We Are Born

When we are born, we are taken to the Institution. They feed us, raise us, provide for us. Their Scholars teach us to think. Their Admirals teach us to fight. Their Counselors teach us to obey. And we become who we are meant to be—who they want us to be.

It is the will of the State. To be accepted in society, you must accept society, and their goals for you. They say it in the ancient Axiom: "A life of success is a life of submission. A life of completion is a life of compliance. A life of stability is a life with the State." Their path for our lives is the path for our prosperity. It is the best path. It is the true path. It is the only path.

But there are limitations to this path. Namely, the Patrols who guard the edges. If ever we veer too far to the edge of our path, they kindly place a barrel on our head and give us a warning to turn back to safety. And we, being the tractable men that we are, immediately forsake our dreams of the unknown and return to the proper trail.

The Patrols are sharp. They use their prowess to keep us sheltered. Their eyes are all-seeing. Their minds are all-knowing. And their influence is all-powerful. We must yield to them. We must yield, or we must die.

Keeping us on the established course is not the only responsibility of the Patrols. They must also keep back those forces which threaten to oppose us. For us to truly be safe, we must not be infected with the knowledge of Outsiders. Their ideas will corrupt and confuse. The ears of all who listen to them are torn from their scalp, their mouths sewn shut, and their hands—even those hands which are so capable of doing every good for the State—are severed from their flesh, all to save us from any unruly epidemic of ignorance.

But once—once—I did hear their words, and I was not unhinged. My mind was not shadowed, my eyes were not blinded. Their words screamed in my ears, beat in my heart. The words so simple, the message so clear. I was not addled. I was enlightened.

I heard their words in a quiet place, long, long ago. So long that I wonder if even the wise, crippled Sage could remember. I was but a Youth, delivering a message down a familiar corridor. In those days, the great window of the Drop both frightened and intrigued me, and I stuck close to the inner wall. I knew I could not fall from the inside, for the stone is strong, and the glass will not shatter. But chance can unnerve even the bravest of souls. So to the inside I stayed.

Until the day I heard a faint rump against the window.

The noise was soft in the soundless hall. It beat once more, then three times over. Repeated, unsteady, unfaltering. My hands, my entire form, became cemented against the window, sweeping the Outside for the source of the pounding. The Drop was sheer, resting high over a sheet of rock that stretched an eternity down to a raging river. Stones fell from my throat to my stomach as the water gushed out from so far beneath my feet. For a moment—a fleeting, falling, moment—I felt as if I, too, would succumb to the wrench of gravity, losing myself in an endless abyss, but the moment fell away faster than my fears. The inside is safe. The stone is strong, the glass will not shatter.

Again, I heard the batter. And this time, I saw the hand. Palms encrusted with blood and fingers stiff with grime, it lifted weakly to the window and fell against the pane in a solid, panicked knock. I rushed to meet the ragged source. A man, a withered, aching man, was garlanded on the edge of the sharp cliff, dangling so loosely it was as if the slightest shudder of wind would blow him down the heights of the chasm. He was an Outsider, of this I was sure, and among all the things I could have done in that moment, I laughed. A man—an Outsider—had scaled an unscalable mountain, only to knock at a window that would not open. The Scholars said that the Outsiders were fools of the forest, and now I could see the absolute truth of their words gleaming at me from outside the frosted light of the corridor.