12. The Race #2
The shouting ceased as everyone joined the race. Focus prompted silence.
There was no panting. No sound of feet hitting ground. Only silence, and the occasional quiet word.
I felt that same fatigue from the stairs settle in.
This was not as harsh as that climb, yet the onset of cognitive lethargy was creeping in.
The difference between sprinting and jogging ahead made sense.
All I had to do was remain steady. I didn’t need to win or come close to it.
All we needed was to finish in the top seventy five.
Plenty of competitors around us seemed to have forgotten that as they sprinted by us. Ralia nodded as I glanced at her, keeping our steady pace.
I tried to access my neurospace to message her and tell her to conserve breath.
No. That didn’t work. I was in my neurospace and had no reason to breathe. Why was everyone else silent when they had no reason to conserve breath? Were they as new to the neurocore as I was?
“Slow your thoughts, bakuh.”
Zeg. He was right. Every thought exhausted my mind even more. I was wasting my cognitive stamina on ideas and worries that did not matter in the–
“Focus!”
Right. Thanks.
Run.
No breathing.
No thoughts.
Empty concentration.
“You can think, bakuh, just keep your mind on the race. Worries will exhaust you more than any other thoughts.”
You understand this race?
“I understand this world, to a degree, but cannot explain everything. Observe. Take things in passively, just as you did while learning Amerikese by watching Republic entertainment.”
How do you know I did that?
“Your mind is ever present with mine.”
I didn’t waste cognition trying to understand that.
The corridor stretched ahead of us, unchanged from the entrance. Two walls, a high ceiling, the wide floor, and a continuous tunnel ahead.
Staring down the black abyss before us, there was no end in sight.
When would this end? How long had I already been running?
Despite my best efforts to focus on the present, I reflected upon my time with Deleon. That corporate imprisonment had ended but in the beginning, I never saw that end being anything other than my grave.
Past wars, especially those that “unified” Medislavia had neither clear beginnings nor ends, yet the end did come.
Am I understanding this correctly?
People stopped. Some began walking while others stared into the abyss ahead and screamed.
Am I naive for believing in an end?
“No, you just have to forget your present suffering and have faith that your efforts will pay off.”
Why couldn’t you have told me that from the beginning?
“Because we reached this understanding together.”
Not as all-knowing as you act, bakuh?
The swine snorted, each laugh a draining echo until the sound of capitulation cries drowned him out.
Perhaps my strength was in not understanding this and accepting that. I didn’t need evidence of the end or an explanation of the present. Regardless of the relief of this conclusion, the continual analysis tired me.
The familiar exhaust I had felt while running up the stairs returned like a tide rolling in.
Moments of clarity and mental fog pushed and pulled as I fought to keep up my momentum.
Ralia kept pace, showing no signs of exhaustion.
Focus, or the lack thereof, kept her face still and focused straight ahead.
The hall continued with no sign of change. When it came after what felt like an hour of running, it was not gradual, but as if in the blink of an eye, our surroundings shifted.
We now ran in smaller groups stretched out across multiple rows of cubicles.
Their walls divided us with neurosets on desks and corporate posters with passive aggressive statements of control.
Though this scene was darkened by the light-headed structure of the neurocore, it was easy to see this for what it was.
We were sprinting through an office building.
The people who sat at their desks paid no heed as we ran by. The business itself was nondescript, but I could tell this was one of those places where Water Hill’s failures would fill space.
The building was not endless like the previous corridor.
After a long stretch, we emerged and ran through a parking lot, past a row of skyscraping apartments, then back to the parking lot and through the office building once again.
Everything had the dark neon cast of an artificial world, but the idea remained the same.
I was running through a repeating workday and felt my mind coated by the thoughts of a standard corporate employee whose single motive was to impress his superior.
Clock in. Clock out. Repeat. Repeat the same job with my mind tapping in and out of the neuroset.
Just as there had been with the tunnel, there was no end in sight. No reprieve or hint of retirement aside from death.
One of the competitors ran right, choosing to jump through the window rather than continue with the group to the next work day where the only thing we were promised was a token of appreciation to distract us from the fact that we would never receive a raise.
I knew I was no employee, yet I felt the frustration of decades of labor where my only rewards were disappointing paychecks and a jacket with the company’s logo.
I watched the defecting competitor smash through a veil of red light that shattered like glass.
My pace grew lethargic as I focused on the man who had ejected himself from the race. He did not fall, as anyone would after leaping through a window, but disintegrated. A digitized scream broke the dense silence of the race as his form broke into red pixels that flickered like fireworks.
“Pet!” Ralia shouted.
I focused on Ralia as I quickened my pace to reach her.
We glanced at each other, now side by side again, as we ran into the next business day.
Years of endless work at the corporation passed until we passed through the office for the last time.
I knew that only a mere hour or two had passed, but the cognitive fatigue and the attached experiences of a corporate slave argued otherwise.
It reminded me of the life I thought I had lived with Naoma and our kids, but this illusion was a lot easier to see through.
The cluster of runners had spread wide as some began to walk and others chose to end their race prematurely.
A vivid memory of the first man to jump through the window plagued me.
Each subsequent scream was just as painful, leading me to wonder if there was any chance their consciousness had survived the unapproved capitulation.
The result did not matter. I could not lose or surrender if I wanted to. I did not trust this Test and therefore, did not trust that there was any safe exit besides victory. Even victory carried no promise of safety.
Our pace had slowed to a jog, matching those around us as we ran through the tunnel from the beginning. We were far from the front, but I had seen too many choose to walk or end their course for me to think that we were at risk of elimination.
If I had learned anything from my time since receiving the Bite, it was that assumptions and unchecked trust lead to dire consequences.
I felt like I was back in school, trying to grasp a plethora of new concepts at once.
No, that was a gross understatement. I had been given years in school.
This felt more like having the world’s true state revealed to me and the information regarding the Luxists, Gui, Gong, the old earth, and every related component shoved into my mind in an instant while being expected to understand it.
The feelings of self-hatred for not being able to comprehend it all returned.
How were we expected to tell the Earth that this was a prison for some world-consuming god when I didn’t understand that myself?
Recalling the memories of the Luxist’s reveal prior to leaving Arabasia, I understood what I was facing in this race.
The walls were no longer monochromatic. Blue lines formed throughout them, including the ceiling and floor, then broke into fragments which then formed into shapes. Characters. Words.
Everyone stopped where they were. Looking around, I saw the same confused frustration that I felt. No one could move.
Until the woman before Ralia did.
Her eyes were on the floor, watching her feet as she walked.
Another man did likewise as he faced the left wall.
More joined in, focusing on their individual walls of choice as they kept a steady walking pace.
I turned to the floor.
“What is the cost of knowledge?” I read.
I moved onto the next sentence.
“What must one sacrifice to step above the simple minds of the world?”
I focused on the words. My feet moved in sync with my thoughts. The more I read, the farther I ran.
“One must sacrifice time.
“Other pursuits.
“Forsake unworthy endeavors for that which they desire.
“Those who fail have fallen victim to the ignorance and vain pursuits of the world.”
The platitudes were replaced by a comprehensive overview of the Republic’s history since the old China combined with what had once been the United States.
Was the author of this aware of what the world truly was?
Was the Correction behind this Test as we presumed?
Were these tales of ancient nations the history of this world or the previous?
The questions slowed my pace to a halt.
I glanced up before continuing, seeing that I was not the only one whose introspection delayed their progress.
“None of this makes any zegging sense!” a man behind me shouted. He focused on the ground, reading and mumbling under his breath. From what I could hear, the words he spoke did not match those below.
I glanced down, reading the words while thinking about his frustration as the same emotions built up within me.
It took a moment to clear my head, but once I did, my progression continued.
Not only did I have to read but comprehend the words below me.