Speakeasy 169 – On the Outside

He had already been living on the run when she met him on an old town where Order was slightly more relaxed than in other places. But she despised Them all the same. Everybody did in every place that wasn’t Free. And everyone had a different idea of what free was. No one ever knew, they had never been told. The Free did not contact the enslaved; in fact these people didn’t even have a name to categorise them. Not even people. For others, they were: Them. Those out there we rarely heard about. The imperfections of our perfect world, hidden in the shadows, doing all the dirty work, or left Outside to die, or become enslaved by the Order. That was all there was: Outside and Inside. There were no windows, just an unreachable barrier that separated the two. They were worlds apart. The Unnamed, as they called themselves, had chosen this wisely as not only their caste was unmentionable, but most of them had no name, as they had been thrown out at an early age because of an imperfection: A missing limb or a malformed one, a misplaced organ, heart condition, cancer, mismatched eyes. Anything that was below their standards. Unsurprisingly, after a while the Outside was not so sparsely populated anymore.

Walker had come to her town with another, older boy but he had been found. Dreamer’s Walker had escaped and found her accidentally by hiding in the same place she did when the world got too real. Of course at ten years old she wasn’t fully aware of the reason, she just instinctively left when the invisible weight on her skinny shoulders was top heavy. He was Walker because he travelled; the boy with him was also Walker. They didn’t have names so they gave each other names. She was Dreamer. The names they had categorized people. A smart No-name would stay that way, or at least not give away their names too easily, but children are unaware of such silly things as they would see them, so they exchanged names and two days later Dreamer ran away with Walker.

Dreamer then became one of the few with more than one name. They travelled together from village to village, not lovers but instinctively kin and by the time they were 15 they got caught up in some trouble. By that time they were a little less knowledgeable about the world but it could be argued that they were not less foolish for they were at the age when the young mind thinks idealistically and everything is possible.

Our Dreamer and Walker understood more of the world they lived in and its workings, and they would stir unrest in the villages they went to, they would rouse anger in the villages they stopped at, and they would incite the people to rebellion in the villages they left.

Eventually they were reported in one such village and found before they could leave. Dreamer got caught and Walker ran away. She loved Walker dearly as a brother, they had travelled alone together for five years and knew nothing or no one better than each other. She never got to tell him how much she loved him. The next day at the stocks in front of everyone she said nothing but thought it so loud that she convinced herself he had heard it. She died with no regrets and Walker never knew. He could only guess and hope she felt that way because it was the way he felt for her.

Though they were the same age, he had always acted the older brother, protecting her. But it still hadn’t been enough. And he hated himself for that.

And Walker walked alone while Dreamer dreamed above. A lone wolf crying out to the moon. Wolverine. And suddenly, he had a new name.

………*……*………….:…:………:………..DEMDOTS………………………??……….?….

The owner of this blog, B00kworm, is currently somewhere in England, with no wifi and a weak phone signal. It took her three tries to send this to me, one hour for me to type it all up, and god knows how long for her to write 600 words ON HER FREGGIN PHONE! Just barely making it on to the speakeasy Grid. GG bookworm!

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Speakeasy 162 – What is Death?

Until the day I die I’ll never forget those glassy, unblinking eyes. The way they stared on without feeling as the bullets came out of their porcelain hands. I will never forget the way they killed my body to capture my soul. But they’ll kill that too soon enough, and then I really will die. The only thing that matters now is the time I have between now and then.. Because the human instinct is to survive, that’s what they’re counting on with this. I just hope they’ve underestimated it, although now that I think about it, it’s highly doubtful. I know I have to bide my time, I’ll only get one chance.
I hate them so much, the people doing this to us. I hate them for putting me in this white, synthetic body. Plastic and reinforced, the new thought police: perfect, because they are without thought, they can never betray.
They bring us here, from the darkest part of town where men live in the ignorance of life itself. Except they could never know that I had not lived there all my life. They tell us this is the year 1984, it’s a joke but I read, and I understand only too well what it means.
The dark places where they found us and the likes of us will be the first to go, then they will slowly enslave the working classes, building their way up so well that no one will realise before it’s too late. I know how these things work:
I used to be deep in politics and the deeper I went, the more trouble got into. The world we live in now is far from what you’d think. There are layers upon layers of corruption, manipulation plots and manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres in all levels and more as you go higher up the ranks. Of course once I discovered that I tried to restore a democratic and honest government but that wasn’t happening and I was slowly starting to attract unwanted attention. So I retreated into the shadows, where no one would come looking… Until now.
They brought us in, they taught us how to read, they taught us how to fight. Then they immobilised us and put our brains inside these machines: cleverly put together as to resemble human movement as accurately as possible but with a few… upgrades… like the bullets that can be shot through our hands though for now it’s just empty rounds. They need human brains that already know how to move to be able to keep up with the intricate design. We have to be inside.
I’m in a big room in a rather small complex, there are bedrooms (because maybe the one inconvenient thing is that though the body doesn’t need to rest, the mind does) and there is a place with chargers for our bodies and sustenance for our brains which come in cartridges that last a week. The last place is a training ground where we have to remember how to fight and get better at it.
…
I’ve been here for three months now, a monotonous silence with nothing but us. Actually there is a painting, of a man, hung up high on the wall where no one can reach it, even with the “super jump” as I like to call it. A man from long ago, looking down at us disapprovingly. He keeps looking down with that same unwavering stare, guarded by two feisty little hairy beings. He called us dangerous. He taunted our maimed souls: “look what you have become”. And we lower our heads, furiously mute and helpless. Because we cannot talk.
…
By now I can see that most have already become exactly what they wanted us to be. I think some of them believe this is hell.We have no means of communicating. Now I know, they weren’t going to kill us… that was never going to work, they want to drive us so mad that they won’t even need to kill us, over time we will all become the mindless creatures we saw when we first got here, and that’s when I saw, in a flash of lucidity, that I was never getting out of here “alive”, so to say. And so like that, I give up.