1 Welcome to My World

"For the past ten years, war has destroyed most of the world we know. No one ever thought it would come, there had been threats but never carried out. World War three, 2040, probably the worst war the world has ever seen." I say to myself as I sit in the library with a book in my lap and brush my finger over the braille in the book. That's ironic, hearing it come from my own mouth since I have been blind from birth. From what I know, for thousands of years mankind has lived on the surface, but all I know at this very moment are the cold, wet, mud walls that surround us all. The war has been over for two years, I was born in the midst of it. No one lives up there, the nuclear radiation is too strong, so the world has moved below ground. This is where my story begins. I, Nick clearly, a blind boy from Australia, born in the midst of the war, moved underground with my family minus my older brother. Many people have tried and have failed to be rid of the radiation so we can live again where we're supposed to, but they paid for that mistake with their lives, they never came back. I've heard that even the strongest HAZ Mat suits shrivel and burn in the exposure to the radiation. So we all live underground as if we were aboveground. We've got the internet, electricity, computers, fridges, schools, movie cinemas, malls everything we need. We live in peace and never open the hatch to emerge to the upper world from here. I've heard that if we go up there we will die or be given a decease far beyond cancer. So we have set up houses and everything as normal, mud is only used for the tunnels but there are houses in the tunnels. So we live like ants.

I've got a few friends down here that help me around. As I make my way around the maze of a tunnel of cold mud we call home, I make a map in my head of where I need to go, how many steps I need to take before needing to turn, who I would meet on the way and who and what I should avoid. Every day is the same, I walk to school, attend school, never wag, never late for any classes and go home. I've got a very monotonous life.