Story Time Again, Though This Time, It's Not As Good.

Ever since he was a young boy he could remember everything. The flowers, the trees, way the pure icy blue water would flow effortlessly through the stream, the way the fish would dart and swim about, dancing with each other, being hurtled at breakneck speeds along the flowing wall of freezing liquid that served as the barrier around his home. It wasn’t as if he had to remember anything. The nine acre space he inhabited was so familiar to him it was almost an enormous extension of his own body. His existence was that of a stupid animal, one that walked slumped, scraped and bruised head touching scraped and bruised knee. Memory was useless in a world like his, so why was he plagued with these thoughts, these memories of the dreadful past? He remembered when he cut his arm on a sharp rock when trying to slice a fruit, he remembered when the tree fell and destroyed his hut in the times of rain, he remembered all the times he failed to catch those damned fish. He was cursed when all he wanted was to live in the now, the present. This was a curse he could not lift. His existence was meaningless, an existence of survival. He would fish, pluck fruit, eat and sleep day after day after day. To him irregularities were an ugly thing. Monotony is beautiful and structured, stable and organized. But all the time, those blasted irregularities would always pop up all around him and ruin his strict routine. He longed for the days of early childhood when nothing would bother him, when he didn’t know the beauties of structure, where nothing could disturb his peace. The days where he would fiddle about aimlessly, grabbing fish and rodents in his mouth, crushing them with his bare teeth, consuming them without a care in the world, catching horrible sickness and doing it again. Before the gods began cursing him. He hated them for it, the gods. He hated them for the curse that was struck upon him. He hated them for every time they caused an irregularity. He understood not the cruel humors of the beings in the sky. He did not understand when or why they would drop a strange object from the sky sometimes and knock the fish out of his hands. He understood not why they would always visit at night and ruin his shelter, he understood not why they always laughed, why they always mocked him with their booming voices. Even their supposed greatest gift to him was nothing but dread. He hated his teacher. He hated the cold metal exterior, he hated the strange, robotic inhuman voice it spoke with, he hated its patronizing tone and the way it acted better than him. Above all, he hated the learning. He hated having to know how to speak like the gods, he hated speaking English, he hated studying Mathematics and he despised Physics and Chemistry. This life was not suited for him. He wanted to hunt. He wanted to fish. He wanted to eat, to live and enjoy life, not stand and be subjected to the blathering of an unfriendly machine. His life was a curse, and he cursed the gods for it. He hated the gods. Until the day that one came personally to greet him.

“Dmitri.”
“Yes?”
“Dmitri.”
“Yes?”
“My god, Dmitri! I demand your presence!”
“Of course, comrade. I apologize for having you wait.”
“Ah, this you must see. Do you recall the event beginning Experiment 123K9?”
“Was it the event in which a stuffed bear was inserted into the human’s cage, sir?”
“Look at what he did, comrade.”
Some five hundred feet below them, a man about the age of thirty stepped out of his crude straw and wood shelter cradling a small brown woolen object. The man walked leisurely to a second shelter near the river surrounding his encampment where the roof broke the line of sight.
“Sir…”
“Of course.”
The superior of the officers struck a few levers and twisted a few dials, when suddenly, the window in the front of them quickly switched to a view of the hut’s interior. The man’s waist long light brown unkempt hair swung and tossed about animatedly as his body twisted and turned in strange ways, forming a sort of rhythm with his body. Above him on a shoddily made pedestal sat the stuffed bear. Dmitri’s eyes filled with awe and wonder, his mouth opened. His commander merely sat back and smiled calmly. Dmitri was amazed.
“Sir, do you realize the significance of this? He is the first to display non aggressive behavior when presented with the animal!”
“Yes. The implications are astounding. He is the first human subject to be sentient without contact, save the teacher of course.”
Dmitri’s expression of glee faded.
“He is sentient, sir? He is self-aware?”
“Yes, Dmitri. I am glad the meaning is not lost on you.”
Dmitri’s expression hardened and his smile turned to a frown.
“Sir, should we be containing him? Should we be subjecting him to these experiments? Should we be testing him like a rat? Is he not the very same as us?”
The officer stepped calmly out of his chair and reached into his pocket.
“Sir, what is it you are doing?”
The officer pulled out a long whip from his coat pocket.
“Sir, I will behave, I will behave.”
Dmitri dropped to the floor and started sobbing and reciting the pledge.
“I will serve the Ulterior under any and all circumstances presented to me, and will lay my life down for him no matter what strifes or toils face us-“
The superior officer struck the whip across Dmitri’s face and dragged his unconscious body to his bed.

That night Dmitri did not sleep. The prisons they contained the natives in helped control overpopulation and war by prohibiting reproduction and containing each person in their own personal all-natural jail cell. What they did was good, they were a benefit to the human race, they were rebuilding their once great empire. But what the Soviets were doing had a cost. The cost was their own humanity. The Soviet Empire was savage and evil, they had forgotten what freedom was and were perpetrators of genocide and mass torture. Dmitri could no longer be one of them. Dmitri would leave and explore the once-great world, seeking out a new home for himself. It was decided. Dmitri was to be a deserter.

The Ulterior seized Dmitri’s unconscious body by the collar, shaking it in the face of Dmitri’s superior officer.
“What is this? You could allow such scum to grow in your company?”
The superior officer stumbled over his words,
“Ulterior, I apologize for my inferior’s defiance, for his spit thrown in your face.”
“Yes, well consequences will be harsh. I will make sure he will see. He will see what is received when the Ulterior is angered.”

The sentient native stared at his reflection in the river, marveling at the quiet wonders of his world. Tranquility was always good to him, never hurt him like his cursed memories. Peacefully, the silence enveloped him. It was at that moment he felt his greatest, the best he ever felt, he felt at one with the world. With his own private world. He and his home were finally at peace. He instinctively shifted his head away from the water when he heard the raucous noises of machinery. With great horror, he realized what exactly was happening. His shelter was being destroyed by an enormous metallic god. His eyes widened. In a frantic haze, his body was set into motion. He was sprinting, pushing his body to limits never reached before, galloping across the nine acres of woodlands until finally, he reached his destination. He stopped, stunned. Where his secondary shelter once lay, there was only wreckage, splintered pieces of salvaged wood and rocks lacking cohesive shape. One thing and one thing only lay before him, standing tall above all the rubble. It was his personal god upon its pedestal. Running toward the god, he heard the ominous mechanical sounds of the god that destroyed his home. He refused to look back, only ran. Finally, the metal god spoke.
“Please evacuate your shelter, your cell is being taken by a new subject.”
But he kept running, hoping against all hope that he and his personal god would be together once more. His hoping was to no avail. With a crash, the claw sent the pedestal and the god into the rapidly flowing river. Only shocked for a moment, the native’s gaze hardened, his brow forced into a position of distinct anger. Enough bad memories plagued him, this one was not going to do the same. Without a running start, he dramatically dove into the freezing waters of the river, eyes set on his god, unaware he was being tossed into a brand new world, one which he was not accustomed to.

In the native’s cell, an extremely loud noise was heard as metal was thrown to the ground. A large room had fallen from the ceiling, the smooth shelter being pushed several meters into the Earth below. With a loud pop, the kind you get when opening a bottle of champagne, the room’s lid flew off and was absorbed by the ceiling to be recycled for scrap metals. Smoke and haze poured out of the small room, building up to a blast of fire shot from the shelter’s bottom, throwing the room’s inhabitant into the native’s former home. The man stumbled across the ground, blindfolded until he eventually ran out of energy. There he lay for a considerable amount of time until he mustered up the strength to stand. The man was young, strong and tall, cropped hair dark and dirty. Slowly, he untied the rope connecting his hands and removed his blindfold, grunting primitively. This man was Dmitri.