Blue Eyes in A World of Gray

Jacen walked along the sidewalk with the same unhurried tread as always. What was there to hurry for? The Ministry was not going to reward him for arriving early, would not give him an extra point or two on the Social Score monitor that was pinned over his heart. Even the Superintendent would not notice if he were early. The Ministry doors unlocked at eight o’clock sharp every morning, and no attention was paid to those who arrived before the clock struck that exact time. The Superintendent would only take notice if he was late – well, he would take notice and two points from Jacen’s current SS total, which was presently a comfortable average. He couldn’t afford to let it drop below that.

So he kept walking. His worn tennis shoes beat a depressing tattoo against the cracked sidewalk, one that could be called a pattern but certainly not a rhythm. Rhythms were banned. They reminded some of the Old People too much of music. Music was illegal now, too, just as other incomprehensible things were – strange things like art and guns and freedom and love. Jacen didn’t know what any of those last things were, not really. He had heard about them in the System, where the children went before they were old enough to be drafted, but he didn’t know what they were.

He thought he could remember music, though. If he closed his eyes tight enough and blocked out all the few, other thoughts he was allowed to have, he thought he could pick out a string of sounds that lay dusty and unused somewhere deep in his memory. If it was music – and he wasn’t exactly sure it was, being unable to recognize something he could not comprehend – it was from a long, long, time ago, dating from his very first months of life. It would have had to have been music born just before the New World began, because that’s when he had been born, too. Just a few months before the reconstruction. Just a few months before the Old World ended and everything changed, if one believed what the Old People said.

It was a shame about the Old World ending so soon after he came into it, really. Sometimes Jacen thought he would have liked it there.

The cement wasn’t so cracked the closer he got to the Ministry buildings, but garbage still littered the storm drains and there were some rusty, liquid-looking stains near the outdated streetlamp that hadn’t been there yesterday evening on his walk home. His feet turned left at the streetlamp without the rest of him thinking about it, and he went back to following the flat, colorless path to the huge mausoleum that was the place he worked, the place everybody worked – the Ministry. It was the path he took every day, the one he had walked every day since he had turned sixteen and been drafted, just as everyone else was, into the service of the New World. It was never different. It was always the same, with a ritual sameness that reflected the rest of his life, his and everyone else’s. 

Except today it was not.

Today, there was a girl standing on the sidewalk ahead of him. She was not very tall, nor very thin or what some of the Old People would have called pretty – but she was in his way, and that made him take as intense notice of her as if she had been the Superindentent’s trim, black-clad assistant who was always the one docking the points in his spreadsheet. 

Girls were never seen around these Ministry buildings. They were never seen within them, either – their designated service areas were on the other side of the compound entirely. Jacen wasn’t sure of the last time he had even seen a girl. That might have been in the before times, too – and he was pretty sure the girl had been his mother. He couldn’t be sure, though, because all he could recall were wisps of brown hair and two cold, hazel eyes.

This girl had brown hair, too, but her eyes weren’t hazel. They were blue, and staring off to his left, trained on an object in the distance or perhaps nothing at all. When Jacen glanced in that direction, he certainly couldn’t see anything interesting. There wasn’t supposed to be anything interesting, there or anywhere else. 

When he looked back, she was still staring. But this time her blue eyes were fixed on him.

His heart began pounding as he lost himself in those deep blue irises and his brain somehow managed to be very foggy and exceedingly clear at the same time. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from hers, no matter how badly he wanted to – which he was beginning to understand, he didn’t. He didn’t want to look away from her. For once, he wanted to meet someone’s eyes and see them, not as just a co-citizen but something…something else.

Those bright blue eyes blinked at him, confused and wondering, another word Jacen hardly knew the meaning of and wasn’t quite sure how he had learned. Then her lips curved into something like a smile, and it shone directly onto him.

Jacen forgot about the Ministry, strangely, within a moment. He forgot about the Superintendent and his assistant. He even forgot about the SS monitor clipped onto his shirt and the two points that would be docked from its total if he lingered on the sidewalk for even a second more and was late to his station. He forgot about all of it and somehow, he didn’t care. 

And suddenly, with an earth-shattering clarity that he had not had since he was months old, since before the New World came, Jacen realized he knew what love was. It was this feeling that kept his eyes fixed on the girl’s, the thing that forbade him to look away.

It really was a shame about the Old World, he thought again, this time with more conviction that he had known his body housed. Because the Old World had allowed love. In the Old World, the Old People had been encouraged to love.

As he stared back at the girl with the blue eyes, Jacen was quite sure that he would have liked it there very much.