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I have a confession to make.
I was born right-handed.
Does that shock you?
I realize that my telling you this is dangerous,
given the current political situation.
But I've always been inclined to take risks.
It's part of why I found it impossible to live as a righty.
That sober lifestyle never suited me.
And besides, you're here,
which means you're in violation of the Transit Code.
Turn me in, you'll be turning yourself in too.
And don't think you can make an anonymous phone call, either.
They can trace it.
If you want to hold onto the scraps you call freedom,
You'll take my secret to your grave.
Why did you come here anyway?
Nobody spends nine hours riding an unlicensed bus
through thick black smoke
without a good reason.
Someone must have told you
that there was something important out here.
It's true.
There are things they don't teach you in Civilization.
Things you're not allowed to talk about.
I was born in what now seems like an enlightened age.
Traditional roles were beginning to dissolve!
Righties were making art!
(Cerebral art, naturally.)
Lefties were opening businesses!
(Eccentric ones, of course.)
And lefties were gaining political rights for the first time:
the right to vote,
the right to run for office,
the right to live independently,
without a righty to watch over them!
But for me,
it wasn't enough.
I couldn't form an image of myself as a righty.
Even as an artist, I was expected to be cold, rational, businesslike,
to favor drab blues and grays.
I felt sick when I wrote with my right hand,
and people called me sick when I didn't.
So I left, and started a life as a lefty
in the Dark States.
They weren't called the Dark States back then.
That scorched, ruined landscape hasn't always been there.
A few years ago,
it was a fertile plain
called the Free Zone.
A new world,
unbound by the rules of Civilization!
The first colony was only sixty people.
By the end of the second year,
we were over sixty thousand strong!
Heretics, dissidents, dropouts:
off the grid, self-sustaining,
no need for assistance from the East.
I think often of the people that I knew there.
The misfits who willingly withdrew there,
so they could cast off the shackles of taboo there...
Roger, who had been accused of flagrant
mockery of nature, after writing ambidextrously.
Donna, who'd been living as a vagrant —
I don't know what happened;
she was never quite direct with me.
And Harry, once a lefty, now a righty;
Carolyn, who worshipped Aphrodite;
And Marvin, who'd been known to use his fingers in his sex life;
Jack, who was convinced he'd reach Nirvana in his next life.
We knew that we were entering an era
where there'd be no such thing as impropriety!
If it's true that art's a hammer, not a mirror,
we would hammer out a perfect new society!
No landlords there to check which hand you write with,
No codes of dress, de jure or de facto,
No judges that you have to be polite with
to keep your reputation intact! Oh,
we
watched our rebel state continue growing!
The future had been written in advance!
Our luck would always rise, without plateauing,
And a backlash from the old guard?
Not a chance.
But we received a startling transmission
in October of the third year.
The voice of a rabid rhetorician,
filling the airwaves with absurd smears,
invoking the glory of tradition
and using us to stir fear.
We heard clearly: