The hum of the massive engines grew closer, ever closer, carrying the emissary of the king back to the colony.
He had lived there years ago. He had been sent to test a sampling of the population which the king had found promising. The outcome had been disappointing: they had not recognized him as an emissary of the king, and had not listened to a word he said. But they were being given another chance. Their last.
Seeing the bigger picture made it easier to forgive. The colonists were a blinkered people, unaware of the forces which tossed them, driving them helplessly against each other. After the king’s last departure, his enemies had taken over everything without anyone else in the colony having knowledge of it, and for years they had handed over most of their wealth to the invisible controllers.
The only ones aware of what was going on were the few who delivered the ill-gotten gain to the new government. It was a great disappointment to the king that these few belonged to the promising sample, who seemed to be ingrates and miscreants intent upon behaving as badly as possible.
The steady drip had become a way of life, first as taxes, next as inflation, then as interest on loans and finally as phantom benefits against the perils of infirmity and age. The pressure had been incessant. However, by now this was how only the more fortunate colonists lived. The others had proven to be more useful dead than alive, and were being starved. They were in the way, and the way was steadily being cleared.
This is how it had happened. As soon as the king had left, his enemies assumed control and recruited the most weak-minded colonists as slaves. A program of conditioning ensured that the slaves would do whatever they were told without thinking. They proved themselves most useful at wiping out thinking elements in the population and moving onto their lands. They spread like a cancer throughout the colony, and were rewarded by becoming the market for goods supplied by the free colonists, who died at their work.
The free colonists were populous, and those who died were easily replaced. In fact many were considered surplus populations, and even if they had no suspicion of what was going on they simply were not needed. As they died the truth became apparent to them, but the slaves remained oblivious, having been told that their victims had been given the same chances as themselves but lacked even the most rudimentary survival instincts.
The slaves were, of course, told that they possessed independent minds and had thought of this themselves.
An elaborate economic system was set up to mask the unpleasant reality. Buying and selling was important. It kept the slaves from asking questions, had them thinking this was all their own idea because there were rewards to be had, trinkets dangled before their eyes so no-one would notice just how much was being extracted.
The government manufactured money at will, so that it did not reflect physical wealth and became devalued. The slaves were required to produce more and more real wealth for increasingly inadequate salaries. Driven by overwork to become wasteful and spendthrift, they fell into debt. Every time they bought anything they increased their indenture to the government.
As they sold their labour the government took the physical wealth they produced and sold a tiny portion of it back to them at an inflated price so that they had to work harder and harder for the necessities of life. The portion sold back was carefully controlled, but some of the true wealth that existed was displayed to the slave population as an incentive to labour.
An underclass preyed upon the slaves for money which it paid the government to feed its addictions, so that they would have to work even harder. To pay the government to feed their addictions. That is what it meant to be a market population.
The government also sold the slaves a tiny portion of the wealth produced by the surplus population, again at inflated prices, though it had cost the government nothing at all since the workers producing it had died. That is what it meant to be a surplus population.
Surplus populations were those which had not yet been replaced by the slave populations. Their leaders had been bribed to offer up their natural resources to the government, as the people died. They worked much harder than the slaves before they died. In a colony so rich in natural resources that, in order to ensure their starvation, the government deliberately destroyed an immensity of wealth.
The miscreants weren’t dying out. They lived alongside the slave population, which obediently hated them because the government was suspicious of their intelligence. They were smart enough to survive, but they had a hard time of it. Except, of course, for the few who knew very well what was going on. These few had climbed the only ladder which was available to them.
Their alternative was fast approaching.
The king still retained hope for the miscreants, but their true worth would not become apparent until they were free from corrupting influences. The emissary had been told to wait until the collapse of the entire system was imminent. Only then could he separate wheat from chaff. When the colonists had nothing to lose the choice would be put before them.
Every one of them would have a chance. On his previous visit, the emissary had let it be known exactly what would happen. He had left behind him agents who disseminated this information at great risk to their lives until it became known throughout the colony. After doing everything it could to stamp out the message, the government had embraced its words and had twisted their meaning.
As time went on everything which supposedly was given to the emissary’s agents ended up in government hands. For their mounting suspicions, the miscreants were ruthlessly persecuted by the slave population on the grounds that they had rejected the emissary. In case the government’s delivery service might tell the truth, the slaves were conditioned to hate every miscreant on sight.
The emissary’s message was simple and easy to understand. The system would be overthrown, it said. Everyone working for the system would become destitute: the slaves, the miscreants who directly fed the king’s enemies, and the increasing number who were trapped in the web against their will. The government would begin a new system. Fully aware of the emissary’s influence, it would continue to defeat him by appearing to endorse him.
In a master stroke of irony, the king had dealt his winning card. Having grown hard in persecution, the miscreants would never support a government which appeared to endorse the emissary. They would be free. As for the exceptions among them who knew the government, the emissary’s ship would arrive before they could begin another steady climb into the halls of power. The slaves would move against them, delaying their opportunity to rise. That conditioned hatred would play into the king’s hands.
The fact of the matter was, the king held all the cards. He had delayed retaking the colony to precisely this point in time, the very point in time when the miscreants were most likely to make the right choice. He had made it as easy as possible for them. He was sure that most would embrace the emissary as an alternative to their new situation.
But it was still up to them to decide. The king would give one card away, and every colonist, promising or not, would hold that card. The emissary’s agents had done well. It was common knowledge in every part of the colony that a time would come when the new system would require something. This would be the sign. It was part of the message.
It would require something of each and every colonist who wanted to buy or sell.
And mercifully, the emissary would return to save those who refused to buy and sell, who refused to feed the king’s enemies any longer. It was their last chance to say that they had not wanted to live off the other colonists, that they wanted things to be different. Though not before they themselves had a taste of what it meant to be of no use to the government. What it meant to be free in this colony.
The king was not asking for heroism. They had been told that the emissary was on his way. And those who were incapable of making an informed decision would be spared because they were unable to buy and sell. Anyone who was not actively and deliberately supporting the king’s enemies was assumed to be loyal.
The engines hummed on their long journey. The government deliberately imposed the famous condition for buying and selling in order to eliminate the superstitious, less intelligent slaves from the work force, the ones who were not worth saving.
As the huge bulk of the ship drew closer, increasing numbers of the slave population became destitute. A new voice was heard among the masses, a voice of hope, a voice that promised a return to law and order, a return to responsible government, a return to kindness and decency… in the emissary’s name.
The miscreants huddled together for mutual support. Its guilty members were accused. In response to a wave of persecution, those who had strayed from the flock returned.
The engines whirred with the reduction in speed. The massive war machines slid into position. There was an increase in activity among the multitude on board in preparation for the huge number of people expected and the facilities they would need.
In the colony they were mirrored by a multitude from every land, a multitude grown ragged and thin, a multitude who could neither buy nor sell. A few bought and sold for the ones they loved, who were promptly traced as government agents disloyal to the king and hauled away to prisons swarming with enemies of the state.
A giant vessel appeared in the sky. The voice of the emissary called to them. The ragged multitude cheered. Prison doors fell open. Men, women and children scrambled in the dust to reach the ship. It passed through every land, gently raising the weary head of each believer waiting to receive the emissary’s mark....
The miscreants were left to die, and with them all others who did not believe.
The armies gathered. From far and near, in hordes they descended upon these enemies of the state, to fight the government which they had supported and the giant battle station it was launching.
Men, women and children slid away into the shadows, into caves, into forests. The prison doors were barred, and behind them masses huddled in confusion.
The miscreants built walls with every material they could find as rebel forces surrounded them, intent upon defeating the government once and for all. Behind the walls, the last agents of the emissary began their work.
A giant ship hovered overhead, waiting. It was the first to go.
The holdouts heard about the battle. How clever they had been. He had not fooled them. The warship opened its doors and the slaves poured inside.
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