When the Message Came....

Part one

It had been some months since I’d had any direct interaction with the visitors when I noticed the headline in my news feed as I sipped on a morning mug of moonshine.

Cope juice we called it.

It was tucked in there amongst all the war, genocide and gloom that dominated every day’s news cycle the world over.

War on every continent. War on every ocean. War in lower orbit. War on the Moon.

Seemed like humanity was hell bent to export its most profitable pastime way past the limits of the Earth these days.

They didn’t need that many flesh and blood assets on the front lines anymore, those days were coming to an end and the flesh and blood was press ganged and pushed to its most extreme limits not on the fields of battle so much as the rare earth mines and the uranium munitions factories.

Everywhere on Earth the economy of oppression and genocide was mobilized. You were either a compliant asset or a problem to be removed from the equation.

Robots were doing most of the actual removing now.

Humanoid parodies made in our image with a neural net designed for optimal tactical adaptability and a body constructed to operate in any environment and under any manner of extremes.

We called them “skinwalkers”. Someone’s idea of a joke but I could no longer recall the gist or origin of it. They didn’t have skin. They did not look like humans. They were not designed to blend in.

I had made the smart but desperate choice of a life underground, constantly on the run, never sure where this day may lead me. I had become one with the Resistance.

Because I knew. I had understood. Resistance meant survival and refusal to comply. No more, no less. The goal of the powerful was to depopulate the planet and enslave those considered useful enough to keep alive. The goal of the resistance was to survive, repopulate and avoid capture.

It was a war of attrition that seemed at times hopeless and yet, hope never fades where life persists.

Some people were kept alive for their specialized abilities, unique skill sets, extra-sensory perceptions. Most were kept alive to work, on the mines, in the factories. They didn’t live long lives.

Then there were the “chosen ones”. Young boys and girls deemed too attractive and desirable to waste on menial labour, and so were whisked away from their families at a young age to serve the Empire in their harems as sex slaves. If they survived into adulthood then they were sent to the mines, which usually finished them off within weeks.

It was a common joke in the illegal back alley bars. You can be a minor or become a miner, but either way you’re gonna get fucked by the Empire.

I didn’t find it funny. Nobody did. But sometimes sick jokes were all we had to remind us of our humanity.

In some places society still seemed to function with a sense of civilian normalcy but control in those places was tight, surveillance absolute and enforcement sudden and brutal at the hands of the civil patrol bots.

You had to be smart or gifted to stay one step ahead. Precognitive and telepathic ability were my assets and I was determined to use them to remain alive, and a pain in the Empires arse, for as long as I could.

And of course I had received help, from the visitors. Time and time again they had shown up just at the exact moment in the right place to save my arse from capture.

On that morning that I noticed the headline I was skulking about the back streets of the immigrant shanties in the central district of Eurasia.

It was an area familiar to me, and one where surveillance and enforcement had not quite taken as firm a grip on life as elsewhere, and the resistance still had a meaningful presence there. Yet one still needed to be alert and careful. Every once in a while a civil control team would beam into the street or the square and gather up a few “people of interest” never to be seen or heard from again.

These incursions would sometimes meet opposition from an old soldier or two. A javelin or an rpg could take out a skinwalker, or at least render it harmless, and these were still about in abundance. Small arms fire was useless against them though. The tech boys could occasionally disable them with their hacker beam arrays, and once in a rare while one of those strange and quite scary fuckers from the Temple of Mental Redemption would manage to hack directly into its neural net and take control for a few moments of the bots cognitive autonomy. They would usually then force it to destroy itself, although I’d heard rumors that there was one now serving these psychic warriors in their secret temple and from which they were receiving direct intelligence of troop movements and the next intended targets of the empire.

Those Temple types were in a different league though. They had trained and honed their mental abilities to such a degree that it would no longer really be accurate to even call them human. The resistance recognized them as allies, and we were sure grateful at times to see them, but it was a wary relationship with a lack of trust on our part and a lack of respect on theirs.

The visitors though! Oh what a strange tune they were playing! The empire had declared them enemies of course and so we of the resistance had made efforts to reach out the hand of friendship.

And some of us, myself included, had received a friendly hand in return.

They were definitely not human.

They were not from Earth at all, and they had made it very clear that they were not friends of the Empire.

They refused to kill people, even as people sent assets to attempt to kill them. They rarely took a direct hand in confrontations on the planet, but were said to be involved in the struggle for dominance on the Moon.

They had told me that all they really wanted was for humanity to be grateful for its existence and discover with them the truth of our mutual origins. Something about the search for God I suppose. The Empire, and all of its media whores, called them demons from hell. So did the Temple of Mental Redemption and it was our relationship with these “alien” people that was at the heart of root of the mistrust and disrespect intrinsic to our two factions.

The Temple didn’t trust the visitors, we didn’t altogether trust the Temple, nobody trusted the Empire and only the visitors seemed to have any faith in the resistance.

Welcome to clusterfuck planet Earth. 23 years after the nuclear devastation. There used to a part of the world called by some Iran, like there was once a place called Turkryie and another known as Syria. But after the devastation it all became known only as The Dead Place or the Wasteland. The region was still mined of course but they had to use bots for that. Humans and other animals could not survive there.

It was 2053 and you had to be smart, strong and stubborn to survive. The average life expectancy was 25 to 30 depending on your region and your occupation, and if you valued your freedom at all then most of all you needed to be lucky.

I’ve always held those four aces in my hand, and although i wouldnt exactly describe myself as free anymore, I’m still here to tell the story. The story of the time when that headline dropped into our news feeds and changed everything.

That headline story about the message to the Empire, the Temple and the Resistance. A message from the visitors, with the list of names.

A list with my name on it.

(Part two will drop in a week or so. With heartfelt thanks special mention and appreciation to Maddie Rune for the inspirational prompt! You can find her work here: https://substack.com/@maddierune?utm_source=global-search )