don't kill off all the Admin when some prole manages to pass the exam." "Admin," she explained patiently, "are not clones." Read the rest of the story:
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