< Magazine Index > < Index for this Edition > < Subscribe > < Return to Page One >

       Almost every urban area had a large, grim structure, like something out of Tolkien’s Mordor, which chilled the heart of anyone who saw it. This was the city jail, with elongated vertical windows that reminded one of a cobra’s eyes. Some cities had as many jails as hospitals. From the air, a prominent feature of the nation’s greatest city was a gigantic prison barge used to house internees on six levels, one of them below the waterline. 
These were only the smaller prisons, built to keep lawbreakers within four walls. Much larger, but almost equally effective, were “reservations” or “tribal homelands” used to confine what remained of the aboriginal population whose ancestors had once populated the entire continent. Once the rulers of a continent, those earlier inhabitants had been all but exterminated by firearms and early forms of chemical and biological warfare, involving neurotoxins and anthrax … and by mistakenly placing their trust in the empire’s empty promises.

  The empire’s arsenal was the greatest even known. Their engineers could make matter annihilate itself, and thus create explosions great enough to vaporize whole cities in seconds. Another, more subtle weapon spared city structures but merely destroyed the human population, with a spray of subatomic “bullets” that ripped apart the body’s microstructure. 

       But the empire’s greatest weapons – even more powerful, one commentator noted, than its bullets and bombs – were its powers of illusion and persuasion. In the early 20th century, with new technologies to help, those powers expanded beyond the wildest dreams of ancient sorcerers. From the simplest of materials and most elementary of information, the empire created whole universes of wonder and magic, which held the rest of the world in awe; and this inventive genius was such that their technology seemed like magic itself. 

       At times there seemed no limit to their abilities. They could extract the essence of life. They could create new species. They once made an entire island disappear from the face of the earth. They emplaced new stars in the skies. They could literally touch the moon and planets, and discern the most distant bodies in the cosmos. They had artificial eyes hundreds of kilometers above the earth’s surface, plus a network of “ears” in the depths of the sea. And rumors described a tremendous underground complex of man-made tunnels in which society’s leaders could hide in case warfare or natural disaster devastated the land above.

       Their aircraft could make themselves invisible, and their machines could “think” for themselves, even learning the world’s languages and carrying out lengthy conversations with their human masters. Much of the routine “thinking” in everyday life was actually handed over to such “smart” machines, leaving their controllers free for other pursuits.

       These marvels emerged in an incredibly brief time. Less than a century passed between the flight successful flight of a man-carrying powered aircraft, and the first manned landing on the moon. These people learned to control so much, so rapidly, that the day arrived when they envisioned themselves as deities, or else a great collective deity, and set their sights on the rest of the galaxy. 

       They would conquer death. They would harness the energies of the stars. In principle, they could cross the galaxy in the wink of an eye, and they began looking for ways to do so. They would build entire new planets for themselves and their descendants. They would become one with their fantastic machines, and the machines would be one with them, and together, as the most “evolved” of all species, omniscient and invincible, they then would conquer the universe. In new, refurbished bodies, they would become immortal, and they would develop visionary powers that would let them see into the distant past and future by reading the universe’s own encoded history. Nothing would be impossible unless they deemed it so.

       Such, anyway, was their grand vision. It sold well. The “scientists” and visionaries who encouraged it became wealthy and influential, and bestselling authors too. They imagined astronauts venturing out into space, encountering other highly advanced civilizations, and being welcomed into a vast galactic confederation. This setting provided science fiction writers with an abundance of ideas for adventures. If it happened that the imaginary aliens were hostile, then they were portrayed as none too shrewd, or else prey to superstitious fears which the human heroes quickly discerned and used to vanquish the foe. The parallels with the empire’s self-image were plain. Anyone who opposes us (the empire believed) must be inferior, misguided or simply evil, and will be either converted to our way of thinking, or destroyed.

     In fact, the “superstitious” extraterrestrials in such stories, not the heroes, bore the closer resemblance to the empire’s subjects. The will to believe was so powerful in this land, and the power of superstition so strong, that there was practically no limit to what the public would consider reasonable.  Once, photographs of a formation on the Martian surface, a mesa resembling a human face, set off intense controversy about the “face’s” origin and the supposition that an ancient war had destroyed an advanced Martian civilization. The pictures were of poor quality, and mystery surrounded both their origins and their subsequent history. But no matter: the smallest piece of such ”evidence” sufficed to leave people agog. 

        The lecture circuit was full of “contactees” who claimed to have established ties with extraterrestrials, inhabitants of an “inner earth,” or dwellers in a “spirit world” of the disembodied dead. Celebrities included an alluring young woman who tried to pass herself off as a “princess” of an advanced underground civilization (no evidence of which, by the way, could be found on the surface). Her husband, a handsome “prince” of the same realm, came along to corroborate her story. 

       Whole sections of bookstores were devoted to works on augury, divination, mediumism, and “prophecy,” including commentaries on a would-be seer, some four centuries dead, whose fraudulence had been proven time and again, with no discernible damage to his popularity. 

       A simple device for contacting “spirits” became a best-selling plaything. Manuals included instructions for contacting the dead and invoking the assistance of “angels.” Crude photographic hoaxes were promoted as “proof” of a “heaven” which looked suspiciously like a restoration of the Acropolis in Athens. Other faked photos purported to show ghosts captured on film, while believers in parapsychology strained to see “auras” that were said to surround the human body. For a national magazine, a widely published author chronicled his alleged encounter with an “entity” like a Halloween goblin. On another occasion, he related how he went into the desert and had a conversation with a cactus. No fantasy seemed beyond acceptance; no skeptical voice seemed able to make itself heard.

       Just as the public’s appetite for the mysterious and the occult appeared insatiable, there likewise seemed no limit to belief in the empire’s own propaganda, and in myths that it found appealing. “Conquer we must,” urged the doggerel that served the empire as an anthem, “for our cause, it is just.” The lyrics went on to imply that “God” – an impressive and conveniently elastic concept – had the people’s trust and presumably would reward them with victory.

     A glorious vision, to be sure. But it was fragile, and reality had a way of obscuring it. Believers did not care to be reminded that they were only fragile bipeds whose territory occupied less than one percent of a small, rocky world circling an undistinguished star on the dark fringes of that galaxy they dreamed of conquering, or that their empire had existed for only a few human generations – about the lifetime of a large tortoise.

Go to Next Page of This Article - C L I C K    H E R E -