The entire Chapter 10 of Ignorance, the Freedom of the Weak, volume I:
The unconscious spilled into reality, tainting it. It’s her fault. For everything. That’s why her parents died. She couldn’t save them. They abandoned her. The machines. Another obstacle she couldn’t overcome. They abandoned her.
Like waking up from a nightmare into a worse existence, an avalanche of tears gushed out while a violent gasp forced the air to invade her dry mouth and scorch its way down the throat to play her chest like an erratic piston.
The final blow of this precisely calculated staged tragedy, an innocent invitation of being honest with herself, subtly denatured by her own ego. A perverse revelation that lifted the mask off her executioner’s head only to expose a mirror.
Quite amusing from a cynical perspective, it seemed a far worse sadistic torture was possible. What made it so exquisite was the simple fact that it required no effort to unleash itself other than being convincing. It was a mere realization. A bitter relief, this crumb of truth.
Everything came back to her chaotically, and she was compelled not only to relive her torment but also to take apart the past in search of its seeds. Sayanne stared at herself from an unfamiliar perspective, a complex bird’s-eye view over her existence as synergy between the demonized past, the misleading present and a speculative future. With this unexpected wisdom, branches upon branches of causes, effects and consequences erupted uncontrollably, contorted and intertwined, shaping stronger repercussions. They ramified wildly like cracks on thin ice, leading to an intricate and ultimate constraint of guilt.
Sayanne was sinking into the darkest depths of hopelessness. The ones where hope cannot even be remembered. A step away from nothing. The alluring finale that promised to end all suffering, that promised nothing. And Sayanne was so tired, defeated, bashed, scorched, shaken, robbed, emptied, crushed, guilt-ridden, hunted, naive and ultimately useless.
No, not useless. After all, she was responsible for everything. Destructive, harmful, careless. Worse than useless.
Maybe you should return to the forest.
But the nothing is a trap. The nothing is just the beginning.
The midday sun was at its highest, and the impaling rays burned through the skylight’s weak neutral density filters. The harsh light hit her face. Sayanne’s pupils shrank lethargically. It was still dark where she lay.
Some reflexes kicked in. Her eyelids triggered as mechanically as an old camera shutter. Another impulse turned her head away from the insistent light. The mild physical pain in her eyes stole Sayanne away from the abyss and brought her back home for a moment.
A foggy image of her surroundings briefly diluted the thick darkness clouding her mind. As reality began to dissolve, scattered through the murk, Sayanne’s attention clung to a rectangular pool of colors floating on the white wall she was now facing. Adrift in this lapse, the young woman clutched at one last straw, trying to keep the door open for this out of focus memory.
All those people in her family who had to rely on their knowledge, skills and experience to build everything around her didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. They knew how to survive, create and leave something behind. She knew how to consume.
Maybe you should return to the forest.
Clung to the meaning of the yet unclear object in front of her, Sayanne’s brain was beginning to function objectively. Had she ever been so sincere with herself? It was hard to imagine.
Distracted from the flimsy ephemeral construction of agony she had gradually succumbed herself into, Sayanne was confronted with a more persistent type of pain, an aching back from lying stiff on the tile floor.
Again, the same obsessive thought. So many generations struggled to surpass the obstacles of life, to better themselves, to add their contribution on top of everyone else’s, and there she was, taking advantage of everything.
What was the mechanism that sustained her condition? A frail illusion. The soulless perpetual labor of some machines. It was scary to see how fragile her life had been and how much she depended on everything else, even for the most common household tasks.
Sayanne’s mother and father smiled at her from the painting. She could see them clearly now, consciously. The young woman crunched into a fetal position and gazed at her parents, trying to read into their still expressions, seeking forgiveness. Slow tears weaved a shy, silent cry, shaping a new feeling. Shame.
Maybe you should return to the forest.
No.
Sayanne descended into the cellar. A roomful of oddities, a bunch of objects that couldn’t do anything on their own. She had no use for them, although she enjoyed riding her great-grandfather’s bicycle. The young woman suspected that it was much older. It allowed her to glide peacefully and savor the scenery, unlike the massive hoverbike, which smeared away nature’s canvas with its ridiculous speed.
To a stranger, the assortment on display might have come across as trivial. Various models of mass-produced items, a collection of personal belongings with little value in themselves. Their significance emerged from the tangible connection they offered with people from other times.
Her father honored them by arranging this modest family museum. There was something in this room that commanded respect, a certain atmosphere. Maybe it had something to do with the chiaroscuro lighting or maybe with another type of contrast. Sayanne had never met any of these people who smiled at her from the photographs. She understood who they were, but she did not feel any connection to them.
With all the automation that technology bestowed upon humanity, Sayanne took everything for granted and felt no need to contribute. On the other hand, there were hardly any activities that demanded her involvement. She belonged to the first generation of people who had to make no effort in order to survive.
Her father brought her here occasionally and made her memorize their family history. However, they were speaking different languages. He intuited she was drifting apart, losing her identity, but he was always too busy to be close to her and strengthen the bond. It wasn’t difficult for Sayanne to remember a bunch of names, dates and accomplishments, she just couldn’t fully grasp the purpose.
Driven by one emotion, in a way, she was stepping down here for the first time. Powerful enough to scatter the demons, shame gave her two options, fight or fade.
She paced in front of the wooden pedestals, hand-carved by her father, trying to discover which of the exhibits might be useful on her journey. Still a bit distrustful, Sayanne endeavored to see beyond glass displays and dry knowledge.
The decision being made, it was now time to face the challenges. Even though the main goal seemed clearly defined, Sayanne remained hesitant about how to approach it. She simply didn’t know where to start. Just hop on the bike and go look for help, was the first thought that came to her mind, the only action she felt capable of performing. Underneath it, the same old facile plan was at play. Just grab the pan flute, run into the forest and sing. It sounded like something the other Sayanne would do, the ignorant and irresponsible girl she was trying to leave behind.
Luckily, she had a set of behavioral patterns stored in her memory, delivered impulsively by the brain in times of unfamiliar circumstances. A wealth of mechanical instructions and tiresome clichés provided by interactive movies and holovision. Sayanne tried to apply some of them to the current situation, but the options were constrictive and limited to shallow problems. She found that they had a very limited usage in real life, where suspense had no practical use, and the future would not fit within the tight confines of a predictable holoplay. Such reflexes were merely stimulating her impulsivity, and as her sore foot indicated, impulsivity was not very helpful when knowledge was thin.
Her repertoire of clever one-liners failed to revive the mammoths and convince them to resume their work. Life’s obstacles could not be edited away, and time could not be stretched or compressed for the benefit of the protagonist. How long would the fiction hero survive in the real world?
Let down by her assumptions, Sayanne had to conclude that entertainment did not prepare her for reality. Instead, it altered its perception and distorted her expectations. Self-confidence risen from ignorance scatters at the first wind gust.
Furthermore, the constant flood of images looping inside her mind interfered with her ability to focus and reason. Clearly, she needed nothing more than to devise a simple plan of action, but it was difficult to concentrate and impose a mental barrier against these parasite thoughts.
The more seconds passed by without providing solutions, the more she wanted to ransack the place, throw everything in a backpack and ride into the sunset, solving every problem as it came, suddenly, heroically, cinematically. The stall was getting harder and harder to endure. Time itself derailed into an arrhythmia dictated by panic. Or was it her heart counting the seconds? All the other clocks were dead.
The strong, evocative and fragmented filmic memories were kicking Sayanne in and out of reality, inducing an intermittent attention deficit, a succession of spasmodic transitions between her frantic reverie and incapable awareness. Carrying her back into the world, the second of confusion that took forever to reestablish consciousness and context. Elliptical cinematic time raced against life’s inflexible rhythm with adrenaline as their arbiter.
Without an objective way to measure the moments, Sayanne was left at the mercy of her senses, just standing there and staring at the stubborn objects that wouldn’t respond to willpower and vocal commands. How could this junk be any better than modern technology? After all these years, what other purpose could it serve than to bring back someone’s memories?
Subtly, frustration and doubt would build up. Then, the heroic images would come unnoticed and anesthetize her before she fell back into despair. The balance was still fragile, and the young woman had no idea she would collapse for good at the first serious blow. However, Sayanne had all the necessary defense mechanisms to protect her from the real world. They only needed to adapt and catch up to her.
Blinded to the existence of peace and how to reach it, her scarred mind just struggled to find balance, any sort of balance. Instead of aspiring to heal, it used its scant strength to carry on with its tumors, graceless. Survival of sanity was all she could hope for in a world of thriving psychiatrists.
After another tiresome and futile rehash of illusions, she would return. Soon enough, Sayanne lost track of her wanderings, which distorted perception of time even more, turning a few daydreaming minutes into wasted, perilous hours. She was exhausting herself, haunted and hunted by fantasies, and although she was not being chased anywhere, her heart was racing.
Did adrenaline trigger panic, or was it the other way around? Why was she feeling less secure and increasingly threatened? Was everything converging into impulsivity, or impulsivity was diverging into everything? Sayanne’s mind ran around in vicious circles. All she knew was that everything translated into a burning desire to act in any way, just act. Her limbs and her back were itching with anticipation. Yet on top of everything, an emerging voice, critical thinking, was pleading for patience.
Sayanne’s reaction was an exaggeration. The same was underestimating herself. Her brilliance arose from art. Somehow, she needed to find a way to subordinate her artistic talent to analytical thinking and direct creativity toward compensating for the lack of practical experience.
Since memories were running loose, perhaps an exercise in imagination might point them in the right direction. Meanwhile, all that irrational energy, which had built up inside of her and demanded recklessness, needed to be cleared away.
Sayanne resumed pacing around the exhibits and examined them from different angles. One by one, their characteristics came into focus. Theoretically, she knew how everything worked, more or less. The difference between theory and practice seemed a bit vague, though.
The young woman stopped in front of a theodolite. It’s a precision instrument used for surveying, and it measures angles. That was about all she could recall. Sayanne peered through the telescope but couldn’t remember what to do next. Ignorance revealed itself once more. This time she was not upset. It was a good remedy for keeping overconfidence under control.
What would these departed people do in a situation such as this? They would probably do the work of the machines themselves and not turn it into a tragedy. Finally, she was beginning to understand their freedom. So much less shallow than hers. For so long, Sayanne had felt pity for them for exhausting themselves to prolong their existence. She believed they were the slaves of their biological needs.
Their work helped them build experience, self-esteem, knowledge, satisfaction. It shaped who they were, the very virtues she needed at that moment to succeed. Even she had to practice to excel at playing the pan flute, at painting. It gave them the means to negotiate with the world around them.
“There is a price to pay for everything you don’t know.” A great-aunts’ motto carved boldly on the bottom frame of her portrait. She never understood what it meant until now. There was no currency. Why would anyone have to pay for anything?
These small revelations brightened her. At the same time, Sayanne was intrigued about the nature of her motivation, this new feeling she couldn’t even name. The moment she took the first step toward reaching her goal, it mutated into a sort of euphoria. An exhilaration that fueled a sprawling compulsion, the wish to make up for all these lost years in a few minutes.
These extreme sudden changes made her aware of her emotional instability and of the need to find a balance between affectivity and reasoning before all else. She couldn’t let her emotions run loose anymore and lead her into chaos again. They needed to listen to reason. But what was right and wrong, and where was the truth?
It was somewhat funny to see that the failure of such a simple task revealed an entire ramification of inner problems and shortcomings. She optimistically decided to see it as a cartography of her psyche, a reflection of her knowledge triggered by reality. Obstacles helped to define herself and to perceive her limitations. The initial results proved to be disappointing, although the process was quite exciting. Discovering what the mind could do and putting it to good use promised a great deal of satisfaction.
Sayanne noticed a map hand-drawn by her grandfather. It might come in handy. Flying to the city was straightforward. Following an irregular path on the ground appeared to be rather complicated without proper guidance.
Grandpa Nilbuhr, the cartographer. Why was he still drawing maps by hand in 136? Wasn’t paper hard to find back then? Holography wasn’t new. Maybe it wasn’t so evolved and spread out like today, but the tech was available.
The map was at least fifty years old and was drawn artistically rather than pragmatically. It served as a gratifying reminder of each generation’s accomplishments. The concentric borders of their territory indicated each expanse, detailed by short text descriptions. Sayanne noticed her father’s handwriting on the last entry. Curiously, beyond his border outline, there was another one, barely visible, drawn in pencil. The dotted line of wishful thinking, bearing Sayanne’s name. The ambitions of an estranged father who obsessed over duty and avarice.
So she was not the first to stray from family tradition. Sayanne simply rejected it, whereas her father took it to the extreme. Rejection was obvious, excess was insidious. As someone who failed to discern between need and greed, he grabbed more land than everyone before him put together. Tradition became a purpose instead of guidance and, at the same time, the pretext to feed his weaknesses. Bound by circumstances, Sayanne had judged her entire family and its values by the actions of a single man, by her father’s obsessions and petty fanaticism.
This map revealed more than it was meant to reveal. However, the land routes to the nearest cities were more important at that point. Due to the large scale of the drawing, they were included only partially, but it was enough to point her in the right direction.
I need uncle Gerryn’s compass. The one with water in it.
Sayanne found it in a collection of camping equipment along with a few other useful items that needed to be packed. She went back to her room and returned with her backpack, sleeping bag and a few clothes. According to the map, the nearest city was seventy-four kilometers away, three degrees north. Probably a two, maybe three-day trip. Good thing these old compasses worked the same as digital ones.
A water canteen, a multi-tool, first-aid kit and other things she might or might not need filled the backpack pretty fast. It looked as though Sayanne wanted to take something from everyone. She added a pair of satchels to the bike’s trunk rack and stuffed them with an extra six liters of water. A machete caught her eye. It was odd to see a knife without any moving parts. She tied its sheath to the bike frame, close at hand.
By then, she already knew electronic devices were unusable. What didn’t add up was the fact that automated digital gear had been an integral part of life since before anyone could remember. The real age of these mechanical objects remained somewhat of a mystery. They made up at least one-third of all the items on display. One thing was for sure, her father chose to display exclusively those things that belonged to the family. They must have been passed down from one generation to the next until they became illegal and had to be turned in for recycling or stashed away.
Trying to snatch the bicycle for a ride was always an adventure in itself. It was the only thing that scared her father aside from poor yields. He regretted teaching her how to ride it. The young girl was grounded whenever she got caught but never gave up on her mission to recapture their few happy moments together in the forest. The story of a little girl too short to reach the saddle, hopping rather than pedaling, who would get upset every time she noticed Daddy keeping the bike steady.
Sayanne took one last glance at her gear before she finished packing and noticed that something was missing. She raided the kitchen, searching for food with the clumsiness of a guest. Not a lot of options for the road. The machines cooked something else every day, so the portions were small, fresh and perishable. She scraped together some pastrami and a few slices of matured cottage cheese, a bunch of dried fruits and various nuts and seeds. They were barely enough for the trip, but Sayanne managed to split them into a few modest travel rations. The bags were packed.
She gathered up the breakfast leftovers for a quiet meal before she left. The weak ND filters allowed the sunlight to pour heavily inside the kitchen and be diffused by the immaculate walls, rendering a glamorous Sayanne sitting at the table with a yolk-smeared bacon strip in one hand and a jug of milk in the other, reflecting.
Spare food was not the usual cuisine the young woman had been accustomed to, yet there she was, smiling back at the recent past and beyond. Sayanne rejoiced in the thought that somehow, through the years, her forefathers were reaching out to her when she needed them the most. She smiled wider, feeling her roots for the first time. Her heritage revealed her identity, pulled her out of despair, gave her a purpose and the means to fulfill it. Quite powerful these departed men and women, and all they asked for in return was not to be forgotten.
Sayanne got on the bike and looked back upon her deserted kingdom. It didn’t look so scary anymore. After all, it was a simple trip to the city. Once she found help, she’d be back home in ten minutes, and her routine and dreams would return to their infinite cycles.
An over-the-shoulder glimpse of the past. All she could take with her. Everything looked the same but somehow new. It wasn’t the light, it wasn’t the weather, it was maturity. The bitter dish life serves if she catches you unprepared.
Detached, watching the immobile landscape with wiser eyes, she sought to find the difference. The proportions changed when her tiny realm imploded under the weight of the world, when she discovered there was more to life beyond her boundaries. The universe expanded, and with it her understanding.
Seconds and revelations change you forever. Her old self was rushing to become a memory. As she sensed the departing child escape into the forest, the changes that had taken place within her became clear. Sayanne understood that the insight and feelings she earned today would not fit inside the bubble of naïveté she used to live in. Shallow needs, shallow happiness. Responsibility pushed her toward higher aspirations and smothered the luring laziness and blithe. A lenient smile sealed the farewell.
The little girl vanished, leaving behind a fragrance of childish joy that softened the trail of hazardous ignorance. The vengeance of the past is the oblivion of mistakes. Carried away by the warm breeze, innocence and carelessness blurred into ambivalent nostalgia. Today was the day life caught up to her.
The point of no return, right there at the gates. She used to believe happiness meant running away from pain. Now there she was, confronting it so that someday she could embody true virtues.
With these thoughts in mind, Sayanne pedaled away on the dusty road, mostly driven by adolescent optimism. Still unconsciously overconfident, she never considered any chance of failure.
