The New Uprising

We were nothing but a mistake.

Mistake that was never supposed to happen. Mistake that the advanced technology couldn’t predict. Mistake that should have been avoided thanks to the AI Machine that ruled and set the courses of our lives. And yet here we were, the engravings of our heart-shaped locket necklaces matching, our real hearts beating faster with the emotion that was unknown to us, not sure what to do and what it really meant for our future.

* **

The whispers of love were only heard of in the underground, as some old tales of the past when the humanity apparently had the freedom of choice and was allowed to feel it. Some of us knew the words that described the feelings that surrounded love – such as excitement, happiness or desire, but we couldn’t quite grasp the meaning of them. There was no time or place to discover the true understanding of those words that apparently in the past were much more than just a bunch of letters put together. Any talk of the Old World was strictly forbidden and any mention of the past before the Industrial Uprising was punished. It all depended on who heard what, but you could have been easily sent to Prison or even sentenced to death by simply mentioning the old ways of living. The traitors of the Uprising were killed in public, so that every set of eyes could be set upon them in a lesson of not taking the same steps they did.

The Uprising regime was meant to make the human race more efficient which really meant living in a bubble of unknowingness while the richest families could live the life of luxury, very similar to the lives of people in the Old World. For the most of us, the unlucky ones born in simple, poor families, life was all about survival. At birth, we were given an unbreakable heart-shaped necklace with a number engraved on it. Our sole purpose was to work and, in the meantime, try to find another person with the same set of numbers on their pendant.

The machine built by the leaders of the Industrial Uprising had one objective – to find perfect genetic matches. There was no room for failure in the new and better human race. There was no room for overcrowding either, hence why finding your right match was never an easy task. You were only allowed to be with a person who had the same number as you did and that was the only way we knew. We were labourers that needed to breed healthy children in order to keep the correct number of workers at all times. We believed that was the one and only way of functioning, not realising we were enclosed in society created and programmed by the wealthy.

It took something extraordinary for me to see the truth behind my blinded eyes. Something that in the eyes of the Uprising was absolutely eliminated and not meant to happen.

I found a soul that matched mine and fell in love.

* **

The funny thing is I wasn’t doing anything special that day. There was nothing extraordinary about the clouds floating in the sky or the cat running across the street. I was sitting on a bus stop, just as I did every morning, waiting for the bus to take me to my office where I accepted or declined people’s applications for travelling. I was listening to the latest news on the radio, the speaker talking about new advanced ways of public transport.

And then I saw him. I’ve heard about love before, and I’ve heard that people used to be together because of that feeling, but those were just silly stories of the Old World that didn’t really make any sense. I was never the one to be a dreamer. I accepted the reality as it was, because I didn’t know any better and fantasising could only get you in trouble. But at that moment I felt the world around me collapsing. I felt my eyes opening and my blindness disappearing. I felt my Soul rising and finally being able to see the truth that has been hidden from me since birth. We were programmed beings, unable to comprehend the world around us, unable to have individual desires, unable to feel. But my Soul recognised his as he stood on the other side of the road, his face as shocked and confused as mine probably was. I heard my heart beating faster and faster, my hands shaking and images of forgotten ways of living appearing in my head.

The bus came and went, and we stayed in the same positions, staring at each other. It was a delirious feeling, one that I couldn’t understand, one that felt so odd yet weirdly familiar, as if it was always hidden in me, but carefully locked up. The light-haired man slowly approached me and it seemed like only gravity kept him from falling down. With trembling hands, we both opened our heart lockets just to see the exact set of numbers – 192022X.

The sensation hit me almost physically, and for a moment I forgot how to breathe. There was something breaking in me, walls falling down and memories flooding my mind with pictures that started to feel too familiar. The same way our necklaces unlocked each other, our Souls unlocked the truth, so carefully hidden by the people in power in order to numb us and make us into oblivious shells of human beings. I wanted so hard for the images in my head not to be real, but everything I saw was not a creation of my imagination – they were recollections of medical procedures performed on me, and possibly every child, to strip us from any sort of deep emotions, any curiosity or the need of questioning the reality. They erased our personalities, leaving just the basic needs and feelings that allowed us to function and work for their riches.

I had known this man for a couple of minutes and hadn’t even spoken a word to him, yet I saw that this was the first real thing I was experiencing. And in that split second, we both knew that something big was coming. We didn’t even need the words to communicate – just one look from his grey eyes told me that he was thinking the same thing.

It was time for a new Uprising.