16. Ark of the Tea

Noah was sure that this plan was going to work. It was not really about his belief in his own ability or the skills of Jack, but it was more about the dumbness of Bella who was the weaker or may be the only weak link they could exploit. Jack was also confident, but still extremely careful about his moves.

“I have never met a willing parner before. The people of this city are so mean. They don’t even come close to realizing what big mistake they are making. They are such horrible creatures who don’t deserve to live under my father’s extraordinary leadership and incredible shelter. But I won’t give a damn and I don’t need to. I know exactly how my world needs to work and I can make it work, and the bottomline of the same is decided by myself” exclaimed Bella.

“I am quite surprised about the same. One has to wonder why it is so with such a lovely lady, and I am not even flattering – I haven’t started that process yet. Why would I need to use flattery anyway when there is so much of beautiful truth involved with you which cannot be avoided?” said Jack.

It was not that Bella was not used to flattery, but for sometime, she had the need to hear more of it. She had a shortage of people who praised her, as she stuffed most of them alive. It surely was fun for her, but she fell short of men due to the same. So, this was something that hit where it had to hit. The first impression was made, and it was the best and the most suited for the time.

“So, is there any place where you wish for us to go? I would leave that option to you and I am not even going to make you choose from my places this time. You seem to know how to treat a honourable lady and so why don’t you tell me what you want?” asked an impressed Bella.

“Why don’t we go to AchCo Pipelines? Won’t you like that?”

There was a few moments of silence. It was not exactly what Bella was hoping to hear – not even close to what he had expected. Any normal person would have wished to go to one of her grand cottages and enjoy the luxuries there. That would leave her baffled, but still happy enough, yet not without questions.

“Why would we want to go there? There are only rusty pipelines there and a lot of people who are quite disrespectful towards the honourable people like us”.

“Just for the sake of being alone. We can have some good time there, just you and me. I have heard that there is more to that place than what meets the eye. You can just send the employees home if you want to”.
“Not a bad idea. Let me make a few calls”.

As Bella goes on phone to make a call to give the employees an early holiday, Jack alerts Noah who doesn’t exit his workplace even after recording his exit. The whole place becomes empty very quickly as the order reaches there. But Noah waits there for the arrival of Jack and Bella and on their arrival, uses chloroform on Bella.
“Our time is now” said Noah.

They moved deeper into the inner sections of the building until they reached the ladder which lead to the lower side of the coffee vents. Noah manages to stop the flow and open one side of the vent while Jack places tea leaves inside it.

“Lets leave a message with it” said Noah

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated” said the message cards which were sent with the tea leaves through the vents.

Noah and Jack took the exit on the back side so that they could be sure that they don’t come across Bella if she awakens early. They were sure that they would be hunted on the next day as Bella would recognize Jack and the cameras would identify Noah as his partner in crime who had come up with this idea. They could be doomed; they were to be hunted, tortured and brutally murdered by Acheron’s men, not only for disrupting his money flow and power, but also for playing with and knocking out his daughter.

Bella’s response was surely going to be even more fatal. She is known for being dumb and strange, and certainly not for being the forgiving type. Her fury and the love for stuffed people might tell a greater story for the future generations. She would have some weird plans for her, and it is a twisted procedure that would start in her mind from the very moment she gets up. There would be no more games, and no more of being the nice person – there would be torment.

The only better thing other than self-satisfaction was that they had started a revolution, something which is clearly against the norms of a corrupt dictatorship. Their life might end and the revolution might begin with tea, something about which they were more sure than most of the other things of tomorrow. They might be destroyed, but not defeated on an eventful day. They might be executed publicly to a jeering or cheering crowd, and a lot of people would be there to see it. But they might have already made the difference by then, for there would be many acts of brutality and there should be excruciating pain and suffering, but there shall be revolution and there is going to be change, which used to be them, to be carried over.

To be continued…

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12. Alien Suffering

“What are they? Aliens from beyond the galaxy or demons from hell?” Christian wondered. He tried to take his arms out of the chains, but it was perfectly bound. “Listen to me, you have got the wrong person in chains” he tried to reason with them. But none of the creatures seemed to care even a bit.

Many hours passed. For Christian, even the seconds were as long as the hours, if they were not days which had passed. The humanoids were still busy and there was no sign of movement from the girl on the right side. Two of the creatures took off her chains and she fell down like a petal of a flower. Whatever clothes or rags which were left on her body had turned red with her own blood. They tried to lift her up and make her stand on her feet. All of a sudden, she jumped on one of the creatures, and almost bit its neck off. The humanoids gathered around her to pull her back, and they grabbed her hair and clothes but there was no use, as she held on to the creature with her teeth. The attacked creature finally threw her off itself to reveal that its blood is blue in colour. As she fell on her back, she seemed to be in pain as she dragged herself slowly towards nowhere in her blinded state. The creatures seemed unaffected by the attack as they pulled her away into the next room.

They then took her back to the same position, and after giving her an injection, she was hung upside down with blood dripping even faster from so many wounds on her body almost as if there is no area in her body that has not been tortured. He felt depressed and sad about the girl who made such a valiant attempt, something which he is unable to do. He guessed that the four people on his left side might have been skinned alive. Even wind seemed to be afraid to go towards that direction. One of the humanoids came to Christian with a syringe full of a layered liquid and injected him with it. He felt a horrible feeling of burning throughout his body and sensed blood coming up his eyes and mouth. He screamed in his full voice, but they made a wound on his each hand and looked at the drops of blood dripping from it. He had hallucinations of battles involving advanced weapons of mass destruction and chaos on Earth and the ultimate devastation of both Mars and Titan. He was slowly losing consciousness when he heard a sound of something huge breaking and a bigger noise of some big explosion with a powerful light which almost blinded him. There was something going on around him and this time it was not torture. He was able to see nothing more than a little bit of smoke, a few masked men with unfamiliar weapons and the girl moving a bit and falling into the arms of a woman with a gun before he lost consciousness.

“What is is that you seek? Is it death, life or the narrow bridge between them? Is it hell, paradise or the purgatory where you need to end? Or did you just cease to believe in all of them?” whispered the voice.
“What shall my death bring? Is it the better of the three?” asked Christian.

“Why do you think about what is brought when your opportunity to bring one of the three upon yourself has not come yet? Why do you think about your spirit life when you still exist in the material life with so much to do? Why do you bother when God’s providence which your rational world call luck and your cynics call fate has brought you to such a situation from which your knowledge of the real truth shall make you free from the burdens of science and technology which has forced all these questions on you? Doesn’t it bother you enough to take you out of this illusion of a reality with the mask of progress and development? Is this modern world that you come across really not an extention of the ancient world which has used a visage of extreme vanity to go back far beyond the darkest of ages when the Original Sin had forced a depressing choice out of divinity?”

“What shall I seek then? Am I powerful enough? I lived all my life among the people who never understood me and still live with myself who is that much ignorant about my being me as much as anybody else. How do you define reality? And how do you describe this modernity that has lived beyond the evil of the earliest worlds?”

“You don’t exist. It is your essence that exists. As a whole, humanity survives, even as the question remains – for how long and where? But they exist, but without their essence. They are just random creatures brainwashed with ideas of science as truth, when human life was never supposed to be a result of theories. It was to be dependent on the essence that exists, but what we see now is the existence that exists. But you are different. You have the essence still active, which is why you are able to feel this will to strive, this desire to seek and find, and not give in to those theories of absurdity. You will not give in to human control which is just an optical illusion caused by those random people who claim that they have the final say. Look at the wars, the bloodshed, the torment – they are all the result of this development of technology which has made a bigger cannibal out of man than ever. They have all lost their essence; the divine essence which has been replaced by the inherent evil”.

“It is such a shame” remarked Christian.

To be continued…

8. Madness in Two

“Do these advertisements ever end? Do they serve as elements of eternal torture?” asked Jack.

“Acheron Industries serve your every need. We make sure that you exist in this small utopian world” said the robot in the advertisement which featured on the television every fourty five minutes or so.

“Existence. They have it. What do they know of our existence? How can they call this an existence compared to the Acheron family’s godly existence? These people are not even creative enough to make a real good advertisement. Tell me more about this Bella Edward Jacob Acheron or whatever name she has taken in the last few years” asked Noah.

“She is currently stuffing people on her walls. She chooses from the people imprisoned in her father’s private prison. She divides them into two groups, Edwardians and Jacobeans, and looks inside them for clues to being a vampire and werewolves, and finally hangs their corpses on her walls according to which creature they look closest to. No wonder the prison manages to perform more death sentences than any other prison in the city” said Jack.

“Can she make a Hannibal? Does she eat them too?”

“No, as she is too intellectually inferior to read The Silence of the Lambs, I think that should save most of the people from losing their body parts. But she still thinks that they are vampires or werewolves, and therefore is kept to that private prison where people of certain characteristics are bought from the state prison rather than taken directly there. She is their lovely waking horror”.

“Does she still read the book?”

“No, I think she is aware that there will be more of similar books, as even during this age, the people of her age wants books that makes no sense, but are still too easy to understand. They can’t trouble their intellect, and they want to be that hopeless teenager who wants to do nothing other than whining and crying over a love which doesn’t exist, but there are still two men of different species infatuated with her. I guess they believe that they can gift their babies to the guy who didn’t get the girl too.”

“What is with these bloody love stories which sell at a higher rate than every resource?”

“Well, they are the means for these people to keep something which doesn’t exist alive. In that case, when they banned religion, they should have banned this overrated piece of nonsense instead. Love which leads to carnal desires is that cancer which has killed the world and led to these. Don’t you know that these Antony-Cleopatra kind of relations which were boosted by these books lead to the final war which made all these dystopian thing happen in the mask of an utopia”?

“You mean they thought there was something like true love? Were they that stupid?”

“Yes, they were. They believed all those lies which were spread through the romantic nonsense which lead to the most evil period in the history of Earth. The carnage that followed had its root in these fake love stories which proclaimed that these people were anything less than sex maniacs. There was actually no point. Even they believed so, but still continued to pretend to believe in these lies. It should be an excuse for them to get immoral, as they don’t have religion to guide them now, and the only thing they can think is evil”.

“What does this girl thing about that side of Twilight?”

“She doesn’t seem to realize that side too, without the elements of blood and gore. She needs that half vampire, half werewolf hybrid though. She has asked many doctors if they could do a Frankenstein and create one lovely monster for her whom she can marry. The only requirement was that both of them should have some awesome teeth which could transform her into a vampire or a werewolf whenever she wanted. I believe that she could get something done sooner or later, as her father is starting a new research facility in an attempt to create immortal supermen and name them Achers”.

“So, is it like everyone will cease to die some day?”

“No, just the rich ones, at the cost of others. There are lots of people paying a good amount of money to live forever, but there is only about fourty five percent chance of success, and it is a big risk. From what we know about, there will be no refunds from Acheron and a failure will clear about twenty five square kilometres of area as a result of mass destruction. As he has denied the existence of God and declared himself the son of a monkey and an ape, and has started looking for the origins of life which he wishes to create out of nowhere, these twenty five square kilometres would be enough for him to create that facility, and thus there is the backup plan for that land which he took from the common man for such a low price”.

“So, he is that much of a mad genius as her daughter is a mad fool. They both have madness as their weapon, shield and weakness despite of the power they possess working better than their madness. Can we use that this state of madness to our advantage”?

“Yes, which is why I mentioned her earlier. This madness can be used. There can a superb plan associated with this one”.

“I think I already know what to do as long as a plan is concerned”.

“This can just add to it, and this one can even stand alone if needed. Just wait till I finish the thing and make it a working plan”.

“The plans are many, but success gets further unreal”.

“So says my favourite cynic, the gamer of tactical warfare”.

To be continued…

7. Of that Faith

“Is this death?” asked the man full of burns.

There was a failure in the main generator which had caused an explosion which lead to eleven casualities and twenty four injured. The man was one of them. It was seemingly hell out there, and in the absence of the chief medical officer, it was only worse. The destruction of the main generator had resulted in the reduction of power by fourty five percent in a world where there was only the power for basic needs. The communications were destroyed by the explosion and even the medical equipment rarely work in the way it is supposed to be, due to the lack of sufficient power.

“I will die, won’t I? The only question is about what is taking death so long. I have thought about it throughout my life. I would have committed suicide if it was not a crime. There was never a point in life, for mine was full of pain. Forget the mental stress, but the physical side! I had abscess all over my body and each and every attempt to heal them has resulted in another problem. Science has failed me. The doctors have said that it doesn’t matter how many surgeries I undergo, it shall come back again. I have understood that it gets only worse with every surgery and time has acted as a catalyst to my pain, my life lost cause and now this. Death has been my expected saviour for a long time” he continued.

“No, this is not death” replied Christian. “Believe in God, for our Lord will save you. There is no death other than not able to reach paradise. There is no loss other than failing to become a saint. Please pray and believe. There is still chance”.

“Do you have any idea how much pain I am in right now? There was always the pain of the abscess, and it has taken from me my confidence and everything positive. It made me pessimistic. I kept myself away from everything, and I never had fun for the last fifteen years. I had to switch off my phone and run away to a world which had no human being around; sometimes it was my room and at other times, it was just a randomly chosen place where nobody could reach or an abode not that easy to find. My life is a collection of missed opportunities about which I lament every second of my life. It has burned me throughout, and now this burn which is slowly taking the life out of me. I have died in life throughout, and this is the eventual hell for me”.

“Do you really need to think about that now? Everybody has the highs and lows in their lives, and sometimes it is the latter that has the upper hand for a very long time”.

“It was the new fast food culture. There were negative health effects, and in my case, it was worse. There was no liquor, drugs or smoke, but this one was more than enough. Fast food chains might have had more money from me than anybody else. From the 2060s, the neo-augmentation process by those giants might have increased the quantity available for the same price, and has surely attracted so many more regular customers. But for me, it was more because of the fact that the options were less, and I was no risk taker. I went with the flow, but I lost myself in that powerful flow as I was weak, and was buried in everything bad. There was still no risk for obesity, and there was no cholestrol or diabetes. They could have stopped me. Why did they evade me? I wish there was a return to what I used to be, about eight or ten years ago. There are things I need to change, and there are things which I have to make right”.

“Forget all of them, and turn to God; you have this chance which not many had. Just turn your soul in the right direction and miracles shall happen, in this world or the other”.

“I had a dream, a few hours before this happened. I can’t say that I saw the dream, because I rather felt it. There were spiders, cockroaches and scorpions on my bed. There was a huge number of these insects and I fell from the bed. The spiders seemed to eat the rest and they got bigger. I felt that it was real, and even after regaining my senses, I could see those creatures. I waited for a long time for them to disappear; I washed my face and even tried pinching and hitting myself. But they wouldn’t go. Finally, due to the weariness, I decided to fall asleep on the chair. I still could not stop feeling the presence of the insects. When I finally woke up in the morning, there were none. Was this a sign? I could feel that I was sick in the morning. Or may be I am mentally unwell too”.
“Why do you bother? They are of no significance. Put your trust in God and close your eyes”.

He closed his eyes. He reminded Christian more of Count Ladislaus de Almásy from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. He even has Herodotus’ Histories with him. He wished that the similarities ended there. But what had actually hit him was nothing other than the dream of the spider, the eight legged long thing which was the symbol of the Northern Bloc’s corporate group. He always gelt that it had made perfect sense for them to use that logo, as they also weave webs and catch their prey. Those were surely powerful and wide-spread webs, as not many are known to escape from the same.

To be continued…

2. On the Titan

The Settlement 47, somewhere on Saturn’s moon: Titan. In the year of our Lord: 2080.

Four months have passed since the colonization of Titan. There have been thirteen settlements on Moon, twenty nine on Mars, and there have been five on Titan so far. The last two colonizations had resulted in two world wars, but due to “The Treaty of 13”, there would be no war to follow this settlement at Titan. But the Fifth World War will be due by the expiry of the treaty, on Thirteenth January, 2089. It is an unavoidable fact. All the power blocs have accumulated enough weaponry to claim it in future which might be a devastated Titan. There are six of them right now, the Northern, the Southern, the Eastern, the Western, the Central and the Imperial.

There are many common men who have volunteered to go to the new settlement at Titan in spite of the poor facilities there. Out of the five settlements on Titan, the latest of them is the Settlement 47, and the man in charge of that small world is Christian. It is the only settlement of the Imperial Bloc on Titan. The other four belongs to the Northern Bloc, the most powerful military force in the whole of Earth, against who the Eastern and the Southern has formed an unofficial alliance which might be official with the next world war. This alliance is already planning on a possible future colonization of Jupiter’s moon, Callisto. The Northern Block owns eight out of the thirteen colonies on Moon and twenty three out of the twenty nine colonies on Mars. As the rest owns one each on Moon and Mars, the Central Bloc owns one extra on the latter.

In the fog, and under the light, sat two people in silver outfits. There were guns, books and a few gadgets which shows low battery.

“We are not really the ones supposed to be here, I guess” remarked Zachary, the chief medical officer.

“You are one of them, my friend, it is just me who doesn’t belong here” said Christian with a big frown on his face.

“There are no places of worship here, and building one is out of the equation. There is nothing more of the green world out here, not even a part of what remains on Earth. There is also nothing to be done”.

“I thought religion and spirituality might be the least of your concern here. Now, I do wonder if they sent you here so that you could be taken out of those fixed set of beliefs”.

“They are not just a set of beliefs; and I volunteered to be here. I had even volunteered to go to Mars, but I was a minor then, and had to fulfill the promise to my parents”.

“May be you did. But they still manipulated you into it, for you don’t know the corporate world nor do you know the government. You are just that typical everyman character who knows nothing about what happens behind the scenes. This is just the beginning – wonder how much of a dystopia our world will be, after fifty or sixty years; if there is something left of our world by then. The Northern Bloc already has enough firepower to destroy all the three Settlement planets along with Earth”.

“It is because you are into all of these as an employee. I believe that we will be saved. We might not live long enough to see it, but humanity will find its salvation one day; whoever is left to find it”.

“The one thing I have always been sure about compared to most of the other things; it is easier to convince a corpse compared to you. But I respect that, for there are only a few people left who got opinions of their own, and that number has been going down. Soon, there will be only puppets in a dystopia on a hundred percent dead world”.

The Pathfinder machine breaks the conversation, as it arrives from under the canyon after doing the usual check for unidentified life-forms. There is nothing new to report on its long list of descriptions about the large number of turns it had to make. Christian considered it a waste of power at a time when the settlements were trying hard to keep the lights on. But he had to obey the orders.

Christian made his routine checks on the machine. That was the only thing he enjoyed during his stay there. He has been an expert mechanic right from his childhood, as he repaired his own hover-car, never giving it to the workshop. Zachary had his own problems in the medical fields, as the atmosphere of Titan had something infectious about it, always creating more than one abscess on the body.

The storm alert started blinking. It was the time to get into those titanium-hybrid abodes and have some rest. This resting was such a major thing in their life, that they found it an important event of the routine. There was always the option of exploring more and more, as the next settlement was too far away from them. But there were bots assigned to do the same, and the local exploration was the job of the Pathfinder. A regular journey through the surface of Titan was not healthy enough for a normal human being.

It was in such a world that Christian spent his life. There were just the books on technology and gadgets short of power to keep him company, along with a good number of people who failed to share his interests. Most of the available power had to be used by the machines for the exploration of the surface and underneath the planet in a consistent struggle to keep the settlement safe from any unidentified organism or infectious disease. There were mistakes made on the Moon and Mars, and the experts on Earth were being extra careful during this settlement. To add to it, the Imperial Bloc has been new to the Titan surface, and the experts predict it a colossal task for them to keep themselves working there, with absolutely no help expected from the comparatively well-settled Northern Bloc colonies.

As a representative of everyman who had too much love for nature, God, poetry, art and all the things of a beautiful past, the world was never enough for him. It is out of the situation where the world becomes not enough, that rebellions occur. As long as Christian is considered, there was such a thing already boiling in his mind and soul. He was denied both his spiritual and intellectual satisfaction, and his aesthetic sense had nothing to be satisfied.

To be continued…