12 - Freedom - J.F. Hire

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To maintain a freedom within the confines of obligations -- that was our goal. Not this.

Today I wake up and wait. I wait for the cue, the call to action.

Everyone is either acting against me, beating me to the punch, or doing nothing at all.

So many of us did nothing at all. We are trapped within complacency. Within sweatpants or no clothing at all.

We are not making a statement or taking strides in some direction. We have no direction at all. We have no goals, because we have become aware of two things: goals change, and there is always someone waiting around the corner with a way to cut you down.

Our destiny has become slow and meandering, without creation, without fuel. Not entirely stagnant, but more-so a bundle of firing nerves. A spastic society, if you could all it that. All potential energy and no outlet.

Why bother looking to the past, I've been sitting here for two hours writing, thinking. My calendar calls from the floor. This archaic tablet from a time of standards. What is the real purpose within a hard day's work when the next day is just as hard?

What is the purpose of philosophy, when the question still remains a monolith we awaken to?

We are philosophers, we awoke in the fall of the last year on Earth. Since we have found our place among the stars, we have nothing to do but think and sleep.

Trendinis suggests that we are already dead.

 Jonin proposes that we were never alive to begin with.

All theory has convalesced into a pink ball of consciousness.

They were before the time of Complacency. They remain a memory of which cannot hold meaning.

Our fathers answered The Question, and now that is all we can be:

'what is the purpose?'

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"She found the note stuffed between pages of an alien tome, but could read it quite clearly. This wasn't some alien language. Anxiety had set in as she read this note for a fifth time. Sitting on the side of her bed, her legs dangling over the gold-plated floor... She had to share it.

She contacted a friend, not so much for a second opinion, but like a virus, the note had contaminated her mind, leaving her helpless to what happened next to her and her female companion.

'I just-- do you think we should do something with it?'

'I don't know... I've been considering it for days now.'

'Let's just sit a while and think about it.'

The two girls sat there for days. No one heard from them for weeks, until one day, when the town was eating below the habitat dome. One woman screamed, and then everyone looked up.

The girls were floating, listless, unmoving, just over the dome of the eating hall. They grasped the note in both of their hands.

'We must retrieve them! We must give them a proper service!' a woman would cry.

When the townspeople got a closer look at the note, officials dropped the case and told everyone to go back to their lives, and let the girls float on, untouched."

So if you ever see two girls floating in space, holding a note, never read it, or else....

Adani wrapped up his story, smiling smugly at his friends, who were beside themselves with disbelief.

"Come on! You're supposed to tell something believable!" one boy said, shaking his head and returning to tending the fire.

"Yea... I don't know, it was just a little spooky, really. And if you're not supposed to read the note, then how do YOU know what the note said? I don't know..." said a girl, laughing.

"Well it's just a summary of the note, I don't know what it really said. You know? Come on guys! Traki, did you like?" Adani asked his friend, initiating a conversation about how to best compose a story in the future.

To the right of the group was Hanna, a silent mouse of a girl, looking about to them all for a while, before her eyes slowly gazed down, fingers twiddling.

"I just don't know..." she whispers to herself. An ancient uncertainty began growing.