I woke up for my second day of work at the crack of dawn. My room was still dark but it would light soon. Since District 13 was underground it was dark by default, but the solar panels that were installed above the ground by a specialist group of engineers allowed the light from above to be transported into lightbulbs for the day. A lot of District 13's light only occurred during daylight hours so we really rose and slept with the sun I suppose. It was dark now, but as the sun came out, the rest of the lights in District 13 would power up slowly. During midday was when the labyrinth of grey rooms would be the brightest. Everything was grey because the outer walls and buildings were made of metal and those were the default colour. There was no resources for the luxury of paint or alloys that had different colours. The air filtration system was also another very important feature built into District 13's infrastructure that was overseen by the engineering department.
Truthfully I often felt District 13 was one blow from caving in. If any of our systems stopped, if any humans tampered or messed with it, if any natural disaster happened - we would all die. I sometimes felt claustrophobic here, trapped so many miles beneath the surface of the earth, but those were thoughts I shared with anybody much. It could create mass hysteria if we were to dislike the very conditions of District 13 that were keeping us alive so I kept my mouth shut on the negative emotions associated with it, but growing up in District 13 often involved a sort of abject horror and panic about the entire thing.
I did my morning routine and then had breakfast with Bellamy as usual in the dimly lit kitchen. The faintest of all light was coming in from the sun's rays outside to keep it lit, but we were mostly still in darkness. District 13 was probably several notches darker than the average amount of light people living outside the District experienced in their day, but since we lived here all our lives and had nothing else for comparison we probably didn't sense it. Even though some days I felt like I was standing in a bright room, or it was rather bright today, there was always this sense that it was quite gloomy in comparison to true brightness.
Pictures of the world outside that we saw on video, in books, were the closest we could get to a reality outside of District 13. I spent many a time in my childhood staring at those pictures, torn between a sense of longing for a world where we could all experience that, a sense of pride at our District's ingenuity and the way we'd survived for so long, and a sense of tornness between the past, present and future. Did I want the future of District 13 to be above ground like the society and civilisation used to be? Did I want District 13 to get bigger and better at living underground and for us to eventually solve your own problems and have enough excess resources to bring down the Capitol politically as well? Did I want District 13 to be it's own metropolis underground, so advanced and with such great living conditions that people from the other Districts would all be swarming to move to District 13? Did I think the Districts would never defeat the Capitol and that maybe all the other Districts would eventually seek refuge beneath the ground and become part of an ever expanding District 13, and that the Capitol would take over on land?
Did I believe that one day instead of empty threats of using bombs the world would resort to nuclear weapons again, even though there was a treaty after the last war that prevented any more nuclear weapons being dropped, and that life on the earth's surface would eventually be uninhabitable and underground was the only way to survive in the future and that District 13 had been a leader, a pioneer, in underground survival and technology? Which place was really better considering all the weapons and conscience humanity now had in it's grasp?
They were difficult questions to grasp, and I only remembered a vague sense of unease and displeasure when I thought of them for most of my childhood. I usually didn't allude to it when talking to others, it didn't make you appear strong, but I had to admit to myself that most of my life and whatever existential thoughts I had growing up in District 13 was more one of muted agony at the state of things. I yearned for something different yet didn't have hope it was truly better, and was stuck between wanting District 13 to go back to the past where things were better, or edge towards a different sort of future. I suppose if I'd wanted District 13 to remain underground it would betray grim predictions of where the future may lead to, that life above it was unsustainable. Currently though, District 13 had plenty of backing and sentiment for another rebellion with the Capitol and to resume life above ground again, so that's where our policies lay. I was a little relieved I was born into this time period of District 13 for it stopped me from darker thoughts of expanding District 13's underground life and truly preparing to build a civilisation in that way.
I was born after District 13 went underground so I'd never known a life above the surface. All of the seconds, minutes and hours of my life were spent growing up in this little patch of District 13 beneath the ground and I suppose I perhaps felt a loyalty to it.
"Have a good day at work," smiled Bellamy as we finished breakfast.
"You too," I said with a tight smile at her before leaving. I was rarely ever truly happy so none of my words or smiles betrayed genuine happiness. Most of it was a general tenseness I carried about with me all day.
I locked the door before I left. My house was one of the few with a working lock. Locks were rare in District 13 because each lock and key required metal to make. Metal required melting, which was only possible with incredibly high temperatures from large flames. This was close to impossible for there wasn't exactly a lot of room underground to have giant furnaces, flames or cooling chambers and water tanks on hand in case anything went south. There was also the issue of smoke which had nowhere to go and could threaten to suffocate everyone if the rooms to take it all collapsed one day and couldn't contain them anymore, as well as the threat of what would happen if an uncontrollable wildfire spread out across District 13. Also the fact that flames required something to be burnt as fuel. District 13 had no means of receiving oil or coal from the Capitol like many other Districts, as poor and ripped of as they were, they still received some shipments of oil and coal from the Capitol every year. District 13 didn't have this. There was no way for us to mine it ourselves.
We weren't near the ocean at all so we couldn't possibly mine oil from the seas. Our underground facilities were nowhere near fossil fuels so we couldn't mine it from there, nor could we dig it up from anywhere that had it. So anything requiring flames to produce high temperatures in order to heat materials for production was sadly non-existent in district 13. It was just impossible.
Instead the only locks we had were ones that had already been made before District 13 went underground. Those lock and keys were still used nowadays, expertly fitted into doors of new buildings we made, and recycled time after time. It had been less than a hundred years since we first went underground so those locks were still able to work, but we were running on borrowed time. Eventually, the metal would rust, the keys would chip and wear, and we'd have to face the reality of either trying to find some way to meld metal again, or turn to other methods of finding energy.
Most doors in District 13 didn't have locks because there weren't all that many that were salvageable from above. Instead only a few important buildings had locks, usually those containing information that would be dangerous if it were to get out, as well as very important places like the waste management systems, the air filtration system, and so on, where no one unauthorised as allowed in. Our apartment was one of the few residential buildings in District 13 that had locks, because it belonged to government officials and someone thought there was a risk of important documents being stored there that could cause a lot of damage if they were stolen. We were truly, in a sense, the elite of District 13. My family were the upper crust of it, the ones closest to the government when District 13 came about, but not the actual president. Our name fell after my father died and we weren't known in politics anymore, but people were happy to see me back in politics. My father had been an efficient politician apparently, and people who met us both often looked for some semblance of my father's capability in me.
So far I had only received people's hopes, praises and satisfaction when they conversed with me. I had never disappointed anyone.
Once in the building I signed in and got to work. Over the next few weeks I got used to the routines of my job. There were many tasks I had to do.
Every Department was split up into smaller subsections. Some Departments were over areas small enough they didn't need to simplify their jobs some more, but most did. The subsections carried out the day to day work, and higher ups in the Departments managed over them. There were a lot of recording and logs that needed to be done for all the Departments. One of the key principles of District 13 when it was invented was that there'll be written logs of almost everything that went on beneath the surface because this sort of existence was very new, so we wanted as much information about what worked, what didn't, what we actually needed to get things done and so on. They were kept under lock and key in each Department's buildings. The representatives from the Departments usually came from as different subsections as possible within it, because some of them were incredibly difficult to learn and it was too much to ask of one person to know all areas in depth. So experts from different fields came together to represent them.
Later on in the Government Building, the Department Representatives got across any major requests they needed from other Departments, any complaints, any major problems they were having with their field and weren't sure of any solutions to, things like that. And they were discussed at the government level. A large portion of the discussions were based on projects for the future. Often there was no one project that was more important or needed than the other for a department to undertake, it just depended on where one's priorities lay, and there lay the thick of all the politics - determining District 13's ideals and stance on the future. This had been a feature which was sort of just creeping up on District 13 in recent decades, as only more recently had District 13 begun to get better at surviving enough they had the liberty of choice of which projects to take on at all, and there wasn't a pressing need to divert all energy or resources towards one project that was absolutely necessary for survival.
I didn't think some of the government officials even knew that these projects weren't necessary anymore, and seemed to be more based on ideals now. Though I felt the undertow of them all, and knew the conflicting sentiments among the governors of District 13 about where to go.
Then there were summaries of the final decisions, or the resolution to the problems, and they needed to be summarised and packaged together for the Districts. Often though, Representatives from the Department only knew their own Department well, and had close to zero knowledge of any other Departments. Talking to them I learnt, was a bit like a chore because they were rather narrow-minded, they could only see within their own Department and understand things happening there. It needed another set of brains to put two and two together, to work out how to cooperate several Departments together, and that was my job. It could be tiring sometimes, but the cold efficiency of decisions gone right, or ingenius solutions, was what kept me at it. I had always a penchant for spotting efficient solutions, ever since I was a young child, and any profession which needed this was rather easy and welcoming to me. I was well suited to the job.
There were some jobs in District 13 that didn't go through the Departments at all, but they were tiny small jobs that were so insignificant no one was bothering to keep track of everything.
I often travelled from Department to Department quite regularly. So did most of the members from the Department of Communications. Some of the Departments were easier to travel to, but some were further so I would only visit several times a week and not everyday or anything. My days were usually different to each other but it was enjoyable in an efficient sort of way. Most problems were easy to solve, but the hardest was always the ideals of District 13 and where it would go in the future.
I reflected a little on it's history in the recent few weeks. There was nothing like actually working at this job that made me more reflective and contemplative of our history more than ever. District 13 was originally the leader of the first rebellion against the Capitol. We were running but then we lost, the Capitol had more forces, and when it became clear they would eventually win the war and overpower us, it was just a matter of time, we had a deal with them that they would bomb the surface, we would retreat underground and leave the Capitol alone, and then the Capitol would use this as a symbol to the Districts not to rebel for it would appear as though we had been bombed down.
The Capitol agreed to this because even though we were on the losing side of the war, our industry was nuclear power before everything had happened, and although we were primarily focused on power, we had just about enough research and resources to make a nuclear bomb. In fact, we still had it, and we could've blown the Capitol to smithereens and given everyone genetic defects for years to come due to all the radiation if we wanted to. It would've been death for us as well for the Capitol would truly unleash all of their forces and hatred towards the Districts onto us then, and I doubt we would've survived that onslaught, but it would also kill of a critical part of the Capitol's population, make their land uninhabitable, touch their previous stores of valuable materials, or infrastructures such as their laboratories and factories there, and we knew a nuclear bomb had the capacity to cause enough real damage to the Capitol they would think twice before ignoring the threat.
The Capitol weren't stupid, they knew the horrors a nuclear weapon could cause, probably tried to plot how they would recover after the bomb had been dropped just to see if they could withstand it, and had ran their heads over the simple fact that they couldn't, however many times it was needed to firmly drill it in, that they agreed to stop the war on this request. District 13 had said we merely wanted to be left alone after that, and it was just a preposterous idea at that time, that we would survive completely underground for so long, virtually all of the Capitol officials at the meeting seemed to think it was a joke and only let District 13 get away with it because they thought it was a plan doomed to fail from the start. That was ultimately what sealed in the deal, the Capitol's own ignorance of our abilities to survive underground, and how we came to live underground.
What they didn't know was that District 13's industry - nuclear power and research - made use of underground labs and equipment for quite a long time, and we already had built networks and infrastructures underground. We weren't sure if we could truly fit everyone underneath, or manage to sustain a population underground so much, but we had more development there than what the Capitol knew at that time, and after the fateful weeks where the bombs were dropped, we truly kicked it into gear and began our existence underground.
We actually didn't have enough time to build new spaces underground during wartime. All the underground labs were built by digging a hole in the ground first, and then refilling it with soil so we had to have access to the air to build them. We didn't have access to the ground ever since we started living here so we haven't expanded ever since. We've just been reusing old infrastructure. It's quite crowded in District 13 because the entire population is packed here, but sometimes I think the crowded nature is good. It makes everyone feel more homely, comfy, less scared, and like we're more in companion and good spirits than we really are. We only have a high population in relation to the space we live in. Our population is actually rather low generally speaking.
We had to have better air filtration systems, waste management systems, engineering systems. So many industries that used to be managed by factories above the ground or imports from the Capitol had to be recreated here. There were huge developments that occurred over the last few decades even though our infrastructures couldn't be expanded much, but that was roughly how we survived for so long.
A lot of the original citizens involved in the discussions, the decision-making process, and the implementation of District 13's underground existence near the start were all deceased by now. I don't know if it was the air, food, water, people, or a mix of all of those and more, but life spans were just shorter in District 13 than the information we could gleam from the Capitol and the other Districts. In the other Districts many people died early but there was always a group that were wealthier than the rest, or had better conditions than the rest, who lived to a ripe old age. In District 13 even the wealthiest families who grew up in the best conditions in this underground world died sooner than the wealthy families outside. The average life expectancy was at 70, and considering it had been many decades since we first went underground, many people that had memories of a time before District 13 was completely underground had passed away over the years. Most of the officials who made those decisions were quite senior in their careers by that time, so they were already on the upper age range, and since several decades had passed, they had virtually all deceased.
There were a handful of people still living that had some idea of life before District 13 was underground, there was a database of all of them in the government building I had access to whenever I wanted, but most of them weren't high up in government or had any knowledge that was of use to me. They simply just existed as normal people.
When I rack my brains to what those people might've been thinking then, when they bought District 13 underground, I find no comfortable answers for they all passed away and it appeared didn't pass down their true political viewpoints, or made it public, for I hadn't known them. I could only do guesswork.
After they died of, the rest of District 13's government slowly became more and more populated by individuals who had been born and raised in the underground of District 13. We used the old nuclear power generators to generate a lot of the electricity needed for our smooth running, but even then, there were limits to what we could do, and the dangers that could happen if we overtaxed the system was also mammoth, so we were bound by restraints always. I was thankful our industry was useful in our plight of living downstairs, but it wasn't truly a paradise or anything and we still felt the strain every day, the splitting of the seams of the Districts. Some parts of the old nuclear power industry had been permanently shut down, deemed too dangerous, others flourished because they were more efficient for what we needed them now, but we had stopped researching because we didn't have the resources or energy to do so, and for many decades, our goal was simply to sustain ourselves, remain alive, and deal with the many problems that seemed to crop up year after year due to living like this.
Disease surprisingly was one of the biggest issues. We had massive outbreaks every few decades or so, sometimes occurring several times in one decade that unfortunately took away many numbers. The Waste Management system also did cremations of deceased bodies and every time these outbreaks happened they were working overtime on the corpses of new people who freshly succumbed to them. That was how my father died. Mother had a small case of it but she recovered. It was father who contracted it from someone, we don't know who, and somehow got more of a dose and was sick enough he had to pass away. I could barely remember the details, but later I read about it in newspapers and textbooks of District 13's history, and had almost memorised all the details of that outbreak. We called it the Lightning Fever because it came over people so suddenly it was like lightning.
The newer members of District 13's government were mostly stuck on offense versus defense. There were some ideologies of starting a rebellion again and taking down the Capitol with the rest of the Districts, where we would be the leaders once more. There were some ideologies of accepting refugees from other Districts if they believed District 13 was still alive and incorporating them with us, but not starting anything with the Capitol. There were some ideologies of taking down the Capitol but instead of returning to the ground after, we would continue to live underground as it was ultimately better for the future, where nuclear weapons could be dropped anytime. Perhaps in a future where nuclear weapons existed underground bases would be a necessity to all civilisations and we were on step ahead.
We still had the nuclear bomb we threatened to drop on the Capitol. They tried to make us destroy it but we managed to simply agree not to use it, and it's still nestled in a carrier at one of the deepest levels of District 13, all these years. In a highly restricted section, no one is authorised to visit it. I don't think ordinary District 13's citizens think about it much, but if they think further they should realise we still have the bomb, or it was never said in history we got rid of it, and in a way, it's still the last resort. I know if we threaten the Capitol with it the right way, they will still be more scared.
Most of District 13's ideal oppositions are as to whether or not to expand more underground, how to build up a relationship or communications with the other Districts, whether we ought to at all, our refugee intake policies, and of course, whether to work more on our military or not, or whether we ought to start planning military activities against the Capitol to take them down. Even though we had largely been unbothered by the Capitol all these years, we still felt their oppression over us, and as long as they had rule over Panem, we couldn't meet our agendas either.
Most of the politicians in District 13 were divided on those values. I don't think many have noticed we left the time when District 13's governing body was just about survival, and entered a time of conflicting ideals, but we were there now. Sometimes other politicians gave comments or remarks that betrayed their true thoughts on these topics that they didn't notice they were giving out. Perhaps they thought they were impartial or still stuck in an era where all of District 13's political discussions were just on pure survival, but we had departed it years ago, and I sensed the undercurrents of new political leanings that had existed for a long time.
But they were faint, and subtle, and for the most part, District 13's government was still down to earth and people-serving. For now.
I got into the ho-hum of work and all the usual routines, meetings, discussions, problem solvings. I was efficient at it and well appreciated by my colleagues all across the Departments. There weren't any truly politically significant events where I had to give opinions on those things yet, but I could sense them all running beneath the surface. For now.
And that, was work in it's usual routines.