168403-47563846581685-84756182-47113759-438531573858-58439234921
Black, it’s the canvas, the backdrop to
life, black with, green, green numbers.
In a room the size of a, well no one can be
sure. In a room which must go on forever, yes maybe that’s it, this isn’t a
room it’s a the world, it goes on and on and on until you’ve gone all the way
round and end up where you’ve started. In this existence, there are only rows,
which is the world really. Rows of white boxes, which sit on top of black
tables, which stand on top a white floor. In front of each screen sits a
person. There eyes never move from the screen that’s in front of them, if the
gaze has ever been broken or ever will be is anyone’s guess.
6583335794372-47834966-81113411-5454832961-4344854735748564-5447
But why, the green letters never seem to
say, why is all this here, why everything.
In front of every person is a keyboard, but
there are no letters, only numbers and symbols. Figures seem to glide over them
like it’s what’s keeping them alive, but it’s not that, it’s all they know to
do, what they think life is. All that can be heard is the pressing of keys and
slow breathing, the two seem to both be an instinctive, not able to stop either
without trying, but why would you try to stop to breathe. Out of each person
wires grow, they all come from different part of the body, and all contain
different color liquids or gasses. The wires spiral upwards until becoming one,
and then disappearing into the cardboard sky. One square in the sky for every
person, on each square the wire disappears in the center and then there’s a
number, it’s going up every square we go.
456394628457-547835758539356385-587583-53-5749362495379-35358365
What am I doing again? Did I ever know? When
did I get here? When will I leave?
Number 274001167 looks up, and then quickly
back down at the screen, not taking his figures away from the keyboard or
stopping the swift movement. Nobody else turns there head, nobody even
registers then unseen movement, the person sitting next to him has been here
for 50 years, if you’d watched him for that amount of time then you wouldn’t
have seen him move his head a single millimeter. After about an hour he moves
his head again, stares now, at the people around him, he looks at his wires,
wonders why he can’t feel this part of his body.
I touch one of the tubes and a resentful
sensation makes me pull away and force air through my throat without thinking,
the shock makes me lurch back. I want this thing out, but I touch it again and
I feel it tear me.
The person thinking, the person who turned
his head, and questions what’s going on. He is made to feel pain, as he becomes
free from the rest of humanity he bleeds and yells and screams as the inhuman
material is ripped from his body. His neighbors do not show him any love, or
any sentiment or acknowledgement of what is going on. But after the tortured he
feels the euphoria or freedom of freedom, of not being locked into a machine.
He lies on the floor, arms hugging his legs
drawn up to his chest, lungs trying to slow themselves, sweat mixed with blood
rolling down his skin, but a smile on his face. He realizes that this is his
true body, not the wires and plastic and twisting metal. Brushing the fabric on
top of his skin he comes to the conclusion it’s not a true part of him either but
it’s not doing any harm. After time, when the effects of the fight for
independence have worn off, he beings to slowly get up. Sitting closed legged
at fist, then slowly using the desks either side of him, up onto his feet.
Blood still tickles from some of the sockets in his skin, and beginning to use
muscles that don’t know what they’re doing, he moves forward.
Moving slowly onwards, life feeling like
it’s going extremely fast. Right leg, left leg, right leg, left leg something
about the repetitiveness reminds the outcast of how his life was. His progress
beings to speed and soon he finds that when he looks back he can’t see where he
started.
The black void that looms in front of me
scares me but then I feel I must embrace it, I know I can’t go back to the old
life, if you can call it a life, my fingers ache now as they’ve stopped moving
for the first time in a life time, it’s the rest of my bodies turn to feel the
burn and the excitement of movement. My right leg seems to drag a little, as I
stumble forward it doesn’t seem to know what to do, I force it along and
continue making steady progress.
The wall in front of the free man baffles
him, his figures touch it and wonder what it is, whether his quest was pointless
and he should plug himself back in but he throws that idea to floor to rest
with his chains. He simply turns his head and beings walking, with more
momentum in his step now, up the wall. The pain coming from all the different
parts of his body seems to subside with this newfound determination.
1 hour – Adrenaline
2 hours – Joy of being free re-surfaces
3 hours – The build of happiness peaks
4 hours – The sense of being trapped begins
5 hours – Hope in something unknown –
Staring into the unknown, the doorway, unknown to anyone in this world, having
never been through one in living memory. He touches it, making it rock slightly
on its hinges. He pushes it now, glimpsing a new light, one that seems
effortless, not manufactured. Overwhelmed with his discovery he staggers
through this doorway, facing him is a stonewall but to his left is the real
world.
I look, and challenge my eyes, this part of
reality cannot be real, the color, the deep blue and the enormity of the
ceiling above me, and the amazing green, not the neon green of the old life,
the intense bright of the small lines coming out of the floor. I look up to the
bright light in the sky, my eyes flinch away from it, looking down I see how
everything looks up to it, the light, the source of everything, the source of
joy.
Without thinking our escapee runs back
inside, not out of longing for the old life but out of a longing for the new
one, and at the idea that everyone should see this. He goes to the nearest
person and touches her; she looks up, wondering what the strange feeling is.
Our freedom seeker explains with the few words he knows but the number doesn’t
like what she hears.
Red turns the white floor into a place of shame;
hope is the last thing that drains away, pain continuing everything as it
always has been.
168403-47563846581685-84756182-47113759-438531573858-58439234921
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