Memorize (Book One)

The Fields

When the regular day was over, when meetings and amusements were done with, there was a place where Jay liked to stay.

Beyond the Red City, with its immense flat buildings and its never-ending avenues aligned with soft blue lights, well after the outskirts of the city, there was a huge broad mountain ridge.

Nobody went there, for the obvious reason that there was no one to see and nothing to do. It was not even advised to go or stay there too often, lest it might indicate some unwelcome fit of nostalgia or a lingering sickness. Any sign of weakness was monitored for immediate intervention. Illness was hunted down in the colony. GloCo was a permanent companion, the confluence of a parent, a doctor and a friend, a lover and a guardian. With GloCo, you were never alone. This tiny region in the nape of your neck, and most intimately, the grain of your skin and the blood in your veins, carried GloCo's tiniest heralds. There was no escape from within.

Over the months, Jay had learnt how to master the faint numbness in his limbs. He did not know where it came from, or what it meant. Yet he knew how to breathe in such a way that his body kept the heralds at bay. He was the only one aware of it... and it would stay that way.

B24 was a huge planet, and from the top of the ridge, as far as the eye could see, there was a vast display of mountains and valleys. Every now and then, as often as possible without arousing suspicion, Jay hopped into a pod and flew over to the ridge.

And then...

His breast swelled and he took in the warm, dry air of B24. He would just stand, or kneel down. Sometimes he would plunge his hands in the fine red sand, and let it rush through his fingers. Then he would feel something that he could not even name...

Below him, the City looked liked a mechanic, robotic animal scared of the heights. Its soft, dim lights glowed patiently, surrounded by the Fields which spread out endlessly. They were the longest and widest possible area of cultivated plants, settled in alignments of huge rectangles. Due to the atmosphere, and to the color of the soil, they were mostly red. The plants themselves were red, though a darker, cooler shade than the sand. The pale dots created by the watering and regulation system punctuated this picture with small touches of pale white. Thousands of thousands of white droplets in a geometric sea of carmine and crimson. And the gigantic city, huddled against the Fields, looked just like a base camp.

A base camp... to where?

For an instant, Jay would imagine things that didn't belong to this world. A sense of something that tasted like one of these very sweet fruits ripened for ages in the low rising suns of B24. Something that felt like flying above the Red City, an entertainment the colony-dwellers were allowed to indulge in. Something soft to the touch, warm yet not too hot to the skin. Something immense, bigger that what the word immense means. And with the sense of immensity came the numbness, again. As if his body was telling him a story he could not understand.