In the first rays of pale, morning light, a petite woman, is found sitting cross legged on a dingy old box spring bed. She sits there in front of a small computer and types away furiously. Humans aren't allowed to have any electronics; not since the great war. If anyone gets caught they're sent to the ones in charge. A small noise startles the woman enough that she swiftly shuts the computer, and hides it beneath the flimsy blankets for now. She waits a few minutes for something to happen, and when nothing does, she decides to move the computer to it's normal hidden spot and get ready for the day.
It takes a few moments but eventually she steps out of a tiny entranceway into a long desolate hall. She has always been one of the first to wake up and it doesn't look like that's about to change any time soon. Her black combat boots tread as quietly as possible down to the left toward the kitchen area. Her long white hair is tied up into a French braid as it has been everyday for as long as she can remember. Her bright red eyes glance around to see if anybody else has decided to wake up yet. Along this corridor it's only the enforcers. The ones who don't make the rules but they do keep everybody else in line.
There's labels and rules; things they've been allowed to do and plenty they're not. They ask permission for everything and every request is only admissible once a year. Today just so happens to be that day. Where humans can submit a request to bare a child, find love, or switch careers. If the requests were denied you'd have to wait another year to ask again. It has been this way for hundreds of years and any stories about the world previous they'd long been denied access.
Rumors often flew among the enforcers that these stories were still available. Except nobody knew where to find them. Humans aren't allowed to go to school, learn to read, or even learn to write. From the moment they are born they're futures are based off of how quickly they can adapt to the world around them. The ones who learn the quickest receive the better jobs; the ones who didn't end up in the slums. Where a majority of the population reside in the worst conditions imaginable.
A dingy brown door came up fast on the woman's left and she swiftly went through it. She'd never submitted a request for anything which is why she had no partner and no child. Life just seems simpler that way. So what possessed her today?
She stood at the threshold of a well kept, ancient oak wood, paneled room, and stared at the desk with yellowing parchment paper stacked in neat piles. A silver pen lay beside it. She'd once asked how humans were able to submit requests if they'd never been allowed the knowledge to read or write. Her superior had told her in secret that the pen did all the work for them.
She stood there for a few more minutes simply staring, before turning back down the hall, toward the kitchen and then to work.