Wake Me In The Future (5 page)

Like several of the other members, I’d jockeyed for the position of leader, but in our world nothing guaranteed leadership like natural aggression, a dominant personality and sheer size, and Jason Wentworth had all those qualities in spades. He was massive, brutal and hard, and to the annoyance of some of the gang, including me, extremely good looking, which in itself bought a certain arrogance that never failed to manifest itself when he was around a good looking girl. It was only the gap in his front teeth, one of which he’d lost in a fight with a gang from a rival school, that ruined his perfect smile and satisfied my need to find something wrong with him.

Nevertheless, like all the other members of the gang, I'd been satisfied with the benefits I gained from being part of it. I felt a sense of belonging, which for me, had been lacking at home. And the element of adoration from some of the other students, both girls and boys, along with the respect it bought me, was appreciated; regardless if borne from admiration or deference to the gang, or as I suspected - outright fear.

And the rules of our little crew were as childish and cruel as you’d expect of developing teenagers, who were neither children nor adults. You stuck up for each other, regardless, and you never, ever, bought shame on the gang. Apart from that, and doing everything that Jason told you to do, you were ok. But the consequences for breaking those rules didn’t bear thinking about; at least I didn’t want to think about them anymore, having observed them in action myself. Because, in addition to being thrown out of the gang and ostracised, which in itself bought untold shame, some very nasty things could happen to you involving Jason’s dad’s razor and a tin of black boot polish.

I'd been present on one of those occasions, after John Spear had made a joke about the size of Jason’s mother to the wrong person. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, especially when the humiliation was compounded by the cheering audience of Jason’s two shrieking sisters. It had been a horrible and humiliating thing to do, but I knew that Jason had a sadistic side and I began to do everything I could to keep well away from it.

No, during those years Helen may as well have been living in a different time, which was funny really, considering our destiny.

It had only been in the last year at school, when the girls were filling out and the boys were showing interest, that I'd really noticed her. Up to then the pseudo sexual interaction had really been posturing and practice for the real stuff that we were all now eagerly waiting to experience.

And in those last few months the inevitable teenage pregnancies occurred, mostly as a result of over protective and domineering parents, pushing their kids into doing the exact opposite to what they’d demanded. Even I thought at the time that the psychology of it was so transparent, but obviously beyond some people.

Helen had been pointed out to me a year before by my best friend as ‘having potential’ and I’d been keeping an eye on her ever since; my youthful egotism piqued by her total lack of interest in me.

In that final year at school I’d started to question why I was going with any girl that threw herself at me, and why someone like Helen, who obviously knew about me and my place in the gang, didn’t even seem to know I existed. The brash type of girls I’d been dating were little more than a quick fumble behind the toilet blocks, they really didn’t care about me, only my membership of the gang and what it could bring them, and to be honest when I thought about it I’d never really cared for any of them. They and their pretend relationships were all quite shallow, and far too easy. And being honest I knew deep down, that I wasn’t doing any of this for myself.

No, my natural male desire for challenge wasn’t being satisfied by these ‘walk over’ conquests and I was beginning to lose interest. Questions began to form in my mind about what I was really getting from acting as part of something bigger than myself, because I didn’t really have any independence, having to live by those petty rules all the time. And besides, a lot of the things I’d done with them were beginning to not sit right in my developing conscience. I was losing interest and getting just a little tired of it all. And it was just beginning to dawn on me what a shame it was, that the intimacy I’d shared for that first time, hadn’t been with someone special like Helen.

But at least I'd actually been successful with the girls, unlike my best friend and fellow gang member Pete, who was a bit of a 'jack the lad' and liked to play tricks on anyone whenever he had the opportunity. Although he was academically bright, I thought Pete could be so stupid sometimes. He had a big mouth which may have come as a package with his flaming ginger hair, which mysteriously, somehow prevented the former engaging with his brain. He just had to say what he thought, whatever the consequences.

Like the time we’d been in class with Miss Clarkson, our rotund French teacher, who had the habit of wearing tight leggings which didn’t do her ample figure any justice. As she bent over her desk, in the process of picking up the board rubber she’d dropped, Pete happened to make the observation that it looked ‘just like two whales mating’ – and he’d said it out loud!

So that was Pete, he was a tall and awkward sort of boy and always had problems relating to girls, and if the comment he’d made to Miss Clarkson was anything to go by, he was going to be one lonely lad. And if his lack of success in that area was one of the reasons he'd wanted to be part of the gang in the first place, it hadn’t seemed to have done him any favours; because up to then no one had ever actually seen him with a girl.

And so I was relieved when I reached the end of my school days and I was finally able to escape from the life I’d fallen into. I found myself on the way to the end of term disco for the last time; walking toward the old school hall with a sense of anxiety, more from realising it signified I was going to have to make my own way in life, than from any tangible fear.

The electro pop of the nineteen eighties boomed out of the speakers on the walls, which were decorated with the garish entries to the school's annual painting competition. The canvases, each tagged with the name of the owner, covered the spaces between the curtained windows from one end of the hall to the other. The rotating glitter ball hanging from the ceiling was frantically beaming dancing specs of coloured light around the room like a million flickering glow worms chasing each other in a never ending race. This spectacle of light almost made the heavy red drape curtains look alive as they scaled the sides of the hall and masked the ceiling high windows. Pete and I walked through the throng of dancing figures towards the stage at the front of the hall where soft drinks were being sold from an old trestle table. The red illuminated numbers on my faithful old digital watch told me it was seven forty five.

I noticed her immediately. Helen stood in the corner next to the stage, leaning casually against the black Yamaha upright piano, while a small group of friends sat around her on chairs, like courtiers attending a queen. Pete pointed in their direction as we drew closer. ‘I think I am destined for one of that lot over there,’ he said jokingly towards the group of huddled girls around Helen; and with hope in his voice said, ‘do you think any of them will turn into Derry Abby?’

I had to smile at his obsession with the lead singer of the pop group ‘Redhead’, and thought how I would have been just as obsessed myself, if any of them had the potential to grow into my own fantasy woman, Olivia Bomb.

‘I wouldn’t think so,’ I said nonchalantly while still gazing at the group, my eyes not really focusing on anyone other than the standing girl. Then, perhaps subconsciously the music, along with the continued conversation from Pete, seemed to fade into the distance, as I leaned against the stage looking directly across at Helen.

It was like I was seeing her for the first time. I noticed she had a natural style and it wouldn’t be long before the changes in her body, even obvious now, would draw a lot of attention from the opposite sex. It was certainly interesting me.

I stood, mesmerised by the classic good looks that were unspoiled by any makeup and the easy and confident way she had of holding herself. Was I finally accepting I could have feelings other than lust? After all, she wasn’t the type I usually went for.

I ignored Pete completely when he mentioned walking around to spot the real talent; I was only half listening anyway, and was just satisfied being entranced by Helen, and trying my hardest to fight the mad compulsion to go and talk to her.

Just as the reasons for approaching her started to outweigh the reasons that were preventing me, I heard a horrible whisper in my ear that sent a chilling tingle down my spine. The unmistakeable drawl of Jason Wentworth broke the spell.

‘Don’t even think about it Richard, they’re not in our league, and anyway,’ he said putting his arm around my shoulder and turning me away from the corner, ‘you wont get anything out of them. I’ve got some great girls lined up for us tonight - this way my man.’ And all the courage I'd built up drained away into that embrace, as I realised I’d never been any different than all the other victims of this overbearing bully.

As we walked towards the entrance I strained to take one last look over my shoulder at Helen, who at that very moment had turned her head in my direction and smiled.

And somewhere during this dream or whatever it was that my mind was trying to present to me, my new body had reluctantly relaxed and given me over to the Information System, allowing it access to my mind.

Chapter 06
– Which Society

One by one any sensations I had left, ebbed away, leaving only an unsettling wave of nausea to wash over me, before that itself subsided and left my mind to drift in a dreamlike state, where colours and shapes fought to coalesce into meaningful thoughts. But even those clouds of unformed reality seemed to flicker and die. Then, just as I thought I was going to completely lose
grip on reality, I became self aware again, standing upright in the pitch blackness.

I'd normally not taken much notice of the dark, yet now I felt it all around, closing in on me. But before it had time to wrap me in its bitter cold embrace, in the distance, shadows started to form.

I’d never used recreational drugs before but I’d known many people who had, and I wondered now, if this was similar to their experiences.

The shadows gradually took the form of windows, cut into the fabric of the darkness before me, through which I could see images tuning into focus. This was no narration, like the information I’d just received about Helen, or a dream like the one I’d just experienced. It was a gradual awareness of the world around me, about humanity, spanning the Solar system, an inhabited Moon and a terra-formed Mars, and a population now into hundreds of billions.

Like the resurrected memories of an amnesiac, the knowledge was returning to me, supported by the images through the strange dimensional windows.

The exploitation of the Solar system had reached spectacular heights; a result of the superior intelligence of the advanced technology that had been given free reign and provided humanity with the means to exploit the resources around it.

The majority of the human race no longer supported the creation of wealth, nor were they influenced by other humans holding power, because these – the two most corrupting of human constructs - had been handed over to, and were now managed by the Information System. Power and wealth no longer formed or moulded human society as it once had.

The only human influence was through various groups that people belonged to for pre-determined periods, which in themselves were constantly monitored by a myriad of checks and balances. Even then, they did nothing more than rubber stamp the decisions of their artificial creation; but at least the absence of emotional input had finally removed greed fuelled corruption from human affairs.

I observed a multi-society civilisation, diverse groupings on different continents and planets, where people lived content and happy within the laws of their own particular societies.

There were societies of different religions, naturists, separate sexes, modified humans, vegetarians, even a society where it was acceptable to insult and abuse others, where absolutely no law applied; that particular setup seemed like anarchy
to me
and I wondered just who would opt to live there.

Surrounding and binding all these diverse groups was the one that had become the largest. It was known as
Open Society,
where everyone conformed to common patterns of behaviour regarding privacy, modesty and decency –
so this was what Ankit had been referring to
. Open Society could be tolerated by most people and it was where almost all humans, at sometime or other, spent time. It offered a common level of interaction that was the least offensive to the most people. It looked to me, that they'd reclaimed what I'd less formally known as Open Society
in the past.
They'd separated all the extremes that had gradually built up and bought it to its knees over my lifetime. It had now settled to a balanc
e
of accepted norms
.
But unlike the past, t
he
p
eople who wanted to live significantly different lives
or express themselves in ways that offended others and led to civil unrest,
were
not suppressed and outlawed, or made to feel they were wrong, but
helped to set up their own communities in separate parts of the system.
I could imagine the upheaval this would have caused in my own day and thought how impossible it would have been. The transition must have been a very gradual process.

I didn’t know how fast all this information was coming to me but the images seemed to be speeding by, like someone flicking through a book.

I learned that everyone was free to enter any society, at any time, as long as they conformed to its laws, and the citizens of this new time had become adept at modifying their behaviour as they crossed the borders that separated them. And the phenomenal technology and amazing transport methods of this new age had removed any
fear
of splitting families and friends up as individuals found their different niches. After all, at the speed of thought any group of people could be back together to interact in any of the societies they mutually chose, before they all returned to the ones they called home. Only a few stalwart diehards refused to conform to the expected norms of Open Society, but this was no different than the small group of humans who had always existed with that frame of mind. Only now those people were actually able to live the lives they chose, exclusively, in a society of like minded people.