Purging the Circle
The attack was so sudden, so overwhelming, so unexpected, that our defense forces had no chance.
The enemy was so brutal, so ruthless, so efficient, so thorough, that much of Earth was swept clean of human life.
Their technologies were so advanced, their motives so obscure, their objectives so ... well, so alien ... that all we could do was watch in awe and horror as their evil space-spawned armada scoured away our homes, our families, our lives.
Yet not all the vanquished were among the dead. With cold precision, our new insectoid masters spared one in a hundred of us, for they needed slaves, cowering, obedient slaves, to finish their work of dismantling the history and memory of mankind.
So, despite the wrenching vision of fire-belching warships, despite the anger and grief I felt as I watched my family, my home, my city, my nation, my planet succumb, despite the deafening noise of near-total destruction, and because I did not awaken, I was taken prisoner and made to do their nefarious bidding.
Be clear: we slaves were never hostages to our captors. There was no one and nothing they needed or desired as a ransom that they hadn't already seized by right of conquest. No, we were grunt labor only, cheaper to use than machines, because they neither fed nor housed us. Easier to use than machines, because we needed no programming, we already knew the land and obeyed their gestured orders out of abject fear. And we were easier to dispose of than machines when they were finished with us - they simply left us where we fell.
Some were made to scrawl numerals and alphabets on scraps of paper, as they leered over us while making a mucous rattle we came to know as their laughter, their mandibles clacking menacingly as they devoured the letters and words we were forced to create.
Some of us were limited to drawing only zeroes and the letter "O," which our new masters considered pornographic, as they watched us and drooled their delight and snapped their electric whips if we dared slow with fatigue. Outside of our calligraphic slave-cribs, these round symbols were forbidden and any human found marking with a circle was summarily tortured and killed. Many did so, simply to end the pain.
"Q"'s and other letters with tails, such as "p" and "y" were considered merely naughty, and selected human victims would be forced to scribble them like graffiti on what remained of our civilization ... buildings, statues, bridges, churches ... before they and the forlorn structures they had tagged were blasted with heat rays for the aliens' perverted amusement.
I was assigned to a work gang with other able-bodied men. We were tasked with erasing the image of the circle in all its manifestations from the remaining instrumentality of the Earth. We slagged down the wheels of automobiles and trains, we replaced endless numbers of manholes with new ones cobbled together out of scrap metal in the shape of triangles.
Coins, soda cans, cathedral windows, door knobs, eyeglasses, traffic signals! Of the pervasiveness of circles in our world, I was wholly unaware before I and my ragtag cohort of a demolition crew were tasked with their removal.
The coins, I heard, were gathered and flown in a gigantic warship to some exotic locale, where they were reputedly dumped into an active volcano. The entire town of Akron, Ohio was destroyed in an instant by a nuclear explosion.
We were given no food, no water, no rest, no relief. We ate and drank what we happened to find in the ruins as we worked, and a few of my fellows, made mad by the stress, turned to eating pages from books and magazines in emulation of the aliens, who could be seen at all hours joyfully eating our written heritage.
It turned cold and one by one, my circle-wrecking crew dropped from hunger and exhaustion, and died, their skeletal bodies slowly covered by drifting snow. My time would come soon enough, I knew. If I could have turned traitor and pledged my allegiance to the a conquering nation or adopted the victors' religion, or embraced their language and customs, my moral fiber was such that I would have done so in an instant. But one cannot will oneself to become a ten-foot-tall armored grasshopper.
So, as usual, morning came and I awoke refreshed, comfortable and warm in my bed, whatever deep psychological pain I had borne, resolved by means of this dream - a dream neither more nor less than the usual evening's entertainment.
posted by Mique @ 4:39 PM
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