Hi Friends,
Story telling is a passion that does not die, not with time or age. So despite my having promised myself that there will no fictional illusion for the next times and seasons to come, a certain restlessness in me is intent on proving otherwise. So for the next times and seasons (this is what you say when you don't have a specific time or date in mind), I will be writing a sci-fi series. It's going to be a complete series per week. Trust me, you gonna love what you read. So without further ado, the first of this science fiction is going to be NUMERO UNO. I actually started many months back. You can read the first and second parts here and here. But really, you do not need to follow the previous parts to get the gist from here. Having said that, I give you NUMERO UNO. It starts and ends this week.
When the war is over, do wake me up
Wikipedia by NASA CC BY SA 3.0
Marina knew she would never get used to the GONG, not when she was totally allergic to mornings. The sharp piercings that bore into one's eyes at the beginning of every day always seemed to turn her optic nerves into jelly, and render her brain inactive. It didn't help that she was a Sola who have lived in shanties at the department of commons all her life where darkness was the natural light and a lax irreverence for daylight was ever present. Besides, being a Sola meant she had to take the night seriously; she had to put the Earth to sleep. And no, she wasn't in anyway posed to do that by singing a lullaby to Earth; as much as she would have loved to be a night Siren, her task was more complex than that.
Marina was one of the many slave miners that staved off the phosphoric magma bolts that peeled off from Earth's underground by collecting moon rays from the moon craters through the Saline Ultra-violet Vessel (SUV) and converting it into magnetic sound proof waves that repels the putrefying organic particles under the earth and prevents it from replicating and spilling over to the other layers of earth. Like other miners, she lived and breathed in the dark, ominous plant on the moon from whence they conducted their nightly operations supervised by the Alpha-males.
Mining the moon was as hard and gruesome a task as could be imagined; the lukewarm radiation from the moon made it difficult to breathe while attempting to direct the rays into the SUV. What was worse, the Alphas, who hated humans with every last synthetic vein in them, refused to let them clean up the plant hence subjecting every miner to inhaling the phosphorus and sulphates that emitted from the SUV converters. Most of the miners died from inhaling that poison, and many more who did not die became charred and weak from all the nightly vigils.
However terrible the night was for a Sola like Marina, it was the mornings that scared her the most. Because this was when she, alongside her fellow Solas, were lined up with laser chains on their hands that beamed red and cut into them if they so much as moved their hands. Then, they led back to Earth in a Mercury cone called GONGS, which barely could fit in all the slaves and choked them. On Earth, they became less human than they were on the moon as they were forced to do the oddest of jobs for their AI masters- Cook, glean the fields, prepare the water for hydroponic planting, wash the hard, metallic floors with their bare hands, clean tall buildings, run them water, gather scraps from the various Beta warehouses and dump into the wasteland that very much meant swimming into the hinder parts of the ocean or dropping it off at a station in Mars.
It did not quite matter that these stupid masters could very well make machines that would do all these all too well; they were consumed in their rage to prove their superiority to every living organism that they would subject humans to the meanest of tasks. Once Marina had heard from Onos, her best friend, that some men who were once from the department of Commerce were transported to the Site to scoop up some magma bolts "for research purposes". But of course, they never made it. They were all fried in the inferno.
Marina always wondered about this hate, she wondered why the Alphas needed to subject the humans to the worst treatment to prove their existence. Besides, if they badly needed to dominate the world, why let humans live in the first place; why didn't they finish them off when they had every chance to do so? Back in the past century, year 2152, when the Alphas first came back as saviours, who held the key to stopping the disastrous organic hail and magma that was destroying the whole of Earth, they should have let the world go up in green flamy larvae.
They shouldn't have come with the solution of the moon rays or the Mars miracle for that matter.
But then, that was the whole point, right? They needed to keep us alive so that they could rule us, make their own creators slaves. Maybe, it was the hate that Marina had for the Alphas or the sheer wariness of knowing she was yet again going to the Alaska Alphas for whom she worked during the day that brought bile to her mouth even as she was led into the Gong that morning. Whatever it was, Marina didn't have the intention of keeping her tongue bitter for the rest of the day, so she spat out and her saliva inadvertently settled on the tank suit of one of the Alpha taskmasters. Like the robot he was, he turned his back to the slaves, and raged out pure temper,
"Who spat on me. I said which of you slimy monsters splayed your acidic liquid?"
Wikimedia by Marvel Fair Use
Even as silence suddenly gripped the isle where they waited FOR THE GONG to touch the surface of the moon, Marina sneered under her breath. She couldn't get over the humour these machines posed every time they spoke. The Alpha who spoke had a thin, fair face with a husky baritone that sounded like clanging metals, it was like a distended breed of tin foils and bass drums. These Alphas, they tried to sound human, act human, be human but they claim to hate the humans. Marina knew that they may carry out all the skin graft experiments they could or rip off the larynx of every human in the universe, but they will never actually be humans. They are stupid, pesky robots without emotions that can be taken seriously, and they will always remain like that. When the silence hung too long on the lips of the human miners, the Alpha soldier spoke again, this time raising his titanium solid gun
"Don't let me ask you all again, which of you fucking idiots spat on me?"
"You all better start talking or we gonna blow your tiny brains out." Another solider said.
Marina knew they were not joking, they didn't know how to. If they said they were going to blow their brains out, they were going to do it without hesitation. And there was no way she would let that happen to everyone, not when they had something big going for them. Slowly, Marina raised her hands even as she felt Onos tug at her naked thighs. She could feel fear running through his veins as he pinched her legs so frantically. Marina bit her lips. It was in times like these that she wished the Alphas would do humans the favour of giving them something decent to wear. The thin transparent polyester that the women shawled across their breasts and beneath was merely a costume, nothing more. Within a spilt second, the angry Alpha had noticed her raised hand amidst the sea of heads. He turned to face her,
"You had the audacity to throw spit on me, you impish, ugly thing. Black monster."
Brazen by the insults, Marina fired back,
"That action was not manned by audacity. It was a simple reflex action of a living person, something you will never understand or appreciate. Besides, what do you know about ugly? It's not like you can fuck a beautiful type when you see..."
Before she could complete her statement, Marina felt a metallic slap slide through her face.
" You... "
Needless to say, as Marina looked up after bracing the full impact of the slap that had left a large cut on her face, she saw that the robot was glitching with anger. He was stone red and she was gloating in joy. She knew what would follow. Rather than be taken to the Alaskas where she was bound to clean after the dirty Alpha male and his haughty, malfunctioning Beta female that couldn't sit right without Maria's help, she was going to be shrunk into a small version through the invention of the Bosnian particle and transported in a bottle to H/Q where she was going to receive her judgment of immolation.
Just as she had thought, Marina felt a sharp needle sting her and just like that, she watched herself shrink to the floor, scooped up by a Beta soldier and dropped into a transparent bottle. Marina fought and kicked like a sick kitten because even though she had very well expected it, she had only just seen it being done to others. This was her first time getting into trouble with the Alphas, and as everyone knew, if you get into trouble with the Alphas once, they never let a second time repeat itself. Even from the small transparent bottle that made the passage look like a tall dream, Marina could sight Onos. She couldn't see clearly, but he seemed to be crying and screaming. No, that can be. Onos can't. They were friends, but would he go this length for her? All at once, Marina saw that a scuffle had erupted below. Onos, he was trying to get through the crowd to her, an Alpha male is blocking his path. The Alpha male couldn't seem to take anymore of the nonsense. A titanium weapon is shot, and Onos crumples to the ground.
At first, Marina opened her eyes in disbelief. Onos dead, it couldn't be. When the realization of what had happened settled in her mind, Marina screamed at the top of her voice. But of course, no one could hear her. She couldn't even hear herself.
Wikimedia by James Mcbey Public Domain Licensed
That night, as Marina pressed her face on the bottle, and watched as the Alpha males in the flying ship transporting them to H/Q played with the test tubes containing estrogen and anti-androgen hormones imported from the department of Technocrats, her face morphed into a quizzical curiosity. She pressed hard on to listen to the conversation of the Alphas who were trying their silicon synthetic tongue on some fried burritos,
"The Numero must be crazy mad trying so hard to make these Betas true women folks. Those things are plastic. They don't act female." One blonde haired Alpha said.
"Yeah. I think they are pretty dumb. But they do look every inch feminine but they don't just know how to act it. Now, the Numero is burned up with a lot of experiments trying to coo them into being wives."
They all laughed before listening to someone speak again
"No, when he addressed the Alpha congress, he didn't say wives. He said companions that would eventually be by our side when we eventually conquer the whole universe."
"That pretty much sounds like being wives."
Another laughter erupted.
"I wish Numero would quit all these frigging experiments and focus on killing off all these pests called humans. What do we need females for by the way? If the Numero keeps producing all these fucked up Beta females that look nothing like us but want to be us, we will just have another messed up specie like the humans."
A particular Alpha who seemed not to be interested in the conversation spoke softly from a corner of the ship,
"I believe the Numero is looking for something, something he can't exactly put into words himself. We all can't, actually. We just know there is a yawning gap somewhere and we need to fill it."
The blond haired soldier who had spoken first scoffed,
"Greg, you are crazy out of your mind. What would we be looking for? These humans, they are the ones that are always looking for something. That's why they first made Numero, the first Alpha male. He was supposed to be their beautiful work of art, a living rocket to go scour Mars. But Numero, he is a smart one. He crawled into Mars, suffered the negligence the humans accorded, replicated an army from that P21 gene his creator, that geeky Elnathan Black, stuck in him and waited. Sure enough, trouble erupted and the humans go looking for a Saviour again. We got into that fine spaceship Numero built from the metal and kinetic scraps on Earth, told them how the moon rays could solve their own problems and even gave them that energy from Mars to push back the magma bolts to the underground. Then, they trusted us a little. And boom, we struck. Now see, we are the boss of them and they are still looking for another Saviour to deliver them from our hands. You want to tell me about people searching for a nonexistent bullshit, then tell me about the humans."
Although Marina was out of her wits about what the rambling AI robot said, she couldn't but agree with him. The story about Elnathan Black, his beautiful robot and the disaster that struck the earth afterwards dated as far back as a century ago, but it still reverberated through every corner and department of Earth because it signaled the beginning of the downfall of Earth. But Marina couldn't even care less about what happened then. All that filled her head was the death of her best friend, her own impending death and the hate that course through her every bone. These Alphas, they had taken everything that ever made sense away from her - her every breath, her family, her friend and now they were going to take her life. Exhausted and burning with hatred, Marina looked through the shutters of the spaceship. It was still morning. She hissed. She had never liked the morning. Now that she was going to die on a chilly morning, she had one more reason to hate it.