The Master Plan

There seems to be several budding authors here on the monkey. I used to love creative writing class in school and authored several short stories that recieved high marks.
I was inspired by the stories here to try my hand at it again. It has been years. This is a work that has been in my mind for some time. Inspired in part by some Patriot novels I have been reading of late.
I started this several months ago and have just gotten around to finishing it today.
So I submit it here for your enjoyment. Constructive critique accepted and appreciated.



The Master Plan

If you are reading this then I am no longer with you. I have run my race. My hope in writing this is that after I am gone someone will know what happened. What we fought for, and against. What we died for.

The truth can be concealed, but it can never be erased. Like the ashes from a long dead fire, the evidence remains for those who choose to sift through it. I am sure that what you are about to read is not what you have been taught, what you have been told.

The victors write history, and the vanquished are portrayed through biased eyes. The opposition can be exterminated much easier than their ideals. Freedom is an idea, a state of mind, which cannot be killed by bullets or bombs. I may be one of the last to carry the torch of freedom, but the idea, the longing in men’s souls, will not die with me. Whoever you are reading this, that idea, is being planted, it is awakening a stirring in you that you may not even have been aware of. Let the flame ignite, let the idea grow, keep the flame alive and let it consume you. Then I will not have fought, and died in vain.

When it all began is debatable. Some argue that the plans have been in the hearts of men for centuries. Some say it began at the dawn of our nation. Do we still have a nation? No matter, it all began in earnest in the last half of the last century. Just before the new millennium. I was just a small child, but I remember my father preparing for some big change that was coming. I was too young to understand. It was something about the intelinet at that time. It was a primitive system and there was some virus or bug that was going to crash it. I remember helping Mother dehydrate food and pack it into plastic buckets. Father and his friends would gather and make plans. I remember all of the people who gathered at our house waiting for the crash. We lived on a small farm then. Back when people were allowed to live outside of the ecommunities.

The big crash never happened. I don't know if the gov fixed it or what, but I remember all of the people who were at our farm soon starting going back to their own ecommunities. That was in what they now call the "Dark Days". That was so long ago. If you were born after the great calamity then you have no idea what it was like back then. You have been taught that it was a dark and dangerous time. A time of greed and waste. But that is not the way that I remember it. It was a good time. We could live anywhere we chose. We could travel anywhere we wanted without having to apply for permits. We used to have a "car", it was like a transit, but it was ours. We could use it anytime we wanted to. They tell us now that the people then didn't care for Gaia and that they harmed her and made her sick. But I remember my Father taking me on walks in the ecos. He would teach me the names of the trees and show me the animal prints in the soft ground. He loved Gaia and I know he didn't hurt her on purpose.

And we actually were allowed to have weapons then. I remember my father showing me his powder blasters. It wasn't the evil dangerous days that they teach us about now. The way they describe the dark days everyone was going around killing each other with bangers. But that is not the way I remember it. I never saw anyone killed with a banger when I was young. But every one of my father’s friends had them. My father had several. He called them "Liberty Teeth". He gave me one of my own when I was ten. He told me that as long as I had it I would be free, but if I ever let the gov take it away I would be a slave. I didn't know then what he meant by that, I do now.

Freedom. Is that word even spoken today? Has it been washed? The word may be cleansed from the language but the idea can never be. I don't know how far in the future that this will be found and read. Or if it will ever be found at all. But at the time I am writing this, the gov has washed many words. They think that they can stop an idea, a dream, by prohibiting people from speaking it. But ideas cannot be washed from the minds of people. Not yet anyway. They are working on tech that would do that. Cleanse peoples minds. That is the kind of enslaving, freedom robbing schemes that we have fought so hard against.

Who are we? Who am I? We are, or were I suppose, the last of the freedom fighters. The "terrorists" and "anarchists" as gov labeled us. But we didn't want to spread terror. We never wanted anarchy. We fought for freedom. The freedom to live our lives as we saw fit. To live where we wanted, work where we wanted, have children if we wanted, and raise them ourselves. We had been taught, as I was by my Father, to cherish those freedoms, to fight for those rights.

My father taught me about history, a history that even today has been washed from all gov learning centers. But it wasn't always so. My father said that it used to be taught in the learning centers when he was a child. He told me stories of great men who created a "nation", I never really understood what that was, but there were many of them. But the one that these men founded was the freest of them all. In my fathers "nation" you could live anywhere you wished. You could own parts of Gaia. I know how crazy that must sound to you, but it is true.

We lived on a small farm that was all ours. We didn't grow crops for the collective, we grew them for ourselves and sold them. It wasn't out of greed. We sold them for a fair price so we could grow more the next year. After the virus failed to crash the intelinet things got back to normal for a while. But I remember a few years later my father was excited about a great leader that was going to make the nation back to what it had been before. What that was I don't know, but it was something to do with the founders and a paper they had written. After the great leader was killed things got really bad.

The gov made laws that you couldn't have bangers anymore and they sent out sec men to gather them up. My father and his friends took theirs and they hid them in the ecos around our farm. But the sec men knew that they had them and one day they came and there was a battle. Those old powder blasters were really loud, they aren't called bangers for nothing. I was so scared, hiding and listening to all the bangers. Then it was quiet. I remember my father coming to get us. He said that we had to leave. There was a war going on with Sec Men all over the nation and he said that they would be coming back to the farm soon and that my Mother and I had to get someplace we would be safe.

My Mother and I and several other women and children got in cars and we went to another farm a long way away. My father and his friends went to join the other fighters to have war with the sec men and the gov. He told me before he left to always remember that freedom wasn't free. To never let gov make me a slave. It wasn't too long after that when the great calamity happened. I have heard since that my father and his fighters were winning and gov caused the great calamity to stop them.

I remember hearing of several "cities", the old ecomunities that people lived in then, that were gone. They were disappeared in a great explosion. It was these explosions that caused the great sickness. Soon after that gov said that we could no longer stay at the farms. The sec men came and moved us all into the new ecomunities. A few of the people I knew were later sent back to the farms to grow food. But the gov told them which farm and what to grow and it all belonged to gov. No one was allowed anymore to live outside of the ecomunities.

I grew up in that time. The time they called the rebuilding. I remember thinking that everything was fine. Things weren't easy but gov was there to protect us. Everything they did was for our own good. We had to rebuild and form a new world. It wasn't until I became pregnant that my thinking started to change. I had just found out that I was going to have a child when the gov came out with the new directive that all children had to be turned over to them. People couldn't be trusted to teach them correctly. That is what led to the great calamity they said. People teaching their children dangerous things. Wrong things and ideas. And children couldn't be expected to know that those ideas were dangerous. So the only answer, they said, was for all children to be taken to gov learning centers to be raised and taught the right way to think.

There was something about that that I just could not accept. Something was not right. Other people around me tried to convince me that it was the right thing to do. That gov knew what was best. Weren't all those crazy people that caused the great calamity to blame for teaching their children to refuse the gov, to not do what they were told? It was that kind of irresponsible parenting that had led to the great calamity. We couldn't allow that to happen again. Gov was just trying to keep us safe, and anyone who spoke against that was not supporting the move toward world peace. They were dangerous and needed to be watched. But I knew that my father was not the crazy anti peace radical that they said. He loved his "nation" and he loved freedom. Maybe he did teach me things that the gov said were wrong. But as the child within me grew I started to remember those things more and more. The things he taught me about being free and being willing to fight for freedom. Those words started to take on a meaning that I had never considered before.

One day I woke up and I knew that I could not obey the gov anymore. I could not turn my child over to them. I wanted to raise it, to teach it the things that my father had taught me. I started making a plan to get out of the ecommunity. I made it to the outside, but I had not planned well enough. The outside had changed so much since I had last been there. I was soon spotted and picked up by a sec men patrol.

I was taken to a ternment camp. It was there that my son was born. I saw him for just a few seconds. A matron from gov was there to take him. I swore that I would find him. That I would get him back.

A few days later myself and several others were being moved. They told us that it was to a farm to work for gov. But I learned later that it was to an extermination camp. I later saw many of these around the ecos. Our group of cars was ambushed. I again heard the noise of bangers. I couldn't see what was happening. We were in the back of a big car, what was called a "truk", it had a cover over the back, myself and several other women were shackled to benches, the other women were screaming, the two sec men guarding us got out of the car and were firing their light rifles. I could hear the hum of them in between the loud booms of old style powder blasters. I tried to get as low on the bench as I could. It soon got very quiet. We could hear voices and suddenly the cover of the truk was thrown open. Two men stood there pointing old style bangers at us. When they saw that we were women, and prisoners, they lowered their weapons.

They loosed us and took us back to their camp. They had a base deep in the ecos. I recalled going into the ecos when I was young and doing "camping". My Father really loved to spend time in the ecos. He loved being surrounded by Gaia. There were mostly men in the camp. Only a handful of women. I learned that there were 20 of us taken from the convoy.
Only a few remained in the camp. Some were taken to other camps. The men said it was too dangerous to have a lot of people in one camp. The sat seekers would pick up the thermals and lead the sec men to us. I learned that the people there were resistors. That's what they called themselves. They too had decided to not obey gov anymore. But they didn't want to just go and be left alone in the ecos. They were going to try and fight gov. Just like my father and his friends had done. I listened again to stories that my father had told me. Stories of our "nation" and how we were supposed to be free to choose how we would live. Free to choose which person to mate with, where to live, what job we wanted to do. Free to go where we wanted, when we wanted.

The stories began to stir old memories of my father. I remembered how he had told me that freedom wasn't free. That it came with a cost. And how it had to be protected. How he told me of a tree that had to be watered with blood. I remembered a saying that he used to say, " If you won't let me have freedom, then let me die" or something like that. I started to have feelings that I hadn't had before. I started to long for freedom. To ache for it. Just as I ached for the son that gov had taken from me. I ached for freedom for him. I wanted him to know about freedom and about how men had died to have it, and to protect it. And how gov had stolen it from us.

I began to learn of the things that gov had done. Not the great rebuilding of the world, and the bringing of harmony to man and Gaia that is taught in the gov learning centers. But of how gov used the great time of chaos to grow bigger and bigger. How that it had taken more and more of the freedom from the people to "keep them safe". I learned how many believed that gov might even have caused the great darkness just to be able to have the power to tell people how to live, and where to live. I heard stories of great "Patriots" like my father who had fought, and died, to try and stop gov from taking our freedom. And I was saddened. I cried when I learned how that many of the people had not helped them, had even helped gov to find them and to kill them. How they died trying to protect us, trying to secure a future of freedom for us. And how we had let them die. Let their dreams die. Let freedom die.

A great fire was kindled inside of me. I would not let my fathers sacrifice be in vain. I would not let those brave patriots die in vain. I would fight, I would fight them, I would fight for freedom, I would fight for my son, and for his future. I would fight for him just as my father had fought for me. I would fight, and I would die if need be, just like my father, for freedom, for my child, for the world.

We began to attack gov convoys. We raided re-education camps and freed the prisoners. Many joined us. Many didn't. They could not adapt to living free. To being out in the ecos. They had been raised entirely inside ecommunities all their lives and the ecos frightened them. Some went mad. Some turned themselves in to sec teams. But our numbers continued to grow.

I rose in the ranks of the resistance. Many of the things that my Father had taught me began to come back to me. I remembered shooting his powder blasters and how he taught me to "sight" one in. I was older than many of the new fighters that were joining us. Most of them had never touched a weapon of any kind. They had only seen the light rifles of the sec men. Most of them had never even seen an old style bangers. The noise frightened them enormously. I became an instructor. I would teach them how to use the bangers and how to aim them and hit what you were aiming at. We managed to get a few light rifles but found out that if you weren't in the govs biodata base then they would not work for you. We learned the hard way that they all had sat locators in them.
But under my, and some other older resistors training with the powder blasters we became am affective force. There were several of us who remembered our fathers, uncles, and brothers who had buried, cashed they called it, lots of the old bangers and their ammos. We unearthed plenty of weapons to equip our small but growing army.

The "movement" began to grow. The more camps we liberated the more new recruits we gained. We began a campaign to inform the people of the bad that gov had done. The lies that it told. We wrote letters and sent resistors into the ecommunities to spread them out where people would find them. We made pictures on vid cams that we sent out over the intelinet and made discs and spread them around the ecommunities.

I suppose that at first we were just a nuisance to gov. A fly or skeetoe buzzing around and annoying. But then we began to grow. We began to have an effect. Our posters and vids were telling people the truth. People were starting to ask questions. They were starting to say no to gov.

We were no longer an annoyance. People started to actively resist. There were instances of people in some ecommunities rising up and forcing the sec men out. They declared these ecommunes, as "Free lands" and set up there own people to run the departments. They took the gov farms and forced the gov workers to send all of the food to their ecommunity. Many sec men were killed in battles. We were no longer an annoyance, we were now a threat.
I think that we scared gov. It saw that if we continued that we might actually succeed in taking back our "nation". Of course there weren't any of us that remembered what a "nation" was, but we knew that it was something good.

The real turning point came when my camp was in a raid on a central ecommune that was the center for a large gov department. We killed all of the sec men there and took over the ecommune. In the department of Homeland Security offices we found a valuable store of old documents. Their data files revealed details of govs "Master Plan". The plan included sending out special sec teams to do violence in "cities". The acts of violence were used as an excuse for gov to take away more freedom from the people. There were files that talked about a "Plague", a great sickness that killed a lot of people that gov had used to kill off ecomunes of resistors. They had special sec men who posed on the intelinet as patriots and who infiltrated patriot resistor camps and led the sec teams to them so they could be killed. The files revealed the lies the gov told about the re-education camps. There was no re-education, they were extermination camps. That was govs "re-education".

But the most damaging of all the lies was a file that detailed the implementing of a "Forced Retirement" program. It told of the plan to take all children away from their parents and educate them in gov learning centers. To train them to follow govs rules without question. To strive for "harmony" above all else. It told how they were developing mind control methods to "scrub" thoughts and ideas from the minds of the people. How they were working to develop means to monitor people’s emotions at all times. But most of all it told of the frame work for their "Master Plan". A plan to eliminate "drains" on the gov.

Not only would they eliminate "naysayers", those who said no to their rule, but they would eliminate anyone who could not support the collective. Anyone who was hurt or deformed, or not mentally competent. And anyone who got too old to work for gov. At age 40 all people would be taken to a "mature" ecommunnity. These ecommunes were actually death camps where they were euthanised. Before they could become too unhealthy to work for the good of the collective. Their motto, to be taught to children from birth and all throughout their years in the gov learning centers was " Burden no other citizen, contribute to the harmony of all".

We were very successful in getting the word out. Of informing the people of what gov had planned for them. But we were too successful. Gov started to hunt us down. They raided our camps and killed or captured many of us. Many gave their lives trying to spread the word. Trying to tell the people of the dangers of gov. But gov controlled all of the infoways. They shut down the intelinet. It became a crime for anyone but a sec man to use it. They started their own campaign to discredit us. They told the people we were "terrorists" that we wanted to hurt them, that we wanted to go back to the dark days, the greedy days that almost destroyed Gaia before the great calamity. That we had caused the great sickness and that we would destroy all of the ecos. They scared people into believing that we were the enemy. And that only gov could protect them from us. They used the same tactics that they had used before. They created fear and chaos, and then told the people that they could stop it, that they could save them.

It was no wonder that people began to turn on us. They turned us into the sec teams. They refused to help us. But we fought on. We still held out hope that if we could just somehow wake people up that they would see the danger that gov was to them. If they would just take the time to hear the truth they would start to remember what it was to be free. How sweet it was to make your own choices, to live your own life. But gov countered our efforts. They began to wash words and phrases from the language. How do you tell someone about things that they have never heard of? How can you make an argument with words that they have never heard, that they have no knowledge of?

But we held out hope. The fire of freedom still burned in us. My camp was infiltrated. A special sec man, or men, had managed to come into our group. They reported our location to Home Sec. They came for us early one morning. It was still dark out when I woke to the sound of bangers. Then I heard the hum of light rifles and knew that we were being raided. I grabbed my powder blaster and some "nades" that a member had made. We fought hard, we killed a lot of the sec men. But we were outnumbered, they had surprised us while one of our teams was away on a mission. I found out later that they had ambushed that team and killed every one of them. Myself and several others were captured. I fought until I was out of ammos for my banger. I felt something strike me in the head and everything went black.

I woke up to find myself shackled to a bunk in a cell. I know now that we are in a gov "re-education" camp. But we all know, the few of us that are left here, what type of re-education that gov has in mind for us. The lucky ones get taken out to the death camp to be "re-educated". Many of us are being used for experiments. They are taking some of us and trying to scrub our memories. Make us forget about freedom, about the bad that gov has done to the people. There have been several of us that have come back from the labs with their entire mind scrubbed. They only sit and stare and drool on themselves. I think they put them in the cells with the rest of us as a warning to us of what they can do. Others go completely insane and scream and scream until they die. I only hope that when they come to take me that it is to the death camp and not the labs.

I know that I will not leave here alive. I have fought hard for freedom. I have fought hard for you, I have fought hard for my son. Will it make a difference? Will we succeed? I don't know. But I know that by writing these words down, by telling my story that the idea of freedom will not die. It will live on. Someone someday will find this. Maybe it will be my son? That is too much to hope for. I have never learned what happened to him. Did he join the resistance somewhere? Or did gov succeed in turning him into a good citizen? I'll never know. Are you who are reading this a good citizen? Do you know of us? Are you free? Do you know what freedom is? So many questions. Questions that it is not my fate to have answered.

But I will go to my death with the hope that by writing this that somehow I have helped to keep the flame of freedom alive. The burning desire to live free. I will continue to write this letter until they come for me. I will hide it away and hope that someone may someday find it. Maybe someone who is free, someone who knows the truth, someone who..........................................

Suddenly he was aware of the soft female voice of the summonser "ity is at the door". Who? BAM, BAM, BAM!! He felt like his heart would leap from his chest, he jumped from his rester and ran to the door. His hand trembled as he pressed the open button. Two uniformed sec men stood there. "y..y.. yes. Can I help you?" "Is the summonser broken in this domicile citizen?" one of the sec men asked, "Yes, er I mean no, not broken, I um, I didn't uh, hear the summons."

The taller of the two men said "We're from the Department of Homeland Serenity, harmony meters picked up heightened levels of anxiety from this unit. Is everything all right here?" " Y..y..Yes, everything’s fine. I was just,.. just reading."

"What reading material could affect the H meters? Everything on the reading lists is designed to illicit peaceful and harmonious feelings. Maybe we better come in and look around." The sec men pushed in past him without waiting for a reply. The shorter of the two reached into his satchel and pulled out a small device. The man recognized the portable scan machine. The sec man waved it slowly in front of his body, from head to waist. He spoke to his partner "Rapid heartbeat, elevated respiration and body temperature."

The other sec man looked at him and held out his hand " Perhaps you had better show us what it is you were reading." It took him a second to realize that he was still holding some of the old manual word pages in his hand, the rest of them had been in his lap and had scattered onto the floor in front of his rester when he had jumped up to answer the summons. He nervously handed them to the sec man and knelt down and started gathering up the ones that had fallen onto the floor. " I..I, uh, I found these today and I, uh, I don't know why, but I brought them back to the domicile. I haven't seen manual word pages since I was young."

The sec man was scanning the pages, he looked at the man, " Where, did you find these?" The sec mans tone was stern, his look glaring. The mans heart began beating hard in his chest again " I..uh..I..labor for the Reclamation Department, I'm on..on a decon crew.." The shorter sec man took the other word pages from his hand and started to read "I..uh..we..we were..we are um deconstructing an old domicile in sector..sector 6 and....".The tall sec man interrupted, "Sector 6! That's outside of the ecommunity boundary!". "Yes..yes, but we are sanctioned, we're sanctioned, I.. I'm sanctioned. We all have Home Sec sanctions to go outside."

The shorter, and older of the sec men looked up from the word pages and said to his partner " Sector 6 is where the old re-education camps were located. They used to domicile terrorists and other haters and nayers out there."

He looked at the man "Have you read these?" The man was sweating, his heart racing, "Not all of them, o..o..only, only some of it"

"Where did you find it?" the older sec man asked. "It.., they..., it, was in a cylinder and inside of, inside a wall that we were deconstructing, I..I found it,... in the wall. What is it? What..what does it mean?"

The short sec man spoke to his partner "This is an old psych weapon that the haters used to use. They would create word pages or vidpics and send them out to unsuspecting citizens. They would cause the citizens who saw them to start having wrong thoughts, to start developing dangerous ideas and feelings. Eventually it would cause them to commit acts of terrorism against the harmony of the people. After the haters and nayers were re-educated, or removed, gov tried to scrub all of these types of weapons. But every so often one turns up. I heard of a citizen in another ecommunity that found one of these and it caused him to go insane. He committed grievous acts of terror against gov and against his fellow citizens. By the time the sec team found him it was too late, he had to be euthanised. His harmony was beyond redemption."

"Am..am.. I going to be alright?" the man said in a shaky voice.

" Your very lucky citizen. I think we got to you in time. We'll have a team from Homeland Serenity come and give you a memory scrub and I think you'll be fine.," the older sec man said. The younger, taller one said to the man " You won't remember any of this, but maybe in your sub mind you will remember how close you came today. The rules that gov sets for us are for our own good. That is why we cannot read things that are not approved. Gov protects us from getting wrong ideas. We don't want to go back to the dark times do we?" The man shook his head in agreement. The taller one continued "We have come a long way since those days. We no longer have corps hurting Gaia with their greed. We live in harmony with Gaia and with each other. Our collective provides our needs and gov protects us and provides for our harmony, so that we can live a life of peace, free from wrong and dangerous ideas. We don't have to compete with others, gov takes care of all of our needs. From the time we are conceived into the collective until we are matured and removed from it. We burden no other citizen, we contribute to the harmony of all."

The man was sobbing " I..am s..so sorry. I..I had greed, I shouldn't have taken the word pages. I didn't know how dangerous they were. I'm so sorry, I didn't want to disturb the harmony of the collective."

The older sec man put his hands on the mans shoulders and guided him over to his rester "Here, sit down and rest. The serenity team will be here soon. It will be alright."

"Thank you, thank you so much" the man sobbed.


"It's alright citizen" the sec man replied,


" We're from gov, we're here to help."

 

I was going through a storage locker and found the hard copy of this. It gave me chills reading it again after more than a dozen years. A lot of the things I wrote about are eerily familiar today. The ongoing censorship, rewriting history.
I think today, on the anniversary of the start of our fight against tyranny, it is a good time to revisit this.