1.5 Breakaway
The day after Seeker decided that he needed to leave the slum, he realized what it was like to live through the aftermath of an idea so inspired that it teetered on the edge of foolishness. He seesawed between moments of hope and utter hopelessness. One side of him wanted to break these shackles that life had imposed upon him, but the other side doubted if that was even possible. As he started thinking about it more and more, he realized that everything he knew about the world outside the slum was second hand, based on movies and books and stories he had heard from other people. He had never left the slum in his entire lifetime.
It wasn’t that none of the Insiders never left the slum. Many slum dwellers worked in jobs outside the walls, usually jobs that no one outside the walls wanted to do. The lucky ones used to work as laborers in construction. Then there were jobs that required cleaning high rooftops, and picking and sorting trash from nooks and crevices of the city that no machine could reach. There were jobs maintaining public restrooms, cleaning out gutters and any such work that either could not be substituted by a robot, or where it wasn’t cost effective to do so. However, these jobs usually did not pay enough for these workers to ever realistically consider leaving the slum and a very small percentage of people were actually able to break away. The odds were not in Seeker’s favor.
The construction projects within the slum had been stalled for many years now, and Seeker had found a job working at a bar during the evenings, which meant he had a lot of free time during the day. Every time he felt like he had finally mustered the courage to take a step outside the slum, he got weak in the knees and his mind made up some sort of excuse for him to stay within. He had had this job for a while now and he thought he owed some sort of loyalty to Aunty, the woman who ran the place, or so he told himself. At other times, he managed to convince himself that the idea he had that day was merely a result of panic he experienced due to his near death experience, and that it was too crazy to consider seriously. This went on for a couple of weeks, and had it not been for another scare, the bold idea he had had would have remained just an idea.
As he walked back from the bar one night, he heard footsteps. Normally, he wouldn’t have paid them much heed, but the incident from that night had made him shifty. He immediately looked around for a corner to hide in. Suddenly, he felt really cold, despite the warm night. He kept peering over his shoulder until he got back to his tarp tent. When he reached his tent, his heart was still pounding. He realized then that he could not put it off any longer. He would take his first steps out of the slum the very next day. The fear that was holding him back was overcome by the fear of being afraid.
The following day, he drank a strong cup of tea and decided to follow through on his resolve. On his way to the exit, he walked past all of the places that had constituted his world thus far. He first passed the house where he lived with his mother right until the time she died. It looked exactly like he remembered it. He had never bothered to find out what had happened with the place after he had left. Someone claiming to be his mother’s relatives had been living there ever since and he could have staked a claim at the place, but the memories of his mother’s passing made him stay away.
He then passed the Youth Center, an orphanage for boys from the slum, where he had been led to right after his mother died. He saw the balding, bespectacled man who sat at the table in the office there, just as he had when he had first walked through the door. His hair was greyer and he was more portly than Seeker remembered. His first memory of that place, though, had been the scent of stale sweat, something he continued to associate with it. Over time, he had been grateful to have a place like that but the first two weeks had been unbearable. At the time, he didn’t think he could make it, nor did he want to.
He found himself standing in front of the Youth Center and staring at the building. He remembered the early days when he barely touched his food at mealtimes. He cried himself to sleep during the nights when he managed to get some sleep. He held his breath till his face turned blue, in the hope that he would stop breathing so he could be with his mother. What had his mother told him about the afterlife? Wasn’t that supposed to be a happy place where they could be together and eat all the mangoes they wanted? Why would he want to be stuck in this place when a world like that lay beyond? But somehow, he just couldn’t hold his breath for long enough. Just as he thought he had willed his body to stop breathing, his lungs would take in a fresh draw of oxygen. Life would keep clinging on.
He thought about the moment that, in some sense, brought him back to the land of the living. He peeked inside the classroom through the metal bars in the windows of the Youth Center to see a group of children sitting on the floor, just like he once had. He remembered sitting as far back as possible, leaning against the wall and trying to make himself invisible. He remembered when the social worker had first handed him that magical rectangular device called a Slate. He remembered seeing all the pictures and letters that he couldn’t make sense of. He remembered how it had lit up as he touched it, with pictures and moving images. He thought back to that strict looking lady with her hair tied in a bun, who had asked him if he’d used one before.
“That’s fine, dear”, she had said with an understanding smile. “Why don’t you come and sit in front? I can work with you today.”
The Slate had given Seeker a glimpse into another world that he never even knew existed. He had almost forgotten his grief for a precious few minutes that day. It was almost as if that little rectangle gave him a reason to live again. The Youth Center was where he learned to read and write. That’s where he had learnt numbers and counting. To him, they hadn’t been just words and symbols, but more like a passport to another universe. It was then and there that he had first been conscious of the world around him. He asked questions that even his teachers could not answer. That’s how he got his moniker. That’s how Sekar became Seeker. The Youth Center had given him a new lease on life, and a new identity.
Slowly he extracted himself from his memories and started to walk away from the Youth Center towards the wall of the slum, which represented the biggest hurdle he needed to overcome, both physical and mental. This wall had been in place well before the War, and was one of the first artifacts to be repaired after the War truly ended. It was a means to preserve the existing social order between the Insiders and the Outsiders (which was a name only used by Insiders). It was generally assumed that Insiders found the wall offensive and demeaning, but after living this way for decades, many Insiders saw the wall as a sign of safety and familiarity. Nearly half the Insiders, such as Seeker, had been born into a world where the wall always existed and a world without the wall would have disoriented them.
There were a few gates going in and out of the slum and they were usually left open. Seeker couldn’t remember a single time in his life when he had heard of the gates being shut, but had heard stories from old timers at the bar that it had been shut a few times during the War, sometimes for days on end. It had taught the Insiders to be self-sufficient, and largely untrusting of anyone outside the walls. The gates were usually manned by armed guards, who were covered from head to toe in a black uniform worn by all police forces within the district. They all wore helmets and protective eye-glasses, which covered their faces and gave them a menacing look. The menace was amplified by the large stun guns that casually adorned their waist packs. These stun guns were supposed to cause moments of excruciating pain before the victim was paralyzed for a few hours. The protocol between the Insiders and guards was understood -- so long as the Insiders did not cause trouble, the guards would stay practically invisible -- but they were also trained to deal with any trouble quickly and ruthlessly, which they did, resulting in very little of it.
The solid wall was about fifteen feet high and there were fences with some mesh wire that extended another ten feet above that. There were rumors that it was an electric fence, but no one knew for sure, since it had never been tested. There were cameras mounted along the top wall after every few feet. The physical surfaces of the wall were a metaphor for the worlds they faced. The inside of the wall was damp and covered in moss, and there was graffiti over the exposed brick. The outer surface, on the other hand, was evenly covered by some sort of shiny, metallic-looking substance that made it look slick and pristinely clean.
As he stood a few feet from the gate and stared outside, he felt even more dread than when those urchins had chased after him. He nearly turned on his heel and dashed back in panic, but something kept him from doing so. The sight of the policeman at the gate didn’t help his nerves either, but just as he stood there, terrified of taking a single step, he caught a glimpse of the world outside and his curiosity overcame his fear. He took a deep breath and looked straight ahead even as he could sense one of the policemen at the gate looking in his direction. He willed himself to take one step after another and was acutely aware of the exact instant when he crossed the threshold from inside the slum into the world beyond.
Things felt the same and yet, everything felt different. He knew that he was breathing the same air that he breathed a few seconds prior and tried to remind himself that any differences were more perceived than real, but he also couldn’t shake off the feeling of desperation. He kept turning around every few steps to stare back at the gate, almost like a child would look at their mother on the first day of school. He stopped, told himself to calm down, and after taking a few minutes to settle down, started to look around. He was standing on a sparsely populated sidewalk and looking out at a road that was separated from the sidewalk by a three foot high solid transparent barrier that seemed to shake when a car passed along the road. Up above were a network of overhead highways that were at least four levels high. The only way of crossing was by means of overhead walkways, or tunnels. The tunnels led to an equally complex underground maze of more walkways, underground transport and markets. He knew that civilization extended out at least fifty feet below the ground, and with some shop owners living in houses below their place of business, they could go through days at a time without feeling the need to rise above the ground. Because it was a clear day after many days of rain, Seeker decided that he wanted to take the overhead walkway. There was sunlight filtering through gaps in the walkways and he decided he wanted to feel as much of it, now that he had the chance.
He walked up the stairs and kept walking on bridges and moving walkways, on escalators that suddenly started moving under his feet without warning and through tunnels that blocked all the daylight out and made him squint when he got out from the other side. He shuddered every time a car passed under a bridge he was walking on as it shook ever so slightly, the wind whistling through openings in the walls. He paused to look at the roads through these gaps in the overpasses, and marveled at how much faster the cars seemed to pass at this distance. He tried to peek inside some of these cars, but all he saw were blurs.
But what he was most amazed by, Seeker realized, was the casual ease with which his fellow pedestrians overcame what he thought of as hurdles. There was an element of choreography with which they stepped off an escalator to solid ground only to immediately step on to another moving walkway, all without altering their gait. Some wore thick glasses that he knew had a screen on the inside, which took up most of their attention, and they were still able to almost absently browse through that complex landscape. On the contrary, Seeker felt clumsy and awkward with every step that he took. He also realized that his appearance made him look completely out of place.
He wore a pair of comfortable blue slacks that were a bit loose, and a thin sweatshirt that was red in color and also had an attached hood for protection from the rain. In contrast, he noticed an abundance of blacks and whites and grays in the clothing around him. While the clothes of his fellow pedestrians seemed to hug their silhouette, they did not seem uncomfortable, at least not to him. Men and women both wore long slacks, long sleeved shirts and thin gloves, even in the relatively warm weather. Apart from a few exceptions, there was nothing ornate about their clothing, or their overall appearance. A small number of people even wore protective eye glasses, the kind the police officers near the gate to the slum wore, but he hadn’t seen any Insider ever wear one of those. Even his hair felt much too long. While his hair fell to his shoulders, he noticed that men usually wore their hair short and the women tied their hair back in slick, tight ponytails. He put his hood up over his head and tucked his hair in.
Just an hour outside the slum had exposed all of his inadequacies and brought to the surface every doubt he had been feeling since he had decided to step out. Just as he was about to feel physically sick from these sensations, his gaze fell on something familiar. He had now climbed to the highest of the overpasses and through an opening in a window, he saw the same building he had seen the day he had his epiphany. He searched for the globe on the building and found it. It strengthened his resolve again. Over the next few days, whenever Seeker felt any negative thoughts bubble within, he looked for the globe. It became his anchor. While he had no idea how much significance the IA was to have in his life in a matter of months, it gave him the strength to keep going.