So 'ere's a dystopian story— a dystopia on alien steroids— that was supposed to just be the ramblings of my MC in Mother Meki as a sort of way to have her express and show you her inner feelings after undergoing so many horrors, but wound up become a pretty funeral doom metal laden disaster. It's not yet a story (Mother Meki is not yet a written story) but just a thought that grew and grew and grew over the months. I created it when my house was briefly infested with roaches a few years back, and I noticed our opinions towards these roaches being "Kill every last one of those motherfuckers. They're pests who only deserve death. You see one, you kill it" and placed humans in the roach category and transhumans in the human category. This story, The Passion of the Roaches, is an attempt to come up with the most depressing story possible. It's not supposed to have any real deeper meanings or be rooted in social consciousness. Just depressiveness, campy depressiveness. You might even laugh at how ridiculous it becomes towards the end. I'm going to come back to this and see if it's depressing enough, and, if not, I'll make it even more bleak. It gets weird, and I mean weird and even uses Jesus Christ as a character, so... yeah. Note, this is copy-pasted. Some of it doesn't make sense if you don't get Mother Meki (specifically, for this version, a very early version of Mother Meki that even the synopsis I posted here is ahead of) OH! And please play this song while you listen to it, otherwise you won't truly feel the hopelessness reeking from this black tome. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=ceCDSjU86eg is also good. Very good, in fact. Any funeral doom metal would help. Thinking about it, some Radiohead might also be passable. It'd probably be a tad more creepy than blackened, but whatevs. I now present to you... The Passion of the Roaches (At least, a general idea of it) The classes were divided into two utterly distinct camps- the extremely few, extremely transhumanized ultra-rich ruling class, and the very many poor- the very, very extremely poor. While this class distinction was nothing new, it was the fact that revolt was impossible that made this different. Passion of the Roaches whole concept is based around one word: hopelessness. Hope is dead. Hope is written out of the history books. Newspeak rendered hope forever forgotten centuries ago. The only ending is the Downer Ending. The oppressed masses can never win and will never win. The event horizon of justice had long passed them, and they are to blame. The heroes do not win, and were instead villified by the writers and revisionists of history. There is no optimistic twist. There may be a ray of light here and there, but all rays of light are sucked in by black holes. And why? One more word- transhumanism. Black transhumanism. Unlike transhumanism of the late 21st century/extremely early 22nd century, which was still an imperfect science and the upgraded in question could still be considered mortal and was still decently spread throughout the classes, the transhumanism of Passion of the Roaches was centuries ahead: post-humanist technologies were the norm for the rich. The rich were truly immortal. They were no longer human, but posthuman, and incapable of death or defeat. They were Gods on Earth, a semi-hivemind of beings malevolent, the Ultrahumans. The Ultrahumans hated the poor- the Roaches- but laughed in bizarre, digital tongues at their attempts to survive in a world ruled by them. Their will became truth. They owned the Earth and all her glories. They controlled the Earth and all her glories. God Himself was their slave. The solar system was theirs to abuse, to rape, and to destroy. Again, they could just as well create a new one. The Ultrahumans were so far advanced in evolution ahead of the Roaches- which composed of us normal humans, as well as those scarred by the Ultrahuman's past experiments and animals with enhanced intelligences who collectively become subhumans- that they were forever doomed to be nothing more than what they were called- Roaches. The rich, the Ultrahumans were the Earth itself. They have become the planet, and They rule it completely. It is by Their almighty will that the roaches even survive, and They will that the roaches survive only because They are interested in seeing them suffer. But revolutionaries want to try. They don't want to give up. Their vocabulary is completely stunted, for the roaches have been denied language, and most have been denied free thought. A select few are capable of free thinking, and they are the ones who dare attempt to fight their oppressive system. They do not- and cannot understand on their own- that they can only think freely because They have willed that they can. They use what limited vocabulary they can muster to rally a pathetic group of freedom fighters. But as they try, repeatedly they suffer from Lapses, which are moments where their neurons are deactivated from conscious thought, and they are driven entirely by an Ultrahuman-run autopilot. Thus, they can stand in the middle of a crowd, watching their glorious leader rally them with a riveting speech, and when they blink, they're in the middle of a 150 degree desert, more emaciated than a Holocaust victim having been without food for weeks. They are tortured by extreme temperature swings- from -300 degrees to 450 degrees in instants. Nature reviles them. With no language, most of the roaches become ape-like and lose all culture. Alma.exe was that one. She was that Ultrahuman who felt empathy for the eternally oppressed roaches. She did not approve of her fellow Ultrahumans' sheer sadism. She hatched something of a plot to share her power with them. But the Ultrahumans discovered her plot and scorned her for it while viciously loopkilling all those she had intended to give the power to. (Loopkilling is something Meki suffers later in life, where one is killed and then revived, and killed again at some point later, and repeat, usually endlessly, making death an expected occurance while one to avoid at all costs, as well as one your loved ones feel no strong emotions about) Why are they called the roaches? What do you do with roaches? Try to kill them all in one foul genocidal swoop. If you see one, you kill it, no questions asked. You don't attempt to reason with it, nor do you give it food or shelter. You kill it. And emphasis on it. You're a human, and it's a disgusting roach. Thus you have the Ultrahumans and the roaches. And it's not much of an exaggeration- the difference between the Ultrahumans and the roaches is similar to that between humans and actual roaches. In real life and still in Meki's time, the rich and the poor are still human. A few of the rich may think of the poor as roaches, but we're all human. That's the difference between RL and Passion of the Roaches. There is no hope, and there is nothing you can do. To those that think that, maybe, the Ultrahumans will suffer from some sort of judgement dies when your mind is erased or reconfigured into a different mindset. And just before the end of the story, the ultimate example of the power of the Ultrahumans- while the roaches still tend to what limp vegetation they can even remember to grow, the Ultrahumans fully transcend physical reality and become Ultraterrestrial. They ascend to the plane of The Ones Who Came Before (from Cthulhu mythos, oddly) and dominate even them, and continue their blows against the roaches. Alma.exe reprograms herself to accept the dominance of the Ultrahumans, and all remains the same for the rest of eternity. Supposedly, the story was supposed to end with an ending so bleak, so black, so downer that Meki couldn't even write it until 2123- for the sake of the story, the Christian God indeed exists and He intervenes to lift the roaches up from their oppression from the blasphemous Ultrahumans. In one final apocalyptic battle, Jesus leads the armies of Heaven against the Ultrahumans- and loses. Heaven falls as the Ultrahumans overthrow God and become the rulers of All Known Things. The Ultrahumans wipe out the roaches before bringing them all back just to wipe them out again. And it goes on and on and on and on. The story ends with this: "And It Began With You And You Did Nothing And It Began With You." So the defeated poor are then further shamed by being blamed for this. All this fall under the Ultrahumans' control and misery becomes universal. Everyone, from proto-lifeforms to extraterrestrial and interdimensional beings, fall to their might and suffer eternal damnation. In the most recent version, the roaches are further plagued by loopkill and nerve control at increasingly, frighteningly high levels. You might know loopkill as being when you kill something and force it back to life just to torture and kill it again, ad infinitum if need be (why Meki used it as a subject) and nerve control is where you take control of one's nerves and increase their sensitivity or reception of touch and/or pain. We can't imagine a pain 1000x over normal because our pain threshold lies at a measly "1x." So even an increase to 2x would be hellish, and the roaches suffer pain near ∞ over normal towards the end. The darkness induced apathy, the utter grimdarkness of it is the point.
It seems to me that it is the presence of hope that causes suffering. In a state of complete despair and apathy, the "roaches" will become mentally numb, near vegetables. They will not suffer because that is all they know. True despair and anguish is the knowledge of the existence of hope and the inability to reach salvation. Complete emptiness, hopelessness, is like a state of Zen. Life is suffering and that is all there is.
EDIT: It sounds like you chose the most depressing setting you could merely for it's own sake. What purpose in a potential story would that serve? A unique setting does not create a good story, and creating a bad story to fit inside that setting would be disastrous. The setting is there to serve the story, not the other way round.
As I said, it was actually the brainchild of a character I created as a form of her own expression. I doubt I'll ever actually write such a grim thing.
I really like this. I think I would buy it straight away if it existed. I think, it could be groundbreaking.
