Chasing Imagination

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
-Albert Einstein


Amy

I never assumed that I could be anything but normal.

I watched Mr. Goodliff striding around the room. The people sitting both sides, in front and behind of me were silent. I didn’t break the trend.

The school had told me I should take history at university, so that was of course what I did without question. I liked history; I was good at history. Maybe one day I would write historical books, or work in a museum, or take guides around old buildings. History was good, according to the government, for history was true. The future was when it got complicated. But the past was set in stone; the past was made up of real, concrete facts, and therefore the past was good.

Today, as we had been doing every day recently, we were talking about life before the Revolution. It sounded fascinating, yet terrifying. The government kept no secrets about what went on before the Revolution, because they thought we should know about what a dark and dangerous place our world was back in those days.

Of course, humanity didn’t just wake up one day and realise that imagination was illegal. Politics was never that simple. But it had been agreed sometime during 2095 that, after the turn of the century, something had to change. And that thing was imagination.

The Revolution happened thirty-seven years ago—it was recent history supposedly, considering we also learnt about things that happened far further back in time. But it was perhaps for that reason that I was so interested in learning about it. I was twenty years old. If I had been born just one generation ago, I would have experienced these harsh, dreadful things known as dreams and stories and fantasies and imagination.

But now we were safe. They told us we were safe, and we believed them. Imagination was dangerous, but reality was safe. The Prime Minister said it. His government said it. The government of every single country in Europe said it, and I’m sure that, if we still had frequent contact with America and Africa and Australia, that they would have said it as well. As it was, the continents had grown more distant from each other over the years.

The Revolution was the day when dreams were banished; the day when imagination was made illegal. Books, films, music and TV were all cast to the ashes; buried deep in the earth; drowned in the biggest oceans.

That didn’t mean we had no entertainment. The media controlled that—we had music, crafted from computers. The rebels called it meaningless, unemotional, processed shit. The supporters called it safe, real, true to the normality of life, and unpretentious.

We watched TV—the news kept us up to date with all that went on in the world. There were game shows that we watched for fun, where contestants answered general knowledge questions or showcased their talents or raced through obstacles courses to win money and prizes. There were many intriguing documentaries on about everything—history, wildlife, different cultures around the world, whether they were modern or ancient, how things were built and constructed and everything.

And there were books of course—textbooks, non-fiction books, anything like that. Some of them, like the history ones, were incredible.

We still played games; rebels were inclined to think that we didn’t have fun since the Revolution, but that wasn’t the case. People liked card games, and sports were also popular. At the moment, people seemed to be particularly enjoying football and basketball.
I had never known anything different to life after the Revolution, so I had never needed to. I had never created or made anything. I had never dreamt. I had never imagined a situation that wasn’t real—no make-believe characters or places that didn’t really exist or things that were impossible and not really happening.

Of course, there were the rebels, though. There were many of them across the world, but the government suppressed them for our safety. There were always the occasional stories though—perhaps someone had let off a bomb in protest, or perhaps a couple of them had been caught. Sometimes, they even told us about giving the rebels the operation.
But the rebels were the closest thing us ‘normal’ people had left to fantasy. I had never knowingly seen or met a rebel, and I knew nothing about who they were, where they were, or what they did, other than that they thought life had been better before the Revolution.

I didn’t see why—dreams sounded dangerous. Fantasy could mess with a person’s head, as Mr. Goodliff rightly said, so that they became confused, corrupted or distant from the real world. What was the use in sitting in a room, alone, listening to music or reading a book about people or situations that didn’t even exist? In what way was that productive?

And as for dreams and aspirations, they sounded like the worst things of all. Before the Revolution, people were allowed to choose what careers they had. That was a recipe for disaster. They had all sorts of silly jobs too, actors (people who spent their lives pretending to be other people in front of a camera or an audience), singers and musicians (people who spent their lives standing on a stage or in a studio singing or making music—basically doing anything that a computer could do just as well, if not better), authors and poets and artists (people who wasted their lives writing or drawing or painting or talking about things that didn’t even exist.) Tell me, what was the point in that?

And besides, what was the use in a person adamantly saying that they wanted to be, for example, a chef, if they were so much better suited to being a shopkeeper? It would be a life and a talent wasted. And then people got jealous and greedy and discriminated against—there were always certain jobs where more people wanted them than the amount of vacant places they had, and that was never going to work out.

Life was complicated before the Revolution. Now it was so much simpler.

Our entire class thought exactly the same way. One by one, we all had to read out the piece of writing we’d done for homework about the Revolution in front of the class, about our thoughts and opinions—not that anyone would dare to publicly challenge what had happened. Even the rebels, or the terrorists as Mr. Goodliff preferred to call them, did their business in secret. They weren’t supported enough or brave enough to come out in public to say what they really thought.

‘Amy, your thoughts?’ Mr. Goodliff asked, looking at me with his deep blue eyes. I wondered if I would ever end up lecturing future generations about history in a university, or in a school of course, like him. It could be an interesting career, but I’d have to wait and see where I was put.

I stood up. ‘The Revolution was the change that the world so badly needed,’ I said, reading from my notes, saying exactly the same as all the rest of my class, just phrasing it a little differently each time. ‘Before the Revolution, people were out of control. They believed they could do anything they wanted, which they so obviously couldn’t, because that is just completely impractical, and it led to a lot of bad vibes across the world. Many were jealous of others’ talents or professions; many ignored their own lives in favour of aspiring to be something that they were blatantly never going to do.
‘And as for this thing called imagination, it sounds like the most dangerous tool known to mankind. Surely one could waste their life, living more of it inside their own deluded mind than outside in the real world. It would be a life wasted, possible talents wasted—what’s the use in spending so much time talking about something that does not even exist?
‘And then there was individuality. That also sounds harmful. Individuality brings about discrimination and bullying, but it also gives people the idea that they possess much more power than they actually have. Telling people ‘you can be whoever you want to be’ is not healthy, for it implies that there is no society and no rules. Total anarchy could break out; and not to mention all the wars and deaths and bloodshed that took place because of differences in opinion. Take World War Two, for example. Hitler thought that he could ‘achieve anything’ and ‘be whoever he wanted to be,’ and that led to millions of deaths all across the world.’

‘Very good, Amy,’ said Mr. Goodliff. ‘Sit down.’

Ten minutes later, Mr. Goodliff closed off his lecture, summing up all we’d discussed today, and dismissed the class.

‘Are you coming out later?’ asked Fran as we walked out, bouncing up beside me, wearing her new lilac t-shirt. Pastel colours were in fashion this season, and therefore anything dark had disappeared entirely from the shop shelves, and we were encouraged to store away anything dark coloured that we owned until it came back into fashion again. Trousers were back in again—last season, during the middle of winter, everyone had been wearing jeans, nearly always blue, but those a little more eccentric—however strict the rules were, some were always able to bend them—wore black.

I also noticed that Fran was wearing her denim jacket from last season. It might be alright, considering it was a very light, pastel blue, in keeping with the current colours, but very few people were wearing denim now. I was surprised she’d got into the university wearing it—last week, I’d seen a boy wearing a denim jacket on his way into the building, and one of the teachers had made him take it off and confiscated it.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to go home first and get changed though. I don’t want to go out like this.’

‘Sure,’ she agreed enthusiastically. ‘Do you want to meet at mine at six?’

‘Yeah, that’d be nice,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you then.’

We left the building together, and then she turned left towards her house and I carried straight on. My house was a little further away; they were running out of houses in the town, and so I had to take the car back.

The government provided us with houses too. Apparently, before the Revolution, people had been allowed to choose their houses. Some were huge and some were tiny. They all had different layouts and different decor and different styles. That was as much of a disaster waiting to happen as the choosing of careers; it was simply never going to work.

After returning home, I briefly went back out again to go to the shop. There was a small but perfectly adequate little shop on the corner of the road, so I headed there.

Yet when I arrived, it was closed. The board on the door stated that, on weekdays, it was open from ten o’clock in the morning until six in the evening, and it was not even half past five yet. I frowned, re-reading it, in case I’d missed something. I tried the door, but it was locked and all the lights were off inside.

‘Shop’s not going to be open for a while,’ said a man walking past behind me, making me jump.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Apparently, the man who runs it has been taken away by the government,’ he said.

‘What?’ I cried. Kind old Mr Smith and his wife were the nicest people I could have ever hoped to meet. They certainly weren’t the sorts of people to commit any sort of crime.

‘I heard that Mr Smith was accused of imagination-related crimes,’ said the man, who I had never met before.

‘What?’ I repeated. Mr Smith had never so much as mentioned imagination since I had met him. This was certainly unprecedented. ‘Do you know what it was that he was doing?’

‘Well apparently he had publicly expressed an idea that he had—an invention or something,’ said the man. ‘He had been dreaming up this new concept, and he told it to his wife and a few friends, just in the middle of a conversation. Seems that one of the friends wasn’t too happy about this rule-breaking.’

‘That’s terrible,’ I said, unsure as to whether I was talking about the fact that he had committed this most treacherous of crimes, or the fact that one of his friends had betrayed him. He would have trusted them, and they would have broken that trust. And yet, rules were rules. They were made to keep people safe and make the world a better place.

The man shrugged indifferently. ‘Rules are rules.’

He walked away, and I began heading through the back street to get to the other little shop just a couple of blocks away. I noticed that thick, grey clouds were closing in above, and the January evening air made me shiver through to the bone, so I took the shortcut through the alleyway.

I was about half way through when I noticed someone moving in the shadows down an even smaller alley; a tiny, narrow pathway behind a house.

I stopped dead, peering into the alley, trying to make out what was down there. The person, whoever they were, also seemed to stop once sighting me.

He began to move down the alleyway, passing through a thin shaft of weak sunlight shining down in between the tall buildings.

I caught a flash of red.

Well, how unusual was that really? In the greater scheme of things, so what if he was wearing a red and black jacket?

Actually, it was very unusual. Red hadn’t been in fashion for over a year, and so anything red had of course been banned. And no one wore black on their top halves now—many wore black trousers, but to wear a red and black check jacket was practically anarchic.

I’d always had an inexplicable curious streak about me. The government had always liked to suppress curiosity, but they couldn’t exactly make it illegal, so I still felt free to make it a part of me. I rarely just accepted what someone told me. I always had to probe, ask questions, find out for myself.

I began to follow him. I couldn’t explain why; I just felt that I needed to. Who was he? Was he a rebel? The idea filled me with excitement; if nothing else, it would be great for my history project to see what people might have looked like before the Revolution.

He walked right to the other end of the alleyway, seemingly oblivious to my existence as I kept just far enough behind so he wouldn’t hear my breathing or my footsteps.

We got to a deserted part of town, and he hurriedly crossed the quiet road, going down into the subway on the other side. Waiting just long enough for him to get down, I followed at a run, hurrying down the steps underground.

The tunnel was long and dimly lit; with dirty walls covered in small patches of graffiti. It was ages since I’d last seen graffiti; why was it down here?

He headed straight on down the tunnel, and I continued to follow. There was no reason why, but to merely see this man set off a sudden and previously unknown desire within me. It was a desire for knowledge, for information, for truth.

I continued to walk, keeping him just far enough in front of me so he would hopefully not hear. I had never been this far into the subway before; it was an underground world beneath the pristine little city I lived in that I never even knew existed. It was hideous, yet undeniably fascinating. I was down here now; I couldn’t turn back until I knew what was really going on.
At that moment, the man turned round. His eyes locked onto mine, and I felt compelled to stay there, staring back at him. Try as I might, I couldn’t look away.

He wore a red and black check jacket; bright, vivid red like I hadn’t seen for a long time. He also wore black jeans in a very skinny style; so skinny that I was convinced they must originally have been for girls, and black shoes. His black hair fell low over his face, hanging straight and in layers around his head, reaching past his chin in places. Hairstyles had always been a more liberal fashion, yet at the same time, boys had not had hair that long or that way styled for months now. As autumn had come last year, every man I knew had had his hair cut shorter.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. Even from this distance, I saw his lips move as devastatingly blue eyes pierced my mind, and his quiet voice echoed through the long tunnel, silent other than the rhythmic tapping of a leaking drip.

I froze. What did I say? That I was spying on him? That I was ‘fascinated’ by his clothes and hair and where he was going? That I wanted to watch him for my history project?

‘Who are you?’ he repeated. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Amy,’ I said automatically. ‘Amy Harper.’

Why did I tell him the truth? Because that was all I’d ever been taught to tell anyone. This thing called lying was even more of a crime than just imagination, because it was imagination used to the extent that it was trying to convince others that the fantasy you were making up was actually true, and it was usually used for deceptive purposes as well.

‘What are you doing down here?’ he asked.

I had never used my imagination before; not to a proper extent. Of course, I had decided which clothes to put on in the morning; I had worded a history essay in my mind before putting it onto paper—those things all took imagination technically, but I had never in my life actually made up something that wasn’t true, whether it was a lie or a story or a dream or anything.

It was as if the walls of my mind were suddenly crumbling down. The cage in my head was caving in, and all these new...ideas...yes, they were ideas...came flooding in like the opening of a dam.

‘I came down to get to the train station,’ I said.

I said something that was not true.

I lied.

I used my imagination to create something that was not real.

And it felt really, weirdly good.

‘You’re a bit lost then, aren’t you?’ said the boy, moving just a little closer. ‘You need to turn back and go almost all the way back to the stairs and take the left hand turn.’

‘Oh sorry,’ I said, pretending to sound sheepish. That was it again—pretending—making up something that didn’t really exist. ‘I just assumed that you were going to the station, so I followed you.’ And that was another lie. I was lying again. And, despite my voice shaking and my heart pounding, I realised that this was fun. It was a new experience I’d never even comprehended before today.

The boy raised his eyebrows. Now he was close enough for me to make out the bemused, almost pitying expression on his face. ‘You and I both know that that’s not true.’

I averted my eyes, feeling myself blush.

‘I should be going,’ I mumbled, suddenly eager to get out of here. He’d uncovered my secret and seen through my pathetic disguise. Now I was uncomfortable.

‘You can’t leave.’ His voice was louder, sterner. It echoed through the deserted subway. The strip lights above flickered slightly. I tried to read the graffiti lining the walls. It had grown more abundant the further I’d got into the underground. There were large words written in cartoon-like, capital letters—swear words and abusive terms and anarchic sounding phrases.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, growing hostile. ‘I have every right to leave!’

‘No you don’t,’ he told me. ‘You’re in here now, and you’ve seen where I’m going. I can’t let you leave.’

I was ready to leave. I was not a fast runner, and in my heart I knew I wouldn’t make it back up to the surface, but I was willing to try.

And then he raised his arm.

It was holding a gun.