My thoughts are pure and cold. My gaze is directed downwards. I am invisible. Just a witness, though I could be in the middle of something. If it weren't for the cursed threads.
It's even hard to remember the time when I didn't know about them. What good would it do me if I pulled one of them and I was still just a pawn, obedient and pathetic?
I had the audacity to think that I was destined to free us from the threads forever. Oh, my God!
Maybe even for my own deliverance I should be thankful for an accident, and not for my will at all? I remember this moment as if it were yesterday.
We fought. Before that, Harlequin and I had always fought because he was jealous of me, and I denied everything, though I did cheat on him. It was like some kind of obsession: pale dreamy boys with sad smile and thin fingers ... My heart was heavily swollen in the chest, my fingertips swollen to painful sensibility and touch, a simple touch began to seem forbidden caress, stolen from the shameful reality.
And then came the sobering. Not without my husband's help, as if in a mockery of my fantasies cut according to a completely different template: red hair, loud voice, stingy figure of a fist fighter. He caught me at the "crime scene", hit me, and my "pale boys" and a few times almost sent to the other world. The fact that we stayed together can only be explained by the threads. It never occurred to me to get a divorce. Harlequin - get another one. We just kept repeating the same jammed play over and over again, like clockwork dolls. Reconciliation. Treason. Disclosure. A quarrel. Reconciliation.
Until one day, when I tried to hang myself on Harlequin with my whole body and thereby give Pierrot (that was his name) some time to get away from my eyes, I suddenly did not understand clearly and detachedly what had already happened. Word for word, movement for movement. This discovery struck me so much that I immediately stopped screaming and kicking.
And Harlequin, instead of taking a break and chasing after Pierrot, stared at me bewildered. It was as if he didn't know what to do without me yelling.
- It was all happening," I whispered.
- It was all happening," he repeated, with his eyes extended with horror.
The next day, as we went about our business, we kept catching ourselves in a sense of deja vu. Our gestures seemed stolen, our poses were unoriginal and broken, even faces reflected in glasses and windows as if they were just masks.
That's how we found out about the threads. Now we could be happy. If we had understood in time that freedom was given to us in advance, which we would have to pay with constant vigilance. Instead, Harlequin went to a bar, got drunk, and started sharing with his usual drinking companions that the world around us was full of "threads" that we obeyed like puppets.
He didn't come back.
Why didn't you come after me? I don't know. Maybe they were too lazy. Or... or knew that sooner or later I would give myself away. Just like Harlequin, with other threads. To do harm to myself: to get drunk and talk was his "thread", just as to be jealous of my wife, and then to forgive her.
His death was a lesson to me. I was now thinking about each of my actions. It wasn't "machine". No "obviously. Every second I expected my body and mind to betray me by launching threads of grace that would kill me like Harlequin. But for the time being, I was able to hide and keep quiet.
Then I met people like me, and they helped me escape.
So I found out about the Prophecy and became friends with Android Artemon. Before I met Pinocchio, I thought I was going to be the "hero who would change everything. Among the rebels, I was both a force and a hope. Every day, we would go into town and "cut the threads" as we called it: asking people questions and waiting for real answers. We would rip them out of puppet oblivion. And we were taught to be silent.
Some ran away with us, others stayed in town, becoming connected. From the very bottom floors, where the old Tortilla was splashing in the cooling pond, to the high spires that sent radio signals across the galaxy, our people were everywhere. They only waited for a sign to surround the tower of Karabas Barabas, turn off the repeaters and cut all the threads at once. But so far, our engineers have reported that the tower shutdown would have caused the deaths of all the city's residents, and maybe even the planet. The frequency of "threads" should have been somehow "knocked out" of our brain frequencies, but they had no idea how to do that. In the camp they were talking more and more about the Prophecy.
The Prophet will have an artifact that will be able to change the frequency without damaging anyone but Karabas and his minions. We believed it. This is what we lived by.
But when the Prophet himself came to my doorstep, I missed my chance.
Threads are always logical. Or feelings that are "obvious. When the threads are said in you, you don't want to prove anything. So only madmen can be free of threads. I knew that, but the first time I saw Pinocchio, I thought he was just crazy. He also scared me. I didn't want to be alone with him, I was annoyed with any deviation from the regulations, and in the end I drove him into a disinfection chamber because it seemed to me that what was happening to him could be explained by some disease brought in from another planet.
I remember my thoughts.
Closing the hatch behind Pinocchio's back, I thought that if he was too sick, I'd have to kill him because I couldn't put people in danger in the camp. "It's not safe now, and he's going to put us in the middle," I thought, and the thought seemed to me like a natural concern about my people. I would have killed him. Without thinking. Automatically. Because it's "obvious.
And not me, but Artemon should be thanked by the people of this planet: he managed to spoil the locking device hard enough to crack the code and be like this. I squealed and swore to dissolve it into microcircuits until I realized what was in my possession. I realized too late to apologize. The strange time has come when the android is more free in its actions than a human being.
Today is a great celebration in the capital, and I think the best time for the Prophet to reveal himself has finally come. I feel it in the air.
Let my eyes go down, let blue hair be covered with a hood, and let my thoughts be faceless, as a puppet should be.
I hope so.
I believe.
The sun is about to rise. The tower of Karabas will shake to the ground. And we'll suddenly realize that things are different. There will be no more threads. Just a moment, quick as the first dawn ray, but nothing will ever be the same.
The shadows are brightening.
I'm raising my head.
The sun is rising.