WRITING
There has been an overwhelming surfeit of books and movies developed in recent years dealing with dystopian societies. These are excerpts from a novel begun at the age of 13, before my knowledge of the impending concept or having read any material dealing with such ideas. It unfortunately has not been edited since roughly the 8th grade.
The Space Between
INTRODUCTION
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"I am number 640713.
It is tattooed onto the inside of my left forearm.
My mother was 482885, my father 590031, my brother 619208, and my sister 723494. I've memorized their numbers. I sometimes recite them in my head, over and over, like a mantra.
Everyone has a number. Even the Swarmers. When you turn two, they have your parents take you and line you up at the Census Analysis Department Building, and they take a machine and tattoo your number onto the inside of your left forearm, when you are two years old. Then they write some things down and they type some things into a computer, and then you can leave.
I don't remember if it hurt or not. I think they chose the age of two so it wouldn't have to damage newborn infants' skin, and they could keep count at an early marker, but I still think that it would pain one at such a young age to have a number pressed into your arm with a needle. But the ink stretches with your skin as you grow, so the Authorities apparently cleared the path of problems regarding that.
Araxes is the vile name of our city, although the Inferno might have been a more suitable choice in the perspectives of some. The Authorities don't really want us to think that in its ways, our government is a form of sick fascism, and simply now emphasize the fact that we are all “equal brethren” who each have their part, advertised with means of government-endorsed broadcasts, posters, and the dictum of “with those who abide, equanimity is possible for everyone”. But let's get real. Even that is stamped all over with the word dictatorship, and behind the superficial curtain of those words, there's a true proclamation that says “for those who do not abide, you and all whom you love will be shot and killed promptly”. That's better."
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"The sky was grey. That is always what I recall first.
The sky was always grey, but that evening it seemed as if all the earth's shadows and smudges had amalgamated together to form a tone so ridiculously unrelieved and insipid that one might look at it and begin to cry.
“You know, I really think it's possible.” she said, those same startling green eyes radiating like beacons from behind a softly-blowing curtain of ash-laden wisps. What I remember most about that day was how her eyes were not beset with sorrow like the rest of ours': drooping and distant. There was a spark of something good under them, an auspicious glow of stimulated elation, almost. The tone in her voice made me lift my head.
“We could get out of here. We could run away from all of this.”
The words opened my chest as a rush of exhilaration crept in, but almost automatically, I scoffed. It was unfeasible. Although widely considered, such a thing at the time was absurd to even believe that it could be pulled off. At least, that was what the others thought.
“Are you insane?” I joked, tilting my head sideways as I peered at her with a rare smirk.
“No,” she pushed. “I mean, think about it. Think about being away from here. Think about getting to the outside.”
And for the first time, I glared up at the looming, omnipresent black fortress that encircled us all and leaving its depths was imminent. A wave of expectancy smacked my consciousness and caused me to realize just how much I needed that freedom, how much I wanted it. The rumored opinions of the rest were pressed away from me for a fleeting moment—maybe it really was tangent.
Aspen Braddock, my sole partner in companionship, in pulling me through life itself, saw that flicker of understanding as we perched upon our building, a dizzying height from the blank streets below yet a fraction from competing with the factories and office towers above us that groped like fingers into the sky.
“One day,” stated Aspen, her utterance dripping with absolute confidence, “we're going to get out of this place. You and me. I don't care if it takes forever. But we're gonna' do it. That's a promise.” She extended her hand, greased and chalked with soot, and after hesitation, I clasped hers with an equally stained one. We shook on it.
“Deal,” I exclaimed.
Of course, that had been years ago, in the heedless stages of childhood where one's views on the world were so naively malleable. I believe we had been twelve each. Like I had originally thought, our proposed goals were driven into cold actuality with the destined outcome that they were near-impossible. Seasons passed, the times grew harder, and before we knew it the aspirations of youth had faded into whispers. Everything fell to dust. But concepts of the mind are probably the only truly indomitable things in the world, and somewhere in the darkness of humanity and the savage brutality that it existed in, a single tendril of color held our desires dear.
My name is Luka Saynen. This is my story of survival."
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"We didn’t know where they took the kids. I’d always thought they beat them with a ruler or something out in the hallway, but a few of us had taken our wildest ingenuities and run with them. Some people said they were dunked underwater in a chair with electric currents in your arms, or they had to see an Overseer, which was worse.
I did not learn the term “Correction Chamber” until a few years ago. They started using the expression a little more openly at one point, gradually so as we grew with it, until we were just old enough for it to be used as a dead threat. They don’t even have to say the words out loud. You can tell it in their unpleasant insinuations; their quiet stares, the sudden, shooting silences that will drop into a room like a heavy book––that they are screaming it in their heads, that they are relishing the overwhelming sense of power.
I’ve never been, but you can tell something about it, the way the ones who’ve been are so silent for so long when they return. You can tell that there’s something wrong with them, something terrible.
Tom went out this morning. He didn’t come back. They usually let them out after three or four hours. He had tried to correct the Mistress. She was obviously wrong on the question, but naturally it was our instinctive inclination to shut up about it. It was the first showing of some defiance we’d seen in a while, out of anyone. I watched the others’ faces contort in blatant fear for our companion at first, but as simple logic waved a mighty flag over his head as he continued his rally, I could see emotion, curiosity in their expressions as they all realized that he was doing alright, fighting nicely. She sentenced him and we turned our gazes forward again in fear, following their figures out of the room."
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"I am fifteen years old and I have lived my entire life in Araxes. We know the days of the week, and therefore I should tell you the proper date, but they don't often keep track of complete dates here, probably so we don't start counting our days in Hell.
We stand here roughly half a century after World War III. Or, maybe the fourth is more relevant. But that wasn't exactly a war, just the remaining populations on Earth grappling over survival and food and things like that. That was probably five years after WWIII.
There was a unit in school on WWIII at some point a few months ago, and the war was apparently sparked with the institution of a new leader of the United States, wherever that was. That brings me to another funny point: they haven't exactly told us where we're located, either. Earth, there you go.
Anyways, the leader— I think his name was Corden, General R.T. Corden— flipped the stone of his country over and created a sort of dictatorship out of the ashes of a democracy with a shaky framework. There were other wars at the time, as well, and the guy lost control with his militaries and opened the flood gates on all potential enemies. Then the thesis completely turned on itself, and everything wrong with everything was fought over, and the fire disseminated to every part of every country. Every person was pulled into the battle, and every person had something they were fighting for, like things over poverty, and taxation, nuclear development, land rights, oil, environmental issues, segregation, cultural differences, religious differences, overall rights, and so on and so on. Anything and everything. And after dozens and dozens and dozens of years of pure, raw conflict, humans had just kind of eradicated themselves, as well as most life on the surface of the planet. It seems ridiculous, but the nuclear industry, I suppose, had grown immensely and created chaotic atom bombs that simply were dropped into the wrong hands. I understand that included are mixed topics, but let's just get the point in our heads that almost the whole world had been wiped out.
Then things were pretty much quiet for a while, as you might well imagine. But survivors banded together, and started having their own little scrabbles over the limited supplies and weapons left, here and there, big fights and small fights, and those skirmishes put together composed the sort-of fourth World War, or the Suffering Battles as many of us call it. Araxes was constructed soon after that. There must have been enough rubble to create a whole city, or they found some miracle production technique—or just heavy slave labor. I'd been guessing at a mix of the three.
“We're safe here now,” the teacher told us after the summary was given. “the Authorities are here to protect us from the outside. Everything we need is in the city. There's no need anymore to go out, because the rest of the world has gone dark from the wars. Everyone is safe under the Authorities.”
My family, when we were together, lived in a shack made of rubble at the street level. The general frame was constructed out of piles of stone and framework from some ancient building blasted to pieces, and the pieces were stacked atop one other and plastered together into crude walls with mud and metal weaving. Poles were laid across the walls above us, and atop them, blankets and plastic and metal sheets sagged as our roof. There were cracks in our house, between the stone, and sometimes I would go off and find some mud after it rained and, with my mother, fill them in again. There were no windows, and our door was a hole made by a little opening between some concrete pillars leaning against each other. The house was dark on its inside, and our bedrooms were basically separate corners, each of ours privatized by blankets hanging from the ceiling that made “walls” around the corners. My two siblings and I shared a bed in the back left area, and our parents in the front right. We started out with two mattresses: one for the children and one for our parents, but over the years we found more of them, or bartered with someone, until our cots had each grown to piles of several mattresses randomly flung in mounds to our liking. When us kids had gotten two of these mattresses, as well as additional blankets, and pillows, filled with sand, the only stuffing at the time, we spread them out all over the place, happy to have more space. Eventually, though, we just ended up throwing everything back together, completely content with the warmth and comfort our contact gave each other.
Nearby, there were dozens of other families who dwelled in similar conditions within a small radius, although our house was a bit larger than the “average shack” at the time. This was, essentially, our town—our little “neighborhood” made of junk from the war.
Now, although these descriptions sound morbid, I do not recall having an unhappy childhood before eight. My brother and sister were always outside with other children from the place, far from the otherwise depressing atmosphere that many of the adults had cloistered themselves within.
I'm not sure who planned the design of the city or how we were to live, but they did so in a manner that makes me question the limits of how evil a person can become.
The city is enclosed by a fortification that wholly surrounds its circumference. We simply call it the Wall, because that's what it is. A big wall. An immense, dark wall so monstrous that from even the tallest edifice in the city, one cannot see over it. It is our enclosure of sentiment, the keeper and holder of every lugubrious and abominable emotion ever felt. The Wall is also our physical cage, as no one enters the city and no one leaves it. There is one door, and it is guarded around the clock. Occasionally, you will see groups of guards or slaves quickly hustle in and out of the door, which is relatively small. They are the only ones that have seen the outside. Sentries are posted atop the Wall, on which barbed wire and spires of black iron twist menacingly to further caution and prevent those wondering about getting over it, and sentries are posted on the ground beneath its shadows. These duties are stationed nonstop, because again, with the exception of those I mentioned, nobody gets in, and nobody gets out. I've not the slightest idea of how long it took to build the thing, because our largest skyscraper is probably over four-hundred feet tall. Of course, the Wall is taller. Considerably taller.
And because of this wall, most of us live our lives in shadows. Only at the sun's highest point on clearer afternoons do some receive the blessing of natural light, though if you perhaps are located in a higher place you might be granted it more often. Aside from that fragment of time, our world below the rest of the buildings of Araxes is hushed and dark. It is almost like eternal night in many places, such as in the alleyways and streets, and the little crevices in the sides of old constructions where the beggars sleep. If you were to find the right spot in one of them, a place where those shadows, like the ones in our sky, coalesced in the frigid murkiness beneath the Wall at the most vacant spot you could find, it would feel as if every thing of matter and mind inside of you had been robbed. Stolen by some hand of the reaper. You feel so hollow inside, so dreadfully empty, that you might as well melt into the place you are, or shatter altogether. It is as if each memory of happiness has been vacuumed clean out of you. It is as if every happy thing you remember, and the ability itself to experience joy, and love, has been whisked away in an instant by a bitter breeze. It is terrible. It is absolutely the worst feeling that any living thing could be put through.
The buildings here are pressed together so much that it is now impossible to expand outward. Some alleys you might find are only a few feet wide. The majority of the buildings are enormous, towering edifices with unknown purposes—square and baleful, rising up and up into the sky and offering nothing but the occasional row of windows, which are simply tiny, empty black boxes from the outside. The structures loom darkly over the shack-like fixtures of the street levels that most of our citizens reside in, and for the most part, they all look the same.
Factories are everywhere. You can't throw a stone and not hit one. Everyone eligible to work, including most children, works in these factories, except for the laborers of the Authorities and the Authorities themselves. Their hulking figures, when seen from a taller place, clump together in great masses of black shadows, and out of them rise towers and smokestacks by the thousands and the thousands. And out of every factory, on every corner, on every street, spews out heavy, choking black smoke from those towers that causes our skies to become just a little darker with each day.
Sometimes, when the sun's not out (you don't see it clearly most of the time, anyway) and the pollution's really bad, you almost can't tell the difference between day and night anywhere you go.
From the streets, one might feel as if he or she were in a sort of maze. There isn't much differentiating from one road to another. Of course, looking up usually does you no good either, seeing as most of the buildings are the same, too, and just end up fading into the smog at a certain point in your view. The walls of them, at the lower levels, are rather vandalized, but the stretches of profane graffiti and artwork, some of which I've seen calling for reform, have been largely covered up by those posters the Authorities like brainwashing us with. I found it almost funny seeing a young troublemaker paint a goatee onto an image of a Swarmer one evening a while ago. It wasn't so funny when some guards walked by and were soon dragging the kid away with a gun to his head.
And because of the oppression squashed onto us, Araxes' people are like robots, animated solely by the batteries supplied to them by the government, and none of their own willpower. Many citizens are simply incognizant of the world: they stare out of blank eyes as if in trances, seeing but not receiving. The people do not walk with purpose, but they shuffle their feet and drag them across the ground like they do not have a destination, or they are obviously not exhilarated at their planned one. They are cold and emotionless and are so tired that they simply could care less about anything. They're puppets; they're dead inside.
It makes me so sad to see these creatures, all with hearts and souls, manipulated to the point where they have lost the resolution to find points in their lives. The suicide rate has gone up so much that the act is now declared treason by the Authorities. Even if you manage to kill yourself, they'll find your family and punish them in return for possibly convincing you into it.
Tom Hatkin's mother hung herself not too long ago. Somebody found out and reported it and they took his father away for questioning. He apparently hasn't been back since, and Tom got taken somewhere, too.
Nobody's safe."
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{context: the "dove" reference refers to a stained glass window in the church the two characters live in that is of a dove, which has been vandalized with a graffiti gas mask over its head sometime in the past}
“You know what?” I ask after a few moments of pensive silence. “We both lost everything. And now we're here, with everything we'll ever need, and we're together, and we'll never have to go through that again.”
“But,” she frets. “it already happened. We can't change the past.”
“But we have the present,” I exclaim, my words gradually filling with passion, my speech growing faster. “we're lucky to be alive. And we have the future. They can't take away our dreams. They might not come true, but heck no, not unless they drill into our heads and mess up our brains, can they ruin our hopes for the future. We can't live in the past, Aspen. Look how much it's already screwed us up. Everyone in Araxes is screwed up because of what's already happened. Because of what They did to us. But none of them are happy because they're all lingering in the misery of what happened yesterday. We've gotta move on.”
And then I become aware that I have indirectly declared myself agreed to her hopes of one day escaping Araxes. I've sparked the fire inside her, kindling it, and Aspen's viridescent glance coerces down on me, burning with understanding. Within the visions of her eyes, which hold entire galaxies in them, other dimensions of beguiling depth, I can almost see a caged animal, pacing with the bonds of the the Wall. I can see a white dove, debilitated by the gas mask it must wear to survive. The mask represents our affliction, our chains of society placed by these higher powers which bind us to the eternal shadows of the cursed city. It is our hunger, our thirst, our cold and exhaustion, the aching, gnawing numbness tearing at our bones. But in the noxious air of the environment, the mask is the lifeline, the ring of safety that keeps us from crossing into the hazards of the unknown. If we take the mask off, if we leave the strict circle of comfort which we are allowed, then we are vulnerable, we are open to the barbaric nature of the outside world, and the vicious backlash of those who enforce the wearing of the mask.
The dove is us, the dove is our yearning to fly, it is our deep-seated, consuming desire, our will to live and continue on despite the omnipresent hurt we dwell in. It is our beacon of light at the end of the tunnel, it is our wings that we spread, it is rebellion, it is insurrection and insurgence, and it is hope.
Our hope. Our fight. Our reason to keep going. Our reason to leave."
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"Back at our church, I go up on the roof alone while Aspen changes. The clouds of smoke trailing away from the factories are visible at night, as always: thick, yellow, billowing curls that puff over the air in shapes like great dragons, devouring the heavens. The fire from the pipes atop one of the metal factories in the distance roars and breathes in a muffled tone, the great polluted flames leaping up into the air and emitting showers of sparks every now and then, probably as some underpaid child throws in a wad of molten substance into the fires with a shovel. The black canyons surrounding the church stand in overwhelming proximity, their overhanging figures encircling us as if they were Swarmers themselves, guarding us, shadowing us.
But it doesn't matter any more. I don't feel anything. We're leaving.
No more of this.
I hear the slurred scrapes of chains on concrete nearby, openly signaling the arrival of another gang of slaves. I watch them come around the edge of a building to my right, led by two Swarmers in the front and two in the back. Although I can't see them very clearly in the dark, except with the aid of a lonesome streetlamp close by down there, I can still make out their shaved heads and bare feet and the bag-like clothes they wear, draped over their thin frames like sacks. They don't even get uniforms. That's how much they've been degraded.
The chains grate in my head. The grinding, the gritting drives me mad.
Debtors, these people are. People who couldn't fork out enough cash to either the government or another citizen, or they're prisoners that the Authorities decided were useful for manual labor before they were to be released, or more likely starved in prison or executed. They've reduced them to nearly nothing. They're hardly even living things in the eyes of everyone else. To be reduced to the position of a slave for the Authorities is like being stripped of your right to be called a human. They're animals now, pack mules to carry supplies. Nothing more.
They all have names, though. Men and women. I'm sure they have families and stories and pasts and histories of their own, but none of it matters now. I can see it in their eyes: they lost their wills. They've been defeated.
I can see that this particular group has been worked pretty hard. These people are more ill-looking than a lot of others, bonier, sicker. There's more limping going on than walking. None of them are carrying anything, so they must be coming from one of the factories or the junkyard and are headed back to the prisons. The groups I've seen are mostly strong-looking folks, probably healthy and freshly-cut from the bush. This is what must happen to them after a few good weeks of labor. Sometimes you'll see a couple slaves pulling cartloads of stuff down the roads, just like pack mules, like I said.
It's just so sad. The poor souls, or at least the lack of. The work has probably drained even those out of them.
They scrape along the street in front of the church, and I watch them pass slowly, while hidden in the shadows between the spires. The guards yell a few things at one man who's falling behind, and the slaves move on, away into the freezing night, fading into the darkness outside of the reach of the street lamp's light, scraping and grating and gritting along the empty, lonely roads.
But it doesn't matter. I can leave."