Cage of Freedom

“It is great to never be hungry or thirsty! The bliss of not being a slave to need! I used to miss the taste of food sometimes, but this intravenous therapy liberated me from those wants. This syringe gives me everything! The longer I go not needing food or drink, the less I remember what it is like to have ever wanted them. Which does me infinite good living inside this cage. I am free,” the prisoner screams!

Halting his crazed monologue, the prisoner spasms his head around, looking at the metal bars surrounding him and the darkness beyond them. This was his fate. To sit alone in this cage for the rest of his life. 

“You think freedom is for everybody? Your punishment serves you right,” a guard he couldn’t see said.

The prisoner got up and grabbed the bars of his cage, peering out to find the voice. “I am freer than I’ve ever been,” the prisoner yelled back! “FREEEEE… HA HAHAHA HA! Free enough to tear you to pieces!”

The hidden guard said nothing, but the excited prisoner still heard his footsteps. The steps grew louder. Soon they were closing in on the prisoner’s cage. 

“You’re not a guard! You’re the judge,” the prisoner yelled at the man standing before him! 

That man was Aeacus.

“Yes, I put you here. And I have come down here because I've been told you have been celebrating freedom,” Aeacus said. “As you know, freedom is forbidden, hence your cage. You especially, alone here in this void, are especially not free,” Aeacus concluded. 

“I am free! I will kill you over and over and over again, every day. How can I do that without freedom? My freedom will always be mine, and not subject to your laws! You are the one in a prison! My cage is freedom!”

“Prisoner, that IV does more than feed you. It controls you. It chemically supplements your humanly wants and desires.”

“You assume my desires are like yours,” the prisoner answered! “What a slave you are!”

The judge interrupted him, stomping his slippered foot on the black groundless ground. “There is nothing here to like or dislike! There is nothing to do! You are not free! And once I leave, you will lose the freedom of lying too!”

“I can lie to myself,” the handsome yet oddly postured prisoner replied. “It is the only freedom I need.”

“That is not freedom, you fool,” Aeacus said, chastising the prisoner!

“Freedom allowed me to kill, but not to dream,” the prisoner asked rhetorically, sitting back down? “Or was I never free and only dreaming? If all I do is dream, and in all my dreams I am free, how is that not freedom?”

Aeacus looked down at him with an icy stare that the prisoner did not acknowledge. The robed judge shook his head at him and walked away, quickly disappearing into the darkness in which he came. The judge looked back one last time at the content prisoner, confident he had put him where he belonged. 

“HA HA HA HA! You are the one who doesn’t know what freedom is! In the real world, I was not free! I was a prisoner of society and everything that makes it what it is. I am here because I want freedom!”

The sparkling metal bars of his cage did not respond, and the void beyond him stared back at him in silence. He was uncomfortable, as always, sitting on the cage’s cold metal floor. “This is freedom,” he thought to himself as he closed his eyes.

***

I love dusk and the beauty it shows before the onset of darkness. The prisoner sprinted at the first person he saw. It was a young lady who was about 5’5” and wearing a casual, loose turquoise dress. While he was running at her, she looked at him, more confused than scared. When he reached her, she tried to scream, but nothing came out. The prisoner grabbed her head with both hands and gouged out her eyes and his long thumbs. Her scream was horrid, and the pain she felt was even worse. Blood poured out from both sockets as she hunched over and continued wailing in agony. The prisoner felt better and better the more she cried. 

“Your eyes,” he said to the screaming, panicking victim. “They're still in there. I can see them. I wanted to help you by showing you where freedom is. Do you see?”

Her blood covered, damaged eyes were lodged in the back of her head.

“Look up and you will see where freedom is,” the prisoner screamed at her!

The lady did not reply and tossed and turned on the ground in pain. The prisoner watched and smiled being satisfied at having helped the lady find freedom. Because he knew she, with her eyes now below her temporal lobe, was one of the lucky few who would ever understand. The prisoner looked up from the blood drenched face of his enlightened victim, and saw a park full of frightened people running away from him. 

“How they run back to their prisons,” the prisoner said, shaking his head? 

***

The prisoner then opened his eyes, happy. “Freedom…,” he whispered to himself, in climactic satisfaction.

Looking down at the prisoner from a window high in an ivory tower was Aeacus. His council sat behind him at a large stone table. Their purpose, as always, was to discuss freedom and its permanent elimination. The judge knew that if that prisoner’s boldness became public, it would ruin all the work they had done.

“Death is the only way to take away all of a person’s freedom,” Aeacus said to the council. 

“But that is the greatest freedom,” a priest yelled!

“So murdering is freedom, dreams are freedom, and death is freedom? Life is freedom,” Aeacus admitted in a frustrated manner.

“It seems as if we have ourselves stuck in a paradox, and paradoxes surely are not freedom, so I disagree with that,” a young mathematician contributed. 

“If life and death are both freedom, there is no way to escape freedom. No one can get free from this freedom. Therefore, we have never steered from our path and purpose of eliminating freedom, because our freedom is just a constrained infinite loop,” the mathematician concludes, and a drunk philosopher, lazily holding his flask, nods in agreement.

Aeacus turned back away from the tribunal, and instead of looking down, looked up at the all-seeing Mind’s Eye now passing overhead and had been orbiting their world for many years. 

“Well, I am the judge, and I have heard what all of you have said. I think death is death or another life, but not this life. So there might be freedom in death. Giving anyone the freedom of death in order to take it away in life is illogical. Therefore, father, I agree with you.”

“There must be another option. We know living in that cage the prisoner lives in is not freedom. But could anyone somehow find freedom from within those bars? The bars and the surrounding void are imprisoning, but I wonder if he chooses to not see the bars of his cage or the emptiness beyond them?”

“Then he would see nothing,” a hooded wise man answered.

“But would he,” the judge replied? “Do we see images of what we imagine? I do. That means there is freedom in our mind too. Our thoughts are not a loop, they are infinite. How can we free the masses from the burden of this infinite freedom? Look at our Mind’s Eye up there forever rotating around us. We know not where it looks or what it sees. We have asked it many times, and not once has it shown or told us anything reasonable or expected. The only thing it sends to this crystal ball is randomness,” Aeacus says, pointing at the crystal eye at the center of the stone table. “The Mind’s Eye sees whatever it wants! As can we! Just look at it,” he says, pointing at the eye. “Look up and you will see where freedom is!”

“Ignorance is the only way to ensure there is no freedom,” the judge said with finality, and left. 

The prisoner, free from need, kept dreaming.

The End