Writers, don't give up.

For all the writers in the community here, don't give up.  I have come a long way over the last 20 years, and especially over the last 3.

I am going to share something I wrote in early 2016 for you guys.

Keep in mind, this was earlier the same year that Delvers came out.  I actually wrote this before I started writing Delvers.  

This was a short story written for a Wattpad contest.  It's horrendous.

I'm not going to alter it in any way before sharing it with you here.  We can all suffer together.

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My name is Ashley Stone and I believe in God. This made me a criminal on my planet, Trahew. Ever since religion and religious books were outlawed planet-wide about 300 years ago, it's been a capital offense to possess any religious paraphernalia. Just seeking it out was dangerous. It was a huge risk for me to search for religious information on the 'net, but the few pages I found of the Quran and the Bible were worth it.

My interest started when I was a girl and I heard a man from off world get drunk and holler a strange phrase, "God damn you!" The police came to take him away, but that scene sowed the seed of my curiosity. I wondered what a "god" was. Later that week at school, my classmates and I had excited, whispered conversations about religion. In hindsight we were lucky that none of the teachers overheard us.

Teachers were given huge bonuses by the State for turning in students for reeducation. In hindsight, I get chills thinking about the risks we took by merely wondering out loud what a "god" could be. If we were caught, we could have been severely penalized. Our families could have been punished too and neither I nor my mother probably would have survived it.

My mom was a librarian. My dad died in the mines before I was born. My mother would not have been able to afford a private instructor if I got expelled from school and that meant I wouldn't have been able to get an Education Certificate. Without an Education Certificate, the only work the State would allow me to apply for would have been prostitution or organ donorship.

Prostitutes weren't offered any legal protection by the State and a lot of them were murdered with no justice sought for the slayings. Organ donors lived sad, lonely existences as they tried to survive their whole lives on what they made from their own organs and body parts. They usually died of a weakened immune system after they sold too much of themselves to pay relentless bills.

Education Certificates were absolutely critical for ever earning a living and avoiding abject poverty or worse. Even janitors need an Education Certificate to get a job on Trahew.

Sometimes I couldn't believe I almost lost my chance for an Education Certificate with careless talk at school.

I took a lot of stupid risks when I was younger. More to the point, I never stopped taking stupid risks, as evidenced by my current situation, standing in the spaceport with a fake Exit Visa, trying to avoid notice. Sweat was running down my back and my bra was already soaked from perspiration. The hot press of people around me made me uncomfortable and I felt like I was standing in a stinky, heaving oven. My anxiety kept building and I had to suppress an urge to hyperventilate. To calm down, I focused on acting bored and glanced around.

The rusty spaceport had evidence of neglect and hastily riveted repair patches. Just like the rest of Trahew, everything was broken down or about to break down. Ever since the State began funneling more workers to the police force a century ago instead of sending replacement workers to maintenance crews, the whole planet was falling apart.

The crowds of people around me were mostly dressed in mining uniforms. This was the only spaceport on the planet, and all the asteroid workers had to pass through every week. It was horribly inefficient. I felt my frustration with the State growing, but I knew I still wouldn't have the courage to escape if I'd been leaving any family behind. If my mom were still alive, if she hadn't died two years ago because we didn't have the money for antibiotics, I probably wouldn't be in a spaceport trying to illegally catch a shuttle.

Unfortunately, my mother was a librarian, and librarians don't make much Living Stipend. After my mom was caught writing poetry (illegal without a license) by her supervisor and put on part time shifts, money had been even tighter. My job as a research assistant didn't pay much either.

I tried to take out a loan to save my mother's life after she got sick, but by the time I was able to get through the approval process, it was too late. She already ran out of funding to stay in the hospital and the doctors terminated her.

After my mom died, after the State forced the hospital to let her die, I remembered saying a prayer for the first time in my head. It was that day, in that moment I knew I had to leave. In every particle of my being I knew I didn't belong on Trahew and I had to do something about it.

I devoted an entire year and most of my borrowed money to contacting the Underground Prophets, a shadow organization of Believers. After I met them, I knew I'd found kindred spirits.

They, just like me, felt like the State was crumbling around us. The State was failing us. Sure, propaganda in the world media touted "Trahew logic" and our society congratulated itself for being rational enough to outlaw religion. But the government leaders spent more time trying to stamp out the Underground Prophets or quelling Education Certificate riots than maintaining the infrastructure. There were entire skyways that had been shut down for decades.

There hadn't been any religious wars on the planet for hundreds of years, but people spoke in whispers that tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people disappeared every year. Our infrastructure was so broken and our leadership so corrupt that many people simply had no way to get to a job. They had no choices but to take the State dole and join the lottery for conscription.

I had to leave. So here I was, in the spaceport, about to board a ship off world with a fake Exit Visa. I'd used every credit I had, every favor I was owed, and I still needed the Underground Prophets' help to get this far.

I finally moved to the front of the security queue, everything I'd worked years for leading to this. I was placing my life on the line.

The bored looking guard glanced at my Exit Visa and looked at my face. My heart stopped and I held my breath for an endless second. The guard made a notation on her screen, handed me back my pass and said, "Move Along."

I was free.