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