...The dome above glistened with the summer sun, creating the illusion that the city was trapped in a bubble about to burst. It was an effect that its inhabitants did not enjoy, for it reminded them of the taste of fragility and brought them an overwhelming sense of the danger and insecurity posed by the world outside. All of those who lived in Tenico, the city of toys, hated that effect. All but hema, who contrary to the popular tendency had grown loving that effect. For some reason, since child, he had entertained a vision of himself, someday watching the dome popping into oblivion and leaving the city unmasked to the sky above, free from constraint, and again in contact with nature. This was only one amongst many other thoughts and fantasies that hema kept concealed in his own mind, because he knew that they set him apart from the others in his home city and could place him in a dangerous situation if he was ever to give them his voice. And it was because of this tendency, to think apart from the norm, that he had chosen to work as a courier and transport goods between cities.

            Now this was a simple job. Hema worked a locomotive that crossed the continents. He was its sole passenger, present to overlook the computarized procedures and make sure that things ran according to the program. A job which consisted mainly of sitting back on the conductor’s seat and watching the scenery, since his was a totally automated transport train. So hema was there principally as a backup brain, to think his way around any unexpected problems the on-board computers weren’t programmed to resolve.

           

            It must be explained that a city at the time was mainly a conglomerate company, fitted for residence and work, mostly self-sufficient and a manufacturer and provider of trade goods. Somewhere in the distant past the planetary council had decided that the environment had become hazardous to human survival. The company-cities arose soon after. When the first domes were placed around the major cities of the globe, a re-structuring of the relation between city and man began to take place. A new definition for man’s so called natural environment soon developed and there was a global shift in awareness, in which the relation between earth and man was severed, leading mankind away from the teaching and guidance of nature. Soon the myriad of forms in which animals presented themselves as our brethren was dissipating as echoes of a fading myth. Lore of another time.

            At first there was some resistance by the part of the citizens of the new dome-cities. A resistance towards the novel laws and rules that bound what was before known as free behavior. Work was limited within the compounds of the city, by the city, to and for the city. With this came an opinion that dominated the administrator’s direction. It was that no piece was above the whole. That every one that resided in the city was privileged to be there and gain from its abundance, and so must repay in selfless dedication to their provider in return. Slowly and gradually the citizens were repressed to such an extent that creative individuality went missing in face of the drone.

            Eventually the org was built within each city, in which power of ruling was bestowed upon the select few who excelled in proving their science of the way to their fellow citizens. Now the way was the doctrine of correct participation in city life. The golden rules of man's behaviour.

            In order to monitor the ongoing progress of each member of the company, the org established the super surveillance plan. This plan was run into a central computer which gathered and analyzed all data received into a program named the blueprint of society curriculum. This was a system to which all of the citizens were conscripted at birth by implant of a microchip into the body. This chip served both as a tracking device and a registering unit to the org.

            So hema, as every other person in the city, was unknowingly constrained by society, to the point that, with time, the way had become the prison. All were expected to follow what the headmen thought best. They would concoct fashions for all to grasp for and develop tendencies to be embraced by the populace. Ways to look, move, act, think, speak. Ways to feel. Ways to like and dislike. Ways and more ways. Innumerous ways to keep the minds occupied on a superficial level.

In this way the org succeeded in obscuring the creative individuality borne to man.

            Yet this was not the case with hema. For reasons unknown to him he instinctively disliked the org and the drone. He did not relate to the way as they had defined it, but he was alone and too weak in himself to take a point and pop the bubble. So he did as they did and walked the streets anonymous between the featureless faces, with only his thoughts to separate him from the drone. Many times these thoughts were run by an obsession: to be rid of his code number, section 473082 series 7, and to be rid of the aggressive sounds which sorrounded him within the city.

           

            So it makes sense that the most important event in hema’s life came to him one day when he was working the train. They were speeding along the inter-city tracks when the urgent buzzing of the radar alarm began to ring, signaling that an obstruction lay upon the tracks ahead. Hema hit the breaking system and began to slow the train down. Not too far ahead the train came to a halt. Hema peered through the window nervously, in anticipation of some great matchless obstacle laying ahead, but as he saw the injured deer that had collapsed on the tracks, his heart jumped with a strange kind of joy unknown to him to that day. "My brethren", were the first two words to cross his mind, and behind them arrived a reminiscent flow of imagery from a long lost past amongst the animals. The sight had awoken a dormant vision that lay embedded in his genes, waiting for this precise moment to rise and echo through him. It was his soul calling from around that he felt, and so with this urge hema decided to descend from the train to inspect the animal. In his fervent excitement and curiosity he overlooked the safety instructions that were written on the cabin wall. They warned that all who exit the train outside the city must wear a protective mask. In big red letters it was clearly stated that the air was toxic. This was something taught in school and was meant to be part of the collective common sense of all citizens, but hema, who had read these instructions many times in previous trajectories, simply forgot them this time.

            He stepped down from the train and took a few steps before he paused, frozen still by astonishment, so surprised by the unexpected.

            Everything was so beautiful. To the west he could see a great expanse of mountains, whose snows melted into rivulets that cascaded down crevasses, diving distances into the same huge watershed that bathed the coast where hema and the train stood at a halt. To the east lay the plains, stretching to the horizon who swallowed a resting sun. As far as the eye could see, that direction was covered in waves after waves of low brown and green hills. Earth and grass hooded a ground speckled by random and separate trees of the same family, all the way to the end of sight.

            "Breathtaking", he thought to himself, so remembering that he was not supposed to be mask-less. And he noticed that the air was fresh and pleasing to the lungs.

Something then clicked within him, leaving hema with a certainty that all those years spent in the city, thinking that there was something wrong with him because he could not accept the way of the org, thinking that there was something bad about him because he did not identify with his peers, that all those years of doubt and low self-esteem were so due to the great lie he had been conditioned with. The great lie being the notion that man should be separated from the natural world when the opposite now appeared to him as evident. The air was perfectly good to breathe and the outside was not a horrid wilderness, nor kingdom of death and chaos, but a beautiful place that mirrored a harmony drawn by the same greater hand that had drawn man.

            His eyes glistened with new found compassion and sympathy for himself, since he now understood why it was that he had felt such inner antagonism throughout his entire life. There was something for which he had no name, which resided inside of him, that had been speaking to him all this time, saying the very same things that he now knew instinctively. Hema had not been able to hear them for he knew not the language in which they spoke, he had never seen them written and had never learnt how they looked.

            Now he knew. It was the language of the world. It had been echoing inside of him since birth and he had not been able to hear or recognize it. This had made him revolt as he did, feeling within something unexpressed and untold.

            He walked towards the fallen deer and the closer he got the more he fell in love with its beauty. "This being is like me", he thought, "It has two eyes and a head, ears and mouth, four limbs, it breathes, has hair, sexual organs, it is just like me!". Feeling sorry that he had never learnt about the animals, neither seen pictures or drawings, he cursed his educators. How could they have left something so sublime out of his learning. It was surely not of importance to them. Surely not something the org held in high regard. But how unjust and how improper.

            Arriving at the deer hema noticed it had a broken leg and proceeded to use what he had learnt in school about basic medical care to improvise a pallet and bandage the leg. As he did so the deer did not budge for it was not scared, which impressed hema who wondered if the animal knew that he was helping it. As he wondered this he looked briefly into the deer’s eyes and saw the answer to his question. In its eyes he saw a silent knowing that he had not seen in the eyes of any people. He picked up the deer in his arms and carried it away from the tracks to lay it on the grass. With a grimace he then returned to the train, and as he turned the engine back on he swore to never forget that day and what he had felt.

            The train rolled on leading hema away from the deer and the moment that had changed his life.

At nightfall the train arrived at its destination. Hema once again descended from the train, except this time instead of walking outside he walked inside, into another company-city. Making his way towards a gathering place where he usually met an acquaintance he had made in a previous visit, he pondered if he should share the experience and if it would be understood by the others, and decided to risk it. "Soon it would be known anyhow", he said between teeth, "for I cannot hide the truth or tell a lie well". So he told his friend about what had happened to him, and what he had experienced through it. But instead of recognizing hema’s words as a revelation of a latent consciousness inherent in all of us, his friend turned to hema with a strange glare in his eyes and advised him to never again utter those words to any living person, for they were both irrational and incomprehensible.

            Hema was not too surprised at this, he had given it his try. He had also already anticipated the reaction and so he leaned towards his friend and told him how truly sorry he was. If he was sorry about speaking such nonsense, or if he was sorry that his friend did not understand, it was left in the without uttering.

            And so with such an ambiguous statement the conversation naturally proceeded to more mundane topics, and soon his friend had forgotten all about the deer and the outside world.

But hema had not.

            He could not, the impression it had made on him was too strong, and he truly believed in the essence of what he had felt.

            Later, on his return to his home city, hema began to wonder if it was possible that there were people out there in the wilderness living sorrounded by nature, away from the city. It was a prospect that began to appeal to him. The train thus whizzed from departure to destination in a split second for hema was not aware of time in his daydreaming, and when he arrived where it no longer felt like home, he was surprised to be there. Yet it was his decision to proceed as he used to, through the nameless streets, between the nameless faces, as an aimless citizen of the city. He went home and logged on to the information network at his home terminal.

            Once on he searched for animals.

            The result was not very impressive at first, there was not much choice, but amongst the few results there was one that caught his eye. It was an encyclopedia on beasts of lore from ancient times. He downloaded that information, and as it was being transferred page by page he began reading the outcome. Soon night had fallen over the dome and hema still remained facing the screen. He had read over half of the download and was still sitting quietly gazing at his new discovery. What shook him the most in it was a new found resonance within. As he read all this new and amazing data, he sensed that every part of his being, from the core to each and every cell, rejoiced at the sensation of homecoming. He was changing from the inside out.

            That night the first of the dreams came. An animal he had never before seen appeared before him. He was outside the dome somewhere standing in a field, something he had never done before, and he was still. He did not realize it at the time but he was a plant in his dream. A plant staring at an animal that was about to eat it. The animal approached and opened its mouth to grab a hold of him, and hema was not scared. He felt at peace, a strange kind of peace, like the comfortable warmth and coziness one feels at the womb, without preoccupation, unaware of the danger in what comes.

            So the animal ate him, and immediately hema’s consciousness became that of the animal itself, he became the animal, walking on all fours, eating away and bathing under the sun.Yet soon enough this new awareness was to change for he was attacked by another animal who surprised him in his sleep and quickly subdued him into a slow exhaustion of life. He was being held by the neck and choked by a beast with sharp fangs and beautiful eyes. Before long he was that animal too, running alongside more like him through the brush. Like this his dream continued, through endless transformation, giving him a real taste of the change that is in everything. The number of mutations of body and experience he went through in that one dream were astounding, flowing from plant to animal life in cycles both short and dilated. They eventually led him to human life and then the first shock came.

            He was feeling beyond the peace. There was human emotion in his dream now and some of it was not pleasant. There was both joy and pain, complicated emotions that depend on circumstance. He experienced things unavailable to him until then. The life and death experience, and the feelings of others, which were now really the feelings of himself. This time change came when his awareness went from the vision of an individual to the awareness of his or her seed. In this way he was actually learning of what had lead to hema, his lineage through time and space, of its core, the spirit. But this he did not know for the concept was too big for his perspective at the time.

            When the next morning light first awoke hema, he smiled like a child accomplice to a secret inside joke. He felt good, as if life’s mystery had shown him a piece of itself as a gift and proof of its loving guidance. Now positively faithful that this was no freak occurrence the presence of the org in his life did not upset him as it usually had in the past.

            And true this was, for from that day onward, regardless of where he was, in work or home, when he slept he dreamt, and in these dreams he always met new animals that came to teach him in new and beautiful natural places. He was being fed by the spirits of mother nature, nurtured by his real brethren, being introduced to a concept foreign to those of his time, to the transcendence of soul.

            This went on daily until one particular night when hema lay in dreamtime on his bed. That night hema dreamt that he had been sleeping against what he thought was a rock and that he had woken up. He shook his arms and stretched out, pressing against the rock with his back as he stretched. Then looking to his right hema noticed that this was not a rock he was leaning against, for what he saw was a huge and fearsome animal head facing him with its eyes closed.

            From the head to where hema sat was one long neck attached to one huge body. He had never met such and imponent animal, he had never before met a dragon. Hema was so scared of it that he froze. The dragon then opened one eye that stared a hema. There was no other movement for a while. A while in which hema actually had a funny feeling although he was scared stiff. It seemed to him that the dragon wore a grin on his face. Somewhere around the moment of that thought the dragon sighed and there was fire from his nostrils. This sent hema into a panic frenzy and he pleaded to the dragon in a lamenting voice, "don’t eat me, please!".

            At this the dragon smiled and responded in a deep and soft voice.

            I cannot eat you for I am yours. You have conquered me.

            "How come I have conquered you?" hema asked, "I do not remember ever even meeting you". To this the dragon answered that he had been in hema since his birth and that he was the adversity and challenge hema had been born to overcome. He was also his fears unacknowledged and misunderstood. The dragon told hema that those above, his spirit family had with hema’s consent sent him to this time and age that is unaware of soul, so to discover it for himself and conquer the experience and right to ride the dragon's wings unto the next life, to then continue in the path of self-discovery and remembrance of the ultimate. To fulfill his mission of the eons.

            Hema was slightly confused, for his intellect could not entirely grasp what was meant, but those words felt right in his heart and that he did not doubt. There was light in what was said by the dragon.

"So be it", he said. And with this the dragon let him know that he would not wake up as hema again, that he would fly with the dragon into the next life. No more dome, no more ignorance of the beauty of nature, and no more org for hema…