1
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Those words are growled in my ear in the roughest, most primal voice I have ever had the pleasure and terror of hearing in my life. They come from the lips of one of the most wanted criminals in our system, a dangerous and devilish wall of muscle. His arms are sliding around me, making me small, taking me captive, making me his…
He’s right. I shouldn’t be here.
An hour ago…
I’m getting ready for bed. I cleaned my room, every inch of it with a disposable cleaning wipe. That took me two and a half minutes.
My room is three feet wide by six feet long. It’s one of the larger rooms on this floor because I am one of the more productive workers in my factory. I’m quite proud of it. It has a place to sit and a place to wash.
My bed is located in a little loft shelf tucked away up by the top window. I sleep there between the hours of ten pm and five am. I am allotted seven hours, and I like to use every bit of them.
Right now, it is 9:45 pm. I am sitting in the single chair, looking up at the bed.
I am supposed to put my pajamas on at 9:55 pm. Nobody needs more than five minutes to remove their work smock and put on their sleeping gown. Sometimes, I use the extra three or so minutes to read. The only thing I have to read is the Manual, but there are some very good parts if you know where to look. The section detailing every kind of banned intimate interaction lists some very sexy bullet points.
The Manual is the only book we are permitted. Other books are alleged to exist, but I’ve never seen any of them in person. If I had, I’d have put them straight in the nearest incinerator, according to protocol.
Something strange happens at 9:46 pm.
Instead of taking off my smock, I turn around, put my feet into my shoes and leave my room. It takes approximately 72 seconds to walk down the hall, at which point I leave the building entirely.
I am off schedule.
I’ve never been off schedule before. Not since I started work. It makes me feel tingly all the way to my fingers and toes, a little nervous and a lot excited.
Supervisors don’t tell you what the consequences of being off schedule are. The idea that anybody would willingly depart from regulated activities is barely conceivable. Students get a few passes, but once you are fully trained and become a worker, you follow the rules.
I don’t know what I’m doing right now, exactly. I just know that I am doing it.
I’m walking through the city. It is clean and quiet, as always. There are only seven million people here, twenty thousand people per square mile. Practically the countryside.
Each and every building is built the same way. There are residential towers situated next to work towers. Usually, you reside next to your work. That’s more efficient. I have already passed my work. I am a box technician. I fold the corners on boxes. On a good day, I do a thousand box folds an hour. On a bad day, I do a thousand box folds an hour.
The Elite districts rise above us. I do not know what they look like, only that I will never be permitted to enter one. Below us, toward the waterfront and the docks is a dubious no-man’s-land where visitors to the isle congregate. Workers are not to interact with travelers. Workers are to stick to the schedule.
There are brilliant lights and intense scents down by the docks. In the worker quarter there’s nothing but standard yellow illumination. Anything more than that risks overstimulating the workers. We are carefully curated creatures, each with our purpose and place. Red, green, blue lights, those are for deviants.
My mind is a particular kind of blank that usually sets in between box four thousand and five thousand. I feel a deep peace, something close to transcendence. I’m just walking, drawn by the lights and the tantalizing scent of something rich. Food? Perhaps food. I consume worker gruel four times a day. It is infused with all the nutrients a body needs. But the smells curling up my nostrils are making me feel a new hunger, a deeper hunger.
People are shouting at one another. In the factory, we keep our voices low and speak only when spoken to. We are rarely spoken to. These people seem to be speaking for close to no reason at all, and at volumes I would be ashamed to have my voice. I don’t know if I can speak that loudly.
For the past six years, since I graduated from the schooling facility, I have followed schedule. Now I do not know what the time is. There are no clocks here down at the docks where the dark closes in around me like a warm and salty blanket. I follow the pull of the unknown until the embrace of dark is replaced by sound.
OMEGA
A flashing sign lures me, draws me, commands me. It hangs above the door of a building I know I should not enter. The music is emanating from this cavern of the criminal. I should turn around, go back to my room. I should return to schedule.
But I don’t.
I keep walking forward, still uncertain as to why, following a sudden curiosity that will not let me go. There are others here, but I am accustomed to ignoring everybody around me. Workers are trained to focus on their own work and nothing else. There are eyes on me, but they don’t matter.
As I step through the door, music wraps around me, pounding through my flesh. I’ve never heard music like this before. I’ve heard hold music, light melody piped through tinny speakers. I’ve never felt the kind of sound that makes the soft parts of me thrum with primal recognition. I feel compelled to move, like a puppet on a string.
“You’re in the wrong place, Dreamy.”