Steamtalk 3

There were culls before, don’t doubt that.

But they were more subtle, more insidious.

I remember things being a lot more civilised back then.

But don’t doubt for a second that this shit still went on.

The murderous fucks in charge had blamed immigrants, blamed terrorists, blamed unstable kids with thousand yard stares and their twitching hands on their daddy’s guns.

Truth is, the government was doing this stuff on the sly all the time.

You heard about some of ’em, but they were just the tip of the iceberg.

How often you hear about anyone being caught for this shit?

That’s cos there weren’t no one to catch, it was all being done by them.

Standard magician shit.

The left hand feeds you reality TV with vacuous fuckwits who should never have been within gurning distance of a video camera.

Meanwhile the right hand is signing the death warrants of another dozen lives.

They stopped us reading, stopped us questioning, overfed us on junk food and got us over-reliant on technology that slowly sapped our energy and our desire to interact with other people.

They led us to blindly believe whatever the glowing white screen told us.

They stirred up hate, blaming those with differing beliefs, those who hailed from another country.

Now this was a masterstroke, cos the ignorant and the easily-led went out and fought race wars, doing the government’s jobs for ’em. Saving their bullets and making the people use our own.

Those other folks weren’t the problem.

Never were.

Never will be.

We all bleed red, no matter the colour of our skin.

This shit went on every day.

Every.

Fuckin.

Day.

Cos they knew.

We were running out of food.

Out of fuel.

Out of time.

Despite them doing their best to murder a decent percentage of us every year, they still weren’t anywhere near to meeting their target.

So that was when the most drastic solution of all came into play.

They’d set it up well; the newspapers and the fresh-faced anchormen had been bleating on about global conflicts, about the threat of another world war.

Engineering lies to make the sheep believe.

Don’t believe it for a second.

This was not something that happened because of some supposed maniac in a far-away land.

Our own government did this to us.

I wonder if they paused to think what they were doing to us, doing to our children.

Doing to our world.

But I doubt it.

I’d bet my left ball that smug prick in a fancy suit who pulled the trigger on all of us did it without even a second of hesitation.

In the blink of an eye, he killed most of us stone dead.

And looking at things now, they were the lucky ones.

The rest of us just plod on, slowly wasting away until we close our eyes for the last time.

But the grand plan failed.

The big kahuna went pear-shaped.

So things after were much less subtle.

And the culls became a blatant thing.

Without the need for all the cloak and daggers bullshit, they were finally free to do what they’d wanted to all along; mowing down innocents in their sleep and acting like it was all for our own good.

Washing away the fuck ups of the rich and powerful with a river of innocent blood.