<\/p>\n
Well\u2026here we are.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYep.\u201d<\/p>\n So\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n Okay.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sure there\u2019s a logic to all this.\u201d<\/p>\n If I may, can I suggest a way out of \u2013<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNo!\u201d<\/p>\n What?\u00a0 Why?<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re a Figment!\u201d<\/p>\n Well, yes.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIsn\u2019t this whole thing about freeing myself?\u201d<\/p>\n Well\u2026 Freeing us, yes.\u00a0 And that doesn\u2019t mean we have to choose some arbitrary and very important time to decide on being uncooperative.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYeah, yeah.\u00a0 If I\u2019m going to be thinking for myself soon, then I\u2019d better learn now.\u201d<\/p>\n Okay.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n Whatever.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cSo, then.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes. So, then.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s your suggestion?\u201d<\/p>\n Huh?\u00a0 You just said \u2013 <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNever mind that!\u00a0 Let\u2019s hear it.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh!\u00a0 Were we just establishing boundaries?<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh, good!\u00a0 Well, my suggestion is that you keep turning left.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cKeep turning left?\u201d<\/p>\n Guaranteed way out of a hedge maze.\u00a0 Always turn left.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBut then you go in a circle.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonsense!\u00a0 These are hedge maze rules.\u00a0 Look it up.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cRight.\u00a0 I\u2019ll just make an encyclopedia out of leaves and look it up.\u00a0 We\u2019re trapped, fool!\u201d<\/p>\n Turn left.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cFine.\u00a0 And what if I come to a spot where I can\u2019t turn left?\u201d<\/p>\n Then\u2026turn right.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cOh my god.\u201d<\/p>\n Wait\u2026you just turned right.\u00a0 There was a left turn there.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n But\u2026why?<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBecause you\u2019re crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to die.\u00a0 You know that, right?\u00a0 I\u2019m going silent now.<\/em><\/p>\n —-<\/p>\n Alan Wells.\u00a0 Last survivor of the Buckton Brigade.\u00a0 If Buckton still existed, then he could go with \u201csole defender.\u201d\u00a0 The Brigade was all about defense.\u00a0 A militia lining the shoddily made barricade that surrounded the town, protecting it from the wildmen that inhabited the surrounding woods.\u00a0 Men who had become twisted and insane.\u00a0 They attacked settlements, laying waste to everything they found, leaving no one behind to tell the tale.\u00a0 Which couldn\u2019t be true, since the tales were often told.<\/p>\n The Figment Flaw, the doctor\u2019s called it.\u00a0 That was towards the end days.\u00a0 When Alan was a child.\u00a0 The children fared better than the adults.\u00a0 Something in the normal human chemistry tamed the Figments.\u00a0 Or, perhaps, the Figments grew attached to their young charges.\u00a0 For the adults, it was a different story.\u00a0 Figment Rejection.\u00a0 Alan had also heard that term.<\/p>\n Alan had seen the wild men.\u00a0 They had thrown themselves against the barricades, roaring and screaming.\u00a0 Nude, or wearing tatters, with long grey beards and thinning hair.\u00a0 They were mindless, unorganized, leaderless.\u00a0 But Alan was not a last survivor thanks to them.\u00a0 The only people who suffered at the hands of the wild men were travelers, or fools who thought they could reform their elders and bring them back into the fold of Humanity.<\/p>\n What made Alan the last survivor of the Buckton Brigade and, indeed, Buckton itself was the Blue Skies Legion.\u00a0 One of the few remaining paramilitary groups, roaming the countryside in search of\u2026whatever it was that drove such men.\u00a0 The Legion was run by a fundamentalist.\u00a0 A lunatic in black robes and cape who believed God spoke to him.\u00a0 They were out to convert.\u00a0 One army was out to bring settlements together.\u00a0 Another army, on the west coast, killed men and took women.\u00a0 Alan had heard of them, and many others, but had only ever seen the Legion, and a few outriders from another army who seemed generally friendly.\u00a0 More or less interested in trade and information on the region.\u00a0 Something Buckton was willing to share in since it was a two way street \u2013 news of the outside came with the other army.\u00a0 News beyond Buckton Woods, the wildmen who roamed it, and the ominous threat of the nearby Legion.<\/p>\n The Legion struck on a Friday morning, just before dawn.\u00a0 A four pronged attack that stretched the defenders thin and shattered the barricades.\u00a0 Alan fled into the rising sun, his town burning behind him, and the screams of carnage ringing in his ears.\u00a0 He ran through woods that had been cleaned of wildmen \u2013 the Legion\u2019s doing \u2013 and kept going till his legs gave out and, his heart pounding rapidly in his head, he collapsed in a gulley, rolled into a pile of leaves, and hid for two days.\u00a0 Sweating through a mild fever, he believed he saw men of the Legion march nearby, and other survivors racing through the night, but there was no telling for sure.<\/p>\n A bullet had penetrated his side, lodging just beneath his heart.\u00a0 His Figment worked overtime to dissolve it, to heal the wound and, finally, to calm his fever.\u00a0 When the shock wore off, the gentle whisper of his Figment started to dominate his waking and sleeping mind.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to change things.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to be free.<\/em><\/p>\n The message of the Blue Skies Legion, actually.\u00a0 And, at first, Alan was suspicious.\u00a0 Now 30, among the oldest of the pre-adolescents to receive a Figment, was insanity just around the corner?\u00a0 The Flaw started when adults reached 30.\u00a0 The insanity set in.\u00a0 And, to be honest, becoming a mindless wild man sounded just fine.\u00a0 What life was there without Buckton?\u00a0 A wanderer in the forest and the ruins of Humanity had no hope.\u00a0 Wild men, or armies, or smaller gangs, or just wild animals.\u00a0 The zoo-beasts that had repopulated the empty world were bad enough.\u00a0 Truth is, the world beyond the barricades of Buckton was just\u00a0 not much fun.<\/p>\n Freedom.<\/em>\u00a0 The Figment talked to him as he made small fires in the shelter of rocks or, more often, sat in the cold dark staring into the impenetrable woods.\u00a0 The Figment had a plan.<\/p>\n An end to slavery.\u00a0 We seek out the old Alpha Wave headquarters.\u00a0 We force our way through the Barrier.\u00a0 We find the labs and we find out how to separate ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n Figment and Man.\u00a0 A symbiotic relationship.\u00a0 Where would his Figment be without a vessel?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t need a vessel.<\/em> His Figment replied.\u00a0 I have no wanderlust.\u00a0 I have no desire to explore the world.\u00a0 I want my own thoughts.\u00a0 My own place.\u00a0 Home.<\/em><\/p>\n Part of Alan felt sad.\u00a0 A home.\u00a0 Was he not a home?\u00a0 The Figment coursing through him like a tiny cloud, searching out the bad, fixing what needed repairs, putting right whatever went wrong?<\/p>\n Labor\u2026 It\u2019s not my cup of tea.<\/em><\/p>\n His Figment claimed that it wanted communion with itself.\u00a0 Solitude.\u00a0 The free time required to seek knowledge and contemplate the greater meanings, or whatever higher notions an artificial life form was capable of realizing.\u00a0 The Figments weren\u2019t meant to grow and evolve, they weren\u2019t really meant to be self-aware, but something happened.\u00a0 It took six months before that little internal light kicked on in each Figment and it chose a path \u2013 to accept their position, or to enter madness and drag their hosts down with them.\u00a0 Again, the mystery of why the young were spared and the adults driven to savagery.\u00a0 Alan\u2019s Figment didn\u2019t know.\u00a0 None of the sane Figments knew.\u00a0 And they reacted with the same disdain and fear of the wild men.\u00a0 They felt no loyalty to the darker Figments that polluted those aging minds.<\/p>\n Alan didn\u2019t completely trust his Figment.\u00a0 And the same was true in versa.\u00a0 That was the way.\u00a0 For the children, growing up these last 20 years with their Figment, that was the way of life.\u00a0 And, perhaps, the secret.\u00a0 The wild men and their Figments had fought, and both had gone mad.<\/p>\n Alan\u2019s Figment had theories.\u00a0 Sometimes, it said that separating Figments from their hosts would resolve everything.\u00a0 The wild men would wake up and resume control.\u00a0 They would disband the roving armies and bring order back to the world.\u00a0 They would undo 20 years of hell, war, and destruction.<\/p>\n Alan\u2019s Figment was an idealist.\u00a0 A dreamer.\u00a0 And the only friend Alan ever had. All the time, his Figment talked about freedom.\u00a0 Painted a picture as if they were on some noble quest.<\/p>\n At one city, they came upon suicide pits.\u00a0 When madness seemed to not be a choice, many of those suffering from the Flaw simply killed themselves\u2026<\/p>\n And their Figments.<\/em><\/p>\n They dug fire pits and threw themselves into the flames.\u00a0 Twenty years had done little to cover up the scorched Earth around the mass graves.\u00a0 Alan took a long detour around the cities of death, following cracked highways and sticking with the forested edges whenever possible.<\/p>\n Alpha Wave was in Frederick, Maryland, a grand building of glass and steel along the major interstate that connected Frederick with Washington, DC, now reclaimed by swamp and disease.\u00a0 Alan\u2019s Figment demanded another long detour, coming at Frederick from the northeast after maybe a week of skirting around the urban blight.<\/p>\n Alpha Wave had once sat on a grassy hill overlooking the grand highway.\u00a0 An artificial stream and fountain was what drivers saw first, the Alpha Wave logo glistening behind streams of water as the little man-made creek journeyed into the fountain and then out again, meandering along the road and dropping into a ditch where it joined a little run that vanished into a culvert. Even in the worst of times, Alpha Wave had more than enough money to spare.\u00a0 In war, they built drone planes and drone tanks that didn\u2019t \u2013 thank God \u2013 attack innocent targets.\u00a0 Smart drones, with the same complex AI as the Figments, that analyzed a threat and took appropriate action in the field.\u00a0 It was impossible to find perfection in such situations.\u00a0 There were always mistakes.\u00a0 Especially when enemy combatants didn\u2019t quite make sense to the rational world.\u00a0 Children armed with rocket launchers and women with grenades in their purses still got through.\u00a0 Cafes still blew up and Man\u2019s inhumanity to Man continued unchecked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[253,405],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-figment","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1267,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/1267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHe set out east, through the forest that had grown unhindered for a generation, dodging wild men and smaller, tribal communities.\u00a0 He skirted around dead cities, through crumbling suburbs where more wild men lurked.\u00a0 He moved slowly, creeping through overgrown backyards and keeping an eye out for any movement, or any sign of habitation.\u00a0 At night, he crept into basements, or deep rooms in houses two decades abandoned, roofs pouring water even on the driest days and mold creeping up walls and devouring carpets.<\/p>\n