Photography by Tomas Heligr-Pyke · Bokeh
Ten thousand residents enter an auditorium. One hundred leave their old lives behind.
From the 4671 story library. Read the story below, or explore its original reader and connected world.
Every Year
Every year, the district closes for the lottery.
The trains stop at midnight. Factory shifts end before dawn. Clinic appointments are cancelled. By six in the morning, every registered resident must be inside the auditorium or waiting in one of the fenced queues outside it.
There are ten thousand names on the district register.
There are ten thousand seats.
No one is absent.
Iron Fist officers check us at the doors. They scan our district papers, search our bags and send us towards the numbered aisles. Above the stage hangs a black banner large enough to cover the back wall. A single red fist fills its centre. The cloth moves whenever the ventilation starts, and for a second the fingers seem to close.
The lottery is supposed to be an honour.
That is what the district administrator tells us each year. Selected residents are given the chance to serve where New Atriad needs them most. Training. Relocation. Medical service. Habitat work. Advancement. The words change order, but the list stays the same.
No one we know has ever come back.
The official explanation is simple: allocation is permanent. A person sent to another branch receives new quarters, new duties and a new district record. Contact with the former district is restricted to protect operational security.
It is a good explanation because it cannot be checked.
People say the lottery controls overpopulation. They say the selected are sent to the mines beneath the old branches. They say there are Arks still travelling beyond the Moon and the tickets buy a place aboard. They say the Games need bodies. They say the hospitals need bodies too, but not in the same way.
My family never discussed the rumours at home. Walls in New Atriad carry sound through places you cannot see.
We only said the same thing everyone says on lottery morning.
Not us this year.
The Tickets
Distribution begins after the doors lock.
Officers enter from both sides of the auditorium. They move row by row, placing one ticket into each person’s hand. Every ticket has an individual number, except for the selected hundred. Their tickets all carry the same four digits.
4671.
The number is older than the lottery. I have seen it scratched into an access tunnel where the concrete predates this branch. It appears in old stories, corrupted files and dates that do not make sense. Iron Fist claims the number now. District broadcasts talk about service whenever they show it, but nobody here believes the number belongs to them.
To us, it is simply the ticket.
The first officer reaches my aisle.
Nobody speaks. A child three seats ahead holds out both hands because they are too small to know which one is expected. The officer places the ticket in the child’s right palm and waits while the parent reads it.
Not 4671.
The parent folds over the child and begins to cry anyway.
The officers continue.
They do not exempt children. They do not exempt the old. They do not exempt the guards standing at the walls. Guards receive their tickets before the public distribution begins, watched by other guards.
Last year, one of them drew 4671.
The officer beside him removed his weapon. He climbed the stage with everyone else.
This year, there is a new guard in his place.
The line reaches me.
The officer has a pale scar running from one ear to the corner of the mouth. I remember it because I need something to look at besides the hand holding my ticket. The officer places it against my palm and closes my fingers over it.
Then the line moves on.
I do not look.
Around me, paper or plastic or whatever the tickets are made from makes a soft restless sound as nine thousand people check their numbers. Relief passes through each row in broken breaths. Here and there, someone makes a noise that stops almost as soon as it begins.
My hand is wet.
I tell myself that there are only one hundred repeated numbers in ten thousand tickets. One chance in a hundred. I have survived more lotteries than I can count. I will survive this one.
I open my hand.
4671.
For a moment, the number means nothing. Four shapes. A mistake in printing. A trick of the light.
Then the district disappears around it.
I hear myself say no.
The officer with the scar looks back but does not stop.
Roll Call
Distribution takes three hours.
No one is permitted to leave during that time. The selected sit among everyone else while the officers finish each row. Families whisper. Some make promises about finding the transfer records. Some begin saying goodbye. Others stare at the stage as though refusing to look at the ticket can change what it says.
I count the exits.
Six public doors, all locked. Two service doors beside the stage, both guarded. Ventilation grilles too narrow for a body. Cameras in the ceiling. Armed officers along every aisle.
There is no way out.
At midday, the administrator returns to the lectern.
“Residents holding Ticket 4671 will stand when called. Bring no belongings. Your new allocation will provide what is required.”
The names begin.
A mechanic from the row behind me.
An old woman near the centre aisle.
Two children from different families.
A clinic worker still wearing a night-shift uniform.
One of the guards at the western wall.
When his name is called, the guard does not move. The officer beside him says something too quiet for us to hear. The selected guard slowly removes his sidearm and places it on the floor. He joins the line without looking at the crowd.
No one is free of it.
My name comes sixty-three places into the list.
I stand.
The hundred of us gather at the foot of the stage. The youngest child is carried by a parent who does not have the number. An officer blocks them at the stairs.
“Recipients only.”
“They can’t go alone.”
“Recipients only.”
The parent holds on until two officers pull their arms apart. The child is lifted onto the stage, screaming. Nobody in the audience moves.
We all understand what the rifles are for.
The administrator thanks us for our service.
The door behind the curtain opens.
White light fills the stage.
Behind The Auditorium
The corridor is not part of the auditorium.
The walls change from public stone to sealed metal as soon as the door closes behind us. The floor slopes down. Cameras follow from the ceiling. The applause broadcast still plays through hidden speakers, but it grows quieter with every turn.
The guards escorting us seem nervous.
That surprises me. I thought they would know where the ticket led. Instead, they stop at a security line and surrender us to officers wearing no district markings. The selected guard asks where we are being taken.
The answer is a hand against his chest.
“Your authority ended at the door.”
Our escorts leave.
The corridor divides.
At the first room, we are photographed and stripped of our district papers. An intake clerk enters each number into a terminal, then drops the papers through a slot in the desk. I hear a shredder start below it.
“I was told we’d receive new records,” someone says.
“After allocation,” the clerk replies.
At the second room, medical staff take blood, inspect teeth and joints, test eyesight and ask about pregnancies, surgeries, medication and family illness. The questions move too quickly for answers to matter. Each person receives a mark on the intake sheet.
At the third room, the line begins to break apart.
A heavy door opens at the left wall. Six adults in work uniforms are taken through it. I glimpse a freight platform descending towards the mining levels.
Another door opens on the right. Three children and a clinic worker are led into a white medical passage. One child asks when their parents will arrive. No one answers.
Farther ahead, a group of younger adults is ordered to run between floor markers while cameras track their movement. An officer checks their reflexes, balance and aggression. Behind the assessment room is a corridor lined with equipment cases and black observation glass.
I have seen that corridor before.
Not with my own eyes.
In a forbidden maintenance record copied through the branch network, there was a diagram of the old service spine beneath this district. The writer claimed it connected civic auditoriums to freight lifts, sealed clinics, transfer platforms and an intake route used by the Games. The report vanished two days after it appeared. The person who posted it received Ticket 4671 at the next lottery.
I thought the diagram was a lie.
Now I recognise the angle of the corridor and the arrangement of the doors.
“No,” I say.
An officer turns towards me.
The line moves again.
There is one more route in the diagram. It ends beneath the reclamation decks. No dormitory. No transfer platform. No return passage. Just a wide service chamber connected to the district furnaces.
I look at the people still beside me and understand why no one comes home.
Some of the selected may be alive. They may work in another branch, travel on a ship, enter a clinic or survive the Games. It makes no difference to the district. Their records are destroyed before anyone decides where they go.
Ticket 4671 is not the destination.
It is permission.
The state can make one hundred people disappear, then decide what each body is worth.
An intake officer takes my sheet.
The officer reads the mark beside my name, looks towards the doors and covers the page with one hand before I can see it.
“Next,” the officer says.
Someone grips my arm.
A door opens.