A glimpse at what's happening across the Pacific.
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March 22, 2332 (383 People’s Revolutionary Calendar)
Somewhere in Northern China
The mud-walled thatched houses of the collective farming unit smoked in the first light of early dawn, and the soldiers nearby bowed before an image outside it. It was of a man of advanced years, bold characters proclaiming it to be of the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of China. The Party Official leading them recited the words of the Sunrise Incantation, which they repeated after him.
“Ten thousand years to you, O Supreme Leader,
Who kept us safe from the Great Invasion,
Who makes the Sun rise in the morning,
And the clouds give forth rain.
From your great house in Beijing,
Protect the Revolution and lead us to the workers’ paradise.
Ten thousand years to you, O Supreme Leader.”
The Commanding Officer of the military unit in question was first to rise from the Sunrise Invocation, followed by his fellows. The previous day they had dealt with the traitors of this area – not that there had been any legal proceedings in that quarter, but it was an obvious that the peasants must have been hoarding grain in a counter-revolutionary act caused by residual rightist-capitalist-fascist sympathies among them. So units of the People’s Liberation Army had sallied forth from their bunker-garrisons in mid-March to carry out a campaign of terror and slaughter against them, more so as to dissuade such acts in future as to punish the perpetrators.
Some notables had been beaten and otherwise tortured until they admitted to counter-revolutionary sabotage - at which point sharpened stakes of bamboo had been set out, and these most malicious saboteurs were stripped naked and impaled on them – some were still moaning as they ran out their inevitable demise. Then the soldiers had slaughtered the entire village – clad in their three-eyed fusion-powered thunder-armour and carrying gauss assault-rifles, there was no chance of them being halted. More peasants would repopulate it in future – there were always more peasants.
The place had been ransacked of any hoarded valuables – though there was not much to take. There had then been an inspection of the granaries, which were only at 50% of their capacity – clearly those individuals working there must have been in on the conspiracy, and must obviously have deliberately burned the grain and rice supplies collected by the collective farming unit. For lack of bamboo stakes, they were all rounded up and shot.
The Democratic People’s Republic of China was most clearly, under the wise and noble instruction of the Supreme Leader, the most beneficent government in the world. For indeed, had he not ruled nobly and ably from when he united the country in Year 1 of the People’s Revolutionary Calendar, through the invasion from across the eastern sea and the atomic fires that had ravaged China? A dozen Great Leaps Forward, scores of Five Year Plans, and China inched closer each and every year to the Workers’ Paradise. It may not seem to actually be going anywhere, but how could it when counter-revolutionaries lurked within and reactionaries stalked around its borders? A hundred years ago, the Russians to the far north-west had abandoned even the pretense that they were working towards the Workers’ Paradise – of course, they had been capitalist-reactionary in all but name from the period of the Great Invasion onward, if not before that.
The troops moved on marching, until at a nearby railhead that they were told that they were not returning to their usual base some 20 miles away but mustering at Dalian. Every train on the rail network ran through the same Central Rail Building at Beijing on its course, so it would not add much time to their journey – but it was a mystery as to why they were being redeployed so far away.
The CO blurted out a question to that effect, which provoked the Party official assigned to the unit – who had recently argued with him over a minor matter of the Supreme Leader’s teaching – to order him investigated. At Beijing, he was grabbed by Party members and never seen again – though screams were heard from the gargantuan Central Administration Building that night, and some weeks later a naked corpse, its face beaten and mutilated to the point it didn’t look human, was hung from one of the cornices of one of its towers.
Such were the way things went in a society heading towards utopia.
