The year was 1709. I stood there looking at the Great Wall. It was said to be the pinnacle of human achievement. The Greatest Book tells us of the stories of The Wall that encompasses the entire city, and how it is the only thing that separates us from the others. Everyone agreed, “The wall protects us from the others, so that we may grow old. When it is their time, Noah decides if they will be sent to heaven.” Nobody doubted these rules of life. Nobody but me.
The Greatest Book tells of the origins of the wall. There was once a time before the wall gave us order. Before the wall was built. A great many years ago, a great war broke out. Over 500 years the war was fought. When the war turned to the use of magic, a man by the name of Noah Sarcophagus, standing with a long beard and sparkling eyes, used magic powder to destroy everything. He chose one million people to be taken in his Ark to an unknown world, away from the earth. He altered their personality, their blood and their organs. After ten years on Noah’s Ark, they returned to Earth. But not all life had been exterminated. Millions of survivors had begun to go backwards, growing hair on their cheeks, and their minds became dull like cavemen. Humans were becoming animals. They were infected and they were hungry. On the return to earth, The Ark used up all the magic liquid, so there was little escape from the vicious others. But with a force of one million chosen, Noah built the Great Wall, which protects us all to this very day, so that any man can grow to the age of 37 and be selected and pass on to win at life. It is everyone’s objective to be picked by Noah into the gates of salvation. Winning at life is simple. Lead a peaceful life on Earth. Never fight. Never disagree.
I was gazing upon the endless length of the Great Wall, so vast and expansive it was, but still, it seemed too simple. It was only a wall, after all. What was so great about it? I remembered from years ago asking my father why I can’t hear the vicious sounds of the others when I put my ear up to the wall, and his answer being, “That is because the wall is made of stone and 10 feet thick, completely solid.” But here I was today. I could test that quote. When I reached out and knocked on it with my fist, it resonated. If it was made of stone, then why did it sound hollow?
I once told my dad that I thought the wall was a hoax - that it was put there to hide something. He responded, but strangely, “It’s best not to discuss that. Never mention that again, for your sake, son. You will get in serious trouble if you doubt the creation of the Great Wall.”
“Hey, you over there!” said a female voice in the distance, “What are you doing here?” I responded, “I think the wall is a lie.” “Me, too,” she replied. “Today I came to see it again, to see if I couldn’t find something new to prove that it is a hoax. It was a far walk. Did you know it’s hollow?”
I had been to this wall once before. My father had taken me after I asked him what made the wall so special. “See,” he said as he stroked the Wall, “This 100 foot thick wall separates man from beast.” He gave it a punch, and all I needed to know was that it was solid. “So you’ll no longer have any doubts about the reality of the wall, right?” I decided it was best to give in. So I told him I wouldn’t doubt the wall ever again. “What’s you name, anyways?” “It’s Jamie.” What a nice name.
Jamie said, “There are things I question, too. Like a long time ago when I was a little girl, I overheard my mother and father fighting over something... It was a plate. My mom was screaming, crying over this plate. She said it was the most beautiful thing she had seen in her life. I was confused. I thought it was just a plate, but my mom thought it was special. Dad was really angry and hit my mom, knocking her to the floor. ‘I’ll kill you!’ he said, as the plate rolled away. Father picked it up, and then he smashed the plate into pieces and pieces and pieces. Through the smashing, I heard my mom crying. ‘You’re destroying it! It was marvelous’.” Then my dad told mom the plate was from a terrible world of the others, and he snuck out a word that he didn’t want to say, color. Mom asked him if the plate had color, and Dad said yes. She asked him what color was, and Dad slapped her, as he finished off completely destroying the plate. I was so confused. I went back to my room, and I’ve kept that event secret. You’re the first person that I’ve told that to.”
I was perplexed. What was color? I said, “It must be an incredible thing, to make ordinary stuff so... what did she say it was?”
“Marvelous. She said the plate flashed. It glimmered like nothing she’d ever seen before.”
“So, what’s on the other side of this wall?” I asked.
“It’s not the others.”
The Others was the name we gave to the descendants of the vicious survivors of Noah’s plan. The Greatest Book said Noah’s chosen were altered physically and mentally. The Book wasn’t quite clear though. How were they altered? Was “color” removed in the process? And why was this concept called color gone today if it was so awesome?
Jamie and I talked forever about the Wall. Eventually, we came up with a plan to break through the Wall. It had never been done before, we decided, because everybody feared the others. Jamie and I decided that the world as we knew it was a world ruled by fear. Noah’s hypnosis could never tell us that a world ruled by fear was good, and the fact that we knew we had been lied to about the wall. We needed to know what was on the other side.
Tales passed down from before the great war tell of a mixture of lime and saltpeter that was used in the making of a magic powder known to our ancestors as magician’s gunpowder. We were set on becoming magicians.
It took us a month to gather and craft the magician’s explosives we would use to break through the wall. Once we were done, we were notified that our grandfather, Tom Ridley, had just passed away and was selected to pass through the wall and go on to Heaven. We were all so happy for him. After that, we walked the ten mile walk from the outskirts of the city to the inside of the wall. I carefully placed the powder in a pile and led a five foot fuse to avoid exploding ourselves.
We gave it a spark and the fuse lit up perfectly. When it got to the huge pile of powder, there was a thunderous boom, then blazing bright fire and smoke erupted. When the smoke died down, it was evident that the wall had been penetrated. Darkness was all I could see in the doorway through all the smoke. As it died down some more, the sunlight began to shine in, and we could see tubing. All sorts of pipes, going everywhere. A siren sounded, followed by an announcement. It was coming from outside of the wall.
We dashed through the rubble into the mess of pipes and wood, noting the wall stood a mere six inches thick. Jamie brushed her arm against a hot pipe and screamed. A guard heard us and moved a beam of light in our direction, but I saw a little door. The light was coming out of a small tube, which we later learned was called a flash light. I lead Jami into the little door. It was a clean storage room, with a glowing tube on the ceiling. There were some similar tubes lying on the side of the room in some boxes, but none of them were glowing like the ceiling one. Jamie looked cute in this light. We were so close I could hear her heart beat. Gasping, I said, “I never asked you this before--” “You don’t need to,” she responded, leaning over, on me. She was beautiful up close, far away, and in any light. But right then we heard the doorknob move. The guard thought he had found us, but there was a chance to escape. On the other side of the small room was another door, which we quickly dashed through.
We entered a hall, lit with those same lights. Along with many other oddities, we began to like the new, wonderful form of lighting, which we just called “lights”. The hall was as endless as the wall, it seemed. There were hundreds of offices all along the hall. We decided to step into one. As we closed the door behind us, probably escaping the single guard that was after us in the maze of doors, I noticed a familiar voice. The voice of my dead grandfather was screaming in agony inside the office. I opened another door and there he was, not dead. There he was, with a saw to his heart, and ink markings all over his exposed chest. The man in possession of the saw halted his cutting, and an uneasy silence engulfed us all. But then I broke the silence and lunged at him with my fist. He was a feeble man for someone who looked to be 30. It was a good punch, as it knocked the saw out from his grasp. I picked it up and the saw blade began to spin. I held it up and asked, “Who are you and what are you doing to my grandfather?” His disfigured face said that the man was not like any other man. His body was disproportional, and his right leg looked different that his left leg, like some of his body didn’t belong to him. In a deep cold voice, he rumbled, “I am Noah Sarcophagus, and I desire your grandfather’s heart.”
“You are the Noah of the great books? The Noah who almost wiped out the human race? Then how are you alive still today?”
“I take what parts I need. The rest I sell to my patients. We have the best doctors in the world here. You see, I am what you call a god. I live forever and watch over the world. That’s what immortals do. You, who broke through the wall, have a lot of strength in your mind. You’d make a fine deity, but you’re not on my side. So you and your friend must die.”
“Wait. What are clones?” I asked, remembering the siren that went off as we broke the wall.
“You two are perfect clones. Duplicates of two people that exist outside of my factory. If one of my patient’s body parts fail, we sell them their own body part, except it comes from a non-diseased copy of them. You may be a duplicate, but I think you’re nothing but shadows of real people. You have a perfect life. You live in a perfect world free of all diseases. Real people don’t have that luxury. I’d love to live in the world I created.”
“So you created the wall, populated it with people, filled their minds with false beliefs that they lived in a utopia, and disassemble them for their parts when they grow to a certain age? Noah, you are disgusting.”
“Ah, but you saw through my plan. I’m dying at last. My body has held too many hearts. My brain tissue is old now, and I think this will be the last heart I can take.”
“You won’t have my grandpa’s heart-- but wait, he isn’t my grandfather if I’m a clone!”
A group of guards were now coming through the office and arrived at our door. It was all over and we were going to die. But I still had the saw in my hand, so I squeezed it and it turned on. I slashed at the guards but one of them grabbed Jamie and beckoned me to calm down. A doctor came through the guards and went to Noah. The doctor performed the heart procedure in front of us. Noah had a new heart.
When the operation was done, the guards and doctor cleared out of the room. Jamie and I could kill Noah, but it looked like that was already being done for us. Noah was dying. His body was couldn’t handle another transplant. He beckoned for us to come closer, so we did. He grabbed me by the neck and whispered, “Go to the top floor and enter the code twenty one, fifty-six, zero. You’ll like what happens.”
And we did. We went to the top floor and entered the code on the keypad. A siren sounded again.
WALL WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN TEN MINUTES.
We took the elevator down to the bottom floor and exited to the outside of the building. We were past the wall, past the offices, and into the real world, full of color and hues and sparkles. The sun was now yellow, and the sky was blue, and my body was a different color, too. I will never know how I immediately knew the names of the colors, but I did, and Jamie did too. We both knew something had been missing from our utopia all along.
From inside the city, a little girl said to her sister, “Look at the sky!” A mesh of lightning flickered up above the city. When it stopped flickering, color rained on the earth where it had never shined before Noah put up the Desaturator. Then a boom could be heard throughout the town in the direction of the wall. “Woah, what was that?” The wall had fallen. Everybody escaped into the real world. There were no vicious others, just normal people like us, in a world much more advanced than our own. We learned computers, cell phones, and technology, cars and new metals. The future was great.
Despite having a so-called perfect world, the wall people’s lives were terrible, knowing that they would die and be used for replacement parts in other people. A utopia will always fall because people will always question their creator. They will always seek a better life. A utopia isn’t possible.
