Do you know the most blissful sleep one can have? It is a gift given only to those who wage a war within an insomniac’s mind. Hours of struggle and turmoil mocked by your own brain. Reminiscent of those childhood tales of quicksand. Something about the more you struggle, the deeper you descend. Utterly forced to accept a groggy, dark-circled morning. If you’re lucky, you may be rewarded with a divine hour or two of such a slumber. The hardest battles yield the sweetest rewards.
Yume, a slightly tall, slender woman with jet-black hair in a jellyfish cut, is waging this war in her bedroom. Well- you could also refer to it as her kitchen, bathroom, and living room. A solitary confinement with limited amenities, all contained within one fifteen by fifteen-foot cube.
A wall in front of the bed that displays TV across several pixeled panels, a wall to the side with shuttered windows, the opposite side having a foldable kitchen and bathroom attachment, and an absent wall behind the bed.
This is the typical housing situation you can find across The Rung. “Rung” meaning a rung in the ladder. The Rung and its citizens, Splinters, are a crucial component of the economic plan signed in by The Chamber to allow the lower class to ascend. Of course, Yume thinks otherwise. While unable to express this to her fellow Splinters, Yume believes it is a slap in the face to be a part of The Rung.
“Why would I want to be stepped on?” Yume mutters to herself and rolls over to the cold side of her bed. All while unsuccessfully trying to avoid eye contact with the projection on the wall.
“It is currently three thirty-three. You are now five hours past your Health Window” Emanates from every corner of the room. The projection of a nurse dressed in white smiles then fades into the wall that she had just jumped out of. Yume, who was too defeated to even alter her alert settings, groans, and turns over to the slightly-less cold side.
Maybe I’ll just put something on to distract my mind, she thinks.
With a wave of her hand, the wall at the end of her bed lights up and begins playing a documentary. There’s a man superimposed over aerial footage of The Rung, beginning a speech reminiscent of an advertisement from the 1950s.
“The Great Ladder of the Northwest is the pinnacle of civilization in the year 3800. This vast cityscape boasts a population in the hundreds of millions stretching across 3 circular tiers. The largest tier, The Rung, holds the majority of its diverse population.
During the rise of our ocean’s water, the people of Japan, coastal Asia, and Europe sought a new place to call home. With its cutting-edge technology and promising social structure, many of these immigrants came to the ladder to begin anew.
It’s quite simple really; you put in the work in the rung and you move up! Humble beginnings in the lowest tier pay off tenfold once you earn your stake in the middle.
Here the citizens tend to their own, private land with beautiful homes. Lavish greenery, designer clothing, and decadent refreshments are all within walking distance.
If that still doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s a tier just for those high-reaching members. State-of-the-art health services, extra sensory implants, space travel, you name it!
The Ladder is a utopia unlike anything else”
As his sentence trails off and leads into another, the screen begins to fade back into the wall, following Yume’s consciousness.
Is it sheer spite that allows her to finally sleep? Probably. Yume is trying to rest before the second-to-last day of her nine-month work cycle. Packer 027 is what she is referred to during the day. For twelve hours and thirty minutes every day, she packages unidentifiable “meat” from a Cryo-Belt. The packing room is lit with harsh, bright lights to spot any “errors” in the produce. Her uniform is a white lab coat, white cap, and white gloves. It perfectly matches the assembly line and walls surrounding it. The view from inside is enough to make your eyes blister behind tinted glass.
Her coworkers, referred to within the Rung as co-candidates aren’t especially friendly towards her, but that is probably due to RULE #5: Under no circumstances shall anything outside of your task be discussed on the premises. The meat goes from one dull white lab coat to the next. No hellos, no goodbyes. Just meat and blinding lights.
The rest of the fifty rules follow a similar tone. They are all in place to keep the splinters in line and ensure productivity is at an absolute maximum. The banned conduct includes but is not limited to, sitting, eating, drinking, taking time off, questioning your role, and other activities that humans typically enjoy.
But it wasn’t the impending workday that caused Yume’s sleepless night. The day after tomorrow is her tenth cycle graduation. She is growing more and more concerned about the fact that her peers have been ascending before her. Nine cycles of candidates have come through and none of them have brought Yume up the ladder with them.
You see, when someone ascends a step on the ladder, they don’t take the place of their superior. The ascendant moves up; both in career and location. Yume and her current co-candidates reside in the lowest of the three steps, which is called The Rung. The Rung is a vastly temporary location, as you can expect to ascend to the next tier after your first nine-month cycle. The next step, referred to as The Middle, is a more permanent position on the ladder.
Ladder steps are separated very rigidly. No one in a step outside of your own has contact with you. It doesn’t matter if it’s your mother. Not an inch of information is given as to where they are, and how they are doing. The only insight into what the next step is like is delivered to you framed in gold. You can’t walk down the street without seeing the blaring advertisements. It truly does look like a step up. Houses with land, people growing food, restaurants, and even specialized education. It all looks so perfect.
It has been almost seven years of anticipation growing weaker and more fleeting. The day after tomorrow holds the weight of her future. You’re only allowed ten cycles to ascend. If you don’t pass your tenth, you’re sentenced to exile in the pit.
Yume has seen everyone she ever knew vanish to the greater good. She imagines that they are on to even better things by now. She would love to hear that her mother has ascended even further, but that’s muddled by the desperate wish that she’ll still be on the second step when she makes it there herself.
She hasn’t been in contact with her mother for eight years now. The Rung has some very particular rules regarding children. Parents must stay in The Rung until their child reaches age sixteen. Once the age is reached, parents are quickly separated from their children as they ascend. It has forced some people into an endless cycle of bearing children as they can’t find the strength to abandon their offspring. The only sure way to stay with a child past the flight age is to get pregnant again. It is a brutal reality, but one that Yume has accepted for the most part.
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She isn’t like most of the kids she grew up with though. Issues with her parents’ marriage have made her an only child. She was the only kid in school to have no siblings. She didn’t think too much of it growing up, even though her classmates loved to point it out. They would berate her for having no family.
Yume never got worked up about it because she loved her small family. Most siblings seemed to constantly bicker and fight for attention. Yume had all the attention she could ask for from her mom, Yua.
That, of course, made it hurt even more when she ascended a few days after Yume’s sixteenth birthday. Suddenly, the little cuts and bruises left from classmates’ comments became festering wounds.
She left and Yume truly had no one. Yume spent the following year of school learning how to survive alone. Her only parental figure during this time was that cursed projection nurse. She always felt like more of a teacher or boss to Yume than a parent. That thing does not have empathy, it knows only repetition and order.
While Yume certainly made a valiant effort to fall asleep, it is unfortunately short-lived. One leg is thrust out of the covers and kicks them off. Sweat beading down her face as she tosses and turns, attempting to regain her slumber. The attempt is unsuccessful.
“DAD” Yume gasps urgently.
She fumbles off her bed half awake, desperately searching for something. Ignoring the returning projection’s loud recommendation for sleep, Yume pulls out a box of keepsakes from under her bed. Weathered letters, trinkets, and an ancient flash drive scramble around the edges of the box while Yume digs through. Finally, she finds what she is looking for and lets out a sigh of relief. It was a letter. Not just any letter though, this contains the last words her father ever sent to her.
“Yume,
My faction is dissolving tonight. I sacrificed years of your youth trying to bring this machine down. But it’s all too much. It’s hopeless when our enemy is within the circle. No ladder in the world will lift you over those walls.
I can’t make it up to you. I can’t make it up to the friends I lost.
We are utterly defeated.
Please listen to what I say now more than anything.
Protect the bracelet I gave you. Each gem is incredibly valuable outside The Rung. Especially the red one.
There’s one last thing that you need to remember.
When all else is lost, cut the cord. “
She reads the letter like she has hundreds of times in the past. Nothing seems to make sense at all. When she received this letter, it had been two years since she last saw her father, Adam. She barely remembered his presence as a child. In and out of her life, even during those fuzzy years as a tween.
Calling those years fuzzy is a bit of a conservative description. Yume didn’t remember a few years of her early life, but she partially chalks that up to the intensive hormonal therapy she received around the age of twelve. She was born into a faulty body; it wasn’t one that matched her brain. Hormone replacement therapy helped her fix these issues.
H.R.T., paired alongside some traumatic family issues is enough to make anyone a little forgetful. Not everything was forgotten though. Her father caused a great deal of pain during his pursuit of freedom.
This man drove her mother to have a mental break and be placed in a rehabilitation hospital. Although he has vehemently expressed his sorrow over the matter, Yume still blames him for the entire ordeal. His acts of rebellion against the rest of the world lead to some rather tasteless childhood memories.
When her mother finally returned, it was clear she had no interest in his antics anymore. She was a changed woman, a woman of order and ideals. The strong role model that ousted her rambunctious father. This is the woman that raised Yume to be the functioning member of society that she is today.
Yume spent most of her life resenting her father for abandoning them. He was off “crusading” or whatever he felt so strongly about. Against her better judgment, Yume found herself missing the better memories she once had with him. While he was a very vacant parental figure, he was still loving and accepting.
She still vividly remembers the day her father gave her that bracelet. Ten brilliant gems wrapped in sparkling silver. It was given to her at the end of several grueling months of hormonal therapy. Twenty-four Super-Doses of estrogen and a cyclical repetition of in-patient recoveries inside this strange, dilapidated hospital seemed to fade away when she opened this tiny gift box. Her father explained to her that some of the gems had been passed down from generation to generation, dating back to pre-chamber times, before personal jewelry was banned in The Rung.
Yume looks down at the bracelet around her left hand and smiles, getting lost in the memory once again. The waters of her happiness will always have an aftertaste of grief. It’s not long before Yume’s memory is invaded by darkness. The brutal beating her father received slips its way in, shortly followed by a snippet of her mother screaming at him to just give up. An amalgamation of sorrow taints her beautiful recollection, before completely devouring it.
This was the second to last time she ever saw her father. However many months it was between the dates she can’t recall. All she knows is he vanished after a rather harsh fight with her mother. Then one night she woke up to him crouching beside her bed.
Yua was scolding him for something, but it seemed as though Adam had just come by to see his child. Her mother expressed such passionate vitriol towards him. It was quite clear he had done something horribly bad. It wasn’t long before some members from the Chamber arrived to arrest him.
They burst through the door and screamed at him about his Holy crimes and unlawful organization. Beat him to a pulp after each statement of his dissension. The representatives shared a moment of laughter as they told him how difficult he was to track and how nice his wife must be to rat him out.
That’s the moment the mystery of her father cracked in front of her. All those times he had vanished were just him slithering away from captivity. He fought tooth and nail to bring The Chamber to its knees, but it was he who trembled that day.
He took punch after punch, all while yelling at Yume to promise him something. The trauma of her surroundings tunneled her vision and had deafened her ears. She never heard what he wanted her to promise him.
After a few more minutes of muted screams and blood splattering the wall, the noises stopped. Yume couldn’t handle any more chaos at this point and was staring straight down to the floor. She saw a couple bright flashes of light and heard frantic steps out of the dorm. When she finally looked up, she was alone in the room.’
She takes a deep breath and looks around at the chaos around her. Objects scattered across the floor, the kitchenette clinging to its wall mount, and blood from her father seem to be the only remnants of the conflict. Yume runs towards the hallway to see if she can get another glimpse of her father. The hallway is entirely vacant aside from her neighbors sheepishly opening their doors to investigate the commotion.
When she comes back to the room, she finds his final words in the form of a letter resting against her pillow.
Why am I doing this? Yume thinks as she shoves the box away and flounders back onto the bed.
The pain of her past starts to taper as she starts to come back to reality. Why did he even bother giving her this letter? It’s not as if Yume had any knowledge on what he was doing back then. Yume hardly even knew who he was back then, just that he was against The Chamber. Against what seemed like such a straightforward and rewarding life. How was it so hard for him to work and live a normal life?
Before she can even attempt the ritual of falling asleep again, the blackout shutters and panel lights began to slowly illuminate the room. Much to her displeasure, the nurse returns once more.
“Good morning, Yume”