One Chip Down

Chapter 1

It is the one truth. If you have made your way to the party, you got to leave sometime. It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter how it was. Those are just things. Good days, bad days, even the terrible ones, are just things that happen along the way. All one can be assured of at ones entrance, is ones exit. Whatever happens in between are just variables.

To be fair, the only reason we were alive still is because keeping us alive was cheaper than getting rid of us.

But back to the matter at hand, it is the one truth, but no one likes to talk about it. It makes them uncomfortable. I guess, I get it. Sometimes, I can’t wait to go back home and never come back. It feels nauseous. The burden of taking off this load tends to get repetitive. It stays with you for eternity and on lonely winter nights, it is all I can think about.

I have a gift. That’s what my father told me, ‘We’re special, son. We’ve the gifted blood coursing through our veins.’ I got to hear a lot of this during the course of my training, that took place in the dingy garage behind our lot, you see, there isn’t a lot of honour in what we do. Having being born with this gift really didn’t feel like that most of the times.

The no honour bit is still something I could make my peace with, its the pit at the bottom of my stomach that bothers me. It isn’t easy. They call me at odd hours. There are no rules to our profession. I have never met anyone like us. Not that all of us are supposed to go out proclaiming our doings. We are better than that. There are rules, even if unsaid. You don’t tell anyone. You can’t tell anyone. I find it difficult to talk for a few days afterwards. It works that I don’t have anyone to tell all this to. It doesn’t pay, well, not all the time. Most of us here don’t have the means, if we did, we’d be inside the city. Not living here at the fringes. Surviving for just another bad day.

When the new order came over, the world was divided. Not everyone could make it inside the wondrous world that technology could afford us. Now that everything else was long gone, there wasn’t much left to be enjoyed as nature’s bounty. Nature was done handing out bounties. We are a selfish race, even with the worst hardly behind us, I still see it in their eyes. The greed, the want to have everything they can. It doesn’t matter if they need it or not. Hoarders of our own filth, it is a deserving path we are on. No one stops from cursing the others. For us, it is the Imperial City and its shiny dwellers. The ones who could choose how to colour their sky while we get left with a leaky roof. Quite literally, sadly.

With living ones life in abject poverty, however, comes the need to work towards a better future, even if this one exists beyond the plane we inhabit.

We don't have much here. It is just stumps after stumps of old buildings, deserted after the revolution. Our existence is out of sheer inconvenience. Our resources are limited, passed onto us when surpluses are enjoyed inside the Imperial City. When they have too much, that’s when they throw some to us. What happens when they don’t have enough, well that’s where we come in.

About a hundred years ago, everyone just realised that life as it is, was too much of a hassle. Masses could be influenced. A group of people could vote for someone one day and take him out the other. It just wasn’t economically feasible. It didn’t make sense for them to invest the money to have another election, only to have the other guy get thrown out. So they decided to not have the guy anymore. No more faces. The system is the same, more or less. People with money decided then, people with resources decide now. It’s just about eliminating the middle man. Why have the puppet when your audience is just going to heckle him?

It was just more resourceful to be done with all that, so that’s when they influenced the masses to take to the street for the ultimate takeover. Banish the laws that held them captive, that made them take a longer route home. When you could have it all, why won’t you?

Now the cities they built were what no one could dream of in their wildest fantasies. In an ultimate act of retaining choice, they gave every one of their patrons the option to choose the world they wanted to live in. Just a small gimmick to make the real look more like the fantasy. Not everyone got in, of course, but that didn’t bother these fiends too much. They just got busy living their best lives, surrounded by whatever they wanted, candies, flying cars, purple moon, anything. You decided your view, even if at the end of the day, you have to work for it relentlessly. Small price to pay apparently, since no one seems to be getting enough of it.

They live their fake lives, working for the corporation that believes in everyone’s right to live a fulfilling life, as long as you live in their perimeter. If you don’t, well, you either live off on what they can spare, or wait for the lucky day that they will decide to open the gates of heaven to a lucky few. There still seems to be some confusion, but apparently there is a lucky draw. It is a trick I suppose, to make us behave, to make sure that we don’t storm the gates of the palace that they hide from us. Showing us a peek, anytime they like, only to bring down the shutter on our eager fingers wanting to get in. It is a sad world we live in, but if history has anything to tell, it wasn't any better before.

There is a tower at the intersection of every street, it is replicated after the big clocks that told everyone time in the early days. Every day, on my walk during before I go to work, I visit a couple of them. But they don’t tell time, time as a concept doesn’t make much sense, if your exit is being timed according to a different calculation. We live on charity, up here in this place. The world where you could roam around and just be, is obviously a thing of the past, and not the recent kind. If I were to meet someone who was cryogenically preserved for the last one hundred and fifty years or so, I possibly wouldn’t know where to begin. I can say for sure that they wouldn’t wish the restoration and brining back to life on anyone else after this. The kind of experience you will have, just depends on the side of the wall you are on.

On this side of the wall, we don’t have much, to say the least. Our supplies are limited, even the oxygen in our air is due to some little clause in an agreement effected a century ago. Ours is more or less, a lawless land. We are mere survivors. We don’t live, we don’t have fun, particularly, ours is not an existence for experience sake. Ours is just an existence for inconvenience’s sake. Especially to the corporations around the world. Every other week, they are supposed to take more of us in, to experience a life that doesn’t feel like a ticking bomb, but they can’t just take in every body. Not just like that. Not without making sure they had the ability to provide us with the supplies needed. So they devised a system, an algorithm that takes the files of everyone living here and runs them through a draw whenever there is a vacancy at their place. It’s an entire show. The screens display the screen sifting through and announcing the numbers. That’s all we are to them, a burden they are being forced to take care of. Needless to say, we don’t get a lot of vacancies, even when it happens, there are at least ten cities like ours, existing in the cold dark void that is our world, waiting to be rescued by the hands of the very people that put them there.

So we had to get a system of our own, we had to make sure that the people who needed it the most got the chance to live on the other side of the wall, we had to make sure they were still alive by the time it happened. So we put in a simple algorithm, telling us which people won’t be able to make it to the next draw itself. If they can’t hold on until then on their own, they would only end up costing to the precious supplies that we never seem to have enough. I mean, to hang it over our heads like that, is probably a little more dramatic than you would expect but that’s how they like to keep us in check.

So the screens present all over the city are a reminder, of sorts, of the mortal nature of our adventure here. It is painful to go through the anxiety of having your life just taken away from you, because of an administrative failure, but I believe, on a very basic level, this is better than what our people suffered back in the day. At least there are no literal wars, just wars that could wipe out the habitants within the confines of a wall, but they happen with words exchanged over in the court of law.

The system guarantees work and food supplies to everyone who is willing and able, and when you aren’t, the system tells you that your being alive is costing the life of an n number of people. Wouldn’t you like to help them? This is the first letter of intimation, I haven’t received one myself, but I have held several in my hands. There are two types of people, really. When it comes to letters announcing the end of your journey, there are two ways you can deal with it. The easy way is, to say all right, and get it done, treating it as the one final job you do. Some people have a hard time, however, and they can’t let go, not even when there isn’t a lot to hold on to. Even if you are willing and able, your life here couldn’t really make it a fulfilling experience, but they hold on to that distant hope of being relocated to the city, where the food never ends and you never have to leave.

So they do what anyone here can do, they resist and make a scene, they go door to door, calling everyone out to see the unfairness of it all. They cause a racket and hope someone sees value in them. But to them I ask, what will you do with that? Even if you have a righteous mob cheering you on as you attempt to make your ride last longer, what would it accomplish, who will you bring down, there is no capitol to storm, no castles to barge into. There’s just rules and screens, the administration doesn’t even sit here, they get to be on the other side, plainly by virtue of being useful. This world here doesn’t care for your feelings, it cares about itself, it cares about the rules and the people who made them. It only cares about them.

But a person at the end of their rope tend to be a little on the edge. In a way, I think it makes sense to do all that, because if you know the worst is coming to you anyway, why wouldn’t you take the risk to possibly have it all. A poorly calculated risk, but what are you going to say to a dying person? The rules are a bit different for them, at least for us.

I work two jobs, one is more of a handed down tradition and hardly requires me to keep time, but it is a job of sorts. It is how I prove my worthiness to the system each year, I don’t get to keep my file in the draw. It isn’t allowed, they tell me, not unless someone is ready to take my place. It is important work, you see. We can’t just let these people pass on to the other world without you.

The first time my father told me where it is that he went every couple of nights, I had a hard time. I was about nine years into this world when I was forced to stare the stark end. He didn’t even try and disguise it like others I guess once you see enough of these, it gets harder each time to justify it somehow. To look a dying being in the eye and tell them lies is one thing, but to believe it yourself, enough to pass on to your child, he didn’t have it. And I think, on some level, neither do I.