Terrain

Zed picked at the earth with his fingers, digging in below the hard crust of the surface to softer soil. He’d been moving for a long time with the crouching stealth of a predator, the flats of his hands weaving back and forth over the barren terrain until the pulse in his palms jumped wildly at the spot where he now dug. He had no idea what he was looking for, though he knew it was of great value. Whichever way you looked at it, he was on a reckless and potentially terminal adventure. Had they not said, reminding them every morning and night through the sound system that ricocheted as fast as a series of bullets round the closely packed cells, that life outside the hive would bring certain death? Yet he hadn’t died. Not yet anyway.

Zed was third generation. He didn’t know first hand what had happened that led to humans living sealed up in hives. A terrible virus they were told when their education began. There were films of human bodies piled up in streets. Small symmetrical windows set in rows of tall buildings that flanked the bodies, gazed emptily over the scene of carnage. To Zed the bodies were no more than a pile of dummies. They meant nothing to him. It was just the olden-days. “Death awaits you out there”, the white-haired tutor boomed on the screen, a bony finger pointing to somewhere beyond the walls. Zed turned his head, following the finger and wondered. He knew death came for everyone anyway, so what was the big fuss? He’d lost his birth parents to death. Nobody ever told him how or why.

The individual cells were set inside a vast hive whose structure was formed of an opaque material coated on the outside with rainbow-coloured larvae that squirmed incessantly - developed to ward off any vestige of viral matter that might attempt to seep in from “out there”. The effect was actually quite soothing, with its recurrent flashes of rainbow flickering through the system. When humans crossed from one cell to another in the weekly ritual of cell checks, they bowed and gave formal little nods as they came momentarily as close together as was permitted en masse. Zed would feel the power from other bodies tugging at him like a gentle magnet.

He was seventeen years old and all sorts of strange sensations were pulsing through his body. He knew that this was a sign that he would soon become a man, but he had to be careful. The Mindometer, planted in the left ear, recorded changes in patterns of thought. If anything out of the ordinary was noted a rigorous session with an elder took place and if this failed to work the “mind-room” was sealed off. Nam tua bona* loomed at you everywhere you went. Zed had learnt how to control his thoughts by focussing his mind on an image. It didn’t matter what the image was, he would use whatever showed up: a finger, an eye, a shaft of light, such as fell through the conical ceiling in his cell at certain times of the day. He preferred light to solid things. He caught the light and held it in his memory to use when his thought-mind wandered.

Zed wondered how they were able to seal off your mind-room. He was considered to be clever and it was true he could zip through a lesson faster than the others. He keenly observed his classmates on the screen for signs of a seal-off. Then he found it. It was in the eyes. There was a fixed vacancy about them, like the windows in the films of the old dying world. He noticed everything; even his periphery vision was sharply defined.

During one of his focussing sessions Zed stumbled upon a way to hide the energetic shifts that gave people away. A trunk suddenly appeared in his mind, the kind that humans in the old world used for storage. Of itself it was no threat so he just let it be there. One day the lid stood slightly open and instructions appeared in his head: the image of a cloak and him taking it out of the trunk and putting it on. He closed his eyes and went along with it, fearing the klaxon of the Mindometer. But nothing happened. He experimented with a minor thought-crime: the desire to punch one of his classmates in the nose, but again the Mindometer remained silent. With the cloak on, his thoughts were now invisible and he was free to roam the chambers of his mind without the fear of being caught.

Protected by the cloak Zed travelled the Multiverse. He didn’t know it was that. He knew very little really. Their education centred on technology. They were trained to maintain life in the hive until a day far in the future when they could inhabit terrain once again. He began to sense that the way they lived in the hive was at odds with what he experienced “out there”. No humans appeared in his virtual travels, but the vast space and galaxies and planets he encountered expanded his awareness. They triggered a sense of deep wonder and joy, states that were new to him and overwhelming. He was shown the natural world: rocks and yellow-white sand, vegetation a colour he had never seen and the immensity of water and sky. He looked up at a panoply of changing scenes: plump clouds in varying shades of white moving across the sky; sheets of rain, thunder, lightning and a familiar blackness. Unlike the black blank slate of night in the hive, this dark was relieved by millions of bright little specks that he learned were stars and a moon that started out white and round and slowly diminished to nothing. When the stars faded, there was a moment where the black silenced everything before dawn hijacked night and the sun rose over the rim of terrain. Thus, his yearning to go “out there”, the real outside, grew daily stronger.

Zed had found a piece of sharp flint to relieve his sore hands from their task. He was digging now with an urgency spurred on by excitement and fear. Although he was invisible inside the hive, he was not convinced he was protected outside. He felt vulnerable away from the enclosed safety of the hive. It was all he’d ever known. In the vastness of his inner travels he had never experienced the sensation of wind in his hair and the supernatural glint of a sun struggling through a vaporous mist. His nostrils tingled with the pungent scent of earth– not unpleasant but distracting in its unfamiliarity. When he squinted in the distance – a concept that had little meaning until now - he glimpsed shapes dominating the hazy skyline: clusters of hives, their egg-shaped domes twinkling now and then as the sun broke momentarily through. Beyond the hives was the faint outline of what he knew must be mountains. He shuddered with the strangeness of it all. Travelling without his body was far more comfortable.

Emotions, they were told, is what had brought the old world to an end. They were stamped out now at the first hint of their presence. Even the act of procreation that required male and female to come together in some strange way they called “plugging-in,” was monitored. Zed’s turn was scheduled for his eighteenth year-day. They had selected someone for his plugging session based on matching frequencies. It was necessary, they were told, that they were electrically compatible, otherwise the coupling link would fail. He was introduced to Kaye on-screen, one way, as he was to her: a brief glimpse at first, then a few seconds more and a minute, to test their reactions. If their impulses recorded the required level of electrical activity they were permitted to “meet”, screen to screen. It was the only form of courtship they would get before they came together in the flesh in the dark of the procreation chamber. How often they’d meet afterwards would be determined by the success or failure of the first session.

When Zed was preparing to go outside, he had been given instructions in his head. Somewhere in the vicinity of the hatch a thing of great value was buried. It was his mission to find it. Disheartened and tired, Zed was on the point of giving up when the flint hit resistance. Crouching down he leaned into the hole feeling for the object he’d come up against. His fingers curled round a handle and with a little effort he was able to loosen the dank earth surrounding it and pull up a small box. Zed’s exhaustion fell away and his fingers trembled with excitement as he scrabbled at the clasp on the lid. The sun was reaching its midpoint high in the sky as the mist rolled away and all around him vague shapes became seen: vibrant plants and trees and grasses, some way off from the rim of the sunken, barren earth that surrounded the hive. Inside the box on the top of what he recognised as papers written in pen-hand, lay a heart-shaped locket that he’d seen before.

One night he’d dreamt of Kaye. They were walking hand in hand in a forest. Even though he had never seen trees, in his dream he knew them as his friends, their branches and variegated leaves leaning down to greet them as they passed. The figure of a kindly old man appeared, “This is love”, the man said, indicating Zed and Kaye. Zed turned to Kaye and opened his left hand to reveal a silver heart-shaped locket that, If you looked closely enough, was engraved with tiny roses. He gently placed it round her bare neck, her open face radiant in the shaft of sunlight that pierced the trees. They kissed...

Zed had not opened the locket in the dream and he did so now with his ragged fingers picking eagerly at the tiny catch. He drew out a small piece of furled paper, gently opened it and slowly spoke the tiny words out into the brightness of the day:

“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Zed made his way back to the hatch with renewed purpose. He had discovered what they had tried to subtract from humans – the most powerful force in the universe: Love. It might take time but with love on his side everything was going to be alright.

*For your own good