Snippet Sunday: A Brief History
Grant drummed his fingers on the armrest, the glowing threads beneath his skin pulsing with each tap of a finger on the cold composite surface. His other hand played idly with his new reader that sat on his lap. He folded and unfolded the device, watching the digital pages of the textbook he had been reading as they morphed from a two-page layout to one page with the unfolding of the screen. Then he folded it again, and the single page shrunk and moved aside, making room for the other that would continue the text.
He’d gotten bored of the book in the two hours they’d left him alone in the room, not that the book itself was lacking, it really was quite interesting, but he’d read the same one multiple times before and the content of it had practically encoded itself in his head.
It was a history textbook, one that was essential reading for every Martian, Yggdrasilin, Elysian, and Flotilla child like him. It told of times that were centuries long gone when Earth was still humanity’s home and almost all common people lived in misery, save for the elite few that had made that misery. It would tell of the laboring and the suffering of regular people, how they were beaten down, worked to death, and no better than slaves. It was that misery that his teachers had wanted every child to remember, and to understand that it was a terrible life that had been brought about by the greed of the Conglomerate.
He didn’t understand the point of it all in the early years of his schooling, when the history lessons were dumbed down and carefully scrubbed of any horrors that may hurt the developing mind of a child. All he knew was that the Conglomerate were bullies, and everyone else would eventually get tired of being bullied. Then life moved on, and both his body and mind grew. His teens were when he finally understood it.
The bullied fought back.
The Conglomerate was too greedy to back down.
And when they were close to dead, they tried to take everything else with them.
They failed, of course, because if they had succeeded, he doubted that the Shaza would have made first contact, and humanity would have never learned just how big the universe was outside of their tiny solar system.
And if the revolution hadn’t won, then he seriously doubted he would be alive, and waiting to meet some professor of reversal physics who seemed to be taking their sweet time coming to the meeting they had organized.
