Escape from Happines
Offical travelouge 001. The base of the mountain Albert, Year Unknown, European alps
This mission, funded by the Commission, is to search for the missing Professor, who was last seen at his summer residence in the Alpine region of the former country of Austria. The purpose of the expedition is to retrieve crucial data on experiments involving Subject X, which was tipped off to the Professor's whereabouts by intellectual immigrants from the former country. Past records had successfully identified the purchase of a wooden cabin deep in the Alps belonging to the professor several decades ago. To this day, no data exists about his past life and achievements. This mission never existed and shall never exist.
*
It has become to my understanding that the world has changed since the last time I have left the City. If my memory serves me right I was 7, and by the standards of the day still a little boy; underdeveloped, and moldable to whatever the Commision wanted me to be. It was a stroke of luck however that I came across the Professor (the very same I am searching for now) that first gave me any real reason and purpose. It was just after a public lecture that he had given that year about a new discovery that I decided to join his laboratory in 2025. It was not ‘groundbreaking’ work in any sense, but what we did was more keen to archeology compared to the science that was recommended by the Commision. However, it was not excavating out old temples or looking at shattered vases. Instead, we ‘digged up’ the most important thing in life; the essence of Happiness. If I can still retell the story of our discovery (for it has been decades ago). Now I can only remember it like how Dr Frankenstein's Monster summed up its own miserable story:
‘‘The presumptuous works of man must be frightful, vile, and horrible, ending only in discomfort and misery to himself.’’
Me being here, alone surrounded by undisturbed nature, is the living truth that what we had found cannot be justified. The gates of heaven must be forever closed because of me. Consoling though it might be, I must confess that contradictory to what we learned from the State Encyclopedia: that trees are not artificial and corruptible, but beautiful and soothing to the spirit. However there is this lingering feeling about the forest being able to free but imprisons ones psyche. This was what I already felt back in the city; the laboratory especially felt like a forest. Knowing how we were able to perform research freely, we were still always under the watchful eye of the Commision. Perhaps the trees of this forest are more caring and forgiveful…
I was not suprised that it has been days since I last wanted to make contact with civilization. However, its time to pack up camp and go in the direction of the mountains. I am feeling excited for the first time in years!
Offical travelouge 002. A fork in the road
En route to the mountain trail were the Professor was last seen. I came across a unknown hiker heading from the direction I was supposed to take. Naturally i got curious and didn’t want appear hostile, for he could have useful information about the path ahead. To my suprise however it was a female hiker, god knows how long it has been since I saw a fellow human being. I only could hoped she would understand my langauge. Better to hide my knife, just in case something might happen.
Luckily the hiker I came across spoke an old form of my language, for she had learned it during high school and her studies in University. She was what we called backed in the City a ‘Intelectual immigrant’ or ‘Emotional’ as I like to call them. She was born before the discovery, and preceding the calaminity (would she had known about me? I hope not). Since she was like me, an fellow emotional, we naturally could talk about how life was before things forever changed. I even offered her some coffee that I had saved from a nearby supermarket - well, technically stolen, for the occasion gave us a rare moment to talk. It was apparently a rare opportunity for another Emotional to meet in such a vast area of uninhabited land. I could not agree more.
We sat down along the path I had to follow and decided to rest in the vast expanse of pine trees and surrounding hills. It was indeed a sight to behold, for in the city we had only mountains of concrete and glass. Unlike the forest, one could imagine being squeezed into a sea of people and still feel somewhat isolated. That was what I felt for the most of my life, nothing new to feel anyway. Her name was Christina, a self-proclaimed proud Austrian. I introduced myself as Albert from [deleted], naturally she was becoming suspicious of me, but I explained that I was born before it all happened, and she calmed down very quickly. The coffee was meanwhile boiling from the wood fire we made from the dried remains of what once was living. I would imagine the warmth of the fire being their farewell, but instead of a soft ‘auf Wiedersehen’ I could hear them laughing and perhaps also screaming to us, not because what we did to them, but what we did to ourselves. It was projection of my own conscience. Would Christina have noticed?
As we drank our coffee and contemplated life in silence, she suddenly asked me a question, perhaps the same question that had been lingering in my mind. ‘‘What are you doing here from the City?’’. Officially, I had been sent here by the Commission, but in reality I wanted to find the Professor, not only for the sake of clarity, but as old friends and colleagues who had shared dreams and ambitions in the past. I told Christina that I wanted to relive old memories. I didn’t lie. I asked her in turn about her own interests and reasons for studying at university, as this was not common in our time, unlike at the beginning of the century. She was studying anthropology, the study of human behaviour and was interested in the interaction of humans with machines and what it could mean to cope with artificiality. Since I myself was the cause of the most recent iteration of the Fall, I was obviously intrigued by the subject.
A wise philosopher said in the past that: ‘‘I am free to act as i choose. It is hard to believe… that natural law explain the events within my family, church or college’’. This was written before the Turn. As I relay his exact words to Christina she replied only with silence. After what felt like an eternity, she said in a soft voice ‘‘Surely you dont believe what you just said? come on, you yourself saw what happened to the old world. By God you are from the same city where it all started. Is there any way to believe we still have our individuality after all this?’’ When she said this exact words I felt a deep sting traveling through my heart, and a dizziness befell me at once. I was staring at Christina’'s eyes like a poor peasant searching for redemption from his lord. The crops have failed, the animals have been slaughtered, and the children are starving. And It was all my fault… how could I explain it all? My only goal was to find redemption, and like a volcano erupting, I began to tell her my story of how it all began.
‘‘To be honest with you, Christina, I cannot possibly say whether we were already individuals before the Turn. I was still a young student at the time.’’ ‘‘Wait, you were there,'' Christina said, while I prepared myself for the worst. ‘‘I suppose there is no escaping it. Yes, I was even at Professor [deleted]’s lecture when the Department of Wellbeing was just starting to be established. Even after so many years, it feels like that moment is etched in my brain stem. It was an ordinary Sunday, and as I walked across the street I saw a poster, or was it an announcement? Of a lecture that evening in the main lecture hall. I was bored, what else could i do? I knew the professor was a tall man with a keen eye for how the crowd reacted to his lectures. You see, I once attended one of his seminars on synthetic biology and the first thing I felt from him was what I could only describe as a fatherly warmth.’’ This was exactly what he wanted to achieve in his talk on The Social Engineering of Emotions. He knew how to shock and awe his audience. Meanwhile Christina began to look sad, even a little angry, when I told her of my recollection of the lecture, but unlike her morbid curiosity about my past of a few minutes ago, I felt that it was now fading in a melancholic spiral. She could only looked in horror when I finished, perhaps it was even worse. It was her look of pity that struck me the most. As if she knew who I was, and the unforgiveable sins I have brought into her world. Christina was looking at the fire, and could only say what this eerie silence permitted her. ‘‘I also lost something in the fire you know. My husband and child amongst a great many others.’’ This was the reality of things as we sat quitely around the glowing red flames.
We sat together for a while near the smouldering heap, eating our half-eaten lunches and sharing our dreams. The fire was almost out, but for me, the flame had already turned cold. “What happened to your family?” I asked Christina, probably in an anguished tone. Christina looked me in the eye as she drank her coffee. Then it hit me like a wave: an oceanic, light-blue hue crashing in from all sides. In a word, it was pure sorrow. ‘‘You know very well what happened. It was happening to all of us, whether we wanted it or not. I suppose it was that long ago, wasn't it?” She looked down into her cup, as if rubbing it would bring back all the things she had lost. Then she said: “You know, Albert, it's nice that you're here. Having someone with real emotions is such a treat. Although, I admit, we all changed. My daughter, Elisa, was only four years old when she turned. I was working on my doctoral thesis in the Anthropology department in [Deleted] when the news broke. We couldn’t believe it at first. You probably know more than I do, you were there, right? My husband worked in science too. He was obviously super excited. I cannot say that I wasn’t skeptical. Some say it’s a mothers intuition.
We fell silent for a moment while Christina looked into her now empty cup. “Yes, I was there. I suppose that's also the reason I'm here now. You want another cup?” After I poured her the last of our coffee I finally had the guts to tell her what for despicable creature I had become. Then I told Christina everything…
*
I remember when spring arrived in the city. A shower of white and pink petals took over the parks and lakes, as well as the old university buildings, like in a surprise invasion. ‘What is a life well lived?’ I asked myself that particular Sunday morning. I was in my old dorm room, and, as usual, I found myself staring out of the window again, looking down at the street below. 'God, I was so young and naive.' I said to myself when I finally recollected my memories. ‘‘The only things I saw were my fellow students scrambling in confusion, finding a way to escape the voluntary servitude that the professors would call 'coursework'.’’ In reality, it was just copying what had already been done. With most papers and essays traced back to the professors themselves if you looked hard enough. Talk about hubris! I was obviously bored and wanted to go outside, but I wasn't planning to join the nameless crowd which I actually quite despised. Luckily, the university campus was filled with paths leading to the surrounding woodlands, i.e, artifical forests. ‘At least, you didn’t got to know me when I was a student.’ I said to Christina. Unlike now, the Commission didn’t select all the students from a young age to study on the Synthetic Biology programme. Those who found themselves on the other side of the fence were either crazy enough or had been forced by their carefree parents to 'just roll the dice', as we used to say. Can you guess which camp I was in? It wasn't actually as bad when we started, I suppose it's been 30 years since then. Anyways, we studied basically how the cell, that is the human cell, could be build up from scratch. It was all founded on this one experiment by Miller and Urey in the 1950’s, about the synthesis of small organic molecules in a mixture of simple gases to form the building blocks of life. For us, the main takeaway was that we humans who are made up of the same molecules, could produce the essence of Life synthetically. We felt that we were on Olympus, especially in the early days. Of course science has progressed since then and the process of producing life itself was not at all romantic. This is what I meant by hubris.
Christina interrupted my endless soliloquy and said. ‘So you’re basically saying that what makes us human, what defines us as living creatures, can be reduced to a few simple molecules? It seems to me that neither you nor the first experimenters believed this themselves’. I felt embarrassed, because this was exactly how I felt now looking back at my student days. ‘This is not what I thought back then. I was fuelled, and perhaps also cursed, by the idealism of this particular professor,’ I said to her, hoping that she would not remember his name. When I had finished speaking, Christina looked at me calmly but sorrowfull, as if she was staring into the depths of what was left of my soul. We both knew what it meant, but I still continued.
‘I eventually went outside to this path I knew that led to an old oak tree. This tree was the only real thing on campus, I thought to myself. In my opinion, the tree was very old, and had an oddly shaped area surrounding it where nothing grew. Younger oaks still grew around the old oak, but they were smaller. As if it was feeding of its lonelines. Surprisingly, the old oak still had some red foilage amongst the more brilliant green of the younger trees. Although it seemed to me that this redness gave the old oak a kind of glowing radiance this tree gave me also such a rush of morbid curiosity. To this day I don't understand what gave me this feeling. ‘Would this tree bear fruit in summer?’ I would ask myself from time to time. Eventually, when I walked further from the tree, I could not see the path in front of me. Was it even a path? Meanwhile, the forest canopy was becoming so thin that I could feel the warm rays of sunlight raining down on me. The sunbeams burned my face and hands. This strange phenomenon made me sick and I needed to take cover from this eeriliy cosmic rainstorm. I layed down next to a nearby stream were some small rocks lay. As in a miracle the rocks completely blocked the toxic rays and I was saved. After what felt like an infinity, I walked back to the original path, and after some time finally found myself back on campus again. 'When will they strike me again?' I said to myself. But never did that experience came again. This was when I realized which path I had taken. It was to the Department of Wellbeing.’
*
It was already well past mid-day, and Christina and me waited in silence for something we didn’t know existed. ‘The past can be so horrible to remember.’ said Christina. “The vividness of it all, when I think about Elisa on these mornings, the ice just melts and it all flows through my mind like a raging river. I don’t always know where it will take me, but I do know that the feeling of loss will never go away. Albert, are you trying to find the professor?” When she said these words, I was finally struck by the realisation, like her raging river ever closer to me on the mountain where I was standing. I was indeed searching for what I had lost all these year ago, a sense of accomplishment never fully reached. I told Christina “Yes’’, and looked back at the snow topped mountains that I eventually needed to follow. ‘‘Do you know where he lives?’’ asked Christina. It jolted me out of my inner thoughts. I conveyed to her that what the Commision has disclosed to me. ‘‘A small mountain cabin not far from the state capital of a former republic. I just know the general direction’’ I said. ‘It might be close to [deleted],’ said Christina. ‘I can lead you there; it's the town where I studied at university. Although I don’t think anyone studies there anymore after the Turn.” I looked at her, and gracefully accepted her guidance, but perhaps it was more of a companionship that I really craved. Atleast she was a Emotional, unlike most people from the City. What was she really after? Didn't she come from this direction already? The distrust was however momentarily, and after packing our equipment we followed the river of our mind to a unknown destination.
Offical travelouge 003. Forest greens and Wise conversations.
