Lift-off

If there is one memory that never faded away, it is the memory of the day he left.

The last thing he saw before lift-off was one of the few gardens that had survived. It was a paradise where ancient animals roamed, preserved immaculate as a memory of a distant past. As he watched them, a strange sense of fear, of being alone and helpless overcame him. But he kept looking, fearing it would be the last time he saw the gardens.

He had been chosen to be a scout for them. But make no mistake, this wasn’t an honor at all. His mission was to spend one thousand and twenty-four years in space to reach his destination, where he would manually deploy and operate titanic machines. They did something, but nobody had told him what. It was all for science.

He found comfort knowing it was the price of paradise. As he held his knees pressed against his chest, rocking back and forth, he forced himself to repeat the lyrics from that one song he had learned at the upbringing facilities:

Everyone has to earn his place in paradise.

That song was one of his earliest memories. The other was the tales of the saviors: stories about his race nearly overpopulating their world to death. Terrible as the stories were, they served as cautionary tales. He had seen the records: billions were lost to hunger and war, the planet became a barren, deserted nightmare. Yet, from the brink of destruction, as if they were the ancient gods that his race had once worshipped, the saviors had saved the world.

The first of them brought an autonomous, everlasting source of energy and food, and other saviors soon followed with even more amazing creations. The discipline known as medicine, once a major field, became obsolete. Every basic living function became a refined, optimized and automated process conducted by a machine. He ignored and wanted to keep ignoring how these proceses and machines worked. But he knew one thing though: all the information about them was safe.

Yes, many copies of the plans for these machines were stored at underground bunkers, in computers that lasted uncorrupted for centuries, and further protected by layers upon layers of redundancy. Because knowledge was society’s greatest treasure, and every citizen knew it.

The highest dream, the most noble ambition, was to produce something worthy of being stored in those bunkers. Or rather, it was the only possible ambition: life was automated, with machines taking care of all non-intellectual tasks, from cleaning and transportation to keeping an individual alive and running the government.

At birth you were cast into a lifesuit, your home for life. Forget about hunger, thirst, sleep, sickness or decay. All you had was thought. Of course anybody could have lived forever in these conditions, but what good would that be for society? No, society needed researchers to advance the state of the art, to push the boundaries of Glorious Knowledge. That’s why at the age of eight you had to come up with an original project to research. You worked at it until you reached either a stalemate or a conclusion. Then you chose another project and continued working.

But what if you couldn’t imagine anything that hadn’t already been done? Well, that’s what the renewal chambers were for. You stepped in and they erased your memory off your lifesuit, just like wiping a hard drive clean. Your lifesuit came out pristine, ready for the next citizen, who would (hopefuly) be more productive than you. Like the song went,

Oh what glorious task, what joy.

To labor in the name of science, and expose the slacker in his defiance.

That’s right, you would think citizens would be sympathetic to one another and not go hunting zealously for those who were simply incapable of producing new ideas. Even if they had worked for more than a century, every day, all day long. Because remember, there was no need and thus, no reason to sleep, play or eat, let alone desire, suffer or love. And since there was no need for it, there was no room for it.

The traveler’s peers had always suspected he was a slacker. He had chosen the amusing life project of diving into the works of pre-saviors authors, trying to find past theories and experiments that could be extended with the infinitely superior modern knowledge. Citizens were valued accordingly to the value of their project, and anybody could connect to your vision system, anytime, from anywhere. When other citizens looked at what he was doing, they spoke such words of encouragement as:

That’s not a real project, that’s rubbish! You are a waste of resources.

Or,

Who do you think you are? We work our asses off and you just sit there doing nothing? Shame on you.

He wasn’t surprised at all when they picked him to be the scout. The System, which incidentally controlled government and the management of all resources on the planet, posted a poll to let the citizens choose a scout themselves.

How democratic.

His wishy-washy project catapulted him to the top of the poll. So one day, while he was trying to read, his vision turned red and a message popped before his eyes.

IMPORTANT MESS$##1E

Yes dear reader, the System wasn’t perfect, in fact it was riddled with bugs. They were mostly just little annoying details, but every now and then an underground bunker blew up, a train derailed or a building collapsed. But it was all ok, because nobody had to take responsability for it.

He didn’t want to listen to the message, he knew what it would say. But then, he couldn’t close his eyes or stop the annoying beeping sound that echoed inside his brain, gnawing at his patience, dripping constantly like—

He opened the message:

You have been chosen to become a glorious scout for—

blah blah blah. Yes, yes, everything is glorious, all work brings joy and knowledge is always precious. He held his face in his hands, demolished by his impending doom. But then he looked up. Perhaps, perhaps it wouldn’t be that bad.

Oh, if only he knew.