Chapter 426
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Saturday November 1st. 104 days since impact. After more than three years of counting down Eve still counted. But now she counted higher. Adam and Eve were on the same schedule now. This meant roughly eight hours per day of noone monitoring the technology. They'd set up alarms that would wake them should something go wrong. This was still a bit risky. But they needed each other partly just to sleep at night. Eve figured that with all the people she'd killed, she shouldn't be able to remember each and every one of their faces. She needed someone who remembered only the good parts of her, Adam needed the same right now, especially after they became completely covered in snow. The chores they did kept them busy, but it didn't completely defeat despair. Adam and Eve realized they could either stare down death with something to live for or not. Something to live for was better. Religion, belief in God, was thriving within the Arks. Christianity and islam were the most popular choices, the death cults seemed to have died with the old world. None of the American Arks had yet adopted an official state religion, but some leaders were considering this. It might be a way to unite their people. Some were coming to believe that God had led them to the Arks. That he had destroyed the wicked world and given some a final chance. Why they'd been saved while others hadn't they didn't know. Eve could see a new religion emerging from this. Perhaps several religions on different Arks. But one aspect of this frightened Eve. If God led people to salvation on the Arks, what of those in private shelters like her and Adam. Would he at least let them live out the rest of their lives in peace, or not?
Picard's wife had apparently enjoyed watching the same soap opera as Eve. She'd even brought old tapes to this house. Eve got caught up in an old plot-line that she'd forgotten about. This plot involved the main character becoming pregnant from rape. She didn't want people knowing how her child was concieved, so she came up with a convoluted plot to hide her pregnancy and make people believe she'd adopted her child. After her rapist was murdered the police investigated for months. As murder mysteries went it wasn't too bad. Eve had to wonder, was life truley this precious, less than a decade ago? A woman fought so hard to protect the un-born child of her rapist? A low-life rapist, wom everyone hated for this and other reasons, the police could devote so much of their time and resources to bringing his murderer to justice? There was a reason why people would look back on the pre-2/4 world as the good old days.