The entire Chapter 6 of Ignorance, the Freedom of the Weak, volume I:
Case was trying to find his way through the dark. Nighttime veiled those shy rays of sunlight that constantly reminded sewer people of another world. Blissful for most, annoying for some, fiercely motivating for one.
Despite moving through his own territory, with little reason to act suspicious, Case slinked along the curved walls like a ghost, covered by thick shadows. He was returning from a successful deal, the final one that would crown all his efforts.
There was something childish in the manner in which he tried to conceal his bulky prize under the jacket, hugging it with one hand while sneaking crookedly, hindered by the burden. But his appearance was the last thing on his mind.
The more he advanced toward the accomplishment of his goal, the more he feared an abrupt failure. Now that he held the final piece of the puzzle tightly to his chest after completing the last risky deal, Case’s heart was pounding, afraid some unexpected, ridiculous event might blow away his house of cards.
A sudden disaster coming moments away from concluding years of hard work would have been indeed ironic, considering all the other risks Case had exposed himself to. But the boy had less to worry about than he thought. He imagined that the threats he was facing were directly proportional to the ambition of his plans.
In reality, all he had to do was maintain the appearance of doing conventional trading. It was more likely that any real danger would come from the men he did business with rather than familiar faces. Case had no idea who those people were or what they used his stuff for, but he had to trust them in order to obtain what he needed. As for his sewer people, they were too busy being trapped in their own mazes, trying to solve the hardest puzzle of them all. Life.
Maybe Case had a bit of pride in him after all.
As soon as he learned how to read, write and make basic use of current technology, which happened fast enough, Novak had to accept full-time responsibility as a father.
Scraping garbage from the sewer floors hardly required any skills or training, but Novak wasn’t preparing Case for mastering the rake, he was opening his eyes to the joys of exploring, turning his hideous labor into an appealing child’s play.
While most fathers passed down their hate and misery to their offspring, perpetuating a depressing existence, Novak knew how to set his torment aside and instill Case with a constructive approach to his future job. He simply taught his son that his task was to explore and discover the treasures hidden into the ever-flowing piles of garbage.
Embracing his father’s perspective, little Case let this new activity take over his excited imagination, and once he was old enough to articulate goals, scraping became nothing more than a means to an end.
Ever since he began reading technical books, Case had been able to point out various other objects that could be turned into profit, as well as new uses for the ones they usually collected. Novak rejoiced, catching a glimpse of Serene’s intelligence driving the boy’s enthusiasm.
The child took his passion one step further when, at eleven, he built a rudimentary metal detector. In time, this simple device increased its range of detection, learned how to discriminate between types of metals and nonmetals and even gained ultrasonic capabilities for image rendering.
As years went by, Novak saw himself be surpassed more and more by his teenage son. Since he knew how to love, he was almost incapable of envy and truly admired his son’s brightness and accomplishments. The feeling that prevailed the most was amazement.
One day, however, the worm of jealousy slipped into his soul.
It was the day Case did more than just find some copper or even silver with his metal detector, buried some place no one would have bothered to search. Novak couldn’t understand how the tool worked, and as it became more complex, he stopped trying to figure it out. Yet the fact that it spared them of most of the scavenging effort never failed to impress him.
It was that easy. Case would walk around, pointing his detector left and right until the device started to flash a discreet red light. Then they would dig and discover some metal. Sometimes more, sometimes less, a lost piece of jewelry or maybe a worn-out screw.
They did not give up scavenging by hand because the metal detector would only point to some materials and not their value, at least not at first. It also took away some of the charm of exploring. Still, it allowed them an invaluable piece of mind. They were not struggling for survival anymore. The device filled the bags ten times faster, but that didn’t mean they could profit ten times more.
Stockpiling valuables was not for the sewer people. Even if they could afford to live beyond their means, they had no way of showing it. Splurging was dangerous. Vanity had to stop there.
They couldn’t increase their profits, but the free time gained from the lighter workload proved to be all the more valuable. Case devoted these precious hours to studying and crafting while Novak turned to reading his novels or traded their discoveries.
He established a daily quota, an approximate value for the items that needed to be gathered. Novak considered their needs generously and set the margins comfortably past the survival threshold. When this quota was met, they would relax and go through the trash by hand, chatting, laughing, bonding.
After lunch, they would plow through the garbage, push it to the dump and return home to enjoy their passions. Novak understood the value of the time they spent together and saw it as a reward for his suffering. He cherished these moments that Serene had gifted him.
Case was too young to understand his father’s life and feelings, but he enjoyed and benefited from this healthy father-son relationship forged against all odds in an unhealthy environment.
If the measure of a man’s wealth were measured in the amount of time spent with his family, then Novak and Case were among the wealthiest people on the planet. A curious chain of events and opportunities, some voluntary and some not, nourished an environment that enabled them to live and feel happiness, while other luckier people were doomed to fill their souls with its surrogate, pleasure.
Even the inability to live as well as they afforded, allowing them some comfort but not pleasure, helped them acknowledge and appreciate the important things in life.
Tranquility blossomed on their faces, and after a while, they lost the sense of urgency that mechanically drove the existence of their peers. Without knowing it, Novak and Case were accidentally experiencing some of the privileges of the upper classes. The other sewer dwellers noticed it before they did. No one had an explanation for it, and fortunately for them, no one could be bothered to take a break from their unending survival race to search for one.
At about fifteen Case began to develop his own contraband network. He disliked trading and bargaining but had to do it out of necessity. Novak’s connections, albeit numerous, could only stretch so far. Case’s goods demanded another market.
At that moment, Novak understood they were rich. And he understood the price he paid for this wealth.
Case continued to build upon his previous work at an exponential rate, channeling his otherwise unusable profits into acquiring more sophisticated technology. He could then research and engineer even more valuable tools. A sort of virtuous circle that led Case to finally discover a way to jam civilian and military surveillance. Without such an instrument, constructing a clandestine aircraft would have been pointless.
The scan jammer became quite popular and was in high demand with the boy’s shady trade partners. It was a breakthrough that ultimately earned him the propulsion and life support systems.
This device alone was worth more than enough to cure her. And Case traded it like it was nothing, just another deal he needed to make for his shuttle. He had no idea such an object, built without much effort, could have saved his mother. Even though he knew it was irrational to think this way, Novak felt angry because his son treated his work with such indifference. By associating the device with Serene’s cure, he had the sensation that Case was indifferent toward his mother as well.
Novak understood the absurdity of this thought, but the irony kept bringing back his pain and reminded him of his helplessness. In moments like these, he sensed his prison. His brief contrasting heartbeats of happiness would return to haunt him and bluntly reveal the misery of his surroundings. Even the smell.
He trembled with frustration, unable to articulate his feelings, as he saw his sole purpose, the love for his son, be eroded and perverted by an inducement sprung from his repressed limitations. At the same time, the old man felt he could have never belonged up there. Somehow, he knew that happiness should be the inherent flavor of life regardless of anyone’s abilities or social standing. His son, too young to question the legitimacy of this rationed existence, just wanted to climb up the ladder.
Novak wanted a decent life without having to become like them. To adapt was beyond his humble nature. It was too late for him. The gutter never needed anyone’s dreams. It settled for their fears, their shame and their hate. Which was enough.
The sewers also served the purpose of collecting the garbage from the street level. There were no aircraft to pick up the trash, no dumpsters or bins. Everyone hid their junk under the rug. Countless garbage chutes poured tons of waste down into the tubes day after day, and even less significant ants had to push it slowly toward the landfill.
The process could have been easily automated. So, the sewer technicians labored all day long using tools that were outright primitive compared with current technological standards. Rakes and shovels were inadequate for moving large volumes of waste no matter how hard they tried. A sort of gas-powered plow looking like an angry snowblower handled this task. However, the sanitation people were reluctant to use it and only chose to do so as a last resort. The plow would grind through the trash and spit it out further ahead as an unusable mix of materials. It was what they considered to be the real garbage.
Destroying it meant depriving themselves of one of the few voluntary activities in their lives, something that gave them a sense of control over an oppressed existence, the satisfaction of achieving a goal for their own sake, a hobby and a reason to socialize. All of these in going through trash.
This decrepit, once yellow machine symbolized the target of their hatred, doubling as a palpable object to safely absorb their anguish. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, they all had to use it. Scraping garbage all the way to the landfill was beyond anyone’s strength. They were left to wonder about the useful items they had to abandon, and sometimes the crackling sounds made by the plow gave them painful answers.
The landfill was deserted. None but the desperate roamed it, dragging their last hopes along.
Case conveniently established his base of operations somewhere between its dunes. The dump belonged to the outside world. It began where the sewage tubes ended, and for a tunnel dweller, it felt endless. An inconspicuous takeoff and landing spot for a shuttle.
By reverse-engineering the tiny holographic projectors from his holo books, Case was able to build a powerful projector, which covered a much wider area. A 3D scan of one of the numerous piles of trash provided a suitable projection that camouflaged his workshop. His real home.
Sanitation technicians were assigned a certain sector. It was the place where they lived, where they worked and where they disappeared, more commonly known as their territory. A set of unwritten rules governed the way a sewer worker approached another man’s territory.
It was considered that every piece of trash falling on someone’s turf became his property. Delving into other people’s trash meant stealing, and such an offender had to face an army of neighbors invading his own territory as punishment.
The individual sectors were adjacent to collective tubes. These were wider in diameter, allowing for heavier traffic and several plows going side by side. As for the passersby, they simply had to dodge the minced trash.
During the day, the traffic tubes were mostly populated by children, elementary school dropouts. Their parents trained them to hang around the garbage chutes and snipe any useful items their surface neighbors might bestow upon them. Such was the sky they were looking up to.
Anything that dropped in this area belonged to anyone who picked it up and found a use for it. The unwanted garbage would be pushed away together with the rest of the trash coming from everyone’s sectors.
The collective tubes led to the dump, an undivided territory no one bothered to claim. The landfill was no man’s land. No rules governed this unwanted middle ground.
Case was nearing the border. He felt exhausted even if the object he carried was more bulky than heavy. The tunnel he walked led to no dead ends. Those were the scariest, the ones that didn’t have them stare into another wall. Case seemed to travel across a giant spyglass. In front of him, a round cutout of the sky was growing larger and larger as he went up the slope. The moonshine bled into its frame, radiating restless beams. Veils of clouds told a leaden story on the sewer stage. It was the eerie ballet of life that scared them. The tip of his shoe scraped the rim. Everybody stopped there. The end of the world. They dumped the trash over its edge and fell back. The boy knelt, contemplating the ground that stretched widely before him. The endless mass of minced garbage with its irregular landforms displayed an uncanny spectacle of tonalities in the moonlight.
Gently, he uncovered his prize, pulled it out from underneath his jacket and placed it on the tube floor. A deflector dish. There was only one thing he could do with it.
Case took another gander over the shoulder to make sure nobody was following him. Feeling somewhat secure, he activated the PDA strapped to the back of his right hand. A library of tools available at the shop popped up on the screen. He browsed for a small hover deck and fed it his coordinates.
The cool night breeze kept him alert and anxious, while the suffocating stench of the sewers threatened to push him over the edge. These were his last real moments of reflection, a few seconds before the platform would arrive. There was no going back beyond that point.
He sat there in silence with his feet dangling over the edge of the tunnel, wondering about what he was supposed to feel. He had reached the conclusion of a long journey, which spanned most of his childhood and adolescence. It was a road he knew well, a path he struggled to lay for himself, knowing where it would lead.
From this moment on, he would face the unknown. The real journey was only beginning, and this time, he could not anticipate its outcome. This inscrutable mystery, which could not be solved by any formula, was a lot scarier than being caught smuggling a deflector dish.
He thought there was still a choice to be made, but the die had been cast years before. He had no other option than to go on and fulfill his dream. Otherwise, all those years of struggle and ambition would have been wasted for nothing. That mattered more than any fear.
The platform arrived. Case placed the deflector carefully on the metal surface, secured it in place and sent it back to base. He knew he was approaching a decisive turning point in his life, but it felt like an ordinary breezy night.
Looking back one last time, he grabbed the handles of the side ladder and climbed down to the landfill. He had to walk for a while, but he welcomed this quiet stroll after the exhausting hide-and-seek race beneath the shadows.
Case wanted to prolong these few minutes of freedom. He was not used to feeling this way. There was always something that needed to be done, studied, built, traded. The hours required to do his real job were minimal, but his ambition was always hungry.
It was time for him to enjoy the fruits of his labor. That moment when nothing else had to be done except walking on in the cool breeze without a care in the world. Those seconds felt so peaceful and so few.
Case was approaching the shop. Before stepping through the mirage of the 3D projection, he needed to check his traps. To keep the scavengers away, another set of holographic projectors displayed unapproachable pits and abrupt cavities, which would have discouraged anyone from advancing.
And if someone had gotten too close, a circular array of sensors would have triggered a surge of electricity passing through inconspicuous pieces of metal lying on the ground. Any unwanted guests would have been treated to some painful arks of low-voltage current.
Case was certain that the hopeless shadows who roamed the dump did not have enough strength to drag themselves so far away from their holes, but he always tried to have as few variables as possible in his equations.
The sensor logs were clean. He stepped inside his workshop, and the lights turned on automatically, revealing an object the size of a gigantic egg covered by a black tarp. The deflector rested in front of it.
“Activate sound dampeners and ambient heaters,” commanded Case.
The shop came alive little by little as he was preparing for the final operations.
He pulled down the tarp, unveiling his life’s work. A shuttle pod. On the outside, it looked like a bunch of metal patches stitched together chaotically, a mosaic of trash. There was something missing at the nose.
Case picked up the deflector and slid it in place. Then he welded a few patches around it to seal the socket, leaving the dish to protrude outside. And that was it. He was finally done.
The boy just stood there, not knowing what to do next. He thought she was beautiful. She was complete, years of hard work turned into reality. From a little boy’s glimpse of imagination to a holographic scale model to a life-sized aircraft ready to take him to the stars.
However, he had no time to lose since he was running behind schedule. Case needed to fly that night. He wanted to close the tier gap by learning to pilot before going to the Academy to learn how to pilot. The boy needed to prove to himself, first and foremost, that he was more than garbage, that he could be whatever he aspired to be. And then to the world. Case had to fly that night. Otherwise, another year had to pass before he could get a second chance to enroll.
He tried to save a few more days, especially for flight training, but his contact at the scrapyard, Dimmer, delayed the deflector’s delivery. That year’s lot of scrapped aircraft arrived a few days late. The shipment was detoured and reached the yard a bit thin the night before because a few parts “got lost” on the way. Everything had an expiration date and, without exception, would be replaced by the government as soon as the day came. The year of manufacture didn’t matter as far as prestige was concerned. It was the same for everyone. It was equality.
Aircraft owners received new shuttles according to their station in life, just like they received new clothes or food. As technology progressed, the replacements would be retrofitted with a few modern features to keep up with the times, but that was it.
The real reason for celebration came when the advancements were so bold and revolutionary the outdated technology had to be passed down to the lower tiers. That would stir a ripple of welfare across the food chain.
Most of these technological breakthroughs coincidentally occurred when statistics predicted moments of civil unrest. This way, the masses had their rebellious thoughts crushed long before they had the chance to blossom. Even if it was highly unlikely that enough people would overcome their fears and strengthen up enough to pose a threat to order, the authority took no chances.
Case brushed off his garbageman’s cuff patch against the canopy lock. It slid back, exposing the inviting interior. The boy jumped into the cockpit, and the canopy slid back shut. The cockpit felt uncomfortable and resembled the exterior hull’s messy design, but the dashboard was that of a modern interceptor.
Case remembered pilots wear helmets. Perhaps he should wear one too. All those years had passed without him ever thinking about it. He smiled. He didn’t care. If anything went wrong, it would be the end. No helmet could save him. He caressed the dashboard, wondering if she would deceive him.
“Ignite.”
She came to life.
The graphical interface faded in on the glass, the dashboard lit up, and the landing thrusters ignited, scorching the ground underneath and jolting the shuttle for a second until it regained balance.
The jolt took Case by surprise. It was his first time inside an operational aircraft. He could feel her. Those countless hours of simulator training could have never prepared him for this. He knew the controls by heart, the takeoff and landing procedures, but taming her was a completely different thing.
Case became overwhelmed with enthusiasm, enticed by the need to restrain her, burning with a strong desire to catapult himself into the night sky. He still needed to take some precautions, though.
A quick diagnostic test of the deflector revealed encouraging results. It was not state-of-the-art technology, but it functioned well enough to get the job done. All systems were operational. One last infrared scan to be sure the landfill was deserted, and he was good to go.
Scan jammers on. No one to bother him unless he trespassed into the range of high-end military radars. He suspected that the most sophisticated planetary defense layer operated about a hundred kilometers away into the exosphere. He should be safe just outside the thermosphere, where security could be bypassed by tinkering geniuses.
Time to expand the universe, to crumble the ceiling of the maze, which always led to dead ends. The links of his chains were stretching, weakened. Case was beginning to feel. It was an avalanche, a torrent of fractured sensations that stole his focus and plunged him into the middle of a storm.
The emotional significance of this moment had finally made its way into his consciousness. From a simple logical conclusion, a fact stored somewhere in his memory, to sudden flames, anxiety, wishes, itch, claustrophobia, eagerness. A dormant rush waiting to be triggered by the slightest glimpse of deliverance.
The boy had been overcome by emotions even before he had the chance to take off the ground. It was better for him to experience these affective convulsions now and get acquainted with them rather than face them later when discipline and sharpness mattered the most. This was not the real test.
He had to regain his composure.
She trembled. She must have been just as anxious. His fingers dove into the pressure-sensitive dashboard. Sudden liftoff. Turbulent departure. Nostalgia felt irrelevant in a place like this. It was also unfamiliar to him. He had not left anything behind yet.
Case wished he could watch the tangled tunnels shrink and die out as he ascended. He ached to see them left behind. They could never be seen in their entirety, always concealed under the pavement, the buildings, the indifference. He could only witness the city wither into the landforms. An unknown world.
Case concentrated on the indicators to divert his wandering thoughts and harassing feelings. Altitude was increasing steadily. Fuel flow distribution on the starboard thruster was a bit off but within parameters. The temperature inside the cockpit was more or less stable. Structural integrity was optimal with no danger of decompression.
The boy raised his eyes from the numbers and discovered that the world had dissolved into obscure silken clouds of the night sky. He reduced acceleration and stabilized the altitude. The moon peering through the smoky veils set a tenebrous mood. He expected his trials to unfold within similar scenery, albeit a lot less metaphorical.
Case started practicing the standard flight maneuvers. The shuttle’s response time was not as accurate as the ground simulator’s virtual ideal conditions. Understanding the laws of physics enabled the boy to build his aircraft. As a pilot, he needed to feel and take advantage of them.
She banked a bit sluggishly, but the boy had to accept that he was flying a giant egg. It was the stripped-down version of a cruiser’s escape pod. Case’s single failsafe was the ejector seat, which he preferred not to use at extreme altitudes because he would have frozen to death on his way down.
What he could build as an engineer and what he was capable of as a pilot were two completely different things. Imbalanced, apparently. A curious realization at that moment, worrying and encouraging at the same time.
She was too tired for him. He was desperate to tear up the skies, so fed up with the simulator’s pitch, yaw, roll exercises. Urging to feel the burn of velocity, he pushed the egg as hard as possible, shooting her into the atmosphere. All or nothing.
The pressure and the heat gradually increased the strain on the deflector as the shuttle advanced through the atmospheric layers. The force field held for the moment, but it would have to withstand far greater forces upon reentry. Case redid the math in his head. Would he find the strength to tear himself away from his moments of glory and descend back into the pits after growing wings? Math remained silent.
Case suffered inside his shell, and his grimace betrayed the inner crucible. It was him battling and withstanding the forces of the universe and not the dish protecting the shuttle. He desperately wanted to sever the roots once and for all, but they kept stretching and stretching without letting him go. Friction seemed to fight against time itself.
Then, the shuttle cleared the atmosphere. Case cast away his agonizing thoughts and witnessed the infinite. He finally broke free, floating around in his tiny shell, inside the void. Yet it was darker than the sewers. This was not what the holograms promised. It couldn’t be infinite. He never imagined the infinite being dark. Were those the stars he had been aspiring to?
The planet looked so peaceful and unthreatening. Seen from such distance, nature concealed most traces of civilization. However, development had stretched into the void. Satellites, space docks, planetary defenses, and Case, floating around some debris, trying not to get noticed. Even in space, he was still buried in trash. But he didn’t see that.
It was just another obstacle course. A suitable place for him to practice his flying maneuvers and hone his skills. Although the clouds, with their irregular shapes and deceivingly morphing silhouettes, could have also provided enough challenges. The treetops, mountain ridges, canyons and all the other landforms as well.
Case paused for a moment, confused. If all he wanted to do was fly an aircraft for practice, then why did he need a deflector to ride all the way up to the stars? Did he want to become one of them or leave everything behind?
Case barged into the closet they called home, determined.
“It’s late, Case,” muttered Novak, lowering his book and yawning.
The boy paced back and forth, irritated by the tight space.
“I saved you some chicken. It’s the real thing, straight from Tier Six restaurants. Harmin called and said someone refused their order ’cause they found a bug or something. Can you believe it? Some folks didn’t even touch their plates when they heard. Well, better than going to waste, eh, son?” laughed Novak, pleased with his cynical pun.
Case couldn’t hear any of his father’s words. His mind was wandering into the near future. If so far his ambition had been tested through assiduous work, soon it would stand against the test of courage. The boy was not afraid he would lose his nerve, he was concerned about the obscure and indefinite obstacles. He was struggling against uncertainty.
“Come on, eat something. You need some real protein. Besides, that thing wasn’t cheap. Oh, and a couple of folks were asking about your perceptual-resolution holo projectors. I told them you’ll have one or two ready by the end of next week. We should try some of those interactive holo films too. You build the projectors and trade them away. We never get to try them out.”
Novak stopped talking and watched his son pace back and forth aimlessly.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Could a bird keep living inside its cage after it learned how to fly?”
“What?”
“Tomorrow... the Academy is open for admissions.”
