When We Were Forgotten
(Short Story)
By: Gustavo Simmons
It
wasn’t impossible to forget, they rose to the power through hate and fear. They
divided the friends and families through their rhetoric that “invisible enemies
within us” were going to destroy the fabric of the nation. Who were they?
Nobody knew, the only information was that they came from the different regions
of the country and used cyberspace as a channel to spread their message and
conquer adepts.
The
future that wasn’t, many people theorized that the timeline split and we became
Earth 295. As if Lord Apocalypse rose to the power and created a new system of
power. Could be it as easy as a comic book explanation? No; the idea of a new world was far more complex than any
point in fiction, far more tragic in which a demagogue and his team found a way
to exploit the inner fears and emotions of a population that was on the verge
of a civil war.
The
first week came with the goal to bring a glory that was already there but
people couldn’t see it; people were blinded by the idea that the country was in
the need to be great again, all because they saw people who were running from a
way that was happening far away as the “real enemies of the nation” as the “real
enemies of their own religion” as “barbarians who didn’t deserved a dose of compassion”
The
second week came with an invisible wall, no one could go in or out of the
country, airports and seaports were ultimately closed. Citizens were asked to
refrain from flying as there was an imminent fear of a nuclear strike coming
from China. Refugees who arrived fearing from their lives were sent back to the
places they were running from; the ultimate action, it costed the lives of
3,250,000 million people in only a 12-month period, as the newly elected
President and his cabinet saw isolationism as the ultimate truth to “save the
country” from the enemies that weren’t there.
The
fourth week became the last in which the country was standing still, it became
the point where the government cut funds to health and education; it severed
ties in which let each State to do whatever they pleased. Human rights were
violated everywhere, basic principles of the constitution were just ignored and
it gave a form of fundamentalist Baptism that started to rule over the public
institutions.
We
became a theocracy within a 14-month period; science and human rights became
for a while a philosophical aspect from the past, the Federal State turner into
simple and mere anarchy, where even transmitting news that weren’t approved by
the White House was punishable by law. In two years, we were living under the
shadow of the phantom government,
where the dear leader was a mere puppet of the 12 masters that controlled
different aspects of the population.
12
masters, 12 corporations that organized education, infrastructure and regional
politics per their own means. They start spreading lies which eventually became
truth, police became an LLC that responded to the interest of a private
creditor. There was no more free press and the idea of net neutrality was from
the past; people running blogs became the source of information outside the
State propaganda.
We,
the free press, we became forgotten, we became a secret; the population became
forgotten of who we were; we weren’t as organized as we were. We just turned
into shadows that became enemies of the “fallen empire”. Walkers as if we were
zombies of the Walking Dead mythos; nobody wanted to be near us but we became
the people who opened the dialogue to throw the dear leader outside the power
sphere and make the shadows to crumble into ashes. Yet, our lives when they
ended became erased from existence, nobody could have remembered us, who we
were, who we are, what we did; our blogs and collective stayed online, some of
them ended up in the underground nets
called Cobra and Thor in case the powers that be decided to shut them completely.
Two
years later society as it was, it was a mirage of the empire. There were more
theme parks, no more entertainment, nobody could travel far away as gas became
a luxury, people started to die as the public health system collapsed and
anyone who dared to do public protest was in risk of being executed on the
public sight.
How
terrible society turned to be? It wasn’t the land of the free anymore, it
became just another dictatorship. What the braves who fought the wars? They
were left to die on the streets as they represented a negative profit on the
earning margins of the government… what had we become? A land of nobody, a land
of the blue, a land where desolation is everywhere yet no one has a voice...
