Prompt
I broke into the store, as one does in the middle of an apocalypse. The
shelves were nearly completely empty. All I ended up finding there was a box
of rotten fruit...
Botner
...that nobody wanted, and a lone bottle of gas that had somehow made its
way into the frozen food section. I poured the gas into the mouth of the
nuclear bomb. Then I lit a match. It didn’t take long for the entire store
to catch fire. I escaped with a few of my comrades, and we fled into the
desert. I later learned that the whole thing was a controlled action. The
peaceful protests that I had witnessed before had been staged in the hopes
of making the current government pay. I had left behind two of my friends,
who, having stayed behind in order to “protect the people” were taken as
prisoners by the terrorists. They were held in what we would later learn to
be a torture chamber, along with about thirty or forty other protesters. The
rest of us were made to stand in lines in the blazing desert sun as the
soldiers gave us a speech about what we were all doing wrong. “This is no
way to live,” one of them said, as he pointed to his own bare foot. “Your
life belongs to the state. You are here to serve it.” It was...
Conclusion
...the most humiliating day of my life, but I will also make it the most
important for the movement. We were galvanized into action, to put right
what is wrong, and make the world a better place. Nuclear war is not the
answer, and I should have known that. We have to show them that they cannot
break us, that we will continue to fight, but will not do so with guns, or
sticks and stones, or even our fists. We will fight them with words, and
turn hearts to our favor. Not everyone will join us, but enough will, and
those remaining will lose in the end, not just because there will be so few
of them left, but because nothing will come of their actions. We leave the
desert, and regroup in the tunnels under the city. A rival faction of rebels
has heard what happened to us, and meets us in the neutral zone. They’ve
decided they want to help, and that maybe, our goals aren’t as misaligned as
we once thought. They don’t want the terrorists to win either, and if we can
come to a compromise, and formulate a solid plan, they won’t. Our first
order of business is to declare someone leader, after our last one was
executed to prove a point to the rest of us. Someone anonymous nominates me,
and even though I don’t want the job, I can’t protest. Our ways prevent
nominees from campaigning one way, or the other. I realize that no one is
going to actually vote for me, but someone wanted to shut me up, and keep me
from swaying minds to the woman I know is right for the role. A man from the
rival faction is elected instead, and the rebellion fails, for good this
time.
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