College flyer

Someone stuck a flyer to the front door of the diner again. She approached it hesitantly, thinking it might be something from the Skinless again, but no. It was simply an advertisement for a university in Haut.

On the front was a smiling, almost comedically diverse group of humans standing together on a bright sunny day. Against her better judgement, she opened the pamphlet.

The featured program was a degree in human genome manipulation. “Be an architect of humanity’s future!” it said. “Help ensure our future as a species,” it said. She looked at the back to see that the university was in Haut. No surprise there. There were no universities in Vermillion. Constructs had no interest in them, and any humans who were ambitious enough to want to improve their station in life moved out of Vermilion as a first priority. It was not a place for the upwardly mobile. It was a place for people who, for whatever reason, had settled to the bottom.

Claire thought about university a few times. There were no shortage of pamphlets and advertisements for places like this, offering a promising career path and a place in humanity’s future. Though she was skeptical of advertisements in general, she had to admit that she did sometimes wonder if humans would even be around in a few generations. It was a fleeting thought, not normally troubling and not explored with any depth, but there were times in the sparsely populated streets of Vermilion where she wondered.

To her, these were questions to be dealt with by someone else. One could be concerned with big global matters as a part of being an informed citizens, but as for solving problems — that was for scientists and policy makers and people sitting on stacks of cash. What was a waitress supposed to do about it?