The world returned grudgingly as unfocused shapes and sounds, and in hues of umber and jaundiced grays. Even that dull shadow-less light strained my eyesight. My head was a void at first. It took a moment before molten pain crashed through to fill that void.
A new and strange scent filled the air. It was entirely unknown to me. There was a bitter spicy warmth which awakened all of my senses in new and almost sexual ways, despite that pressing pain. I recall laying there for a while more focused on those paletted smells than on worrying over the nature and severity of my injury.
I was on a billowy soft mattress, most unlike the then bare foam mattress and cervical brace Associates slept on. This was deep, molding to my form until I almost felt, happily, that it would engulf me completely. There was a character to it in the way it felt and smelled. There was, a humanity, an intimacy the likes of which I could not recall knowing before.
The concrete ceiling above was slanted steeply and low. The concrete itself was unfinished, with exposed rebar. There were tannish-brown water stains, emanating from deep cracks. Chunks of concrete had broken loose, some of them quite large, which gave me a bit of concern. It was too much to take all at once. I closed my eyes and groaned.
It was noticeably colder than the city, or even in the archives down deep below those busy city streets. There were sounds. They were far away sounds, deeply resonant sounds and heavy thundering sounds. There were of course, the muffled distant sounds of the city. I could hear the waves clearer now, washing powerfully, sounding hollow and low.
There were closer sounds too. I could hear urgent and heated whispers, though it was impossible to make any sense of what was being said. It wasn’t children, that much I was sure. If I had been in slightly better condition I would have inferred that whatever it was those heated exchanges were about me.
After a time I managed to sit up, though it was still an open question if I would be able to remain there for long. My head was supported in my hands. The pressure helped alleviate the pain somewhat. More than that, it held the dizziness at bay, which would have very quickly made me vomit.
“Papa, come quick now!” a child said.
I strained to look up without moving my head. The girl from the archives stood in a crooked doorway or more accurately an uneven break in a concrete support wall. She was dressed in rags. Her eyes were fixed on me with a mixture curiosity and suspicion, quite unlike anything capable of Associate children. There was a second wall behind her. A soft orange light waxed and waned across it from an unseen flame.
I made no effort to move or look up or defend myself. The blow, at least for a time, had rendered me defenseless. I wasn’t helpless as much as I was entirely indifferent to my fate at that moment. Death, I decided, would be no worse that the thundering waves of pain hammering the inside of my skull and extending down throughout my body.
I was still trying to focus, my eyes still fixed the floor. A man came in the room. All I could tell at first was that he wore the high black jackboots of a Section Twenty-one trooper. I had no fear. The boots were in atrocious condition. They were worn and terribly scuffed. Cracks had formed at the ankles and across the toes so severely that the boots seemed ready to fall apart. His simple gray Associate trousers were filthy, and tucked into the tops of the boots in typical Section Twenty-one style.
“Not a shred of fight in me,” I moaned softly. It was simpler not to look up. For the moment it hardly seemed to matter.
A brutally long silence followed. It was enough to awaken some animal imperative for survival and resistance. The imperative built in my chest, but without any response from the rest of my body.
To my great surprise the man laid a cool damp rag across the back of my head. I winced, but more for the unexpected nature of the gesture. The affect in my heart and my head was instantaneous. I gave a long low groan as, for the moment, the tension eminating from my wound down into my torso was relieved.
“Obliged,” I said, reaching back to bring the rag tighter to the lump on my head.
I managed to look up, into the face of the oldest man I had ever seen. He was far older than any Associate I knew of, for he would have long ago gone to reclamation. His face was bronze in color. The deeply lined flesh as hard and weathered as the ancient leather-bound manuscripts I had come across in the archives. His face was long and square, reminding me of black and white photographs of John Brown, the abolitionist I had read about.
“Took a mighty big clomp to the lid,” he pursed his lips sympathetically. He wore bits and pieces of old Associate clothing, sewn crudely together and patched in parts. Like the child behind him, a fur wrap was thrown across his shoulders.
“Anyone you know?” I quipped, discovering that it was excruciating even to smile. “I’d like to have a word.” I felt dizzy and nauseous suddenly. “Perhaps it could wait a while.”
“My daughter is this one,” he motioned to the girl cowering behind him. “Heard that screeching and guessed she was being murdered. Couldn’t have that be, you see.”
“Just wanted to know who was pelting me with books. I was supposed to be alone down…”
“This is what she told me what happened. I figured, and then we brought you back here for fixing.”
He had such an odd way of talking. Not stupid, but simple. I gave them both a strange and perplexed look. He seemed to take immediate offense.
“Don’t think ‘cause we swill down here in the low city that manners don’t come to us!”
“Low city?”
I tried to stand, but my heads and legs conspired against me. He caught me just as I was about to spill onto the floor. He was incredibly quick and strong. It seemed no effort at all to hold me up.
“Mister, that clomp still be fresh.” He gently pushed me back to the mattress. “Best you sleep some more time then.”
“Why did you bring me here?” I had to know. “Why didn’t you just leave me in the archive?”
“Don’t let them bugs and rats eat you up.” He drew a hide across my chest and shoulders. It had a musky, salty smell. He studied me a moment. “Besides, you’re not like them kind up there in the city. You’re a different one. You dress like them. I don’t mean for your color and all, but I feel a difference in you. No sir, we don’t see many others like you.”
“Others?” Not sure I’d heard him correctly. “There are more like me?”
“Best be inside the sleep now.”
Sleep, such as it was, really was not much of a decision I had to make. That little bit had fully exhausted me. I closed my eyes, disappointed that I was far too spent to bask in the moment. I felt cheated. I could not celebrate that there were indeed others like me! I tried to imagine what I would say to them, if I would embrace them or embarrass myself with uncontrolled emotion. I was thinking all of this when the darkness descended over me once again.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Last Man: Part Four
I held few illusions that this trial was little more than a show, at least for the Corporation. There could be no doubt they intended me for reclamation the moment judgment was rendered, as if that judgment was ever really in question. The mere fact that I had been allowed to pour through these volumes, forbidden as they were, would have been proof enough that my fate was sealed.
So why fight? Why resist the inevitable? What is the point of struggling against death, if death is the only and ultimate outcome? But death is never the enemy, only the end of pride and struggle. As for pride it is our blessing and our enslaver. To struggle is the true purpose, struggle to breath, struggle to love, and struggle to be. It is the unreasonable pressure asserted against our struggle. That is the only true enemy, and it always comes as much from within as from without. It is the conspiracy of both which robs us ultimately of liberty. In one badly damaged volume these precious words stirred me:
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
I knew nothing of this man Patrick Henry, except that he must have been extraordinary. Little of what he wrote remained. Mold had eaten away or stained many of the pages. What remained dissolved to the touch, leaving this short barely readable passage, and occupying a shred hardly the span of an open palm. Still, a man may hold exalted words and remain a bastard in life!
There was a crashing sound just beyond the limits of the lamp. I stood and turned suddenly, losing Patrick Henry’s words as they flew from my hand. Books tumbled and splashed. Whatever it was, it was much larger than the rats, who normally kept their distance. I raised the lamp higher, squinting to see better.
“Keep back!” It was clearly a child’s voice. That voice had a raw, feral sort of quality. There was a threatening quality, a fight first character I felt certain was real. “I swear I’ll rip yer guts off!”
“Out,” I shouted into the darkness. There was a moment of silence.
“What?” The voice called back.
“Rip your guts out-out, not off.”
I had never heard a child speak in such an insolent and primitive manner, particularly to an elder Associate. Such belligerence would certainly have meant an intense Redirection program and, failing that, reclamation. The Channels do instill proper hierarchical reverence and strong communication skills-GOOD COMMUNICATION SKILLS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS, one hears everywhere in the Channels.
“Show yourself,” I shouted after the phantom, attempting to sound much braver than I actually was. A book sailed out of the darkness, past my head. Another struck my chest. Not terribly hard, and I grunted more from surprise than pain.
“What is wrong with you?” I complained, dodging two more volumes. With the final one I’d had quite enough and charged over the largest mound. My feet skidded and slipped down one side, splashing brackish water onto the next mound.
I was across it in a second, batting away a panicked fusillade of fluttering and dissolving manuscripts thrown up from my fleeing little demon. It was too little too late, however. With a stumbling tackle I brought the biting and screaming urchin down.
There was a brief but furious battle amid the rotting paper, scattering insects and pungent black water. The lamp was between us, the light flickering wildly amid arms and legs and a snapping of teeth. It seemed forever before I was able to subdue the cretin, only to discover, to my great surprise, that it was a young girl!
Her simple pale filthy round face, half concealed by overlapping layers of tattered fabric, was the last thing I recall. An instant later something heavy smashed against the back of my skull. With a blinding white flash and searing sharp stab of pain the world faded to darkness and nothingness.
So why fight? Why resist the inevitable? What is the point of struggling against death, if death is the only and ultimate outcome? But death is never the enemy, only the end of pride and struggle. As for pride it is our blessing and our enslaver. To struggle is the true purpose, struggle to breath, struggle to love, and struggle to be. It is the unreasonable pressure asserted against our struggle. That is the only true enemy, and it always comes as much from within as from without. It is the conspiracy of both which robs us ultimately of liberty. In one badly damaged volume these precious words stirred me:
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
I knew nothing of this man Patrick Henry, except that he must have been extraordinary. Little of what he wrote remained. Mold had eaten away or stained many of the pages. What remained dissolved to the touch, leaving this short barely readable passage, and occupying a shred hardly the span of an open palm. Still, a man may hold exalted words and remain a bastard in life!
There was a crashing sound just beyond the limits of the lamp. I stood and turned suddenly, losing Patrick Henry’s words as they flew from my hand. Books tumbled and splashed. Whatever it was, it was much larger than the rats, who normally kept their distance. I raised the lamp higher, squinting to see better.
“Keep back!” It was clearly a child’s voice. That voice had a raw, feral sort of quality. There was a threatening quality, a fight first character I felt certain was real. “I swear I’ll rip yer guts off!”
“Out,” I shouted into the darkness. There was a moment of silence.
“What?” The voice called back.
“Rip your guts out-out, not off.”
I had never heard a child speak in such an insolent and primitive manner, particularly to an elder Associate. Such belligerence would certainly have meant an intense Redirection program and, failing that, reclamation. The Channels do instill proper hierarchical reverence and strong communication skills-GOOD COMMUNICATION SKILLS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS, one hears everywhere in the Channels.
“Show yourself,” I shouted after the phantom, attempting to sound much braver than I actually was. A book sailed out of the darkness, past my head. Another struck my chest. Not terribly hard, and I grunted more from surprise than pain.
“What is wrong with you?” I complained, dodging two more volumes. With the final one I’d had quite enough and charged over the largest mound. My feet skidded and slipped down one side, splashing brackish water onto the next mound.
I was across it in a second, batting away a panicked fusillade of fluttering and dissolving manuscripts thrown up from my fleeing little demon. It was too little too late, however. With a stumbling tackle I brought the biting and screaming urchin down.
There was a brief but furious battle amid the rotting paper, scattering insects and pungent black water. The lamp was between us, the light flickering wildly amid arms and legs and a snapping of teeth. It seemed forever before I was able to subdue the cretin, only to discover, to my great surprise, that it was a young girl!
Her simple pale filthy round face, half concealed by overlapping layers of tattered fabric, was the last thing I recall. An instant later something heavy smashed against the back of my skull. With a blinding white flash and searing sharp stab of pain the world faded to darkness and nothingness.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
THE LAST MAN: Part Three
THE LAST MAN
PART THREE
Despite assertions this is hardly a perfect society. It is imbued with all the miserable faults and foibles of the human heart. This desire for perfection, this impossible destination will certainly be the downfall of civilization, for in striving for perfection we become separate from ourselves. All the great literature, inspired thought, Art and music are the product of blessed insecurities, unrestrained passions and exalted perversions. They are unhinged anger, psychosis and guilt. Indeed, the greatest irony is that we were perhaps more perfect when we were much less perfect.
Freedom is a malleable alloy. There is no standard but what a man will or will not endure. Beyond that limit his freedom begins and ends. Within that closed room there is no consideration for anyone else’s freedom. Their freedom is an extravagance, a courtesy, not the divine sanctity of another’s solemn sovereignty. It can be bargained away. Though, in truth, the bargaining of one man’s freedom makes all other’s negotiable.
Ours was bargained away long ago. Freedom became defined more by security than by liberty. Few questioned those who blathered that the dead cannot be free, and so they bartered with the state that sovereign right for the weight of a few more breaths, a few more hours against eternity. It wasn’t wild specters that imperiled freedom, but freedom that imperiled the state. It imperiled the Corporation while it was still a small thing, while it might have been crushed and set aside among the other failed and forgotten ideologies, like fascism, and communism, feudalism and theism.
There were those who resisted Sentinel at first. Isolated and shunned by weak willed neighbors, they were quickly dealt with. Their ashes filled the sky from those first terribly crude reclamation centers. They were the lucky ones. They were the last of the truly free, the ones who would not go quietly. They cursed and stood defiant even as the flames devoured their flesh. I wonder if there were men and women like me among them. I wonder if they were the last. Perhaps they were the strongest, those most defiant. I wonder. That thought gives me strength.
It made perfect sense, on a childish level, to eliminate race from humanity. Centuries and millennia of strife, classism, racism and social stratification would be swept away. A new era of mankind, a grand step in evolution would be taken. Race was not the issue, but merely the symptom. A fool will raze the world before facing his own ignorance. The question remains of whether I represent the world or the fool?
I grew tall and lean, much taller than the other children. It was as though being black in a grayish-white world was not enough! My hair grew long and straight and stiff until I wove it into braids. My beard grew thick but short. And there I was, at first ashamed of features echoing my African ancestors.
Not that I only acknowledge that lineage. It was known even in the Twentieth Century that no man could rightly claim a single undiluted ancestry. The blessed diversity of the species was once scribbled through all races and all parts of the world. A melting pot or soup? Certainly a stew in which ingredients maintained a unique character while adding to the taste. How I must have appeared as a monster among all the rest. Now I am as a rare jewel; so proud and beautiful.
You might ask how the world came to be this way. Was it a deliberate process, or the accidental ignorance of our blind collective fate? A nation of good intentions can easily be swayed by the violent acts of a madman or a revolutionary. Broad passions about the rights of man are smothered. All the words of all the holy books ever written, all the best intentions of the enlightenment, the sanctity of the Reformation, or passions of the French revolution were rendered meaningless through the obfuscation of truth, lawyer-ism, and the collective abandonment of individual sovereignty. Hardly a revolution, it all happened with a whisper and over generations.
The Corporation had nothing to lose by putting me on trial. What they had to gain is certainly in question, for it would have been simpler just to send me to reclamation. No one would have known. There will never be any headlines and no programming concerning the trial. No Associate anywhere in the world will ever know. There will never be a popular uprising, no outrage and no curiosity. Perhaps it is a distraction from the burdens of time, or an implicit indication that some unknown and unseen autocrat in the Corporation has a conscience.
And so I was told of a secret archive where the last remaining references to the old world are kept. I was free to use them as I pleased to prepare my defense, as long as I did not take anything away. It was an incredible privilege, I understood, for I would have at my fingertips all that had become forbidden for centuries. Certain that my fate was sealed even before the trial I decided the archives would bring me closer to others like me, though they were long dead and gone.
I dreamed of them for days, hardly sleeping from breathless excitement and fantasy. I would find these treasure and consume every word as a starving body consumes every morsel or drop of food-even the tasteless, colorless vita-wafers that suffices for sustenance for Associates. My mind filled with shelves filled with endless manuscripts, of breathing in the air and scent of them. What I discovered was something much different.
Sadly the archives were not in some ancient catacomb, or some neglected but still elegant old world ruin. There were no dusty windows leaking pale dim light upon towering shelves stacked with untold volumes. There were no sheets of cobwebs to swept aside in discovery of soulful treasure. The “archive,” was in the basement of a sub-basement of one of those massive towers along the coast. Indeed, it was nearly in the low city!
It was a long descent through long sparsely lit concrete passageways and down uneven, hastily crafted steps, as if this had all been an after-thought to the building above. The air grew heavy. The biting smell of cold sewage grew stronger with each step. There were sounds; the dripping of water, the rhythmic thumping of the waves upon the shore, the groan and settle of the building.
At last I came to a metal door. The hinges had rusted and it was with some effort that I finally managed to open it. There was no light inside. That paltry light from the hall fell on some strange shape, like a creature slumbering in its tomb which, now disturbed, would turn and devour me. I half believed, fear banging against the inside of my chest, that the Corporation had somehow tricked me into that bitter end.
There was a small lamp in my jacket. The light was pathetic, but just enough to reveal what was called an archive. In a single great heap, and a number of smaller ones, the wisdom and works of mankind rotted and moldered: Kish, Mandela, Plato, Ellison, Dostoevsky, Freud, Ovid, Sefi Atta, Castaneda, GuanZi, Twain and Dante.
Standing water made islands of each great mound. Obsidian black, the water appeared like some mirror to another world. Stagnate pools had rotted many of the volumes into formless mush. Many more had been devoured or ruined by insects and rats that swarmed in places. What remained was terribly fragile under anything but the most careful touch. How sad, as I sat upon this throne built from the rotting history, wisdom and confession of humanity, like some sad monarch of nothing.
PART THREE
Despite assertions this is hardly a perfect society. It is imbued with all the miserable faults and foibles of the human heart. This desire for perfection, this impossible destination will certainly be the downfall of civilization, for in striving for perfection we become separate from ourselves. All the great literature, inspired thought, Art and music are the product of blessed insecurities, unrestrained passions and exalted perversions. They are unhinged anger, psychosis and guilt. Indeed, the greatest irony is that we were perhaps more perfect when we were much less perfect.
Freedom is a malleable alloy. There is no standard but what a man will or will not endure. Beyond that limit his freedom begins and ends. Within that closed room there is no consideration for anyone else’s freedom. Their freedom is an extravagance, a courtesy, not the divine sanctity of another’s solemn sovereignty. It can be bargained away. Though, in truth, the bargaining of one man’s freedom makes all other’s negotiable.
Ours was bargained away long ago. Freedom became defined more by security than by liberty. Few questioned those who blathered that the dead cannot be free, and so they bartered with the state that sovereign right for the weight of a few more breaths, a few more hours against eternity. It wasn’t wild specters that imperiled freedom, but freedom that imperiled the state. It imperiled the Corporation while it was still a small thing, while it might have been crushed and set aside among the other failed and forgotten ideologies, like fascism, and communism, feudalism and theism.
There were those who resisted Sentinel at first. Isolated and shunned by weak willed neighbors, they were quickly dealt with. Their ashes filled the sky from those first terribly crude reclamation centers. They were the lucky ones. They were the last of the truly free, the ones who would not go quietly. They cursed and stood defiant even as the flames devoured their flesh. I wonder if there were men and women like me among them. I wonder if they were the last. Perhaps they were the strongest, those most defiant. I wonder. That thought gives me strength.
It made perfect sense, on a childish level, to eliminate race from humanity. Centuries and millennia of strife, classism, racism and social stratification would be swept away. A new era of mankind, a grand step in evolution would be taken. Race was not the issue, but merely the symptom. A fool will raze the world before facing his own ignorance. The question remains of whether I represent the world or the fool?
I grew tall and lean, much taller than the other children. It was as though being black in a grayish-white world was not enough! My hair grew long and straight and stiff until I wove it into braids. My beard grew thick but short. And there I was, at first ashamed of features echoing my African ancestors.
Not that I only acknowledge that lineage. It was known even in the Twentieth Century that no man could rightly claim a single undiluted ancestry. The blessed diversity of the species was once scribbled through all races and all parts of the world. A melting pot or soup? Certainly a stew in which ingredients maintained a unique character while adding to the taste. How I must have appeared as a monster among all the rest. Now I am as a rare jewel; so proud and beautiful.
You might ask how the world came to be this way. Was it a deliberate process, or the accidental ignorance of our blind collective fate? A nation of good intentions can easily be swayed by the violent acts of a madman or a revolutionary. Broad passions about the rights of man are smothered. All the words of all the holy books ever written, all the best intentions of the enlightenment, the sanctity of the Reformation, or passions of the French revolution were rendered meaningless through the obfuscation of truth, lawyer-ism, and the collective abandonment of individual sovereignty. Hardly a revolution, it all happened with a whisper and over generations.
The Corporation had nothing to lose by putting me on trial. What they had to gain is certainly in question, for it would have been simpler just to send me to reclamation. No one would have known. There will never be any headlines and no programming concerning the trial. No Associate anywhere in the world will ever know. There will never be a popular uprising, no outrage and no curiosity. Perhaps it is a distraction from the burdens of time, or an implicit indication that some unknown and unseen autocrat in the Corporation has a conscience.
And so I was told of a secret archive where the last remaining references to the old world are kept. I was free to use them as I pleased to prepare my defense, as long as I did not take anything away. It was an incredible privilege, I understood, for I would have at my fingertips all that had become forbidden for centuries. Certain that my fate was sealed even before the trial I decided the archives would bring me closer to others like me, though they were long dead and gone.
I dreamed of them for days, hardly sleeping from breathless excitement and fantasy. I would find these treasure and consume every word as a starving body consumes every morsel or drop of food-even the tasteless, colorless vita-wafers that suffices for sustenance for Associates. My mind filled with shelves filled with endless manuscripts, of breathing in the air and scent of them. What I discovered was something much different.
Sadly the archives were not in some ancient catacomb, or some neglected but still elegant old world ruin. There were no dusty windows leaking pale dim light upon towering shelves stacked with untold volumes. There were no sheets of cobwebs to swept aside in discovery of soulful treasure. The “archive,” was in the basement of a sub-basement of one of those massive towers along the coast. Indeed, it was nearly in the low city!
It was a long descent through long sparsely lit concrete passageways and down uneven, hastily crafted steps, as if this had all been an after-thought to the building above. The air grew heavy. The biting smell of cold sewage grew stronger with each step. There were sounds; the dripping of water, the rhythmic thumping of the waves upon the shore, the groan and settle of the building.
At last I came to a metal door. The hinges had rusted and it was with some effort that I finally managed to open it. There was no light inside. That paltry light from the hall fell on some strange shape, like a creature slumbering in its tomb which, now disturbed, would turn and devour me. I half believed, fear banging against the inside of my chest, that the Corporation had somehow tricked me into that bitter end.
There was a small lamp in my jacket. The light was pathetic, but just enough to reveal what was called an archive. In a single great heap, and a number of smaller ones, the wisdom and works of mankind rotted and moldered: Kish, Mandela, Plato, Ellison, Dostoevsky, Freud, Ovid, Sefi Atta, Castaneda, GuanZi, Twain and Dante.
Standing water made islands of each great mound. Obsidian black, the water appeared like some mirror to another world. Stagnate pools had rotted many of the volumes into formless mush. Many more had been devoured or ruined by insects and rats that swarmed in places. What remained was terribly fragile under anything but the most careful touch. How sad, as I sat upon this throne built from the rotting history, wisdom and confession of humanity, like some sad monarch of nothing.
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Last Man: Part Two
It is wrong to assume anything akin to love between my parents. They were like the others, simple Associates and nothing more. I cannot even tell you their names. Their faces I know only from the case file, small two by two inch images without names or traceable numbers. Not that it would matter. There was no more thought to their coupling than a sneeze or a yawn, or the evacuation of a bladder. It was a release, the chemical fusion of egg and spermatozoa. It was a mandate, reproduction and production, the only measurable criteria for avoiding reclamation. There are only two things certain in life, they say; reclamation and the Corporation.
It is amusing to imagine the horror on the faces of the doctors as I was pulled brown and glorious from my mother’s womb. I can well imagine her horror as well. As if she was guilty of some misdeed, or felonious affront to society. There is no way of knowing, of course. There is nothing in the file. But my sense is that she and my father were sent to reclamation after that. Their files end abruptly the day I was born, and nothing more is heard from them again.
And so I charged headlong into the world, a stain on the conscience of man, an aberration that becomes the accusation. Of course that assumes that I was intended to survive at all. In a world where aberrations are extinguished, removed from the world by Section Twenty-one, reclaimed for spare parts and recycled bio-mass, I was saved. I was saved because of the color of my skin. I was saved to further the frontiers of genetic science.
A child must learn that the world is a dangerous place, and that life is always a fatal condition. The child evolves into recognizing the differences among people alternately as threats and blessings. Such things are taught as much as learned. From the youngest age my recollection was one of being segregated from the other children. Where they were channeled into conformity, parceled into channels and skills to benefit society and the Corporation, I was left alone. While they found community, I found that these thoughts, running so deep, were all that I could rely upon. While I as different was eschewed, they as the status quo were embraced.
I am certain, though I cannot prove, that I was slated for reclamation a hundred, perhaps a thousand times. The hidden hand of the Corporation was impotent in the face of the arrogance of science. And as I, by merely existing, had humiliated science, it’s pride could only be saved by proving I was a freak aberration and not something more. After all, the mere thought of individuality had been bred from humanity, and that which could not be bred out was socialized and marginalized. I should not have existed, and yet there I was, and that is what ultimately saved me.
But life is not merely survival. To survive, to truly survive depends upon so much more. There were caregivers, teachers, doctors, and even scientists who were kind. Nothing overt, but those rare moments of kindness and mercy came as a sudden downpour over the desert of my young heart. I collected them, held each one as though it was a precious jewel.
I think that is where I began to believe that I was special, altogether different from all the rest. Not just because of my color, but because I was saved, because I was rescued from death. There were children who could not or would not conform.. Some would fight, asserting their independence, or cry uncontrollably. All of them were removed from the group and sent away for reclamation. Some simply passed away in the night. The Corporation has no use for the weak. A few escaped, probably to the low city and to an unknown fate.
The hours and days and years I have struggled to understand why I was saved. Not by virtue of the Corporation’s benevolence, Science’s egotism or Section Twenty-one’s oversight, but by something eternally and intrinsically human. It was my obsession, but mercy and decency and hope defy science and cynicism. Not that any of those were the intention of the Corporation. They are random acts, imponderables that bely our humanity, and by quirk or by fate have not entirely been erased from humanity.
For fear of endangering one such Associate I will relate a story here. Do I fear for her safety? Absolutely, but then I console my guilty conscience with the knowledge that after so many years surely she has gone to reclamation by now. The decrepit and unproductive are obsolete and a burden on society. Certainly her ashes have long ago been thrown into the wind. This is how I assuage my guilt over relating this story .Rationalism, the most dangerous characteristic of the human heart, for it is the lie every man employs to hide the truth even from himself.
My earliest recollection is of the Channels. It would be wrong here to suppose anything akin to the once practiced sort of education children were once subjected to in the Twenty-first or even the Twenty-second Century. To be sure it was a step in the evolution of the Channels. Manual dexterity meant a life in data entry, electronics or production. A strong constitution guaranteed physical labor. Agility predicted a life in the service, or among the ranks of Section Twenty-one. The weakest and slowest were ignored, left to starve until they died or were scheduled for reclamation. The most obstinate escaped to the low city to live and die like scavenging vermin. Not even the Corporation or Section Twenty-one venture into the Low city.
In the Channels I was neither slow nor weak. I was nothing, which was altogether worse. If there is hope a body will fight for every moment of existence, a hypocrisy in the face of eternity. But there comes a time when even the most obstinate and independent child comprehends the futility of life. That may be nothing more than a confluence of loneliness and loss of hope
These brave words, my defiance might have been extinguished forever. The possibility (or impossibility) of me, of these moments might have been reshuffled among the infinite card deck of possibilities. That single understanding reveals the true nature of fate, but also of hope.
I recall that I was terribly young. I would say five or six solar years of age. It is impossible to say for certain as those records are the property of the Corporation. The months and years pass uncounted in the seemingly endless Arctic days and nights. To the Associate, time has no more relevance than a passing sneeze. Time is a character of the individual, and that was long ago erased.
Centuries ago, in the folklore of the time, people believed in angels. Did angels ever really exist? Were they real or an amalgam of all that is good in the human species? As history has been erased as irrelevant, except in my case, and only to satisfy the Corporation’s illusion of fairness. Who can say? For my part I believe in angels, at least the earthly sort. It is the reason that I offer this defense, this rebellion, this subversion.
“You must eat this, child. “ The woman’s voice was almost at a whisper, very soft and low. Her face was obscured in shadow. She was daring Sentinel, but apparently the Corporation was uncertain on how to deal with me. The other children were asleep. Their rhythmic breaths rose as a chorus through the hall. A thousand, ten thousand beds, and I alone was dying among that sea.
I can still feel the concern and humanity in her voice, as clearly as if she was in the room with me now. Her hand gently cradled my head, lifting to a spoon and salty warm liquid. Most of that first spoonful dripped down my chin. It was the first human contact I had ever known, save for the other children who would dare each other to run and touch me. Every night she would visit me for food and her saving touch. Sometimes the smallest mercy can change the world.
In time she would lay beside me, as if some part of her longed for a closeness long mandated out of existence. It was as though, despite science, socialization and the imperative s of the Corporation, part of our earlier history resonated within her. Could its productivity be measured? Certainly not, but to me, in that dark and quiet hall, it was beyond measure.
“Why?” I managed to ask her, my cheek pressed to the softness and warmth of her breath. I could feel the beating of her heart and felt so connected to the Universe. At that moment eternity was less a threat, and instead was to be pitied in its endless march. For in that march it was without the capacity to appreciate the beauty of a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “Something I, I…you’re so very special.”
“Why am I different?”
She thought a moment, running her fingers over my hair. “You must fight them by fighting for yourself. Fight them every step and they will allow you to live, enough to challenge them, but never enough to frustrate them.”
“There is no other way?”
“I don’t know why you are different, but you are here, and that is all I can tell you. Just know that you are very special indeed.”
A tear fell across her cheek. She caught it and pressed her wet fingertips to my cheek. She held me tight, muffling a cry. In the morning when I awoke she was gone. Perhaps Section Twenty-one had taken her away for the offense of compassion. Maybe she realized her transgression or was reassigned. I took it in stride and took her words to heart, and never saw her again.
It is amusing to imagine the horror on the faces of the doctors as I was pulled brown and glorious from my mother’s womb. I can well imagine her horror as well. As if she was guilty of some misdeed, or felonious affront to society. There is no way of knowing, of course. There is nothing in the file. But my sense is that she and my father were sent to reclamation after that. Their files end abruptly the day I was born, and nothing more is heard from them again.
And so I charged headlong into the world, a stain on the conscience of man, an aberration that becomes the accusation. Of course that assumes that I was intended to survive at all. In a world where aberrations are extinguished, removed from the world by Section Twenty-one, reclaimed for spare parts and recycled bio-mass, I was saved. I was saved because of the color of my skin. I was saved to further the frontiers of genetic science.
A child must learn that the world is a dangerous place, and that life is always a fatal condition. The child evolves into recognizing the differences among people alternately as threats and blessings. Such things are taught as much as learned. From the youngest age my recollection was one of being segregated from the other children. Where they were channeled into conformity, parceled into channels and skills to benefit society and the Corporation, I was left alone. While they found community, I found that these thoughts, running so deep, were all that I could rely upon. While I as different was eschewed, they as the status quo were embraced.
I am certain, though I cannot prove, that I was slated for reclamation a hundred, perhaps a thousand times. The hidden hand of the Corporation was impotent in the face of the arrogance of science. And as I, by merely existing, had humiliated science, it’s pride could only be saved by proving I was a freak aberration and not something more. After all, the mere thought of individuality had been bred from humanity, and that which could not be bred out was socialized and marginalized. I should not have existed, and yet there I was, and that is what ultimately saved me.
But life is not merely survival. To survive, to truly survive depends upon so much more. There were caregivers, teachers, doctors, and even scientists who were kind. Nothing overt, but those rare moments of kindness and mercy came as a sudden downpour over the desert of my young heart. I collected them, held each one as though it was a precious jewel.
I think that is where I began to believe that I was special, altogether different from all the rest. Not just because of my color, but because I was saved, because I was rescued from death. There were children who could not or would not conform.. Some would fight, asserting their independence, or cry uncontrollably. All of them were removed from the group and sent away for reclamation. Some simply passed away in the night. The Corporation has no use for the weak. A few escaped, probably to the low city and to an unknown fate.
The hours and days and years I have struggled to understand why I was saved. Not by virtue of the Corporation’s benevolence, Science’s egotism or Section Twenty-one’s oversight, but by something eternally and intrinsically human. It was my obsession, but mercy and decency and hope defy science and cynicism. Not that any of those were the intention of the Corporation. They are random acts, imponderables that bely our humanity, and by quirk or by fate have not entirely been erased from humanity.
For fear of endangering one such Associate I will relate a story here. Do I fear for her safety? Absolutely, but then I console my guilty conscience with the knowledge that after so many years surely she has gone to reclamation by now. The decrepit and unproductive are obsolete and a burden on society. Certainly her ashes have long ago been thrown into the wind. This is how I assuage my guilt over relating this story .Rationalism, the most dangerous characteristic of the human heart, for it is the lie every man employs to hide the truth even from himself.
My earliest recollection is of the Channels. It would be wrong here to suppose anything akin to the once practiced sort of education children were once subjected to in the Twenty-first or even the Twenty-second Century. To be sure it was a step in the evolution of the Channels. Manual dexterity meant a life in data entry, electronics or production. A strong constitution guaranteed physical labor. Agility predicted a life in the service, or among the ranks of Section Twenty-one. The weakest and slowest were ignored, left to starve until they died or were scheduled for reclamation. The most obstinate escaped to the low city to live and die like scavenging vermin. Not even the Corporation or Section Twenty-one venture into the Low city.
In the Channels I was neither slow nor weak. I was nothing, which was altogether worse. If there is hope a body will fight for every moment of existence, a hypocrisy in the face of eternity. But there comes a time when even the most obstinate and independent child comprehends the futility of life. That may be nothing more than a confluence of loneliness and loss of hope
These brave words, my defiance might have been extinguished forever. The possibility (or impossibility) of me, of these moments might have been reshuffled among the infinite card deck of possibilities. That single understanding reveals the true nature of fate, but also of hope.
I recall that I was terribly young. I would say five or six solar years of age. It is impossible to say for certain as those records are the property of the Corporation. The months and years pass uncounted in the seemingly endless Arctic days and nights. To the Associate, time has no more relevance than a passing sneeze. Time is a character of the individual, and that was long ago erased.
Centuries ago, in the folklore of the time, people believed in angels. Did angels ever really exist? Were they real or an amalgam of all that is good in the human species? As history has been erased as irrelevant, except in my case, and only to satisfy the Corporation’s illusion of fairness. Who can say? For my part I believe in angels, at least the earthly sort. It is the reason that I offer this defense, this rebellion, this subversion.
“You must eat this, child. “ The woman’s voice was almost at a whisper, very soft and low. Her face was obscured in shadow. She was daring Sentinel, but apparently the Corporation was uncertain on how to deal with me. The other children were asleep. Their rhythmic breaths rose as a chorus through the hall. A thousand, ten thousand beds, and I alone was dying among that sea.
I can still feel the concern and humanity in her voice, as clearly as if she was in the room with me now. Her hand gently cradled my head, lifting to a spoon and salty warm liquid. Most of that first spoonful dripped down my chin. It was the first human contact I had ever known, save for the other children who would dare each other to run and touch me. Every night she would visit me for food and her saving touch. Sometimes the smallest mercy can change the world.
In time she would lay beside me, as if some part of her longed for a closeness long mandated out of existence. It was as though, despite science, socialization and the imperative s of the Corporation, part of our earlier history resonated within her. Could its productivity be measured? Certainly not, but to me, in that dark and quiet hall, it was beyond measure.
“Why?” I managed to ask her, my cheek pressed to the softness and warmth of her breath. I could feel the beating of her heart and felt so connected to the Universe. At that moment eternity was less a threat, and instead was to be pitied in its endless march. For in that march it was without the capacity to appreciate the beauty of a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “Something I, I…you’re so very special.”
“Why am I different?”
She thought a moment, running her fingers over my hair. “You must fight them by fighting for yourself. Fight them every step and they will allow you to live, enough to challenge them, but never enough to frustrate them.”
“There is no other way?”
“I don’t know why you are different, but you are here, and that is all I can tell you. Just know that you are very special indeed.”
A tear fell across her cheek. She caught it and pressed her wet fingertips to my cheek. She held me tight, muffling a cry. In the morning when I awoke she was gone. Perhaps Section Twenty-one had taken her away for the offense of compassion. Maybe she realized her transgression or was reassigned. I took it in stride and took her words to heart, and never saw her again.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Last Man: Part One
The Last Man
A Novel
By
W.C. Turck
Copyright W.C. Turck 2009
Exclusively on Blogspot
PART ONE
The pale light bleeding in thin lines through the shades has the quality of warm malaise, the usual burden of fevered Arctic nights. Drawing them aside I can just make out glimpses of the polluted brown coast among the line of coastal towers. They are monstrosities, these towers, bordering on the ad hoc and haphazard. Almost organic, the towers have long ago shed the pretense of beauty as mere assemblages to hold the greatest quantity of humanity as close to their workstations as possible. They are unfinished thoughts of minds more concerned with utility than soul or passion or even basic functionality. Not that those aspects carry any weight anymore. Instead they are relics of a world gone by, just as I am.
Lest anyone fear that this is some sort of melancholic lament for the “good old days,” it is not. I won’t trouble these pages with self-serving laments over the ascension…no, the avalanche of history. Nor will I entertain those inclined to such thoughts, to some secretive sense that fate or the world or the tides are aligned against them, or is subverting their truer place in the world. Instead this is my testimony, a feeble attempt at remembrance, like a footprint at the shore.
Some would say this is my confession, and that may well be true. By the combined consequence of history, birth, the minutes of the day and failings’ at simple survival I am caste alternately as criminal and victim. Both are shades of the other.
This was once a frozen place, but that was in a world gone by, a place as distant and hazy as I feel at this moment. This is what becomes of the unheeded cries of a fevered world, whose sickness became culture until it was simpler to erase history than ascend to its warnings. And so history is erased, discarded as worthless, which may well prove true. And one day soon I will be gone as well, vaulted towards an inescapable fate, by the bureaucrats of Section Twenty-one, the proxies of the Corporation.
An innocuous glance continues my subversion. I know it is a futile act against Sentinel. Sentinel is everywhere. It sees everything, and even reads my thoughts, these thoughts. But the subversion is not in the thoughts so much as in their character. Certainly it is a risk to have any thoughts at all. Simply thinking is a violation of numerous Section Twenty-one statues, but then again I am a special case. Perhaps I am the most special case, but that remains to be seen.
My subversion is well worth the risk. It connects me more fully to them, to their humanness, which here, and in this place, and in this time is now considered a supreme act of terrorism. It is for them that I stand and live and defy. When my suffering is at its worst that is the time I feel closest to them.
A needle prick carries the well fever and epiphany of pain. Like me, it is a flaw in the perversion of modern genetics to manufacture and reconfigure humanity. Theirs is a revulsion of history and that which made men whole, despite their flaws. But history is betrayed in our bodies. It fled there long ago from the arrogance of purposeful evolution.
Oh, the world that resides with in that first wonderfully awakening instant of pain! At once curious and electric, but so terribly fleeting as it trails away from its cold eruption into something warm and remorseful, like the first breath of a beautiful word fading towards its demise. The pain clears my mind and diverts unguarded thoughts before they can betray me. This is how I have stymied them for so long!
A crimson drop grows at the tip of my finger. It reflects the acrid gloom of the city. I study the blood for a moment, as though it is some ancient relic of myself, of what I am and what I am not- which seems to threaten the very existence of society, according to the Corporation. Even the reddish smear it leaves across the wall is an element of the battle. For now it is fresh among dozens of others.
Section twenty-one regulates and controls the society. I should say here that they are not cruel or calculating by any standard, which is not to say that I fear what is written here will be read by Section Twenty-one. Society regulates itself well enough through the consequence of blind momentum. Section Twenty-one shepherds that momentum through the implication, through a culture of fear as subverted but as real as an extra helping of salt brings a certain bitterness to a stew.
That they are not overt in cultivating fear they view as benevolence and judiciousness. Section Twenty-one allows me the paper and pen to organize my defense. It is curious how they bend over backwards to create the illusion of fairness, as if the ultimate outcome was ever really in question. Instead my hand strains to write these words, a melancholic refrain to ancestors distant and long dead. That refrain is as much a part of my defense as I am. It is their defense as well, for it is their memory that has been erased from the world. That is until I came along.
And what do I expect from these selfish thoughts? Perhaps they will be a cornerstone to a revolution that reasserts the autonomous stature of each soul. I might hope that the spirit in every human being, all but extinguished by the Corporation, will re-ignite and run like wildfire around the planet and beyond. And if cities are razed and millions lost for the retrieval of our plundered liberties then so be it. What could prove a nobler cause?
Ha! It is a laughable thought. What absurdity to believe that the pallid assertions of pallid assertions of words swept into the dustbin of history, when my eyes no longer see and when my hands no longer write, and when the years have ground me to dust, that these words will do them any justice. But still I continue, playing the game, lifting my head each morning, while fantasizing about nothing short of revolution. It is as if there was some intransigent quality to the breath in my lungs, or the blood in my veins that compels me despite a tattered heart.
There is a world outside my window. It is a dull urban landscape: monstrous conglomerations of metal and glass and concrete. The city appears more as some odd crystalline growth, inhabited by mindless crustaceans or single celled organisms than by people. It is too much for the land, almost too much for the clouds drifting among them through jaundiced industrial haze. On twisted and overlapping expressways, far below, traffic lights appear as sluggish rivers of molten lava.
The sun lays low on the far horizon, hardly more than a pale disk through dust and sulfur smog. I pause from these words for a moment to ponder the city, I wonder about the people who go more quietly about their lives than I do. I would prefer to change places if only I did not hope that I served a greater purpose or that I wasn’t locked in a battle for my very survival. Would I relish their ignorance, or feel the fool in some errant awakening? In the umber shadow of sleep the faces of my ancestors visit me, and I know that I must see this through to the end.
Millions rush blind in their tasks, sending up choruses of breathless greetings and simple offenses forgotten almost before they are spoken. They are feverish, feverish in their work, feverish in their play and even in their sex. This is a new world, wholly different from the one mankind understood before. There is no war. Birth and life and death are mandated by the Corporation, administered by Section Twenty-one and monitored by Sentinel. Gone are distinctions of race. The blend is complete. Homogeneity is the new order. The dream of the futurists too afraid or hypocritical to ponder the ramifications has at last been achieved.
It heralded a new golden age, the extinction of animosities, inequality and war. There is no want and no poverty to speak of, none that is acknowledged anyway. Mankind is identical in every way and at every point on the planet. They are identical in the color of their hair and eyes. And their bodies are uniform, at least as uniform as the schemes and science of modern genetics will allow. None of them ever envisioned me.
And I among these uniform hordes, by quirk or fate, or by the mindless consequence of the Universe stand alone. I am a scar from an erased past, an anachronism, an aberration in a world in which the question of race is obsolete. I am a threat to man’s formulated illusions of himself. I am the unintentional heretic, an intrusion upon the unprepared modern conscience. Black as I am, I am a ghost. I am a tribe alone.
Almost funny, in a sad way, to think that futurists a thousand years ago could not see that mankind had rushed headlong to this world from the beginning of time. Almost funny, in a perverse way, that the differences of man were not a celebration, but was cause for hatred. By erasing our differences we committed the greatest injustice because it masked our greatest weaknesses and blamed our truest blessings. In our blindness to suppress those who hated on the basis of skin color we achieved their ultimate goal.
My room is as small and inviting as a tomb. That may sound melodramatic, but suppose a world without art, without culture and individual character. Suppose the final days of the species, and the reawakening of a new era, a changing consciousness that compels the hordes to act less as individuals and more as cells that combine to activate a body. Except this is not a supposition. All of society has been redrawn to annihilate the individual. It is nothing short of a purposeful exorcism of the blessed tumult of the human heart. Only by chance, by my difference and solitude and the prick of a finger has that tumult been reawakened.
The press of the pencil against my bloodied finger brings a sudden sting of sharp pain. Pushing aside the papers for a moment I pause to study the image of my father. I scratched it into the table with a thumbtack and colored the face to a warm brown with drops of my own blood. It is not my real father, of course. It is a fiction. But the fiction I choose to believe becomes my truth and my lie. My real parents were like all the rest. I can just imagine the horror on my mother’s expression when they pulled me from her belly. I can only imagine her shame, as if it was her fault and not the random lottery of DNA.
My boots stand beside the locked door. No worries, it is locked from the inside. I am free to go, just not free to be. On the wall above them a small blue light reminds me that Sentinel is watching. Sentinel is always watching, searching every thought, every movement in hopes of uprooting some suspicious intention or an indication that a body is no longer viable and must be removed from proper society. Sentinel spies. Section Twenty-one punishes. The Corporation decides.
Let me be clear. This is not a prison. Well, perhaps for the mind, since my body is free to come and go as it wishes. But I don’t go out, except to court. Where would I go? I am trapped, not by Sentinel or Section Twenty-one or even the Corporation, but because of this cursed flesh!
The Reclamation center is working overtime today. Two massive smokestacks rise from the center’s massive structure. Thick, boiling plumes of acrid smoke billow high into the atmosphere, where the trade winds thin and stretch them to the horizon. It looks like rain falling over the city, a brown and gray rain. Instead it is all that remains of fellow Associates, the grist ground by the Corporation’s relentless mortar and pestle.
Don’t misconstrue. This is not some sort of lament, nor an accusation. It is what it is. It is the reality of existence that we produce for the Corporation, and when our bodies are no longer useful in that regard then we are waste, burdened and shamed at falling behind, by not carrying our load, by becoming an impediment. Well, maybe them, but not I.
The haze clears enough that I can make out the ruins of the old city far out to sea. The ruins stab from the gray-green waters like rotted pilings or melting candle wax. Sentinel isn’t there, and the fires burning in windows cause me to wonder of the people there. I imagine that they are like me. I imagine that they, well, it is important not to get too far ahead of myself. To properly tell the story I must go back to a time before I was born, and so that is where I will begin.
A Novel
By
W.C. Turck
Copyright W.C. Turck 2009
Exclusively on Blogspot
PART ONE
The pale light bleeding in thin lines through the shades has the quality of warm malaise, the usual burden of fevered Arctic nights. Drawing them aside I can just make out glimpses of the polluted brown coast among the line of coastal towers. They are monstrosities, these towers, bordering on the ad hoc and haphazard. Almost organic, the towers have long ago shed the pretense of beauty as mere assemblages to hold the greatest quantity of humanity as close to their workstations as possible. They are unfinished thoughts of minds more concerned with utility than soul or passion or even basic functionality. Not that those aspects carry any weight anymore. Instead they are relics of a world gone by, just as I am.
Lest anyone fear that this is some sort of melancholic lament for the “good old days,” it is not. I won’t trouble these pages with self-serving laments over the ascension…no, the avalanche of history. Nor will I entertain those inclined to such thoughts, to some secretive sense that fate or the world or the tides are aligned against them, or is subverting their truer place in the world. Instead this is my testimony, a feeble attempt at remembrance, like a footprint at the shore.
Some would say this is my confession, and that may well be true. By the combined consequence of history, birth, the minutes of the day and failings’ at simple survival I am caste alternately as criminal and victim. Both are shades of the other.
This was once a frozen place, but that was in a world gone by, a place as distant and hazy as I feel at this moment. This is what becomes of the unheeded cries of a fevered world, whose sickness became culture until it was simpler to erase history than ascend to its warnings. And so history is erased, discarded as worthless, which may well prove true. And one day soon I will be gone as well, vaulted towards an inescapable fate, by the bureaucrats of Section Twenty-one, the proxies of the Corporation.
An innocuous glance continues my subversion. I know it is a futile act against Sentinel. Sentinel is everywhere. It sees everything, and even reads my thoughts, these thoughts. But the subversion is not in the thoughts so much as in their character. Certainly it is a risk to have any thoughts at all. Simply thinking is a violation of numerous Section Twenty-one statues, but then again I am a special case. Perhaps I am the most special case, but that remains to be seen.
My subversion is well worth the risk. It connects me more fully to them, to their humanness, which here, and in this place, and in this time is now considered a supreme act of terrorism. It is for them that I stand and live and defy. When my suffering is at its worst that is the time I feel closest to them.
A needle prick carries the well fever and epiphany of pain. Like me, it is a flaw in the perversion of modern genetics to manufacture and reconfigure humanity. Theirs is a revulsion of history and that which made men whole, despite their flaws. But history is betrayed in our bodies. It fled there long ago from the arrogance of purposeful evolution.
Oh, the world that resides with in that first wonderfully awakening instant of pain! At once curious and electric, but so terribly fleeting as it trails away from its cold eruption into something warm and remorseful, like the first breath of a beautiful word fading towards its demise. The pain clears my mind and diverts unguarded thoughts before they can betray me. This is how I have stymied them for so long!
A crimson drop grows at the tip of my finger. It reflects the acrid gloom of the city. I study the blood for a moment, as though it is some ancient relic of myself, of what I am and what I am not- which seems to threaten the very existence of society, according to the Corporation. Even the reddish smear it leaves across the wall is an element of the battle. For now it is fresh among dozens of others.
Section twenty-one regulates and controls the society. I should say here that they are not cruel or calculating by any standard, which is not to say that I fear what is written here will be read by Section Twenty-one. Society regulates itself well enough through the consequence of blind momentum. Section Twenty-one shepherds that momentum through the implication, through a culture of fear as subverted but as real as an extra helping of salt brings a certain bitterness to a stew.
That they are not overt in cultivating fear they view as benevolence and judiciousness. Section Twenty-one allows me the paper and pen to organize my defense. It is curious how they bend over backwards to create the illusion of fairness, as if the ultimate outcome was ever really in question. Instead my hand strains to write these words, a melancholic refrain to ancestors distant and long dead. That refrain is as much a part of my defense as I am. It is their defense as well, for it is their memory that has been erased from the world. That is until I came along.
And what do I expect from these selfish thoughts? Perhaps they will be a cornerstone to a revolution that reasserts the autonomous stature of each soul. I might hope that the spirit in every human being, all but extinguished by the Corporation, will re-ignite and run like wildfire around the planet and beyond. And if cities are razed and millions lost for the retrieval of our plundered liberties then so be it. What could prove a nobler cause?
Ha! It is a laughable thought. What absurdity to believe that the pallid assertions of pallid assertions of words swept into the dustbin of history, when my eyes no longer see and when my hands no longer write, and when the years have ground me to dust, that these words will do them any justice. But still I continue, playing the game, lifting my head each morning, while fantasizing about nothing short of revolution. It is as if there was some intransigent quality to the breath in my lungs, or the blood in my veins that compels me despite a tattered heart.
There is a world outside my window. It is a dull urban landscape: monstrous conglomerations of metal and glass and concrete. The city appears more as some odd crystalline growth, inhabited by mindless crustaceans or single celled organisms than by people. It is too much for the land, almost too much for the clouds drifting among them through jaundiced industrial haze. On twisted and overlapping expressways, far below, traffic lights appear as sluggish rivers of molten lava.
The sun lays low on the far horizon, hardly more than a pale disk through dust and sulfur smog. I pause from these words for a moment to ponder the city, I wonder about the people who go more quietly about their lives than I do. I would prefer to change places if only I did not hope that I served a greater purpose or that I wasn’t locked in a battle for my very survival. Would I relish their ignorance, or feel the fool in some errant awakening? In the umber shadow of sleep the faces of my ancestors visit me, and I know that I must see this through to the end.
Millions rush blind in their tasks, sending up choruses of breathless greetings and simple offenses forgotten almost before they are spoken. They are feverish, feverish in their work, feverish in their play and even in their sex. This is a new world, wholly different from the one mankind understood before. There is no war. Birth and life and death are mandated by the Corporation, administered by Section Twenty-one and monitored by Sentinel. Gone are distinctions of race. The blend is complete. Homogeneity is the new order. The dream of the futurists too afraid or hypocritical to ponder the ramifications has at last been achieved.
It heralded a new golden age, the extinction of animosities, inequality and war. There is no want and no poverty to speak of, none that is acknowledged anyway. Mankind is identical in every way and at every point on the planet. They are identical in the color of their hair and eyes. And their bodies are uniform, at least as uniform as the schemes and science of modern genetics will allow. None of them ever envisioned me.
And I among these uniform hordes, by quirk or fate, or by the mindless consequence of the Universe stand alone. I am a scar from an erased past, an anachronism, an aberration in a world in which the question of race is obsolete. I am a threat to man’s formulated illusions of himself. I am the unintentional heretic, an intrusion upon the unprepared modern conscience. Black as I am, I am a ghost. I am a tribe alone.
Almost funny, in a sad way, to think that futurists a thousand years ago could not see that mankind had rushed headlong to this world from the beginning of time. Almost funny, in a perverse way, that the differences of man were not a celebration, but was cause for hatred. By erasing our differences we committed the greatest injustice because it masked our greatest weaknesses and blamed our truest blessings. In our blindness to suppress those who hated on the basis of skin color we achieved their ultimate goal.
My room is as small and inviting as a tomb. That may sound melodramatic, but suppose a world without art, without culture and individual character. Suppose the final days of the species, and the reawakening of a new era, a changing consciousness that compels the hordes to act less as individuals and more as cells that combine to activate a body. Except this is not a supposition. All of society has been redrawn to annihilate the individual. It is nothing short of a purposeful exorcism of the blessed tumult of the human heart. Only by chance, by my difference and solitude and the prick of a finger has that tumult been reawakened.
The press of the pencil against my bloodied finger brings a sudden sting of sharp pain. Pushing aside the papers for a moment I pause to study the image of my father. I scratched it into the table with a thumbtack and colored the face to a warm brown with drops of my own blood. It is not my real father, of course. It is a fiction. But the fiction I choose to believe becomes my truth and my lie. My real parents were like all the rest. I can just imagine the horror on my mother’s expression when they pulled me from her belly. I can only imagine her shame, as if it was her fault and not the random lottery of DNA.
My boots stand beside the locked door. No worries, it is locked from the inside. I am free to go, just not free to be. On the wall above them a small blue light reminds me that Sentinel is watching. Sentinel is always watching, searching every thought, every movement in hopes of uprooting some suspicious intention or an indication that a body is no longer viable and must be removed from proper society. Sentinel spies. Section Twenty-one punishes. The Corporation decides.
Let me be clear. This is not a prison. Well, perhaps for the mind, since my body is free to come and go as it wishes. But I don’t go out, except to court. Where would I go? I am trapped, not by Sentinel or Section Twenty-one or even the Corporation, but because of this cursed flesh!
The Reclamation center is working overtime today. Two massive smokestacks rise from the center’s massive structure. Thick, boiling plumes of acrid smoke billow high into the atmosphere, where the trade winds thin and stretch them to the horizon. It looks like rain falling over the city, a brown and gray rain. Instead it is all that remains of fellow Associates, the grist ground by the Corporation’s relentless mortar and pestle.
Don’t misconstrue. This is not some sort of lament, nor an accusation. It is what it is. It is the reality of existence that we produce for the Corporation, and when our bodies are no longer useful in that regard then we are waste, burdened and shamed at falling behind, by not carrying our load, by becoming an impediment. Well, maybe them, but not I.
The haze clears enough that I can make out the ruins of the old city far out to sea. The ruins stab from the gray-green waters like rotted pilings or melting candle wax. Sentinel isn’t there, and the fires burning in windows cause me to wonder of the people there. I imagine that they are like me. I imagine that they, well, it is important not to get too far ahead of myself. To properly tell the story I must go back to a time before I was born, and so that is where I will begin.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Tick Tick Tick
That would be the clock. Actually, from here it sounds more like BANG! SLAM! CRASH!
Writing for the first posts is well under way, as of this past Saturday. The first chapter of the first book goes up this coming Saturday, September 12. the title is THE LAST MAN, a social science fiction piece I've been thinking about for some time. I won't give away much here, except to say that it is a very intimately personal story about freedom and the power of hope.
The first chapter of the second book will will be posted on Monday, the 15th, is titled IN THE LAND OF JUDAS, a sort of commentary on modern media and the importance of family. I am so pleased with the way each story is unfolding, and I think you'll be just as pleased to read them.
Figuring it should take right at about three to three and a half months to finish each round. After that, I'll be in therapy. For those voracious readers, please hang in there and remember...it's fresh and free!
Finsh these and I'll immediately start on the last two, and finish up next summer with the final piece. Two days to go before the first post!
Got to keep it quick. the stories are calling...
Writing for the first posts is well under way, as of this past Saturday. The first chapter of the first book goes up this coming Saturday, September 12. the title is THE LAST MAN, a social science fiction piece I've been thinking about for some time. I won't give away much here, except to say that it is a very intimately personal story about freedom and the power of hope.
The first chapter of the second book will will be posted on Monday, the 15th, is titled IN THE LAND OF JUDAS, a sort of commentary on modern media and the importance of family. I am so pleased with the way each story is unfolding, and I think you'll be just as pleased to read them.
Figuring it should take right at about three to three and a half months to finish each round. After that, I'll be in therapy. For those voracious readers, please hang in there and remember...it's fresh and free!
Finsh these and I'll immediately start on the last two, and finish up next summer with the final piece. Two days to go before the first post!
Got to keep it quick. the stories are calling...
Sunday, September 6, 2009
The Challenge...
Write five novels on line in one year. Five, count’ em, five full length novels in 365 days, or one book every two months. I will be writing all of them simultaneously. Crazy? It’s insane! A lot of folks don’t read five books in a year. The first part of each story will be posted on Saturday September 12, 2009 and run until September 12, 2010. Three hundred and sixty-five all too short days for a guy with a full time job. So why take on such a daunting, and risky challenge? Three reasons.
I’ve published two books, Broken: One Soldier’s Unexpected Journey Home, a novel of PTSD and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald set among Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, and Everything for Love: A Memoir of Love and War set amid the brutal siege of Sarajevo. Both have sold to international audiences, and I love every soul who bought and read those books. But the recession has challenged a good many hardworking people. Weighted under more pertinent burdens discretionary items like books are quite naturally pushed aside. My goal is to offer five good books to help those folks escape from their troubles for a time, or find community with characters in the stories who are struggling to overcome their own hardships.
Two. The process of publishing makes marketers and salespeople of authors. We’ve gotten away from the art of storytelling. That ancient craft has been forsaken to committees, endless focus groups, and homogenization. Lost is edginess, point of view, individuality and, yes, offensiveness. During the Living Fiction Project I won’t be writing to niche markets. I will be writing to the stories and the characters. Informed often by the news of the day, the characters may go off on diatribes. They may be affected by the news, respond to media, cultural quotes and events as a means to render their world and motivations better for the reader.
This was the way stories were once told. I will have one chance to tell the story and to tell it right the first time. There will be no rewrites, no drafts. The characters and stories will unfold simultaneously for the writer and reader alike.
The truth is, my writing has always been rather organic and natural. That is, I have a vision for a story. I have a beginning and a destination, but the characters are very much alive within that story. They possess their own intention and will. In the story I may wish them, indeed attempt to force them in one direction, only to have them tell me that they intend on an entirely different direction. Their thoughts and words will emerge without being reworked or annotated. No doubt they will reveal themselves in unforeseen ways as each of the stories unfolds. As my wife has observed on more than one occasion, “Bill is never alone. He has all his characters to keep him company!”
Finally, this is the perfect project for a writer with a sort of creative A.D.D. Rather than fending off or setting aside ideas and inspirations that come on something with the force of a sudden summer storm, I will indulge each of those stories. At the very least it will keep things interesting, and keep me guessing as much as you, the reader.
As for the stories, I won’t go into detail here. I have tried to pick stories that are very different from one another. They are stories that will challenge both writer and reader. Some will be quiet and introspective, following lives engaged in the quiet calamities we all struggle to survive and overcome. There is a futuristic piece. There is also a historical novel, telling a fictionalized version of a real event never before written about, but one so profound that it nearly changed the course of history.
I won’t attempt to predict where this road will lead. The first post of each of the five stories will start this Saturday, September 12. My only concern, aside from hoping that my marriage won’t suffer from the intense and awesome commitment and challenge presented in this project, is to tell heartfelt, thoughtful engaging and entertaining stories. The rest, my dear friends, I shall leave to you…
W.C. Turck
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