Burn

They hate us. We know it.

We also don’t care.

We are doing this for them.

The funny thing is there were enough stories out there that really all we had to do was piece together the parts that we believed would be the most effective.

A Game of Thrones was my inspiration. I only got through A Clash of Kings before the Takeover happened, but the HBO series I know well. Especially the very last episode. After all the snow and ash had fallen and all the old kings and queens were dead, Lord Tyrion Lannister was brought before the council of the new lords and ladies of the seven kingdoms. It is there that he implores the importance of why a king or queen needs to be crowned. It is there that he launches into a passionate monologue about why the crown unites people.

“Not armies. Not coin. Not flags. Stories.”

Just stories.

We see it every time someone falls in love.

We see it every time a book - tv show - movie becomes transformative work or as most call it, fanfiction.

We see it every time a kid from around the block becomes an influential political or sports figure.

We see it every time we decide to care about something other than ourselves.

These stories are as vital to us as heirlooms such as heart shaped lockets. These stories like the lockets capture us. They become the gifts that we want to pass down through generations and with each generation the importance of them becoming more significant due to the simple fact that they survived.

That’s why it all had to go.

The internet. The libraries. The access to anything that pointed to storytelling.

The power in these stories is contagious. It lives in people’s minds, in their conversations, and it manifests. A good story doesn’t ask the reader to stop living inside it at the book's end. Instead, a good story invites the reader to continue creating upon the world it created in the reader’s mind and morph it into something tangible in the reader’s day-to-day life.

I’m the one who suggested the Burn Order. I’m the one who set the first library ablaze. It was our first real show of force in the Takeover. We didn’t even leave anything for ourselves due to the possibility of betrayal and instability. If we can kill the spirit of these stories from the past then it will buy us time. The stories tell us that the people will revolt in due time, no matter what. The idea is that if we can push that revolt down the road by a solid decade or more then we will have the infrastructure needed to rebuild in place and fully operating.

It took us a grand total of 3 days to burn all 120,000 library locations. No matter if they were attached to a school of some sort. No matter if it was the Library of Congress.

We sent out a virus that crashed computers. We brought down the power lines. We turned off cell service. We destroyed satellite dishes. We cut interconnectivity within the United States by essential killing the ability to link to the wireless beyond anything that requires more than short distance wave signals.

The end is past coming, it is here.

Two days after the completion of the Burn Order you can’t come outside without a mask or else you are immediately at risk of inhaling toxic fumes from the buildings and the sheer amount of paper and cardboard.

Next will be the raids. We have to confiscate computers, cell phones, hard drives, tablets, all of it.

In time the people will learn to love what we have given them. The opportunity to create history with the presence of mind that history is being created is the ultimate gift. Most of them will do as they did before, they will fall in line – they will do as they see others do – they will live in complete mediocrity.

Then there will be the others. The ones who will rise to create, teach and inspire.

Until then, we are organized and will continue to wreak havoc to avoid the complacency and comfortability of the old society.

It's time to wipe the slate clean.