Excerpt from "We"
Downstairs. The avenue is crowded: we normally use the Personal Hour after lunch for extra walking when the weather is like this. As usual, the Music Factory was singing the March of the One State with all its pipes. All ciphers walked in measured rows, by fours, rapturously keeping step. Hundreds and thousands of ciphers, in pale bluish unifs, with gold badges on their chests, indicating the state-given digits of each male and female. And I--we, our foursome--was one of the countless waves of this mighty torrent. ...
The blessed-blue sky, the tiny baby suns in each badge, faces unclouded by the folly of thought ... All these were rays, you see--all made of some sort of unified, radiant, smiling matter. And a brass beat: Tra-ta-ta-tam, Tra-ta-ta-tam--like sun-sparkling brass stairs--and with each step up, you climb higher and higher into the head-spinning blueness ...
Excerpt from ``We" (1921), by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Natasha Randall. Modern Library, 2006. pp. 6-7. 