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Man has always struggled to understand our place in the universe: why are we here, who created us, are there other life forms out amongst the stars? Now that we knew the answers to those questions, I understood why ignorance is bliss. This was how I always started the day, staring at the water-stained ceiling, wondering what went wrong. I sat up on my paper-thin mattress and stared out the window at what was once a city named Moscow.
My name is Jeremy, but that is not important. Identity is not important, not anymore anyway. I got up and lurched toward the bathroom hoping that the water would be running today. As usual my hopes were dashed when I turned the faucet handle and nothing but a weak moan came through the pipes. That’s three days in a row without a shower. Oh well, no one would notice where I was going. I put on my uniform and prepared for another day of backbreaking labor. I made sure the few appliances I had were off and headed out the door of my compartment.
The building was a housing area for the forced laborers; it was 80 floors of compartments, as they called them, with locks on the outside instead of the inside. I proceeded down the gray-painted hallway becoming more sullen with every pointless step I took. I would have imagined that the old mausoleums they used to store the dead would look something like this, but no bodies were buried anymore, only burned in the pits to feed the machines. I began my long descent down 23 flights of stairs feeling very much like a soul descending to the deepest circle of hell.
The guards opened the doors for me, holding their pikes at their sides, and I stared up at the target of my loathing. Two miles north of my building is where it stands, and will most likely continue to stand for all of eternity untouched by the barren terrain surrounding it. The black pyramid rose to touch the sky; flat at the top where normally there would be a point, it resembled a volcano awaiting its daily sacrifice. The outer surface, which could be seen clearly from where I stood, was polished to a mirror-like sheen. Glyphs and symbols written in an unknown and alien language were scrawled on the face of the mammoth edifice. I could see tiny ants crawling across the surface of it, carving yet another symbol on the southern face. I began walking to join my fellow ants.
These structures were erected in every corner of the world once they came. Or returned perhaps I should say. The Old Ones returned to the planet they had created all that time ago, very upset that we had gotten away from their teachings of Gods and our creation by ‘higher beings’. It is true that these beings are the closest things to Gods as we’ll ever see while in this mortal coil. They are undying and very close to all-powerful, wiping out the men who tried to destroy them in one fell swoop when they first returned. They inspired the polytheistic religions of old and kept a light hand in our affairs for millennia, only intervening directly when absolutely necessary.
Upon their return after a couple millennia of exploring the cosmos, they found we had acquired new ideas that didn’t involve them and this angered them greatly. The technology we had created was a slap in the face of their benevolence; a single God was the height of insolence in their eyes. The worship of men such as Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha instead of Them was incomprehensible. They deemed to punish us for our trespasses. They had conquered the planet in six days, the same amount of time it took them to create it. From then on, no one was allowed to speak as punishment for all of our uttered prayers to ‘mere mortals’.
After telling us of our true history, they demanded that these pyramids be built in their honor, a different set of symbols carved into the face of the temple for each God, five of them in all. They then proceeded to create a new island in the Pacific that would be their new dwelling while on Earth. It was called ‘Uhlu-Salla’, the seat of power for the old rulers. From what I hear it’s a tropical paradise, unlike the hell the rest of us now inhabit. The desolation in my city, and cities around the world didn’t exist on this island of the ‘chosen’. There are rumors about an obelisk at the center of the island that is made of the bones of the men that they slaughtered, a monument to their unstoppable power.
I arrived at the base of the temple in a few minutes of hard walking. The bodies of men that fell off of the tower littered the ground, food for the circling scavenger birds. As I ascended the staircase cut into the south side of the temple, I saw the beginnings of a statue. Another man fell to his fate as I neared the summit; at least he is free now. Even though we can’t speak to each other, I know the dreams they have. They are the same as mine: dreams of Uhlu-Salla in flames.
