Chapter 2: All in a day’s work

He slurped off the last bit of his coffee tastefully and unhurriedly, and placed the still-lukewarm mug in the cleaning bay, a multipurpose shelf tucked away in one alcoves of the large black room. Looking forward to his day’s installment of the Annual Work Schedule as chalked out by the Arbitron in its 58^th update (which had been triggered at the exact moment Aseem came of age), he stretched his arms and back once more, setting aside all tingling memories of the unfortunate day he had suffered physical reprimand for infringing upon the code of the EPUU. He had tried hard to shove the shameful incident out of his mental consciousness, but the more he tried to do so, the more the memory convalesced itself.

The physical gashes he had suffered at the hands of the Arbitron-whip had all but vanished, but the deep rooted guilt of having committed a sin and trespassing upon the forbidden made him feel terribly self-deprecating and ashamed.

He had been taught since he gained consciousness that EPUU was the most consecrated, most impregnable and venerated of all texts ever to have been penned down. The holy words contained therein had been recited by the Unnamed in continuous verses and jotted down obediently and subserviently by Ardhamanas in a dazed stupor of divine communication. It was the Unnamed that had granted the necessary bends in the physical laws of nature so as to allow the potential vault of Ardhamanas’ brain to dream up the Arbitron out of thin air. Hence, Arbitron too was a divine controller; built by man (inadvertently) but made possible by the Unnamed. The world was the Arbitron and a single man at a time was what inhabited it.

It was exactly 10:30 as per the time-piece embossed in matted gray on the wall, and the Arbitron announced in a voice somewhat laced with everyday tedium, “Day 3609 of the Annual Work Schedule commences now. Next let-off scheduled at 06 hours, 30 minutes and 01 second. Proceed to and prepare for Physical Labor Bay 1.”

Ritualistically, Aseem walked over to the designated alcove in the right-wall, which opened up further to reveal what the reader would understand as a distant cousin of a treadmill and a cycle rolled into one lofty contraption; the Arbitron called it ‘Runaround’.

A comfortably wide, soft-leathered and full-backed seat lay invitingly at a 45 degree tilt from the ground. It had a seat belt latch at the side, which Aseem slipped into with habituated smoothness. Back rested and head cocked backwards in relaxed ease, he bent his legs to a spot on a foot-platform detached from the ground, where were latches in which he slipped his bare feet and felt the knots tightening around them to a comfortable yet firm fitting. Knees slightly bent at a lethargic angle, he began pacing his feet on the smooth surface of the platform, thus making the whole apparatus take a circular loop around its axis. The faster he sprinted, the faster the machine completed its loops and spun him around 360 degrees.

At first the very purpose of it would seem befuddling to the third-person, but Aseem had complemented his adolescence by being sufficiently inquisitive about it with Arbitron. As the latter explained, the machine had a deeply metaphysical and spiritual basis to it, not to mention the many physically conducive effects of strenuous exercise to the human body. The circular motion had its roots in the EPUU-ian philosophy of completeness or consummation; the circle was symbolic of the fullness of life in all its glory, and was to serve as a reminder to man that life always came full-circle, and all his deeds were met with counter deeds and that nothing ever was left open ended in the natural order of things.

More importantly, it was said that The Unnamed especially favored the fluidity as seen in the figure of the circle; it was oddly cathartic to it to know that the world was indeed governed by a circular law, a law that dominated that karma (deed) always had to have a corresponding phal (outcome or result). The unnamed, shapeless force dictated that the laws of nature be rigged in a way that all life came full-circle in some manner, somewhere. Such was the profound philosophy that Arbitron waxed eloquent on when explaining to Aseem why the Runaround was to be manned and worked with everyday of his 68 years of existence, before being loony caught up with the rigmarole of natural order.

And so Aseem kept on with his toil, running around sans-haggardness, relentlessly going on with the day’s hard work. As the hours crawled by his mind had already started feeling the numbness and laxity catalyzed by spiritual self-realization and mental hibernation. And no more did he apply any effort to his muscles, all inertia had crept out of them in the wake of his being one with his black, boxed world of the Unnamed; it went like clockwork, the rigorous yet gracefully cyclic flip-flopping of his legs, pressing down the platform and him leaning back on his seat.

It was bliss.

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Read Chapter 3

Stunted

“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.”
-Lao Tzu

Chapter 1: Arise, awake, and stop.

Aseem woke up with a big fat drool linking his lips to the black-tiled floor of his home. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but nothing commonplace too; pretty much like real life, yet not completely so. Drowsily, with the slits of his eyes clamped intermittently at the ends by solidified eye matter, he got off his bed, stretching his arms, in effect creating a number of overlapping cracking sounds of limbs shifting gears and springing from disuse into activity.

Everything about his home was pitch black, like it had always been; the blackness eased Aseem’s eyes immensely, providing a comfortable recess from the nightmare-esque visions of blinding white light he had been harrowed by during the night.

He still reminisced vividly his initial lessons from Arbitron as a child, when he was lectured at length about the irrelevance and randomness of reveries, of the arbitrary mind process that ‘spat out’ or ‘spilled over’ some seemingly perceptible but eventually inconsequential chunks of information into his sensory-perception system. The bottom-line was that dreams, nightmares, visions and such were to be overlooked at the onset, and to discern or scrutinize or hold them in observance would invite nothing but misery. And that was that.

The Arbitron whirred to life upon sensing Aseem’s movements; it kept close, ginger tab on each and every one of Aseem’s activities, even his mental upheavals, ambitions, unconscious thoughts and so on. If there was to be a dictionary where Aseem lived, the term ‘privacy’ would not find itself a spot in it.

“Coffee, black,” Aseem fed his aural response to Arbitron by the vibration of his vocal cords and the simultaneous compliance of his jaw muscles, tongue and mouth; all of it happening, to the delight and amazement of the detached observer, at the very same time as his calf muscles, femurs and countless other localized bodily systems allowed him to walk across the floor, cover about four yards, and disappear behind the enclosure that was the excretion bay.

Coffee was served after the excreta generated overnight in his body were ejected (with a little help from the suction machine) in the excretion bay. He proceeded to drinking his favorite hot cup of black coffee, tastier than anything he was privileged enough to taste.

The amazing utility of Arbitron in everything from preparing food, providing knowledge of affairs of worth, control of body activities to being a source of mild entertainment and sexual fulfillment did never strike Aseem as out of the normal; and justifiably so. It was the Arbitron itself that had made him aware of the astonishing truth of the world, the world that did not exceed beyond the four walls of the, well, world. No matter how many romantic and wishful leaps of imagination Aseem took, the boring truth remained, after all, the only truth; the objective, deadpan, singular truth.

One principle that had been fed to him over repeated lessons during his adolescence was that the simplest explanation to any occurrence is most probably the truth, or the closest to it. He liked to kid himself into believing that such a fundamental inference could have been reached even without it being pointed out to him by the Arbitron, but another of the most basic principles conveniently nullified this line of thought too. It went something like this:

When engaged in a problem of any importance or difficulty, it is never enough to keep in mind that the ‘primary human instinct’ is always wrong, and will lead to misery.

Learn to gauge this impulse, suppress it, and then use it as a beacon of how not to do the given task, instead employing the direct opposite line of action.

As to what defined ‘primary human instinct’ and ‘misery’ was mentioned only in passing, in a tasteless, bland manner; the only to way engrain them into one’s active memory was by rote learning. And rote learning was something he had practiced to manifest in himself through rote learning itself. It was like breathing; years before he was taught about it, he had been doing it as a basic function for his existence.

As he sipped at the coffee in small mouthfuls, his sight instinctively flitted to the corner of the wall farthest from him, where nondescript, dull-grey outlines formed a meaningful mathematical figure against the pitch black background:

09:09:00

Exactly nine, 60-second time intervals had passed by since he had been woken up by the Covert Hiber-Rise, one of the many cutting edge features added to the Arbitron in its latest update, a direct download from Aseem’s right-brain potential knowledge vault.

These scheduled updates had been preset to happen at various stages of his life, and ended only at the age of 50 (which is the minimum human age limit as per The Obligatory Charter for Human Development), when the adaptability of the human body to any further advancements in the Arbitron started to decline, finally ending at a state of complete mental degeneration, or senility, at the age of 68. It was sharply ironic that it took all of 18 years for man to reach the peak of mental and physical capability, only to lose it years later in roughly the same amount of time. It conformed perfectly to the Exalted Prescient Utterances of the Unnamed (EPUU), the holy word of that which transcended creation and human life itself, that which stretched beyond the world of the room in which Aseem resided.

The Arbitron was a wondrous contraption of input and output centers and collective consciousness of all human understanding and wisdom. All condensed in physical form in the shape of the jet-black world that was the room.  Its multi-pronged functionality controlled and regulated every aspect of the small world Aseem inhabited. He himself had gaped with amazement when, in his advanced-level education he had learnt that the formation of the world had taken place with the birth of his great-great grand ancestor, Ardhamanas.

It was documented in the then-Arbitron that he was half-human and half-Unnamed, making him the closest any remotely human individual could come to being the venerated creator of the room itself. Ardhamanas was created, not unobviously by the creator, the Unnamed. Naming the Unnamed was forbidden as per the EPUU, the word of the Unnamed itself. Even to think of the Unnamed in any manifestation or figure or form amounted to heresy and punishable sacrilege, if detected by the Arbitron.

On the same account, Aseem had once, during his routinely chores, stopped in his tracks to realize to his horror that he had subconsciously been thinking of the Unnamed in the form and shape of a human being, with his long, golden locks of hair caressing his broad, robust shoulders, and a loose wheatish cloak with which he covered his bosom, flowing in the light breeze inside the four black walls of the world. His stature was long and lean, his fingers dainty and feline, borderlining on the inhuman. His arms were stretched ahead in benevolent acceptance and head glowing reverently in a faint, grayish halo.

Before this utterly nonsensical figure could take complete shape, an amoebic tentacle suddenly detached itself from one of the four walls, almost as if emerging from nothingness. Simultaneously, the cool, husky voice of the Arbitron (another update from Aseem’s right-brain potential knowledge vault) flooded the world with Verse 266 of the EPUU:

Thou shalt never, in voluntary course of action or otherwise, think of restricting Me, Your Creator, the Unnamed, into the trifling moulds of human figure, nor shalt thee demean and belittle Me by confining me to the meager names of the Human language that I have so benevolently bestowed upon thee. The punishment to any such act of callousness and extreme ignorance will be no less than 25 whips on the blasphemer’s derrière at the hands of the Arbitron. Peace out.

Aseem knew he had breached the law of the land in his blatantly ignorant act of blasphemy. He braced himself for what lay ahead, even as the Arbitronic tentacle pressed him down hard on the black floor. Another arm detached itself out of the wall, and approached him ominously, with him lying spread eagle on his chest, helplessly regretting his momentary lapse of conduct. This arm being the whip-arm, was more solid and sharper at the open-end than its amoebic counterpart. The arm stopped about a foot away from his skin, and then suddenly swung over and struck his behind with immense momentum.

“One,” announced the Arbitron in his clear, penetrating voice. Aseem winced in pain and repentance.

Forgive me Unnamed, for I have sinned. Forgive me in the name of the Unnamed; let me be free of any further thoughts of corruption and heresy, thought Aseem as the flogging went on.

Two. He gulped. Forgive me O Exalted One, for I have sinned.

Three. He spat a mouthful. Forgive me…

Four. Enough. FUCK THIS HURTS!
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Read Chapter Two.

An extended introduction

I have been toying with the idea of penning down a coherent story with a plausible science fiction plot, for my literary and cinematic inspirations have predominantly been those who delve in this genre; be it Asimov, Douglas Adams, Tarkovsky, Andrew Niccol, Kubrick or Duncan Jones. I have also been wanting to dream up a plot where, through the use of many staples of this genre, I could explore themes of human imperfection, ethical issues of scientific advancement, and the paradoxes that might crop up in a fictional near-future due to the clash of morality and human curiosity.

In this hope, and after having seen the superlative ‘The Truman Show’ for the tenth time, I sat down and started writing what was intended to be short story, but has turned out to be an episodic novella of sorts. A long story or a short novel is how I would describe this currently incomplete work. Infact it is so incomplete that I’m stil in two minds whether or not to go on with my new, crazy style of writing wherein I have given up on literary adornment and ‘grandiloquence’, as one of my friends puts it (you better be reading this!). In return, I have started writing longer and faster and more spontaneously than ever before, the end result being that my writing is less voluminous and more, shall we say, reader-friendly.

My next post will be the first chapter of this exciting new story titled ‘Stunted’. I want feedback from you guys to tell me whether it is any worthy of being continued, for I am yet to write all of it. Make them as acerbic and critical as you want to, but please be honest. Thanks in advance to my nearly non-existent readers, hope you like it. START FROM HERE