It had been a week and sleep still eluded Penelope.
She figured that with the free housing that came with her promotion, there had to be a condition, and hated how right she was. Silence was rare. Even in the dead of night when the world was supposed to be soundless in slumber, Penelope found herself tossing and turning against the constant whirl of sirens and rhythmic thumping of nearby construction. Voices of neighbours travelled through the paper-thin walls that her co-workers had boasted were soundproof. The earth shook as the trams, said to have the same speed as a flash of lightning, whizzed by.
And then there was the faint hum of electricity that was forever embedded in the walls, in society. In the world. It vibrated, rumbled like the thunder of an oncoming storm.
The minutes felt like hours. The noise felt inescapable. That was what Penelope particularly hated about the night. During the day, she could escape the noises by keeping her mind busy, hunched over the work table, effortlessly weaving ideas for the inventions she would bring to life. During the day, she was in control. She didn’t need to be human, but an extension of the system.
Penelope, sitting up and digging her nails into the sheets, finally had enough. She balled up the sheets in her fist, wishing to ruin them, distort them, make them impossible to correct.
How did Velcorp expect her to keep up her work if she could barely get sleep? Surely, they wanted to prioritise the well-being of their most prized inventors. Isn’t that how they kept their metallic grip on the world, through their outstanding inventions? Or was it that carefully constructed reputation that they are humanity’s saviours amidst the climate crisis? Making machines that harness the weather so they wouldn’t have to compromise on fossil fuels like other companies did.
The prospect of free housing upheld that idea and was the only aspect of this job that Penelope looked forward to, that kept her morals and fantasies from taking the wheel and derailing her career. However, this cheap excuse for housing was an indicator that despite her promotion, she was still nothing special. She was still a meaningless cog that could be replaced at any minute, in a machine that makes this world go round.
She was never a priority; she never will be.
She truly understood this when she saw her new home, or rather prison, for the first time.
That was when she wondered if there was even a point to a promotion. To any of this. To those restless nights and early hours, to neglecting those friendships that were now unsalvageable.
Now, she wondered, where is it! Where is the freedom? She couldn’t even go outside until dawn. Couldn’t open the window on account of poisonous pollution from the Velcorp factory. Her factory. Or get a midnight snack under nighttime protocol.
She was sick of the control.
Her eyes widened as she turned her thoughts over. She slowly lost her grip on the covers and sighed deeply before putting her face in her hands. Shame crept into her anger.
What was wrong with her? Complaining about something as stupid as not being able to get a snack, was she a child? So many would kill to be in her position, for a roof over their head. Not many get that opportunity anymore and here she is, idiotically complaining.
To complain about something as trivial as noise made her sick to her stomach. The noise was annoying, yes, but it was a sign that despite all our hardships, life persists. The human species thrives. Velcorp may be soul-sucking, but they’ve kept us from extinction.
Penelope took a few deep breaths, thoughts turning to her family. Her hardworking, resilient family. Who had capability and ambition that she wished she inherited, that she wished Velcorp could have seen. But they never did. She realised this when they stuck her family in the mines with the workforce, to mine cobalt endlessly. One of the few jobs that Velcorp allowed humans to do, and called it a luxury.
But then Penelope looked around her at her own supposed luxury and wondered if it really was the better option. Either way, Velcorp dictated her life, owned her soul. Penelope would have argued that being an inventor, and therefore higher in the hierarchy, actually allowed Velcorp to own more of her. That this sought-out stability wasn’t worth it at the cost of feeling an emptiness so deeply that the ache of it clawed your heart, leaving a searing burn behind.
She hugged her knees and surveyed her room. It should have been blanketed in darkness, but the faint light from machinery crept through the cracks of the walls.
The light illuminated the emptiness of her apartment, dotted with remnants of her own personalisation in the form of family pictures, tools sprawled on her worktable, and her most prized possession: her books.
She inherited them from her grandmother who was given them by her own mother. They were such a fascinating rarity. After all the book burning Velcorp had instructed, only a few managed to slip under the radar. That was why she purposely kept them under lock and key in a chest at the end of her bed. However, she had a favourite amongst them and even thinking about it awakened a warmth that cut through the emptiness.
It was a book about nature, all the different biomes and what lived in them, accompanied with detailed diagrams and pictures. When she first got the book, a fervid obsession took over her. She could hardly imagine a world like that. A world overtaken by nature instead of machines. A world she wanted to bring back to life.
The idea fascinated her so heavily that she sought it out in her world constantly, hoping to catch a glimpse of what remained. Even as she learnt the impossibility of this, it kept her sane, even if she was forced to work with the very entity that had taken this from her.
The obsession never truly died. She could feel it, that ecstatic euphoria as she glanced through her window, which should have shown a barren, deserted landscape, overtaken by high-rise buildings that touched the smoke-filled sky, forever grey and hiding the sun. But that doesn’t make a good view, Penelope thought.
So, that's when she reluctantly put her talent to good use.
The holographic picture she constructed was illuminated on the window. It looked real. Too real. It displayed a pitch-black sky, sprinkled with stars that blinked in and out of existence.
She was surprised she got away with it, considering the amount of cameras carefully placed throughout the apartment. They stood out against the stark whiteness of the walls as the black, eye-shaped circles followed her, perking up even if she moved an inch.
Even after weeks, her suspicion inspired a suffocating terror that would start to close in on Penelope. That is, until her eyes snagged on a sight that snuffed the terror.
The moon.
It shone like a pearl one might find in the depths of the sea, that shattered the claustrophobic darkness.
Penelope imagined being bathed in the light of a world spoken of in her book, where you could sit under the night sky. Welcoming the sounds of nature, the croaking of a frog, the hooting of an owl, the rustling of the branches.
A world that wasn’t made of metal.
Where nature took a breath, and humanity took it with them.
Hope sparked within her as the moon's rays burned into her eyes. She closed them. The electric buzz, with that precise uniformity which drove Penelope mad, morphed into the trill of crickets. She then allowed her mind to drift to the image of a crisp summer’s day, where the crickets’ musical talents ceased and the buzz of bees took their place. It accompanied a cloudless sky and field of flowers that gave off a dizzyingly sweet scent. It quashed the inherent rationality that Penelope always clung to.
She opened her eyes. The absence of logic enforced an instability so sharp, so potent that Penelope found herself in a trance as she mindlessly reached for the moon.
Only a second later, she realised that she wasn’t supposed to touch it, as the machinery was delicate. But those rules seemed distant as she stroked the window. Then, the image of the moon flickered.
Insanity retreated away as reality returned.
Penelope held her breath. Surely this will pass.
It never did.
It flickered madly before the image fizzled out. The window turned black. All at once, the sounds of artificiality rushed back. Penelope’s imagined world fell away as she stared at the darkness.
She didn’t sleep after that. How could she when this impossible longing gripped her? When she had finally visited the world before? When it was so close, so close!
Why couldn’t it be closer?
