Anyways, the story is about a fictional city, in a fictional country, in a fictional time (in the future). It's pretty easy to tell I drew my inspiration from. This city, called Clostan, is itself a giant caste system, with barriers physically separating the different classes. One single company controls the city. Of course, the story picks up exactly when a revolution is about to happen.
The following is two excerpts. The first excerpt is the first, around eight pages (on Word, anyways) of the story. The second is an excerpt of the last three pages of the first part. Interestingly enough, it's the first time I use curse words in something I released. Guess it's a sign of growing up. The story isn't really that bright, reading it could really bring someone down... (at least reading only the first part of it)
p.s. ignore all the Alex references... it was seriously the first and most generic name which came up into my head
---
Someone once told me to stop questioning the world around myself, a world bereft with the scent of corruption, a world with a backbone and heart as rigid as steel. He told me that all the shortcomings of the world were the result of our own failures, that if we did not rightfully devote ourselves to the system, we would only exacerbate our own deprived situation. I could never bring myself to believe him.
-
“Daddy, what’s the book?”
“You see Alex, the Book is everything.”
-
The road was an impressive sea of concrete slapped across a mountain. It was ten lanes wide, and one could tell that at one point it was very heavily used as a vital lifeline connecting the city to the rest of the country through the dark tire markings which stained the pavement.
The pavement was cracked on both sides of the road, a result of decades of neglect by man, and decades of nature’s tendency to slowly crumble every last man-made monument. However, Mr. Galileo failed to notice the last detail because of the dilapidated conditions of the road. He was too preoccupied avoid the cracks in the road, which by now were large enough to trap a tire, and he failed to realize that the road was empty except for his car. He questioned the last time he had seen a car pass by on the other side, or had passed one. Eventually he reasoned to have not seen a car in ten minutes.
Mr. Galileo had been driving for the last ten hours towards the city. In those ten hours, the sky had been full of the same haze, a haze which lightly illuminated the clouds which seemed to have no beginning and no end. He was wrong; Mr. Galileo had been suffering from the time-dilation effects of an unchanging scene. He thought only an hour had passed. In fact, he had just driven through the night, and he passed the last town over five hours ago.
At the crest of the mountain lay a toll plaza, except none of the booths are open. In fact, none of the booths must have been open for a long time, for each the windows of each booth were covered with markings, and the road abruptly ended into a iron wall about fifty meters after the toll booths.
Inside the main office which adjoined the toll plaza, two guards lay, half-dozing, each reading the same red-bound book, until one noticed Mr. Galileo.
“Look. There’s someone here.”
“Where? I don’t see anybody.”
“It’s the car. Look. There’s a Prius.”
“Really? This is not good!” His hands and face began turning pale. He started to have light convulsions which shook the chair he was sitting in.
“What do we do??” he yelled.
“Consult the b-b-book. Always c-c-c-consult the book,” the other replied, much in the same mental state as his watch partner.
“W-w-w-what do we do??”
“Which p-p-page…”
Mr. Galileo had just finished parking his car in an surprising well maintained parking spot right next to the office, when two men approached him.
“Hello, sir. What brings you here?” said a man, which appeared to Mr. Galileo to be some kind of police officer, or guard.
“I was just looking to pass, but I just realized that the road is blocked. How long has it been like this?”
“Oh, for quite some time. Why must you pass?”
“Well you see, I’ve recently retired from the company that I founded. The company focuses on researching the origins and functioning of phenomena that incite mass action, such as the workings of one song that incites an entire revolution, which happened just a few years ago in Tunisia.”
“I’m sorry, but I must interrupt. What is a Tunisia?”
“Tunisia is a country, a country in the northern part of Africa.”
“Africa…” The guard still looked slightly perplexed, as if he had no idea what Africa even was.
“Anyways, after retiring I decided to visit some relatives that I haven’t seen in a while. See I’ve been driving for a few days to see one of my cousins. Actually, the last time that I remember seeing him was when I asked him to run a business errand for me, you know, back when my company was just starting, about twenty or so years ago. I asked him to fly to a city called Clostan, which for some reason, is a very large city yet all I could research about it, at that time, was information that was published in 2010 or sooner. I’m pretty sure that this highway leads to Clostan, correct?”
“You want to enter? Enter our city?”
“Yes, I would like to find out how I can bypass this iron wall.”
“Well then, I would like you to come with me. Paul, go check his car.” The second guard, Paul, strode over to Mr. Galileo’s car and began to inspect the inside.
“I have some forms for you to fill out. What is your name?”
“Saul Galileo.”
“Come right this way, Mr. Galileo. Don’t worry. This won’t take too long.”
-
You eventually come to realize that no society can ever be perfect. Perfection is simply an ideal which everyone desires, but none ever achieve. Societies that head towards perfection, who devote every last resource towards said noble pursuit only end up driving themselves into the wrong direction. The society begins to crumble apart, the crumbling accelerated by the vigorousness of the push towards perfection. The truth becomes masked more and more; the mask serves no other purpose than to hide the multitude of corruption which lurks underneath a once stable society, ruined by an insatiable drive to perfection.
-
The horn sounded, a loud horn which shook the very foundations of the buildings and the pillars which supported the buildings and the roads. Alex started walking. If he had started walking too soon he would have been early. Being early was the second-to-worst crime, as outlined in the book, in terms of punctuality, only second to being very early. Being late was slightly less severe, but still quite severe. Alex believed that the varying degrees of severity were all actually a delusion to create some kind of order in society, and that all these crimes were equally as severe.
He reached the bus stop, at which stood large panel, a digital screen, which first showed the time, accurate to the millisecond, then the arrival time for each of the next buses, also accurate to the nearest millisecond, and a small map of the surrounding area showing the approximate positions of each bus in proximity, which was also accurate to the nearest millimeter.
He stood in line, surrounded by students, as this was a students-only bus stop, all wearing the same uniform: a collared grey shirt, grey slacks, grey shoes, and a darker grey overcoat. He had to take the 35-J bus route every day at 8:31:54 A.M., and today, the bus arrived at 8:31:54 A.M., as per usual. Though he had been waiting for the bus for no longer than fifty-eight seconds, he was glad to get out of the line. He somehow disliked lines; whenever he waited in a line, the eyes of the others in the queue would slowly gravitate towards him, towards his brain, and cause him to feel a weird chill in his head.
Alex was now on the bus, which itself was nearly a history museum exhibit; its grey interior made the areas where the grey paint was peeling off, mostly the support bars and the handles, to reveal the raw steel underneath more like a paltry attempt at modern art than an example of the dilapidation of the structure. The windows were covered with undecipherable markings, and the seats had large rips in places, revealing a grey filling. The bus was filled to the point where every seat was taken, nothing more, as it was unlawful and unsafe for anyone to be standing in a vehicle, and having a seat empty, or having one person stand would only be an example of the failure of perfection.
Today Alex was lucky enough to be sitting in a seat near the front of the bus, so that he could have a clear view of the road ahead. The bus moved along the second layer of a massive fifteen lane highway. Alex could only tell it was raining because some water was leaking from the upper layer of the highway. All he could see ahead were a few random shops, and cars which all seemed to be travelling at the same speed, and a black ahead which was probably just more road.
About ten minutes into the bus ride, the bus reached the intersection of the 15 and 590 highways, an intersection which gave Alex a rare look at the sky, and at the layer cake which defined all of the city’s roads. Beneath the towering pillars which supported the four lane interchange ramps which ran in every combination of direction between the two highways, and the twenty-five combined lanes of the two highways, were four tiny green patches, no larger than the bus itself, in each a tree, and an equally small piece of the sky. Still, Alex could see the clouds in the sky, which always seemed to be full of them; when it was warmer, the sky would be full of hazy clouds, in the winter, it would be full of foggy clouds, and in the transition seasons they would be full of puffy clouds. They would sometimes drop drops of water, he had heard stories of the clouds dropping snowflakes from his father, yet he had never seen them. No matter what the weather appeared to be, the sky would always be painted a hue of gray, mixing so perfectly with the greyness of the highways, and making the trees, the only green in sight, seem even more out of place.
Alex’s school was also grey, an old but sturdy concrete flat of four floors and about fifteen large windows wide, nestled in between two layers of road. As he walked amongst the shadows of the hundreds of other students, all dressed exactly like he was, he struggled to find a reason as to why today seemed special.
“Good morning, Alex L.” said a student.
“Oh! I understand now; I remember why today is special. If a random stranger comes up and talks to me, it means that I must ask him the first question that comes up in my head. Of course, that’s what the book says,” said Alex aloud, though he thought he was merely talking to himself in his head.
“Would you care to inquire about your question as to why today is so special?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was gonna do next.”
“Very well. The reason why today is so special, and why I, a perfectly random stranger, would happen to strike conversation with you, is because, Alex L., today is the first day of the new school year, and even more exceptional, the first day of vocational school.”
“It makes so much sense now! Say, you’re in my grade aren’t you? What’s your name again? I forgot. I think it started with a C…”
“Mark, Mark Tom Four.”
“Why the four? Are you descended from three other people named Mark Tom?”
“No, it’s simply to distinguish from the three other Mark Toms I interact with on a regular basis. Now, Alex L., if we continue this conversation any longer, a conversation which has long since deviated from its original purpose, we will be late for class. I suggest we enter the building.”
“Yes, it was nice meeting you again Mark”
“The same to you, Alex L. And please call me Mark Tom Four from now on. May you always have faith in the Book.”
“The same to you; may you always have faith in that book.”
It all made sense to Alex now; he even remembered receiving a letter in the mail a week ago. It told him to go to room 178-9 on the first day of vocational school. Room 178-9 was at the end of a corridor, which on both sides had grey lockers, though no students were using them. To his surprise, there were two room 178-9s, each on the opposite side of the end of the hallway. One door was locked, and the window in the door was covered with a red piece of construction paper. Alex could hear faint chattering through that door. The other door was open, and the room had sixteen desks arranged in a nearly perfect square. Alex counted fourteen other students. Each student was silent.
“Ahh! The last student arrives! Now we can close the door and begin…” said a short and stocky man, who had reasonably long curly grey hair, and a bushy grey moustache, who happened to be Alex’s teacher.
-
CH 2.
Perfection always will be imperfection. It is this imperfection, which can sometimes manifest itself in holes as small as the holes in foil, in the face of superficial flawlessness, that allows change to seep through the system. This trickle of change, this poison, is what allows revolution to happen. You see, revolution always starts from the inside.
“and another important fact about revolutions is that they are minority movements. So a group of even, say, one percent of the population can rise above the masses and incite change, then I would say that we have a revolution in the works…
Now, before I continue any further, let me do roll. You know, seating charts are such a nice way for us lazies to take roll. But I don’t trust all of you. Can’t trust anyone you know? So, raise your hand if your first name is Alex. Everyone? Good. I’m amongst my own people. What you are about to hear may surprise you. It may go against everything that you have learned up to now, it may go against everything that you have seen others around you do. But keep listening, because what I’m going to tell you are the tools you need to rise above the rest.
You see, the purpose of this class, my purpose as a teacher, is to teach you the basics of dockwatching. That’s right, all of you have been assigned to become dockwatchers. I’m going to tell you straight up that if you can stand up, and if you can press a button when necessary, you can dockwatch. The purpose of a dockwatcher is to watch the coast of the city for any foreign vessels. There, a whole year’s worth of dockwatching education in one minute. No, if that were my sole purpose as a teacher I would have committed suicide by now.
My real purpose is to start a revolution.
You see, you are all special, you are all not normal. True, you may look normal, but you are not. Tell me, raise your hand, if you have ever, even once, felt like you were being watched by everyone else around you, that you felt like you had a huge tag on the top of your head in the shape of a dunce hat, or simply a very large dunce hat on your head which emitted discoball colors. Everyone? Good. You realize that these two things, your first names all being the same and the fact that you can sometimes feel like complete strangers amongst a crowd of people despite looking normal enough are testament to the fact that you are all not normal.
Every single one of you, myself included, is a foreigner. We aren’t original Clostaners; I wasn’t born in Clostan, and at least one of your parents was born outside of Clostan. We foreigners are much different from the regular citizens of Clostan, but I feel like you should know about – the bell! Perfect timing! – I feel like you all should understand more about the history of this terrible city before I tell you.
Now before you all leave to your other classes, classes which you will sit in with all types of the other students, none of which are foreigners, I would like you to remember this and creed to what I’m about to say; your lives and mine depend on your following it. What I talk about in this class must not ever be discussed outside of the class. The revolution is at your fingertips. Mayyoualwayshavefaithinthestupidbook blah blah blah…”
-
“The history of Clostan in a nutshell: it’s what we are covering in today’s class. I’m very glad, words can’t really express my relief, at how you all have kept your word and kept the details of my class locked inside those heads of yours!”
“But, how do you know?”
“I just know. Anyways, the history of Clostan begins in a city about seventy or so kilometers from Clostan called Port Tyrathemat, which I’ll be referring to as Port T throughout this lesson as I’ve heard at least ten different pronunciations of Tyrathemat in my lifetime.
Port T was a city controlled by a single corporation, the Tryathemat Port Authority Board, but all the locals called it PorTy for short. Before PorTy decided to start business in the Port T, it was simply a small fishing town. The initial purpose of PorTy was to offer lower prices to shippers than the Port of Clostan; essentially it was a corporation created in malicious intent to draw away business from the Clostan shipping industry, which in fact was very competitive, with about fifteen different shipping companies controlling the inflow of goods from the sea into the rest of the country.
Because it had virtually no competition and local laws and regulations to deal with, PorTy easily offered lower prices than all of the Clostan shipping companies, and soon gained a majority share in the shipping industry in and around Clostan.
PorTy soon became a massive corporation, employing pretty much most of the citizens of Port T. The corporation created a master plan for the city, a grid-like layout, with no real center, except for the three fifty story towers that were the headquarters of the corporation. Except for a very small upper-middle class, which consisted of the executives of PorTy, the rest of the citizens lived in apartment blocks. When PorTy was unable to find enough manpower to continue its unparalleled growth, it relied on illegal immigration, bringing in thousands of people by the shiploads into the city, a journey with conditions like the “middle passage” in the slave-trade triangle so long ago.
By the mid 70s, when Clostan was at the brink of a long road of desecration to today’s conditions, Port T was a city of around 600 000, over ninety percent of whom worked for PorTy. While Clostan was connected by a ten-lane highway to the rest of the country, Port T was connected to the rest of the mainland by a two-lane mountain road that stretched for over a thousand kilometers before any major city. Essentially, Port T became somewhat of its own enclave, as the corporation tightly regulated, and in most cases, forbade the emigration of its citizens, and even vacations for its citizens, for fear that the secret, the secret of the illegal immigration that fueled the corporation’s rapid growth, would be revealed.
And thus begins the start of the parasitic corruption which was brought forth by PorTy unto this city. However, exactly how the corruption worked is a tale for the next class. Mayyoualwayshavefaithinthebookthatidontreallybelievein.”
“It’s raining. Good, because the topic of today’s lecture is very dark, a macabre tale of how an entire city was brainwashed by one corporation, headed by one man.
PorTy expanded its zone of influence into Clostan, in an attempt to completely monopolize the shipping industry of the southern coast. The executives of PorTy carried out a three-pronged plan in order to achieve this.
The first part of the plan was offering competitive wages and benefits. PorTy, from all their successes in effectively ensuring that all profits went back to the central organization instead of the people, had a surplus of which the extent nobody knew of. By turning the city of Port T into a third world, politically oppressed place in a developed nation, Port T was able to use its excess profits to offer unheard of wages to its employees in Clostan, at least at first.
The second part of the plan was to swallow up the smaller shipping companies. Ever since its inception, PorTy consistently pulled strong gains, while most other shipping companies in the region were stagnant or recording losses. Small shipping companies made about a thirty percent share of the shipping industry in Clostan. Within five years of entering the Clostan shipping business, PorTy bought out every single last one of the small shipping companies.
The final part of the plan was vertical integration, a process in which a corporation controls all of the production chain. In the case of shipping, it means controlling the ships, the docks, the freight trains and trucks, and the warehouses in which the goods are sold to. By branding the non-shipping elements of PorTy under the name “Mickie,” PorTy was able to create this illusion that the corporation was actually smaller, less far reaching, than it actually was.
We fast forward five years to find the complete stagnation of the shipping industry in Clostan. Despite the effective monopolization of the shipping industry by PorTy, the shipping industry in the area suffers greatly from the opening of the Batara-Flansco bridge, across the Nanhai inlet and bay in the north, and the introduction of high speed freight trains throughout the heart of the country. PorTy decides the only way to continue its growth is to control the entire city of Clostan.
By now, the late 1980s, Clostan is too small to contain the masses of immigrants from the hinterlands of the country, seeking work in the high-pay shipping industry. Clostan itself is a landlocked city, not in the sense that it has no outlet to the sea, but in the sense that it is surrounded. Unlike other large cities in the country, Clostan is surrounded on two sides by the sea, and by the other two sides by mountains, creating a limited amount of space for living. Since Clostan could no longer grow outwards, it had to grow upwards.
PorTy eagerly took up this idea, and decided to use this opportunity to build up as a way to create its own caste system, the caste system which exists today. They decided to replicate the city roads in three levels; the first level, the undesirables, the second level, the working class, the third level, the upper class. Notice the absence of any middle class. That’s how state run socialist systems work; they kill off the middle class, leaving the masses forced to depend on the government for their sustenance.
This project, which was pretty much an entire overhaul of an entire city, was unheard of; the only comparable event was the overhaul of Paris which happened around 150 years earlier. Only when this project initiated did the middle class finally notice the extent of PorTy’s wealth. In the next five years that followed, an exodus of the middle classes started, while the road out of the city, called the “Clostan Artery” by locals, was still unblocked, and work was just starting on the second level of roads. With an exodus of the middle class came the exodus of many other things: varied political ideals, innovation, knowledge, independent business.
After most of the middle class left, the power only existed with the executives of PorTy, whom were all perfectly content with keeping the status quo. These executives were just as educated as the former middle class, but were polar opposites in every other way; they were elitists.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is somewhere near the end of the first part; Alex has just finished a harrowing series of game shows in a dream in order to unlock his father’s collective unconscious.
Alex could vaguely sense it in the dream, as the windows of the hotel room began to crack at the very center, the walls began to contort, and the monotonous drone of the question reader gradually became higher in pitch. Then all of a sudden, just as the walls were able to collapse on him, just as he was preparing to die buried under the debris of mankind, he felt water.
Alex opened his eyes. He was in the park, the sun still shone, however it had the glow of dusk.
“Do you realize how long you have been sleeping here?”
“No,” Alex replied, still in a state of shock, to what in his mind was no more than a black shadow.
“Well let’s see; you started to nap on this park bench about at 12:14:42 P.M., and now it’s exactly somewhere around sunset. Had a nice nap?”
“Where am I? How did I end up getting here?”
“Don’t play dumb. I know very well what you were trying to do. Did you get it? You know, the code.”
“No.”
“Who am I?”
“You’re Mayor Mihikailov.”
“Yes, yes, you’re smart aren’t you Alex Lucio. The bringer of the light who ventures into the dark into order to find answers. You should be playing to your specialties, you know.”
“What are you gonna do to me now? You’ve caught me after all.”
“Another perverted tactic of yours! You know that acting innocent and weak won’t help you! I’ve already suffered too much at the hands of that guy beside you, your father. By the way, Cornelius, wake him up, and where are my guards?”
Alex’s father woke up, still in shock, as Alex watched ten other black-suited men come out from the trees behind the park bench, and restrain his half-awake father. Soon, he felt vicer-like grips on his arms and legs.
“Well, Alex, let me tell you something. When we lobotomized your father, we also took the key from him. The key to his subconscious, which you have been searching for for – quick, Cornelius, tell me how long six hours is in dream time.”
“About four days, Mayor.”
“Four days! Six hours! In both ways, lots of wasted time! Plus you made this suicidal trespass into the upper level! You enjoyed it though, right? Got to see the sun for once for real. Bet you looked at it too, and hurt your eyes! Well, Alex…”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever wanted to know what the undesirable level of our society is like? Your curiosity, it seems, has no bounds! Yes, you don’t need to act dumb again, I know that you always had this burning desire to know. Well, Alex, something is at least going to come out of your failed attempt to tap into your father’s collective unconscious. Your time hasn’t been wasted!”
Just as the Mayor uttered those words, Alex’s father snapped out of his post-dream shock, and Alex could tell that he was fully aware of the his surroundings, of the improper actions that the Mayor’s bodyguards took to restrain him.
“Alex! Alex! Where are we? I think that I am late for my work. My watch say it’s around 6 P.M.; I am late! Quick! I have to get breakfast ready and send you to school!”
“Dad, we’re not – ”
“Alex, it’s all useless!” the Mayor said. “Don’t worry, we’re going to go to a special place soon!”
Alex could tell that the Mayor was getting excited, then felt a sharp pain in right leg.
-
“Sedative 12, one hour of sedation; Sedative 23, fourteen hours of sedation. Are you sure it was enough, Cornelius? The father, I know, is fine, he’ll wake up the next morning, find a government-issued letter in his mailbox, and continue life as normal. It’s the boy I’m worried about. He’s going to miss out on the show!”
“Mayor, he’s starting to show signs of life.”
“Perfect! Alex, our special guest!”
“Where am I?”
“Don’t act so much like a robot! You’re not one, you’re a foreigner’s child after all, an Alex! Open your eyes more!”
Alex woke up in a van, in the middle seat. Two of the Mayor’s bodyguards were sleeping on hammocks near the roof of the van, while four were in the row behind him. He was sitting in the middle row, in the middle seat. Alex put on his seatbelt, looked outside to see the familiar second layer again, the land where the sun never shone and the sky a permanent sea of concrete. The van was driving down Highway 15, traffic was much lighter than it normally was, as Alex could only see a few buses in the outer lanes.
“Highway 15, the Clostan Artery. Open your eyes more, Alex! Despite all the crap that makes up the second layer, I want you to see this! You’ve never been to Clostan’s downtown, right?”
“Only once, I think, a long time ago. Don’t remember.”
“Look! It’s amazing! Clostan’s downtown is one thing to be proud of at all levels! No other city in the world has such an amazing downtown!”
Alex looked forward, and downtown perfectly from the cliff before the descent to the ocean. Clusters of high rises packed in such close formation, layers upon layers of roads, all staggered in such a perfect way as to create the illusion of a latticework of roads, in the center of the roads, high rises, all branded with the distinctive sun logo of PorTy, created the illusion that they were descending into a land of a million suns.
“See, Alex? The downtown is still beautiful, despite being on the second layer. You know at the end of highway 15, there originally was a huge spiral, as the highway ended and descended back to ground level. The spiral is a special place, a place where most normal citizens, even us privileged kind on the upper level, never get the chance to enter.”
“What’s at the end of the spiral?”
“Why would I want to spoil the surprise! Guards, wake up, and help secure Alex so he doesn’t escape. You know, Alex, I’ve learned a lot from your father, and one thing I’ve learned, is that the only way to control radical revolutionaries such as you, and your father, is to bury them alive.”
Alex felt sharp pain on his left leg.
-
“Mayor, he’s waking up!”
“Cornelius, what did you use?”
“Sedative 9, Mayor.”
“Sedative 9? No, that’s wrong, all wrong! I wanted you to use Sedative 10, damn it; now he’s going to see it all! But it’s okay; he’s locked in by my guards. Use, uh, Sedative 5. You have to get the head this time, the legs have already been used.”
“Yes, Mayor. I apologize for my earlier mishap.”
Alex slowly opened his eyes, and saw a road sign, painted in white text on a green background, a strange occurrence, since all signs in Clostan were printed in white text on a red background. It said something about the destination of whatever highway they were on. He could make out one word: Undesirable Level. Alex then saw a syringe, and could make out the words “SEDATIVE SIX” between the volume measurement markings, then felt a horrible pain, as if someone was sticking a needle into the middle of his forehead.
“Have fun, Lucio, with the undesirables…”
The mayor, supposedly the epitome of the upper class denizens of the upper level, actually, through his language, shows that class barriers are simply superficial and materialistic [like the concrete barriers overhead between the second and third levels of the city], rather than abstract. [just some analysis…]
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