17. Circeei’s Day

Christian slid along the bed until he fell from it. He immediately stood up on his legs and looked through the window to see total darkness outside. But there was enough light inside for him to notice that there were many inscriptions inside the room and also a symbol of cross. The walls seemed to be made of some variety of mud and the colours were all brownish and silver. There was the smell of spicy food around, and a few books were around, but none of them were made of paper.

“So you are finally awake” a voice from the darkness inquired.

Christian turned to the door to see the lady who was on his right side in the torture chamber. She was wrapped up with so many white bandages on her body that the very little silver clothing made her look like an Egyptian mummy covered in silver. She was moving with the help of two walking sticks and from the way she looked, there seemed to be some trouble with her eyes.

“You are alive. It didn’t seem so at that time. There was so much of blood loss and your whole body looked mutilated. The thought of the pain which each part of your body might have endured made me wish that I was dead rather than go through all of those” he said.

“Of course, I am alive. They never really had enough to kill me – it is not that they never had the power, but they wouldn’t make death easy for me, and that helped me in bailing out more than once. As you can see, I am still standing”.

“Who are you? What is this place and what kind of demons from hell are those creatures? Or on scientific terms, what kind of miserable sadistic aliens are they?”

“You can call me Circeei. It is not my real name though. To be frank, I never really had a name. Throughout my life, I have been known by code names, and they have slowly developed into Circeei replacing those 2s with Es and the 1s with Is, and as you might already know, it stands for the Goddess of Magic, for that spell which I have to cast for these people to save them. I was just born when myself and my parents were taken prisoners of war from the beginning of the third world war when the Northern Bloc became the most powerful of the superpowers. We were separated and we children were put in their experimentation cells. The plan was to create super-soldiers to change the direction of the war, but unfortunately for them, the war ended too early. But, they came up with a better plan later to increase our endurance to hostile environments and make us the first creatures on Titan. There were nine hundred of us, forced to run around under different test environments. As our survivor skills were tested, only three hundred and fourty eight of us remained”.

“But all the concentration camps in the Northern Bloc were decommissioned. The human rights groups checked each and every corner of the globe for anything that remained. The Northerns were even applauded for being the first Bloc do so and in the most efficient manner”.

“There lies the irony in it. They were the greatest champions of human rights on Earth, but on the Moon and later on Mars, they brutalized us with no mercy. One has to wonder what they call humans on another planet – aliens? After we were declared the slave champions who were to test the underground of Titan which could support human life, we were chained and taken into one of the largest space ships ever built, and were sandwiched between their code-signalling machines in the basement so that they eight thousand men and women from the Northern Bloc could use the vast world inside the ship and see us live in that underground and learn” said Circeei showing the writings on her body. “Some of the faded signs do go a long way back though, and I don’t want to talk about it” she added.

“These are codes? The secret transmissions which the Northern Bloc denied existence? So they planned this throughout. No wonder they were so hostile in claiming most of Titan. They must have always knew there was scope for pure life in the underground of Titan”.

“Unfortunately for us, they could hide all of these from the media. They literally own Titan. They could even hide this big a spaceship with the help of signals from Titan. They could also jam any signs of life here. What you entered was actually the entrance to this giant ship which covers the original entrance to the underground. It is not just a ship, it is big enough to be called one of the districts of the Imperial Bloc. I am actually surprised that they allowed your Bloc to exist here. I feel that you might slowly disappear from the map sooner or later. This symbol seen on your clothes of your Bloc on this planet might slowly be erased like our very existence were erased from the world, and there are so many things they can blame it on, including a little human negligence or a natural disaster of high level”.

“I should go and warn the others of my camp then. Some of mates have also gone to a Northern Settlement. From what I hear from you, none of them might survive”.

“You can’t go out right now. They might be outside. They are incredibly powerful in the darkness. We are effectively trapped out here. Lets see if we can work out a plan. We are going through desperate times even as I have seen worse. Even the concept of hell has remained just a word for me, as I have gone through most of it in reality, in this life itself”.

There were strange screams outside, but none of them seemed to bother Circeei. Despite of her lack of steadiness and the bandages, she didn’t seem to be in a mood to sit or take rest. There was a strange determination of the highest quality on her face. Christian was never this much affected by a revelation before, and he was keen to hear more about this new world of terror.

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…

10. Final Sacrifice

Elysium, the largest city of Southern Bloc. In the year of our Lord: 2060.

“This is your last chance. Surrender or face the consequences. We have a copy of the treaty which has been approved by our council. Give up now and save what you love” thus repeated the loudspeaker from the battle tanks.
“This surrender is more of your need than hours. Kindly co-operate and stay alive with your loved ones” added the loudspeaker.

The buildings were collapsing, and chaos was everywhere. They had a last look at their child before they surrendered themselves to the invading Northern Bloc army. It was the only way to save the kid, as they had thought. But, how much that worked out is something that they would never know about. It will be another story, and whether it would have a good run is a question they would fail to answer. It would also save the city or whatever is left of it from further destruction. The whole Southern Bloc was nothing better than the wasteland that T.S. Eliot had talked about long ago. “APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain”. – explained the situation of the bloc perfectly.

Dion was the leader of the Southern Bloc when the Third World War started. The Southern Bloc had taken the wrong side in the war, with the smaller nations around the powerful Northern Bloc which cherished their independence. But the Northerns were not that kind of people who liked seeing little ants wandering around their legs and their obvious decision was the crush the little insects. The small city-states had asked help from Dion which he was ready to provide. He has always been the champion of the weak and the voiceless subaltern. It was clearly opposed by the ministers of his chamber, but he was not a man to back away. But at a time when there were only two power blocs, the Northern and the Southern, Dion was asking for a lot more than he could handle considering the collection of arms and manpower which the Notherns have been collecting for ages.

Elysium had fallen, and so had the last hope for freedom. Does the Third World War end there with the fall of the Southerns? No, it doesn’t, as the unholy alliances has kept forming even among the weakest nations, while the Northern Bloc has concentrating its full army, navy, airforce and the special forces on bringing destruction to the Southerns. What would become of Southern Bloc is a question that remains, as no building is left standing. As the Royal Palace has been taken over and Dion and his wife taken prisoners of war, the Northerns can now fix a puppet government there which they can control from a distance. The leader would be a Northern, who would marry from the Southern Bloc so as to maintain his neutrality on paper and so that the new appoinment would be justified in the pages of history. It is more of a temprary contract rather than anything else. To add to that, all the natural resources can be harvested from among the destruction. The rivers from the South shall now flow towards the North, and whatever flows towards the South shall have dams in their path. The annual tribute might be in millions and that amount will have to be paid by the last remaining citizens of the Southern Bloc who number in thousands.

The total loss of life of the Northerns is estimated to be twenty thousand five hundred troops and fifty five civilians while that of the Southerns is estimated to be ninety five thousand troops and ninety nine thousand civilians, with about hundred thousands of civilians captured alive as the prisoners of war, and Dion and his wife has become one of them. They were stripped off their richness and clothed in drags, and put in concentration camps – considering their high status and Dion’s role in the war, their chances of survival in such a hostile environment would be absolutely zero. The only best thing that they can wish for, is a comaratively painful death, as there would be agony and there should be suffering immersed in brutality. He had quoted Eliot before he surrendered: “I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones”. He was not that much of an admirer of The Wasteland, but the situations create different likes and dislikes. What he would have asked in the face of the Northern brutality would have been a few other lines from the same poem: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?” He knew about the war crimes the Northerns had committed, and he knew he would become a victim, and the question about his survival was not a relevant one.

There would be the last question that can remain. It would be about their child. Barely an year old, the child has been identified and taken to the Northern Bloc’s capital city of Asgard. From what is known about the Northern brutality, all the Southerns who knew about the same could be sure about only two things. One is that the child will not die easily, and the second is that the child shall grow up and when it does, there is going to be the brutality of the highest order that awaits. Dion chose to make the sacrifice and not run away by making a deal that his child would survive. But what would this kind of survival mean for the child? Is it any better than the realms of Hades and the being caught by a hellhound at the gates of inferno?

To be continued…

9. Lone Wanderer

The world he knew was in chaos and it was time for him to take charge. The confusion was only getting worse. The hope was diminishing, and the faith was already gone. It was only in a little shade of belief that the whole thing was going forward. Hell might have had many names, but there was the need to make the world better than the infernal environment.

“It is time I make the difference” Christian told himself.

It was a wonderful evening if he was a photographer despite of the human sufferings. He walked and walked until he reached a cave. The machine had pointed towards the South as the right path which had more probability of survival. He believed in the machines and the signs. But the question remained how far the science had lead the humanity, and what other than chaos and destruction did it bring. The signs had become the better guide for him. It gave him hope which technology had taken away from him. He rested there for a day.

The new dawn had arrived and there was a strange music in the wind. He reached the side of what seems to be a frozen river, which was filled with a strange liquid in its frozen state. There was absolutely no contact with any life form yet. The light was high over the horizon. He decided to sleep near a tree-like structure. The silence had defeated the music and it didn’t take him much time to fall asleep.

The next day arrived and there was a lot of dust flying around for reasons unknown. He walked towards what seemed like a naturally created building. There was some movement around it, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. He felt that he could have a look and find out by himself. There was nothing else to be done.

Inside the structure, he found a path which lead downwards, and he was no longer guided by the machines, but by faith alone. He chose to go down rather than move straight towards nothingness which he encountered again and again. He went down the stairs which seemed never-ending. He could heard voices from inside the walls, but that didn’t stop him. Getting help was his only aim.

It took him about five hours to reach the bottom. There were a number of round mounds which seemed like houses of sand. There was an entrance to each one of them. None of them seemed to have life forms in them, but each of them had some pot-like things on the floor and seat-like projections extending from the walls. There were also some strange inscriptions on the walls which extended even to the tiny ventilations on the top. The whole thing seemed like a total mess.

He exited to pitch black darkness outside. There was nothing to be seen. But there were sounds of movements and there was something moving around for sure. The sounds had become incredibly creepy and as a sharp object touched his shoulders, he decided to run. His legs stopped only when his legs felt no ground, and he started falling a long way down until his body felt surrounded by water. There was something about the water that he couldn’t move at all. He was slowly losing consciousness.

He woke up the very next day, with chains on hands and legs, and he ended up staring at a humanoid with big green eyes and a small mouth from which fangs dropped out, and they were entirely without nose and the ears. It was wearing a black robe which covered its whole body which didn’t looked any less human except for the fact that they seemed to have just three fingers and the nails looked as sharp as the claws of a wild animal. It didn’t take its eyes off Christian. It was surrounded by many more similar creatures which were wearing almost the same type of dress and looking the same, the only difference being in the height. They were busy working on some kind of keypads which manipulated some strange signs on a huge black screen. There were also some creepy sounds around, none of them which were already heard on Earth or even on the surface of this moon.

When Christian looked on the right, he saw a beautiful girl who looked entirely human, also in chains, destitute of clothing except for the area around the waist and the chest. Her clothing was purely silver, and the eyes were tied up with a thin layer of white clothing. There was blood dripping from inside the white layer. Her skin was more brownish than anything else and her abdomen, lower back and tighs had the same writing as what was seen in the mounds earlier. The lower abdomen had a small cross-like symbol. The blood was flowing through these small carvings on her body until they reached a small bowl of blood which was almost full. She seemed to have no life left in her. He was shocked to find a bowl with just a single drop of blood just in front of him, which was slightly bigger in size.

On the left side, there were three male figures and a female figure who were completely bloody, and except for their heads, their bodies were completely covered in a white cloth which was almost red with the blood. There were holes instead of their eyes. The blood bowl in front of them was full and closed with a lid. Christian could feel the smell of death all around, and he could sense the strong presence of grimm reaper very close to him.

“Hell exists and so does the eternal torture and damnation, that is for sure. But what would I call this?” He asked himself.

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…