Dreams of the Quill

Stepping out of the food court and turning her footsteps down Hearst Avenue, Marin sighed.

Looking down the hill and over where the bay should have been, all she could see was fog. An almost constant stream of headlights emerged from the fog, driving up the hill, driving up to the college on the hill. Every so often, a car with a broken headlight trundled up the hill. Marin was grateful for these unsafe drivers. They evoked a memory of a time when people would casually forget to turn their lights on in fog. They broke up one aspect of the monotony.

The monotony was, of course, life as it was supposed to be. For four years now, rules were simply obeyed. No one so much as jaywalked in Marin’s recent memory.

No one stopped their cars in red zones.
No one padded along in front of emergency vehicles.
No one drove drunk.
No one abused marijuana, or any other substances.
No one casually took things from stores.
No one dropped only a couple nickels into the bus coin container.

No one did any of these things anymore. Everyone simply followed the rules, almost blindly. But not thoughtlessly. Just looking around, Marin could see peoples’ faces contorted in concentration. Everyone in the city of her college, everyone in the area surrounding the bay, everyone in the state, everyone in all of America was doing their utmost to follow every rule.

Marin sighed again, thinking back on how things used to be, four years ago, before the switch.

The last total war America had seen was back in the forties, with World War II. This war… this wasn’t a total war. But the War on Terror advertised by the President back when he was only a President had escalated into something almost as—if not more—terrifying—it had become a total war on terror, one in which every citizen of the country was working every second of every day to aid the greater cause of defending up-righteousness.

Marin sighed a third time in as many steps down the sidewalk.

When people joined to combat terror by being perfect in their obedience to the President and the Establishment, government stopped having multiple inputs and, with it, life stopped having multiple inputs. Everything had became a single path with one end and no fluctuations, and all the trees and flowers and skies and suns and clouds and people lost their color. And Marin became bored.