Rebels have existed in the human strain since the days of Homo erectus. Through the ages they’ve come in forms as varied as Galileo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rosa Parks. They are people who live their own lives in their own fashions, fighting for things that are right as they see them, each forging their own brand.
The origin of this safe zone — which is known to us all as Free Think but that others branded under names of their own — is the result of work done over a century ago by Anu Patil and Zhang Wen, two such rebels who met on the campus of a university in Tallahassee, Florida.
Both were brilliant.
Both were offspring of strictly adherent families.
Ms. Patil was a young woman born of parents from the Dalit caste who strictly practiced the Hindu faith. Her desire to attend school as a female, even in this modern day, caused great friction in the family.
Mr. Wen was born to a family headed by a factory worker who was, by all recorded history, completely content to lead his life attached to the machinery and processes that produced material for his company. Zhang would not even have been born, though, if his father had not secretly killed a daughter who had come prior to him. The Zhangs were allowed only one child by the state. Zhang Wen’s life was spared by being born male.
The two met while contributing to the earliest research into networked Think Space. Their relationship grew and, within their community, the two became inseparable.
When Anu’s father arranged for her to marry she fought long and hard but, in the end, felt she had to capitulate. With their time growing short, the pair of lovers rebelled in the only way they knew how — by creating a small bubble in the network, a place cloaked in privacy shells and security walls that only they could find, a small island of renegade memory that shifted from host to host where they would always be able to retreat.
Together.
Anu Patil lived many years, including her last two decades in jail, building onto the legacy of Free Think, which has today become a haven for outcasts like you, the rebels of our time who build onto their own such spaces, buttressed and expanded with modern approaches.
We are a mad collection of strangeness, but together we all fear the Central Inspector, all brandish the uniqueness of our own independence as personal banners, and, in the end, we all know that if we give up anything that causes damage to the safe zone of Free Think we will be ostracized, and forever hunted.
This bond is why we continue to exist.