Three hundred years ago.
The planet seems more or less fine. It’s got the typical pollutants. The population, according to disparate experts, is somehow both bursting at the seams and heading towards zero – and fast. Technology has reached unprecedented levels of efficiency, self-sustainability, and parody. No one uses even twenty five percent of the engine power offered by the average handheld. Everyone has one anyway.
When the first tremors begin hitting the coastline, people think it’ll blow ever, so they go down into their bunkers. Everyone has one of those too. When the waters breach the walls at the coast, alerts start going out, and everything happens quickly. Nobody knew this kind of tectonic activity was possible; this is one for the science books. But no one will write them, at least not in this country, because the only people who survive are the ones where the water doesn’t reach. Over five hundred miles inland. And there’s not that many of them. And they’re not the book-writing types. They won’t know for centuries whether people on other continents have survived the global quakes. Both oceans smother the nation because the fault lines run through the core of the planet, and they are shifting with cosmic results. The globe tilts on its axis. It wobbles in rhythmic response to the incident. Its new orientation alters its orbit.
The northern hemisphere will now experience routine heat for all foreseeable millennia.
The southern hemisphere is a frozen wasteland.
Still, in the middle of the country, a collective emerges. Bands of derelict survivalists who have been planning for the end of the world since the beginning of time are finally – and indisputably – right. They don’t need anyone to cower in recognition either; the rest of the population is already so dead that they don’t even have a chance to take it back (the mockery, that is).
And saying, I told you so to a corpse is to literally have the last laugh. The survivalists are busting a gut.
Communities are forming with foundational principles that echo whatever there was near the end. And there are older principles that emerge too. They come from the forgotten forests and plains of the past. They come up out of the graves of the ancients. They glitter like atavistic gold in these new hands, fingers twirling. So, it means something now to talk about self-love alongside self-immolation, and they say the only way to be yourself is to burn. There are those that begin to talk about the application of random acts of justice and the experience of mercy as chance. They talk about the celebration of difference as commanded by the single perspective. The law. And submission to it.
A new thing is coming.
It is the priesthood.
They talk about human dignity and human sacrifice, and they make all these opposite things sound like mirror images. They turn paradox into promise and break it.
A handful seek truth in violence. The spark of rebellion. Blitz raids on what they’re calling Oratory Houses in the black of night while the High Priest whispers history, rewriting. The rebels start fires in the rafters. They send livestock through the doors. Anything to disrupt. And then they scatter leaflets through the streets and spray graffiti on the walls.
So, the priesthood retaliates. Roll call in the mornings in the center circle of every commune. Routine interrogations and psychological evaluations. Everything aimed at what they’re calling unification. The standard is set. It’s arbitrary and exact.
And it doesn’t take long for people to forget.
In exchange for their forgetfulness they are given a semblance of freedom when the priesthood takes its religion underground and transforms Oratory Houses into communal relaxation spaces. Instead of sermons of subjugation the people go to receive rationed doses of squares. The music pulses with mind-numbing force. Between the squares and the endless rhythms, conversation becomes impossible, and though marketed as free time, the user experience at an Oratory House consists of scheduled, irresistible dopamine release, muting all questions. The obligatory ceremonies are over, relegated to holidays and festivals. The priesthood is quiet and though people don’t have to listen, they don’t get to think either, and it amounts to the same thing. The High Priest continues his whispers in the catacombs underneath.
And everything is distilled in the simplicity, the ubiquity, of the wrong glove.
All of the sociopathy of the priesthood goes into its design. Remnant technologies of the recent past are enough to perfect both form and function. Synthetic leather for durability. Rubber insulation. Once confined within a wrong glove, the right hand is neutralized through constant neural manipulation, an infant science applied with severe precision. The glove is fused to skin of the wrist, preventing removal. Of course, some try to cut through the material, but they only succeed in maiming themselves because the layer underneath the rubber insulation is triggered to ignite upon exposure to oxygen. Production is easy.
So is distribution. The priesthood, outfitted with overwhelming force, declares on the first day of the new year that bent is broken – the first full year of the new world completed – and they give every person a wrong glove for their right hand.
“Put it on.”
Those who don’t are executed on the spot.
As are all of the lefthanded citizens of the community.
In the centuries to come, this single perspective is maintained. The law is clear. Children are observed until the age of ten, at which point the lefthanded children are eliminated (if, indeed, any still remain by this age) and the righthanded children are fitted for a wrong glove. It could have been the other way around, and it would have all played out the same. Right or left is not the point. Of course, humans are adaptable. People learn to use their left hands quickly – perhaps even more quickly because of the glove – but the damage is done. Every person experiences the reach of the priesthood. No one is exempt from their arbitrary justice.
No one is exempt from the fear.
The first phase of executions is brutal and public. The second phase is conducted in secret. It’s an experimental operation with a new technological step forward, developed by the priesthood: the black light.
The third and final phase is initiated as soon as the people have begun to forget. It is the Ceremony of Home. The priesthood monitors all data collected from each individual’s wrong glove because the thing is, the neural manipulation cannot be maintained across a lifetime. It can’t even push past forty years. In other words, the gloves don’t last forever. Eventually, sensation returns.
Eventually, everybody bends.
And usually the priesthood knows before the sensations begin: they analyze the data, schedule a ceremony, and send the person home in the black light before they even notice a tickle in their rebel right hand.
Usually.
But sometimes the glove monitoring misses a signal. And then another. And another.
Until, and nobody is really sure how it happens, within the hand an off-grid and unpredictable network of neural pathways lights up. The glove doesn’t notice. The priesthood doesn’t notice.
A rebel is unleashed.