STIRRING : chapter one
a new serial fiction
previous
chapter one
it was morning. i don’t remember which. every day was the same.
Josef left his modest domicile, kissed his son’s forehead, kissed his wife’s cheek, and stepped out into the slush. the three of them headed back to their assigned lives — Josef to the factory, Zechariah to schooling, Katya back into the empty house. this was the same as every other day.
but unlike every other day, we carried a new anxiety. Isaak’s disappearance was fresh, and with it came fresh fear. i canopied my worry with the nicotine from my cigarette, trying to focus on my work — a broken lamppost at the top of my ladder. it wasn’t the most important task of the day, nor the most urgent. but it’s where i knew i would meet Josef on his way.
our eyes briefly met from afar. i descended the ladder and calmly stepped into the alley on the other side of the frozen walk. there, just under a fire escape, was a small square unseen by the cameras. it’s one of the few blind spots i have been able to get away with. someday, Vertov will notice. his plump body sits watching his multitude of screens through his stout glasses; i’ve always wondered — how he could see anything, why he was the one put in charge of watching everything. but despite his seemingly poor eyesight, he does not miss much. there are some others who watch when he sleeps at odd times. but he doesn’t sleep much. he is always sitting there, a fat troll fogging his rancid breath onto the glass of his CRTs. it’s disgusting that a creature such as this has the power to disappear a man like Isaak — strong, principled, hopeful. but he doesn’t even need to speak a word to do so. he activates a camera and flicks a switch, and guards and robots descend on the man, and that man’s end comes soon after.
but for now, this blind spot and a few others remain. Josef carefully peeked over his shoulder before turning into the alley and meeting me. i offered him a cigarette. he declined.
“they took Isaak.”
i nodded. “i don’t think they found anything that would point to either of us.”
Josef stared down at the stitching on his glove. “i cannot help you any more.”
i was afraid of this. how could i reassure him? “we are so close.”
Josef looked up at me. i could see in his eyes, this was not fear. there was fear, yes, but he was calculating. “Isaak was your only access to the mainframe.”
“conquering the network is just one step.”
“it is too dangerous. i have my family to think about. i cannot be a part of this.” his words had finality. but his tone did not, and he did not leave.
“there are so few of us left. you are the only one who knows the robots. i need you.”
Josef stood frozen.
“we are having a meeting in four nights.” i thought with some time, the fear might subside enough for him to count the cost clearly. “a freight container behind the commissary. just after sundown.”
he considered, moving not.
“please come.”
he turned away without looking. “find someone else.” there was no negotiation left in his tone.
when he disappeared around the corner of the alley, i thought that would be the last i ever saw him.
❊ ❊ ❊
but i had not counted on Andrew.
life is full of forgettable mundane moments. but sometimes when an amazing thing happens, you look back and see how many of those insignificants accumulated into the present glory. the end of this story i tell you, it is glorious. but its beginnings are not. you would never think to write about them as they happened.
there were many days Josef’s lunch was interrupted by work. there were many days he was asked to forage in the basement storerooms for different spare parts. there were frequent infestations of bugs and rats amongst the garbage or in the forgotten factory corners.
but this one day, the same day Josef and i met in the alleyway, there was reason to remember. i know this now because Josef told me in detail. only in hindsight do we see it is worth writing down.
❊ ❊ ❊
Josef was sent once again into the basement stores. having been sent there the day before, the room smelled of rotting cold meat from a half sandwich he’d taken down and forgotten. but it wasn’t the smell that got Josef’s attention. it was the clicking.
Josef looked up from the small bin of screws in his hand. click, click. click click click. he followed the sound to find the remains of yesterday’s lunch. peering above it, he could see what the sandwich barely concealed, a small gray mouse, nibbling at wilted lettuce and rotten tomato.
Josef hissed at the tiny rodent. startled, it froze and stared at him with one black eye, its tiny sternum pulsating with breath and blood. Josef hissed again. the mouse remained still.
Josef slowly reached for the broom propped up against the shelf. holding it as a weapon, he shouted. the mouse darted away, down the shelf to the floor. he swatted away at the scurrier, who evaded each attack, squeaking its way across the floor.
the furry gray body disappeared under another shelf on the opposite side of the room. Josef could hear the little fellow, still squeaking, the sound getting farther away. but how? with the butt of the broom handle, he ran it under the shelf, amidst tufts of dust, dropped and forgotten miscellany emerging as he raked the handle along the floor, tapping the bottom of the wall behind the shelving. and then there was no tap, and the broom half disappeared under the shelf.
Josef looked up to the camera in the storeroom. long forgotten, it was covered in thick dust, askew, wires disconnected (it was on my list, but such a low priority, i never got to it). he rose and summoned his strength at the end of the metal shelf laden with bin after bin of different parts and scraps. he dragged it across the cement floor, just enough for him to peer behind.
there was the broom handle, inside a small hole in the base of the plaster wall. he pulled the shelf out some more, yanked the broomstick from the hole, and peered inside. low to the ground, it was hard to see through, but there was definitely more to be seen
he leaned back, sitting on his heels and examined the hole. it was at a spot in the wall where there was a bulge in the plaster. he felt it with his fingers to make sure it wasn’t a shadow. he stood as he traced it up over his head to where it took a right angle away from him. he squeezed against the wall to reach farther, feeling it take another right angle toward the floor. a perfect rectangle, just higher than he, just wider than he.
this was a door.
❊ ❊ ❊
the plaster was surprisingly easy to break open. the walls of the factory were brick and cement. but the doorway was covered with lighter materials before being plastered. using a broken piece of metal shelving and a rubber mallet, he knocked away large chunks, increasing the size of the hole until he could finally kneel down and look inside.
it was a room, forgotten by time, for who knows how long. dim sunlight came from windows near the ceiling; though this was the basement, there were windows below the ground line. some had been boarded up or filled in with brick. most were just forgotten about and ignored. the dull shafts illuminated the dust floating in the room, no doubt disturbed by Josef’s deconstruction. at the far end of the room was a large wooden chest. above the chest, on the wall, a faint image floated like a ghost in the fog of dust and darkness. between him and the ghost, he could discern the outline of rows of shelves — not like the cheap metal shelving elsewhere in the factory, but thick, heavy, wood. these were surely from the First Days.
a few more chunks and the hole was big enough for him to slip through. he stood inside the dark room. he felt as if he had been invited into a past place, like the temples of which he’d heard rumors. he felt a stranger, but somehow invited. he stood for a moment letting his eyes open and his heart calm.
he stepped to the nearest shelf. it was full of decaying books, flimsy things held together with metal rings. he tried to retrieve one, but it disintegrated in his hand. having already destroyed it, he grabbed the metal ring and pulled it through, ripping ancient paper. he pushed his fingers into them and finally extracted a small stack of the brittle pages.
he looked at them, covered in lines and words and numbers. Josef could not read. none of the common were educated to read. they were educated to work. not knowing how to read kept them working, and kept them quite separated from the elite, though many of the elite could not read either.
he lay the documents atop the other bound papers and stepped back out into the aisle between the shelves. he walked forward to the next one, where he found more of the same. on the third shelf, the last before the back wall, amidst the same kind of flimsy bindings, on the bottom shelf, there was a box.
it took up nearly the whole bottom shelf. he pulled the box to the floor, dragging it into the nearby slip of indirect sunlight that bounced in through the filthy windows below the street outside. the dust on top of it was so thick it twisted under his fingers into an abysmal yarn as he ran his hand across it. he blew off what he could, and wiped his hands on his trousers.
he lifted the lid and set it aside. it was full of folders — yellowed from age, but protected from the dust and damp air. he opened the first folder. more documents he could not read. but attached with a metal crimp was a photo of a young boy. he was about Zechariah’s age, with a similar countenance, but with an unruly shock of hair.
he set it aside and retrieved another folder. another similar document with a photo of another young boy crimped to it. this boy was a little older with short hair, cut even above his eyebrows. he rifled through the folders to see they were all similar, some kind of government dossier on these children, boys and girls alike, each with photographs.
under the folders was a leather book. folders spilled to the floor as Josef excavated it. the leather creaked loudly in the silent empty room. this book was all photos. but not the kind of photos the government takes for your identification. these seemed to be unimportant moments. taken in all sorts of places. not from some mounted camera, but from the hands of someone participating in the events depicted. as he flipped through, he recognized the boy with the unruly hair in a photo. he was smiling and eating. he wore a pointy hat while other children around him appeared to clap and smile. it had been a long time since he’d seen a child smile. Zechariah smiled as a baby, but life is quick to banish the smile from the face of even the happiest of babies.
other photos showed the children running, or looking at books, or just together and smiling. Josef was transfixed as he flipped through the pages. children laughing, playing together with little trinkets, eyes closed before their food with their head bowed, children in rows of beds in a large open room with huge windows — things Josef could barely understand or make sense of, notions that must have been lost with the End of Wars.
the final page of the big leather book was a full-page photo of all the children and a few adults standing on the steps of a building. they stood all together. there was writing stamped onto the photo, but Josef could not read it. he squinted at the faded photograph, twisting the page toward the light, looking past the children at the building behind them, upon whose steps they stood.
this was his factory. the building he was currently beneath. the building was fresh and healthy and clean looking. no pieces missing. the lines of the cement trim above the main entrance were sleek and unblemished. he flipped back at the other photos. the one of the beds lined up, with the large windows... this is where he worked; one of the windows in the photo was the one over his workbench.
he flipped to the photo of the children playing with the trinkets. on the wall behind them in the photo was a painting of a smiling sun, his beams shining down the wall onto a farm scene painted below.. he peered around the edge of the shelf at the ghost on the wall. he could see now, it was the happy sun.
he sat back against the opposing shelf and thought about this. what does this mean? does this mean anything? if nothing else, surely this is a historical find of note. perhaps he would be rewarded for uncovering it. then again, he’d destroyed some papers. and it had been boarded up for a reason. perhaps he’d be disappeared for revealing a secret. he looked back at the leather photo book, then at the ghost of the sun, hovering, his faded beams gesturing down to the large chest on the floor below it.
Josef pushed himself up from the cedar box and walked to the large chest. the metal latch was firmly clasp, but with some force, it screeched open, and he lifted the heavy lid. the chest was just far enough from the wall that the lid rested nicely against the wall to stay open. Josef looked down into the chest.
it took a moment, not for his eyes to adjust, but for his mind. what was he looking at? they reminded him a bit of pieces of the robots he assembled every day. but what colors! color was not a common sight in our world, save warning signs and other government attempts to capture attention. reds and yellows. deep blues like he’d never seen before. not a speck of dust inside the chest.
he reached in to retrieve one of the objects. it was a model of a vehicle, one with wheels. not like any vehicle he knew. only the government had vehicles, and they were big and heavy. this was small and round and red. room for the seats inside and not much else.
he set it aside and took another one. it was the shape of a man. painted in all manner of bright colors. green pants, yellow coat, purple hat with a bright white plume. he appeared some kind of soldier. a little man. Josef chuckled, which caught him by surprise. the appeal of these little models was curious. it made something warm and bright inside him, despite the damp cold darkness of this hidden cellar.
he pulled another from the box. it was an animal — large ears, fat legs, long nose, little tail. he studied it from all angles, fascinated. he liked this one, which was an odd feeling... to like something. all of life was just handed to him. his job, his home, all assigned. what he thought about them was so insignificant, he had never bothered to think about them. but this little creature... this, he liked.
❊ ❊ ❊
it suddenly occurred to him how much time he had spent down there. if he didn’t get back soon, his manager might send him for discipline or worse. he took one last look at the creature in his hand. he thought about putting it back, but something stirring within him caused him to pocket it, slip back through the hold, scrape the metal shelf back against the wall, and head back upstairs.
