She was so beautiful. Her warmth overpowered the cold of the barren room. She sat very still in a real wood chair, faintly smiling in that distant and resigned manner as she always did, staring off into the skyline. Beyond the single window shadowy towers dominated the horizon, but in the cracks between, orange and purple sky invaded and broke up the rigid geometry with swirls of clouds lit in soft, random colors. Pressed between the intruding bit of sunlight and my mother’s warmth I sat, mindlessly turning page after page of an old picture book.
I felt the door swing slowly and silently open and turned to look up at mother for guidance. She turned her head, brown hair swung forward and blocked her face from view, but after a second she turned back to look down and meet my eyes. She reached out and placed her hands on my sides and pulled herself down until my forehead met the pocket of shoulder and neck. An arm brushed against my own and I became aware of the presence of two men. I don’t remember what they looked like, but they were much larger than my mother. They had moved to each side of the chair and slid an arm beneath hers, slowly they lifted her up to her feet. She stared at me and her face became sad, but she didn’t do anything, she never even looked at them, just stared back at me as they slowly pulled her away. The door closed and the sound broke the silence as it reverberated through the room leaving the total quiet that much more noticeable.
I shot up in bed. Several seconds later the alarm sounded. It’s strange how a person becomes adapted to their lifestyle. The day you begin to wake up before the alarm goes off is a pathetic milestone stating that your routine is so utterly devoid of change that years of being harassed each morning by the grating sound of a new day has finally trained you into a sad sort of perfection.
The light which sat in the middle of the far wall came to life, casting shadows across the room. It was the same apartment, the one from the dream. I was born here and I’ll probably die here. Out of bed I crawled and over to a small gray metal desk. With a quick tap I activated the speaker and an all too cheery voice announced "good morning, Jonathan, it’s May 7, 4:20 a.m."
Within minutes I stepped out of the building and onto a dark street chewing on a gray nutrient filled block and dressed like a generic corporate employee and carrying a briefcase of tools. Through the ill-defined domain of street lights I passed and returned back into the dark stretches between. The morning was warm, probably already above eighty. Their was a slight pre-dawn stirring of the air as I moved toward the station. Already the streets neared crowding as tens of thousands returned home from late night shifts, and millions more passed them on their way to work. The streets had once been used for driving, now it’s just one big sidewalk, with people flowing in the canyon between towering walls of concrete.
There was the whooshing sound of commuter trains passing overhead as I neared the station. I approached from the back. The rear wall rose fifteen feet into the air and then bent and stretched out and over the people waiting. I passed through the opening and on the other side I joined the masses. They were faceless, literally, standing in insufficient light, a large group of nobody’s, or maybe more accurately, anybody’s. Their combined smell permeated the structure as for years these same people of district 129-C had waited at the same station for the privilege of heading off to work in some thoroughly interchangeable other part of the city. I got in the back of the line and waited as twelve at a time the commuter trains shot them away. The tracks passed the station and immediately turned upward forty-five degrees to rise and meet the rest of the grid, fifty feet above the ground.
Every thirty seconds a train arrived and twelve more left with it. Slowly I shuffled forward with the others in front of me, not that it made any difference as to how fast I would leave, but it did seem to be remotely related to progress and it kept my mind off having to be stuck in here with these people. Everyday was the same blur of images against the background of white noise produced by a hundred conversations, not one containing anything to identify it as separate from any other, and me, looking at the ground, hands in my pockets. I never spoke to anyone.
Finally, there was a train for me. It was aerodynamic, three separate cars each of which carried four people, the front the longest because it sloped forward outof aerodynamic utility and had a window through which the foremost passengers could see the city. The other cars compensated for their loss by having a screen on the partition wall which displayed the news and sports. The five or six people in front of me stepped onto the boarding platform, passed their hand beneath a scanner and entered the rear cars. I stepped forward. My hand had done this so many times that it didn’t even feel as if I was in control of it. It extended toward the scanner, a black box which looked a lot like a surveillance camera, but instead of the single black eye collecting light it actively sent out a probing barrage of radio waves, searching and finding my identity, health records, financial accounts and god knows what else. They instructed the implant, which resided just beneath the skin on the back of my left hand, to remove some amount from my travel allowance.
I moved into the forward car. I’m claustrophobic. Some might think that my ability to ride in a cramped four person box is a reflection of the power of my phobia. It’s not. I do it because I have to. If you can’t get to work then you’re an ineffectual member of society. My mother received that label. They took her away a few days later. I moved into the back row so that I could see every bit of space within the car and placed my briefcase on my lap. The forward car isn’t just the only car with a large forward window, it’s the only one with any window. I’ve never sat anywhere else.
The other seats became occupied and soon after I tried to focus my mind on the acceleration and movement of the train. Through the window I watched as I felt us rise to meet the grid and level out. The world was nothing more than patterns of iridescence. A quick procession of white appearing and disappearing signaled the passage of a train on the other side of a row of buildings, seen only as yellow squares, randomly placed in regard to one another, a more meaningful representation of the towers. At night there’s so much less clutter than during the day, when most of what we see of that building is excess and irrelevant, processed inefficiently to the architects specifications. In the dark there is only activity and inactivity. Light symbolizes purpose, while the dark is still and at the moment completely pointless. My chair pulled at me as our speed increased.
It took approximately eighteen minutes to reach work from the moment I leave my apartment to when I reach my cubicle, exactly the same every day. The moment I wake, the speed with which I eat, my walk to the station, the trains arrival and departure, the order in which I exit, and the time it takes me to walk to my cubicle are all so practiced and orderly, perfect. A loud buzzer sounded the beginning of the morning shift and I immediately picked up electronic parts and began examining them with a variety of instruments to insure the quality of each batch was within acceptable variation.