Thursday, May 22, 2008

الملل

سحقاً، كم هذا ممل!
لطالما حلمت وأنا صغير بالإبحار والسفر، ولكن لم يخطر ببالي أبداً كم يمكن أن يكون البقاء معلقاً بعرض البحر شيء غاية في الإملال. توقفت عن التفكير في الدقائق والساعات، أجوب سطح السفينة جيئة وذهابا حتى مل البحارة رؤيتي وأصابهم بعض من توتري. اللعنة، بل إن الأيام ذاتها تفقد معناها بهذا الشكل، ليس فقط الدقائق والساعات.

ولما كنت قد أوشكت على الإنتهاء من الكتب التي جلبتها معي، وبما أنه لا يسع الانسان أن يقرأ طوال النهار والليل (فأنا أجد صعوبة فال نوم أيضاً) فها أنذا جالس أفعل ما لم أفعله منذ حادثتي: اكتب، أدون، لا لشيءٍ إلا لإزاحة الوقت الجاثم كالجبل.

ماذا اكتب، ماذا اكتب، . . . اه، ساعدت البحارة اليوم على ظهر السفينة. كنت قد طلبت من عبدلله (ونصف بحارة هذه المركبة يدعون عبدلله) أن يعطيني شيئاً لأفعله، فجلس في اليوم التالي ساعة يعلمني خمس طرق مختلفة لعمل العقد من الحبال وطلب مني أن اتدرب عليها جميعاً وأجيد عقدها كأسرع ما يكون. وكنت ظننت أنه إخترع هذه الحيلة ليتخلص مني ويفرغ لعمله، ولكنه أكد لي بلهجة العاتب أن عقد العقد هو أول ما يجب على البحار اتقانه.

أه ه ه . . .
يؤلمني كل شبر من جسدي بعد مجهود البارحة. ولكني شاركت في العمل اليوم أيضاً، فالألم أحب إلي من الملل، ثم انني خجلت أن يظهر انني أجهدت من عمل ساعتين في حين يعمل البحارة طوال اليوم. ثمة عزاء ما في العمل البدني. وكأنه علاج لالام النفس واضطراباتها.


بعد ساعتين من الشد والعقد، ذهبت لاغتسل ثم قمت بزيارة غرفة قبطان المركبة (يسمونها قمرة لسبب ما) لندخن الأنبوب ونلعب الشطرنج ككل يوم في وقت الظهيرة.

شيء غريب هذا الأنبوب، لم أره قط قبل أنا أقابل القبطان زاهر. لكم هو صغير وعملي، ولشد ما هو مختلف عن الأرجيلة، كما أن التبغ الذي يستخدمه لحشوه على هيئة مسحوق مختلف في اللون والرائحة عن أي شيء رأيته من قبل. زعم أنه يأتي به من جزيرة قرب بلاد الروم، فعزمت على أن أخذ منه عينة لتحليلها حال رجوعنا الى بلادنا، إن رجعنا.

جلسنا ندخن التبغ عطري الرائحة ونلعب دور من الشطرنج، أطيله قدرما استطيع، فهو أحد أهم أحداث اليوم، ثم انني كنت استمتع بتعابير وجه القبطان المتذمر وهو يحاول الافلات من مصيدةتلو الأخرى.

"لا أعرف هل أحبك أم أكرهك أيها الأمير الصغير" قالها وهو ينفث الدخان

فأجبته ضاحكاً: "اكرهني إذاً ولكنني لست بأمير، صغير كان أو كبير"

قلتها ثم وضعت الوزير بحيث يستحيل على ملكه الفرار. لو أجلت هذه الحركة أكثر من ذلك لصار تلاعبي به واضحاً ومهيناً. تعلمت هذا من والدي، وقدكان الوحيد الذي يهزمني مذ كنت في العاشرة، وكان يهزمني سريعاً، بل كان يسحقني سحقاً، ولم يكن يسمح لي باللعب معه إلا مرة كل أسبوع. وكنت خلال هذا الأسبوع ابذل قصارى جهدي لأرقى بمستواي. كنت كذلك أرقب مجيء الضيوف الى منزلنا، متمنياً أن يواجه احدهم أبي، فاستطيع مراقبتهما. وكنت الحظ كم كان يطيل من الأدوار ويترفق بمنافسيه فاشتعل غيظاً. واجهته بذلك بعد أحد الأدوار التي كان يسحقني بها، فضحك بصوته الغليظ، وقال "بعض الرجال عقولهم أصغر من عقلك، لو انني انتصرت على وزير بيت المال في عشر خطوات لوجب علي أن اتخلى عن أي خطط تحتاج إلى تمويل حكومي، لكن إن أوهمته بأن كان في امكانه الفوز ، فلسوف ينتظر أقرب فرصة لمواجهتي ثانية، ولسوف يدعوني إلى بيته، ولسوف يستشيرني في مشاكله"

أخذ القبطان في جمع القطع العاجية "بل قد أصبحت أميراً على بحارتي، على الأقل يعاملونك كاميرهم" قالها وفي صوته نبرة حقد لا علاقة لها بخسارته فى الشطرنج "فيم اصرارك على العمل معهم كل يوم؟ ما لمثلك ولعملٍ كهذا؟"

شعرت بخطورة الموقف، ولعنت نفسي أن لم ألحظه من قبل "إنه الملل لا غير يا سيدي القائد، إن وافقت أن تعلمني مبادئ الملاحة، لكان أفضل لي، فقد مللت عقد الحبال على كل حال" قلت مترقباً ردة فعله، فليس من مصلحتي أن أخسر صداقته. للقبطان السلطة الأعلى على سفينته وباستطاعته أن يحبسني في غرفتي حتى نهاية الرحلة إن أراد، الأدهى أنه سيكون مصيباً في ذلك إن كان وجودي يهدد مكانته عند البحارة.

إنفرج وجهه وابتسم إبتسامة تفوق "لا تستطيع المكوث ساكنا، أليس كذلك؟ إنه أول شيء تتعلمه في البحر. إن أردت أن أعلمك عن الملاحة فعليك ألا تقوم بأي نشاط لثلاثة أيام." ثم قال مستدركاً "بالطبع لا يعد الشطرنج نشاطاً"

في الواقع كنت أحب القبطان، أو بالأحرى كان يثير اعجابي، فقد كان صلباً قوياً كشجر السنديان، وكان نشيطاً مليء بالحيوية برغم كونه في العقد السادس من عمره على أقل تقدير. كانت عيناه تلمعان بالشغف عندما يمسك بالدفة ويقذف الأوامر يمينا ويسارا بصوت جهوري، شغفة كان البحر وسفينته، وكان البحارة يهابونه حقاً، برغم انني لم أره يعاقب احدهم أبداً. كان في ذلك يذكرني بوالدي. لعل هذا كان عيبه الوحيد.

مكثت في غرفتي أغلب الأيام الثلاثة التالية، وإن أوجعتني نظرات خيبة الأمل في عيون البحارة، فكنت أتعلل بألم في ظهري. وفي اليوم التالي بعض دور الشطرنج -الذي تركته يفوز به- قال لي القائد "اليوم تمسك أنت الدفة، وتدخل عالم الإبحار تلميذاً، فقط اتمنى أن تحدث والدك حين نعود بأن اسطولنا بحاجة للتجديد والصيانة"

في الواقع زادت هذه الجملة من احترامي له، رجل أخر كان ليطلب مطلبا شخصيا. لم يكن بإمكانه أن يعرف كم المتني جملته على كل حال، وليس خطأه انني أكرة والدي ككرهي للمرض.

"أفضل من ذلك، إن اقنعتني سأحدث السلطان بشخصه" وعدته مخلصاً

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Project Halawes II: dreamers

Read part one first: Project Halawes

...
It was an instant success, the effect in workers' health and moral was beyond expectations, it was as if the spark of life was rekindled in the hearts of these men, for some of them lived every night in the middle-earth playing with hobbits and seeking for Gandalf, some lived each of the Arabian nights many times, enjoying the harem and the extravagance, some dreamed at being Jedi knights, samurai warlords, doctors, lawyers, politicians, people of conviction and significance.

After the initial success, a new rule was forged: "The length of the dream was to be determined by how hard and efficient one worked." The effect was dramatic and pretty much instant, the quality of labor quadrupled overnight. Workers worked with vengeance! Who would not work his heart out for an extra hour in heaven? Or even an extra hour between the arms of Calypso?

The dramatic success drew the advent attention of the Union, which decided to put more funds into the running research, as the whole case presented the potential to be successfully replicated on many other industrial facilities. The research resulted into many discoveries about human dreams and the different ways to control and supervise them. Among the great discoveries of that research, were the very impressive experiments about joint-dreaming, in which they were able to let two people -and later even more- share the same dream, not as in watching a movie together, but as in acting in a play together, so they co-dreamed, not just had the same dream. In which case one of the dreamers acted as the host, and was responsible for initiating the dream and setting up the scene, and the other dreamer(s) could then attend to his dream world and interact. This discovery was greatly hyped as one possible form for high efficiency communication, that can be utilized in the near future. This form of joint dreams was not however used with the red factory workers, for fear of strikes or organized rebellions. For as long as each of the workers dreamed separately in his own dreamworld, there was no foreseen danger to come of those dreams and therefore needn't be controlled or supervised (which was of course not without expense). The joint-dreaming was used instead to entertain the richest industrialists and guild-masters of the three colonies, and it met great commercial success.

But then, in a few years, the red factory met a problem that dangered the whole experiment. The workers simply couldn't dream anymore. In fact they dreamed, but their dreams became more and more convoluted and disturbed, and hence were less and less effective. The research team frantically investigated the almost epidemic problem, only to discover that it was almost unavoidable. Workers that spent years on the red planet naturally found it increasingly hard to dream of rivers or forests, they gradually forgot how such things looked like, felt like, smelled like. Photographs, video scenes and multimedia sessions didn't help much, and the option of giving them periodical vacations was simply too expensive (remember how dangerously new space-travel was at those days and how relatively precious energy was).

Now Frank -the youngest member of the research team- proposed a very daring remedy to the catastrophic situation (and it was very catastrophic indeed to the research team that was about to lose its funding and shut down). Frank thought that using the joint-dreaming (later called group-dreaming or co-dreaming) the problem can be solved, basing his theory on the fact that joint-dreaming was telepathic in nature, and therefore was not limited by conventional time-space rules and was out of the shackles of energy-matter physics. The idea was to have the host (the one who constructs the dreamworld) on a very different planet, and let the workers join his world experience the stimuli and effects that he can so fully and vividly reconstruct, after having personally and actually experienced just few hours ago. Taking the Idea further, there can of course be several hosts on several planets enjoying the marvelous nature of magnificent worlds, and not having anything to do but sleep and dream for 8 hours a day, that would be their work, besides maybe reading a fantastic novel or watching a nice movie now and then.

Now as strange and ridiculous as his solution might sound (and it was indeed met with skepticism and ridicule from his fellow researchers), it was quite inexpensive, and avoided space-travel as much as possible. The Union loved it! And as they saw it as the last hope for rescuing a huge venture, they pushed more money into the required research, and put Frank on the head of it all, neglecting the the envy of his seniors, and the heated scientific debate about the possibility of the experiment at all.

Frank's thesis stated that telepathy (and hence joint-dreaming) was unlimited by space as it was unlimited by time, that it was instantaneous! And thus the dreaming co-dreaming group can be thousands of light years away, without it affecting their capacity to co-dream or communicate, if proven right, Frank would have made a great leap, not only in the field on group-dreaming, but also in the field of cross-galactic-communications.


To be maybe continued ...

Project Halawes

Once upon a time, a time that is yet to come, at the second era of space-traveling for the human race, called by some The Colonial Age, a planet was found that was so rich with metals, energy sources and rare elements, that it was at once acquired by the Union of Enterprises to be turned into a gigantic factory, it was moreover in a strategically position that was almost equally distanced from the three human colonies like the center point of a triangle (at that time there were only three of course, the other unofficial settlements weren't approved yet by the colonial panel and did not pay any taxes to the universal government).

Unfortunately this planet wasn't that great for human life, or any life for that matter, true it did have a reasonable gravity (0.82 G) and true it had some oxygen in it's atmosphere, but the water was dire, and almost always frozen, the temperature was cold even on the equator, the landscape was mainly desert of rocks and mountains, and the color of the atmosphere by day was a deep shade of red. True there was some native life, but due to these reasons and many other subtle ecological reasons life forms were very rare and quite peculiar. Imagine a planet where the rivers are almost always frozen, so there was a fish-like creature that lived frozen and suspended for 3/4th of the solar year and then when the rivers melt it lived and "thrived".


So it was expectedly hard to find workers to man the factory (yes, human workers were still in use in some positions because they were simply cheaper than the robot alternatives), for even workers that were in the direst need refrained from working on the "red planet" (as the workers called it) for more than a year. Now don't you dare judge them, those were tough workers, used to the toughest conditions across the universe and to the then extremely exhausting space traveling buses (which transported workers at 7G to save time). But the red planet was really creepy, and it's nature was totally alien to any human wherever in the galaxy he was raised, the work was tough and all day long (to achieve the maximum productivity), and even the toughest of the workers went sick after no more than 20 months, the sickness was alienation, it had many different symptoms, and if not dealt with, was quite terminal.

So understandably the Union needed to solve this problem, because changing the staff periodically did cost them some money after all. And year after year, the plan to totally automatize the factory was proposed and rejected for its high cost. But then at the tenth year of the factory's operations one brilliant manager in the department of human resources did devise a radical solution. And truly, he was a nice guy and his solution seemed quite humane. He thought: "so they get sick? So what? Let's treat them, surely if there is a cure, it can be cheaply acquired in quantities, and why even wait for them to get sick, let's prevent their sickness, let's condition them psychologically to endure and even relish their daily work."

And thus the requirements were presented to the Union's chief psychiatrist, and thus the "Project Halawes" began. for the first two years conventional brain-washing techniques were used, with the effect of considerably increasing (almost doubling) the average worker-life-time, in addition to increasing the workers' enthusiasm and spirit. But this wasn't even close to the desired results, so in the following few years, different techniques were used singly and in combinations. Hypnosis, religion, and prostitution were some of the many things they tried with various degrees of success, until in the 21st year of the factory's operation, they started to use dreams. Yes dreams, artificially induced dreams of nice places and warm worlds, of rivers and rainbows, sirens and elfs, forests full of life, golden beaches, azure skies, and of course, beautiful women.

It was an instant success, the effect on workers' health and moral was beyond expectations, it was as if the spark of life was rekindled in the hearts of these men, for some of them lived every night in middle-earth playing with hobbits and seeking for Gandalf, some lived each of the Arabian nights many times, enjoying the harem and the extravagance, some dreamed at being Jedi knights, samurai warlords, doctors, lawyers, politicians or even prophets, people of conviction and significance.

To be revised and continued ... (probably not)