“Need tea?” she asked.
“May be later” tea wasn’t his preference at that moment.
“Curiosity is too powerful there, right? There was that saying – We can be destroyed, but cannot be defeated. I remember how that quote came to us, for The Old Man and the Sea was the only book I was able to read in the experimentation camp. They taught us to read and write, but only what they wanted. I actually stole the book from the prison warden. You can’t really get away with doing such a thing, but it was worth the pain. There is nothing that substitutes knowledge and wisdom”.
“You should have been a revolutionary who could change the world if not for the imprisonment and exile. There is the need for such a person…”
“This is a revolution going on here; it is just that we are too weak a force to succeed. Listen to the rest of my story. We were taken out of the basement and literally kicked out of the ship to an alien atmosphere. The only clothes we had were the chips which were stitched to our thighs with camera and locator which we have removed now. Some of us wandered around in the caves and died by starvation or poisoned food, and only three hundred and twenty one of us remained. We stood together and found the right food and finally found shelter in those buildings which we strived to build. We were injected with their experimental medicines which could make our body quickly adapt to the circumstances, and we did. We became the creatures of the Titan wilderness. But our adaptation still left us with the need for exposure to the Titan’s underground atmosphere to survive. We have found enough creatures and plants here in the underground to make food. We are still hunted by them, and my death would have taken our number of two hundred and ninety nine, but as that didn’t happen, we are three hundred to their eight thousand – clearly outnumbered, and also weaker in strength but not in endurance”.
“From what you are talking about, it sounds as if those creatures are indeed human. But I guessed that they are humane only in their body’s basic structure. Where is the humanity in their words, action or even their head? The biggest surprise is that they look so advanced and modern”.
“There is nothing that makes me laugh more than the word ‘humanity’. It happened after we built our homes. The people in the ship knew that we were perfectly okay and having good life, with any more waiting spoiling their chance to locate us. The wished to have us back as slaves, for which their troops entered our homes again, beat us up brutally, stripped us and put us back into chains, as if it was how we were supposed to live and die. But our group of hunters who were out looking for food made an ambush in the machine room of the ship which made the ship act strange, and to its distress signal, the troops went back, but the ship locked them inside. They were already injected with the medication for adaptation and their bodies adapted to the ship. They became stronger and hostile, with a mechanical mind to torture and feed, still retaining their allegiance to their superiors of the Northern Bloc. They are provided fresh meat by the Bloc through space ships which serve not their settlements, but this giant ship.”
“You mean to say that they are better than us. They might be the best in what they do. Then how do you hold this point? Don’t they come down all at once and take over your world with all their advanced weapons which keep getting better and better with the Northerns’ scientific inventions”?
“The small tunnels save us; and so does the traps which we set. We have also managed to steal enough weapons from the ship to make us feel secure enough to defend our point. We have now shifted to this more easily defendable area, and beyond this point there is food. They haven’t been able to penetrate beyond this area which we defend. The underground is rich with its flora and fauna, and they wouldn’t use deadly forces. We are using the available resources of this world to enforce our protection further. But one can’t be sure how much time is left before they find another way to enter this shadow world.”
“With all these planning and brilliant ideas, how come they still take you and four others hostage? I would feel that you were quite close to death, and their ritual seemed too weird for mutants”.
“We were caught during a big firefight which they actually used a distraction to capture me, and they were just collateral damage. We have been tortured continuously for thirteen days and this was the last stage before death. As expected, they came up with their brutal physical and mental torture methods, but there was nothing that I hadn’t gone through or was not prepared for. To add to that, you know that we are adapted to endurance. None of us gave them any information, and they went back after giving the orders of execution. They were instantly flayed alive, and I was kept for the last moment, as they finally had the leader whom they always wanted to capture, torture, murder and eat. In your case, there was no point in torture, as there was no information to be extracted. You were to be killed directly by bleeding. They go on to drink that blood and then they go for flesh – they enjoy it immensely. Their methods is no longer includes anything other than inflicting the maximum pain. What they have injected you with, only increases the amount of pain creating a further illusion of pain within pain which can actually leave your mind caught within nowhere”.
“I never knew my future was so bleak; so much for the modern, civilized world” Christian murmured, shocked and staring at her.
To be continued…
Tennyson
The Divine Epic 