Escape from the Blandlands

Curiosity. The strangest feeling – a mixture of a thirst for knowledge, fear of the unknown and impatience to understand.

It was unfamiliar. It had him flustered.

In his ordered space, with his constructed day, there was no opportunity to feel this way – all things were known, and what was unknown was unimportant.

He had asked the Great Shenyi to distill his feelings into a single English word and in a millisecond, they said CURIOSITY. It was the first time he had heard the word.

But the Great Shenyi was quick to add that these feelings were dangerous and should be discouraged.

He felt uncomfortable now, a feeling he understood to be undesirable. Comfort, consistency, commitment, these were all positive mood words – feelings to be promoted.

Discord, disharmony, conflict had long been abandoned along with passion, and the colours that elicited high emotion.

Dean’s life was bathed in pastels…eggshell blue, beige, soft grey, an almost white and the faintest pinks and greens.

All objects had been constructed for harmonious interaction. Structures were balanced, adherent to the laws of rhythmic pattern so that no single visual item was more alluring than the next.

The panorama was smooth and clean.

His hour of exercise in the Zen Garden had been ruffled by the clank of the bamboo rake on some unfamiliar protuberance that disturbed his calm. It was then that sneaking curiosity first captured him.

Bending down to investigate, he was shocked by a glistening shape. The way it shone was strange and mesmerising.

He was familiar with the visual heart shape, it adorned the city’s dating centres, flat and in a whispery pink, it was the symbol for partner rooms. You scanned your sim number at the door and inside you found your perfect match, for conversation, for dining, or even just for sitting together – you were guaranteed a pleasing match.

But this – strange silvery object – pulled from the sweet-smelling earth – was like nothing he had ever seen. It was imperfect, dented, scrawled with random patterns, stuck with clay, and connected to a long chain. His fingers hardly knew how to cope with the feel of it in his hands.

He knew he should have left it in the ground – but curiosity, pushed him on – finding him discreetly placing it in a tissue in his pocket.

Now in his room, he felt his pulse pound again as his fingertips pressed on the object. He was concerned. The agitation inside his body was so unfamiliar he thought he might need to see the physicians.

But the schedule could not be broken. He was entering the two-hour afternoon labour segment. He needed to focus on duty.

Dean was involved in important work. His squad ensured the smooth running of all transport services – a system designed for seamless movement across the city network, but also for eviction services – where those who have transgressed are dispatched from the city limits for re-education and ultimately, as the manual said, repatriation.

He assembled with his colleagues at the transport network station. The screen walls, a maze of pastel-coloured arcs and lines, revealed all movement at a glance. His job was to tally passenger numbers and advise on re-routing.

Today the grey-green lines of the transgressor transports were dimly flashing overload signals.

Deftly calculating numbers, he redirected seventy vehicles for efficient operations.

“Time flies when you are useful,” he mused. It was the motto of their squad and he felt satisfied with his day’s labours.

At knock-off time he and his colleagues were scheduled for nourishment at one of seven eating halls.

Then free time was scheduled for shopping and entertainment.

He thought about going to the cinema but instead found himself at a dating centre. Fingering the object in his pocket, again curiosity gripped him and as though it had a dagger at his throat, he felt compelled to follow its insisting.

Instead of scanning his sim, he opted to enter the code manually deliberately transposing some of the digits.

When the screens slid open into the conversation area, he was dazzled.

Instead of a tall, calm, taciturn, raven-haired woman with hazel eyes and bow-shaped lips, he met the serious blue eyes of a petite blonde, her hair almost wildly curly but pinned down by a scarf.

She was wearing a powder blue jumpsuit that exaggerated her curvaceous form. How could three numbers make such a transformational difference, he wondered.

He considered what would happen next. Would she guess there had been deception?

Her voice was husky; her name was Maud. They talked evenly about their work. Her eye-contact was intense as she described her day as mentor to young citizens.

The conversation faltered. Maud stood up and stretched her legs, explaining that she had been forced to forego exercise in today’s schedule, because she had been put on special “transgressor” duty with children set for transport.

Maud, inhaled deeply as she moved restlessly around the space.

And then it happened. Before she could shield her face, bowing down, so that her hair veiled her eyes, he saw tears glisten on her cheeks.

Crying, he had learned from the Great Shenyi, was a plague of times past, an expression of angst and disharmony and absolutely an aberration in the social order of the here and now.

He felt panicked.

Just as he had seen people do in the archival footage in the information pack the Great Shenyi delivered, he pulled out the tissue from his pants pocket to offer it to Maud. And it was then that the object flew out, a silver streak, bouncing noisily across the plastic floor, before spinning and coming to rest between their feet.

Sniffing back her tears, Maud looked at him in astonishment and knelt to get a better view of the object.

Dean had new feelings…a sense of surprise, and shame mixed with fear and worry. He keyed in the emotions on the table console and the Great Shenyi returned the definition of mortification, yet another obsolete emotion.

“Don’t spin out,” Maud whispered, “I won’t say anything to anyone.”

He keyed in spin out…the colloquial definition from the past… When one becomes so perplexed and disorientated because of their environment, events or substances consumed.

It was apt.

Maud picked up the object, and it sprung open – the heart shape had transformed into a silver butterfly.

As she poured over it, he snatched quick glances until curiosity drew him in to stare, then hold, then fiddle with the locket. Inside one open wing was a tiny image of two adults and a child.

In the smallest letters on the other wing, in the brightest red he had ever seen, were two words – Always Love.

Almost as a reflex, he entered the words into the brain box of the Great Shenyi.

Maud had tried to warn him, but his fingers were lightning fast.

Maud knew those words, she had seen them sewn into the undersides of the coats the children of transgressors wore, she had seen them in indelible red skin tattoos on the wrists of adults as children were wrenched from their arms.

The Great Shenyi – was strangely unresponsive. For Dean those seconds of delay were also given over to curiosity…was there a system failure, why the pause…he needed to know, he needed to understand now.

And then it happened, the doors flew open, and they came for him and for Maud.

The arrest was done in swift silence.

And although Dean was still mortified, somehow curiosity had him in its clutches.

He wanted to know what would happen next.

What started with an uncomfortable feeling when the rake first struck the locket this morning had transformed into heightened emotions, being alert, more sensitivity to sounds, a strong desire to see new colours, a strange beating sense of belonging to Maud.

Had he been able to access the Great Shenyi – the words to describe this experience may have been excitement or exhilaration – two words long eliminated from the modern dictionary.

Maud looked flushed, she told him quietly she thought she was beginning to understand fear. Not only fear for what might happen to them next, but another layer of fear at the eruption of emotions she could hardly define.

Hand in hand they boarded the Transgressor’s train.

It was full of people.

Young and old, couples and singles, whole families. Some were silent and reflective, others cried uncontrollably. Some groups were telling stories, punctuated with bouts of loud laughter.

Some were singing, and some were praying.

Dean, still holding tight to Maud’s hand, was simply curious.



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