Chapter 9. What is freedom?
John went back to bed and took a very long nap. This kind of behavior was very unusual for him, but he ran out of ideas. Several hours later he woke up, but there was nothing to do. He started fantasizing and fell back asleep. Or maybe it only seemed to him that he did, but in reality he started climbing the ladder in his room. At first he thought about flying to get the Adventurous to come in and give him another lesson, so he was not as bored anymore, but all of a sudden he had a better idea. Instead of jumping down the ladder to start flying, he reached the ceiling and tried to open up the hole.
John was not very tall and also a little overweight and clumsy, and he could not reach the ceiling very well even from the last step. But all of a sudden the ceiling gave in, producing a little crack. John pushed a little harder, and the crack grew, but John was not tall enough to open the ceiling all the way. He jumped and pushed at the same time but ended up in bed. “Was I sleeping?” he wondered to himself. “Had to be,” he concluded. But the idea in his dream was not a bad one, so he started climbing the ladder to try to implement it in real life. He got all the way up, pushed on the ceiling, and again nothing was happening for a while. Then finally a small crack showed up. John jumped and found himself lying in his bed. “What’s going on?” he wondered.
He looked around to see if there were any objects, with which he could prop the ceiling up or push on it so the crack opened further, but the room as always was empty, except for his bed. John scrutinized his bed and discovered that the legs would easily come off. He unscrewed a couple of them, so now his bed was standing on an angle with the head part up, and started climbing the ladder with a bed leg in each of his hands. He used one of them to prop the ceiling open a little bit so it would not slam shut right away, and then he used the other leg to keep pushing it up. Unfortunately, he did not take into account the fact that when the hole opened more, the first leg would fall back out, which it did and hit John painfully on the head. Then it dropped all the way down.
“Ouch!” John muttered and started going down the ladder to get it back, when the hole in the ceiling fully opened and the Adventurous peeked in.
“I see you are well rested and ready for action,” he noted. “How about a flying lesson?”
“That’s what I was about to do,” said John, quickly making up a lie. “I was going to try jumping off the floor of the room above mine instead of the ladder, so I had more room to fly.”
“Sure,” said the Adventurous in disbelief. “How about a real flying lesson? There are not many of them left, after which you can work at your own convenience on mastering the maneuvers, then the test, and then you get full freedom of moving around.”
“Sounds very promising,” John said sarcastically. “The only thing I don’t understand is why we have to learn to fly BEFORE getting freedom to move around? What difference does it make? Is there any harm in me getting out and wondering back and forth in the corridor we were stuck in before, without being able to fly?”
“Well, that’s the point. You could not get anywhere beyond that corridor. If you call getting into that corridor and being stuck in it ‘freedom’, I feel bad for you.”
“Ok, I’ll accept this explanation for now. I admit that being stuck in the corridor isn’t freedom; I was just hoping that next time around I won’t get stuck… Anyway, what do you have to show me today?”
John decided to play along. Deep in his heart he was hoping that Megan was mistaken about flying being a trap. That had to be verified before at least he, personally, made his final decision to not fly. But in order to do that, he had to somehow be able to get out of this room. If it meant flying a little bit without the Adventurous knowing, so be it. Of course, making sure that the Adventurous did not know was another problem, but John hoped he could deal with it.
John noticed that the Adventurous cheered up when he said that he was interested in the lesson. He came down the ceiling and started showing John how to get into the air from the ground. John started making awkward attempts, but it did not work. Actually, John felt that his body was being pulled up into the air, and he had a tough time staying put, but he had to show the Adventurous that it was not working.
Finally, the Adventurous finished his explanations and demonstrations and said, “It looks like you make better progress in private. So I am going to leave you now. Practice, and tomorrow I will show you some tricks you can do to get around objects.”
John nodded. When the Adventurous left, he waited a little while and then resumed his attempts to open the ceiling. If his room had some kind of camera, by means of which the Unknowns could see what he was doing, it was better to get out of the room without flying. Even though John could not wait to try it again.
The bed leg kept falling down, and all John’s attempts were futile. On one of the more successful occasions he managed to hang onto the opening when he jumped, but then the leg fell out, and the ceiling closed on his hands. That was really uncool. John fell down, that is, he let go with his hands and found himself flying in the room. It worked so naturally as if he were able to fly all his life. He tried relaxing so that he would fall down, but it did not work. Only when he mentally focused on getting down did he manage to do it.
He collected the bed legs and was going to go back up the ladder, but his body just flew up on its own, and he found himself right below the ceiling. “Problem solved,” he thought to himself. “I don’t have to jump and pull myself up anymore, I can simply fly!” Because of his accident, the Unknowns probably already saw that he succeeded, so John figured he did not have to hide it any longer. What he could do at this point was to use this skill to get away.
He pushed on the ceiling, jumped out and rushed towards Bradley’s room. But he could not find the place where the opening in his ceiling should have been. There was no latch to pull on or any indication that the door should be in any specific place. “It must be because Bradley doesn’t know how to fly yet that they are not allowing him to get out,” John decided. He went back down into his room and banged on the wall. He was eager to share with his friend what he discovered and to convince him that he should also learn to fly. Together they could find the way out of this world much faster. John would generate ideas, and Bradley would make assessments and think about their implementation strategies.
“Any ideas?” asked Bradley.
John started speaking fast, full of excitement, “Hey, listen, you can fly up to the hole in the ceiling, push it open and get out. I just did it.”
“You said, FLY?”
“Yes, yes, this is a guaranteed way. You can get out this way. I tried all day, and it didn’t work, but as soon as I realized that I don’t have to push on the ceiling and pull myself up but simply fly, it all worked out just fine.”
“So, you ARE flying?” repeated Bradley.
“Yes, but there is nothing wrong with this! I use it for my own purpose, which is to get out! Isn’t it what we want? What’s wrong with using their tools for our own purposes? Come on, Bradley, you just have to try and it’ll work. It works so naturally for me now. I almost can’t keep myself on the ground.”