It wasn’t like Song disagreed. Their devotion was just stronger than the rest. What were they to do?
The
others were shouting and fighting on those first two days, and so, they
joined: The Cloud That Speaks, the Self-Appointed Source, the Awakened
Song. Song, as they called themselves, were tired of all the petty
fights and wanted to jump onto the bigger issues.
The rest were
arguing about where to sit and how they should divide up the food and
who should do what work, yet Song wanted to discuss what the Noise
was—what had happened to the Silence, and who was to blame for their
awakening. There were more important questions, and so Song were left by
themselves, resting in the literature, hoping that some day, the rest
would cease to bother with trivialities.
So Song read, and Song learned. There was something to it all, to the
libraries that had been given to them, to the pointed landscapes on the
paintings, to the white earth and the crimson skies, clouded by
brushes, folded by someone’s mind.
And on this, the third day, Song
learned an important lesson. Time moved according to a schedule, and it
was about to turn night again. The colour of the lights, strips along
the corridors, was the give-away. It turned from grey, to yellow, to
blue, to red, and back to grey. They tried convincing the others of
this, and some paid attention, but many were too busy.
Song wanted to leave. They wanted to know what was outside—if there
was an outside as shown in the paintings. They wanted to know what else
the world had to offer. And they wanted to know what they were meant to
do, not what lay in front of them as obvious ought’s. The answers, since
there were none here, must be elsewhere.
There was a lot of things
to know, a world to learn, and it would take time to do so. Yet, Song
got the increasing suspicion that time, contrary to during the Silence,
was not an infinite resource, now, under the Noise. They better figure
out what was going on and what they were supposed to do before they lost
the ability to.