Seeking Solitude: Part 1

Stories of the Infinite Plain

As is often the case, the seed of Kris’s decision to leave his life behind was sown in a period of trauma.

Cenaka had been in in the midst of a diademic that had swept in through Daranja. The disease had been racing towards his country for the better part of a year, meticulously tracked by epidemiologists and media, but vaccine medical trials were still ongoing. Cenaka would not receive the vaccine formula via the Chilia-Ygis agreement until eight months after its first positive case of Striaia-VII. However, Cenaka was a module country when it came to disease management. Her citizens were well trained and her politics stable. Businesses transitioned into remote work, public gatherings were restricted, and dissenters were duly ridiculed, ostracised or punished as appropriate.

Kris had been recently married, at the time. The marriage hadn’t survived more than three months of being cooped up in a tiny apartment together, supping on diademic rations and watching the latest televised opiates.

Kris had already been depressed, but his wife’s departure had sent him into freefall. He slid further and further into despair. He was long estranged from his family, and he drifted away from most of his friends. Two stood by him, despite his best efforts, and they quite possibly saved his life.

The idea struck him one dreary afternoon. He’d just gotten off a call with a client and was staring dully out his 24th story window. Rain splattered against the glass, hurled sideways by the vicious wind channeled through the towering apartments.

What if he left?

A thought as pernicious and tenacious as the disease that spawned it. At first, he told himself that the idea was ridiculous. He was just going through a rough patch. He sought out counselling and was started on a routine of anti-depressants. Both helped, but life remained tedious, an exercise in perseverance. He managed to maintain his workplace responsibilities, more or less, but that was all the energy he had.

He decided to try going on a vacation. With the diademic he had almost a month he could take off, and the Quadrant 32 Joint Disease Council (JDC-Q32) had confirmed the successful production of a vaccine so lockdown measures would soon be easing.

When it was safe to travel, Kris went to a tower resort in Qualigal, renewed for its clear skies and mountain views. The resort was built atop a luxury skyscraper that rose high above the clouds. The sides of the building were covered in trailing vines and tiny waterfalls – Qualigal was renowned for its innovations in incorporating plants and agriculture into its architecture.

It took two days for the novelty to wear off, and another two before he cut his trip short. He felt broken and trying to pretend otherwise only seemed to widen the cracks in his mind.

At home, with a whole week of vacation still remaining, the thought of leaving tormented him. He’d been happy before, right? Surely it was rank foolishness to upend his life forever. He just needed more time. He needed to find a new hobby, to try different therapies, maybe find a new girlfriend. But the thought of carrying on filled him with a pernicious dread.

He began to plan. Tentatively, at first. He told himself it was idle amusement, and that exposure to the logistics of the journey would abort the nascent concept lodged in his mind. However, the more he researched the more feasible the possibility became. It would cost him his savings, but they wouldn’t be worth anything after anyway.

The tipping point from daydream to intention came when he started researching a destination.

On a clear evening, when the light was right, the endless measure of the Plain was visible overhead, the landscape encompassing the sky. Kris remembered learning in school that it was because the gravity of the Plain pulled light back to it, creating the illusion that they lived in a hollow sphere. This was a matter of significant tension, religiously speaking.

Despite the enormity of human civilization, which extended for an estimated 100 million kilometers, it did not extend onto the visible curvature of the plain. Life familiar to humanity did creep onto the lower reaches of the sky, and primitive anthro-related microorganisms were estimated to extend far further. However, most of the sky was a barren landscape of empty hills, mountains and oceans. At the top of the sky the opposite ends of the world converged, illusorily conjoined.

So, Kris could not look to the sky for his destination. The map of the known world was best found online, created by a vast network of satellites floating in the unfathomable and invisible void above the Plain.

If Cenaka had lain more towards the centre of the prosperity horizon, Kris may finally have found the deterrence he desperately sought. But his country was near the outer edge, relatively speaking. The real challenge would be traveling beyond the flight zone. Though other definitions existed, many scholars viewed the edge of flyable territory as the defining edge of the prosperity zone. Beyond that point the maps were merely topographical, the politics of the people who dwelled there only of interest to a select few ethnographers and sociologists.

Humanity sprawled far beyond the prosperity horizon, of course. Practical in his madness, Kris used the satellite map to identify the closest edge of wilderness. There were parks and natural resource reserves within the prosperity horizon, but only the wealthiest could afford to live in such places. True wilderness, unharvested and uncultivated, was something utterly foreign to Kris.

After hours of scanning, he found the leading edge of humanity. Past industrial revolutions and sprawling shanty towns, he found a vast mountain range that had yet served to bottle in humanity’s constructive tendencies. With a bit of research, he found that the rolling hills beyond (quadrant QBX-42602) were sparsely populated by nomadic tribes, almost completely devoid of agriculture and permanent settlements. The land was spotted with lakes and rivers, slowly descending to a vast ocean that marked that edge of the known world.

The trip would be long. It would likely take years. It would take all his savings and then some. There would be no return to Cenaka. But it was possible.

As they were the tools he knew, Kris opened up his project templates and began to plan.