The Conquest of Bread
by Kirt Pokon
Hunger is the greatest weapon of the Masters. Starve a person long enough and he will do anything if you offer food. Knowing this, it was essential for us to provide our own food. Until then, we had no chance at all.
We were well served by those few with the foresight to refuse the proffered teat and scratch their own grub from the soil. Those few who resisted. Few even among the thirty percent who are predisposed to question and resist authority. Those rarities even among the twenty percent who refused to succumb to the cerebral pacifier with its mindless distraction and world view based in equal parts of pabulum and xenophobia. That mere ten percent that not only see through the lies and distortions, but who seek out the truth and then act upon it. We feral few.
We grew food, and we armed ourselves with the truth, so that as the mad shepherds tended their flock, we could sow good oat, helping those who hunger to understand the situation we are in, what with the consumption of our own planet to produce cheap commercial geegaws to engorge our zombified culture of consumption. Instead of eating the world, we grew it.
When the admunchers grew hungry, as the currency ultimately collapsed and the crudmunchers could no longer munch complacently at their crud, we brought food to barter and knowledge to plant. When Mercy Manor was hit with evictions and refused to be moved out, we were there with food and help. They held out for three months against the Masters and their deputies. And we helped them to escape when the final eviction was served — those who would go.
We grew daily, as people could no longer feed themselves in their struggle with the Masters. We held our lands and ranged through the forests at night, the rivers and lakes at dawn.
We provided for ourselves and helped others cope with the coming scarcity as the world we consumed was used up, being ever careful of the starving zombies, knowing they had nasty teeth and could turn on those who came to help. Just one questioning was all it took and most consumers would turn on anyone.
But all along our numbers grew and we fostered a community, until we reached the Spartacus moment, when the nobles perceived us a threat. They came down on the community, on women and children and the elderly in particular, on our families and our friends. We resisted.
We aligned ourselves with the working exploited, bringing them food as they took up the tools of their exploitation, making those tools serve them and the community. Together we turned agriculture and industry against the Masters. Our numbers grew exponentially.
Has anyone ever seen a community led by true knowledge, where everyone is given a voice in the decisions of their community, and the workers control of their own labor? Such a creature is a mortal threat to the Masters, turning all the zombies against them. And of course when zombies are woken en masse, they tend to run feral.
When the sky crashed down, we went to ground. And in the morning we established a true world of freedom, where every person has a right to basic sustenance and shelter, and where all lend their efforts to the enrichment of the community, without cruelly exploiting anyone or anything.
When the Masters had our communities bombed, our families and friends moved into the factories and businesses while we took to the hills to mount a resistance. For decades we fought the enhanced gene-warriors of the Masters, as the factories and businesses held their doors shut to the goons.
Many were lost, killed by the bombardment or cut down in combat. Much worse transpired when the goons succeeded in opening the doors to a factory. They would prey on everyone taking refuge within. And there is no enemy more depraved than the beasts of consumption. They turn our sons and daughters against us, drug stimulated and genetically enhanced mass murderers who work on the Master's leash.
We had to communicate with other resistance groups from around the world, coordinating our efforts to expropriate and cripple the Masters, if not kill them. We struck them on many fronts throughout the globe, attacking them where they lived, as they had caught us all too many times.
We hit them fast in the middle of the night, sliding through their perimeter, bypassing the guard dogs to take our attack directly to the Masters. We cut them down in the night where they lay with their wives, their mistresses and their children. The avenues of the rich flowed in blood that night. We worked the sacrificial blood of capitalism into our soil where it might at last grow something.
And then we dropped our weapons and wept in horror of the terror we had endured and the butchery we had done. We threw down our blades and returned to our plow shares.
Even with the Masters gone, however, the goons and the assault squads would not let us be. They range in the forests as we once did, launching raids into settlements and holding up travelers.
We were forced to pick up arms again and hunt them down, giving them the mercy killing their genetic degradation requires. It will take at least a generation to completely eradicate them, if they cannot breed.
And so we achieved our goal: we are our own masters. Now we recognize all citizens have a right to food, shelter and education, and communities should have direct control over basic services and local resources. Representatives are elected to undertake federation with other collectives, bringing all decisions and agreements back for the vote of the entire community.
The worker run businesses operate much the same way, and they negotiate with communities for the right to operate business and factories, providing essential goods and services while maintaining a proper reverence of the rights of resources and ecosystems.
Such a community lives at a much slower pace than the global consumer zombies that once dominated the planet, but is that not what we wanted in the first place? And the loot of consumption was replaced by a quality life within a healthy community providing a rich manure for creativity and self expression.
Yet we can never be allowed to forget that all of us, every living one of us is descended from a zombie that once attempted, along with all the other zombies, to eat the world. Let us stay vigilant against the return of the Masters.
Of Russian ancestry, Kirt Pokon is a scientist and a dedicated radical. While he has authored several books, this is his first attempt at fiction.