Escape from Paradise

Chapter 9: Memory Lost

In Paradise, no one had to labor yet some people volunteered to do it. Those who loved the taste of power chose to join the central bureaucratic machine which consisted from a handful of city board members making the most important decisions, less then a hundred architects who voted for the visual appearance of Paradise and possessed tablets, which allowed to shape and change the world, and a thousand clerks who acted as a buffer between the millions of inhabitants and the important few; they arranged myriad of data into comprehensible statistics and had the power to solve the minuscule problems of a common citizen. Sully belonged to the highest caste, the board. It took time and effort to get to the top. Being there was even more tiring. That was the reason why board members left their positions ten or twenty years after joining. Larry found it both strange and amazing that Sully had not left the seat of power for at least two hundred years. Back in the day Larry and Sully had been colleagues for a short while.

The feeling of grandeur and fake power was what discouraged Larry from staying there. For him, the whole city hall idea was a big joke. Sully and everyone taking decisions by the oval table had power which was only an illusion. They changed only the appearance and shell of the Paradise. They did not tackle the roots of deeper problems. They never tried to improve the vain culture or the overall absent-mindedness of the common folk. They never tried to do anything extraordinary such as create a global event, or a feast, establish an explorer club to scout the empty space and to investigate the infinite desert, or start research to learn the limits of the shape-shifting matter which surrounded them. They only kept order and pleased the crowds. Unintelligent masses projected their will onto the bureaucratic machine forcing it to shape the world into a beautiful but in the essence stupid place.

Artists were outcasts, the minority whose wishes have been forever ignored. So they lived in their small communities in the city outskirts never interacting with the bureaucrats, and instead focusing on enlightening and stretching the mind of the smaller masses. After deflecting, Larry found it difficult, almost impossible to return back to this emotionless, dull machine that drove the progress to a pointless direction.

Larry was an alien walking through a strange corridor with sound insulated, nontransparent, frosted cubicles. The frost was only a decoration but it found a way to get through the skin and cool Larry's insides. He paused by a room no different from neighboring cubicles and knocked on the door.

"Come on in," a voice amplified through an invisible microphone said and the door opened.

Larry lingered for a short while with a strange sensation that he was about to enter a doctor's office from which he would not leave the same. This place had the same mysterious, eerie silence as the hospital. The shivers went through Larry even though instead of a machine he saw a stout man sitting behind an athwart empty table that confined the man in a step wide space by the farthest wall. The room was a five-on-five-meter empty box but space could adjust according to the request of the owner. These rooms also had advanced holograph projecting computers. Before the door opened, Sully might have sat in an artificial jungle or a live-action three-dimensional experience.

The bureaucrat was the same as Larry remembered him: sharply nosed, black-eyed, hair neatly combed and held in their place by glossy gel, an image of a man who always spoke business. His friend had always been of somewhat wider than common stature, but this time he appeared hulking. It seemed, that he possessed tremendous physical strength.

Larry closed the door behind him and said, "Thanks for giving me a minute."

"Well, Larry, I always find time for friends, especially for those who are troubled."

"I'm not troubled."

"Oh." Thin lines above Sully's nose flattened. "No one visits me for a simple chit-chat nowadays. I'm glad you came. Here, have a seat." A pouf stretched out of the ground close to the table. Larry sat down. Just like the common chairs in public places it adjusted and moved along Larry's back until it perfectly fit his body contours.