Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

barely afford to feed themselves and you expect them to take down Elites? Travel on foot and throw rocks? Because that is the level of resources most of them have these days. You’ve seen the slums yourself! They have nothing left! They have been lied to for decades, promised the crisis will be solved. Promised jobs and tools to fix what’s broken. Instead, they get nothing but exploitation, torture and abuse. Welcome to 28th-century slavery, where the second-tier citizens aren’t even needed as slaves—they’ve been replaced with nano-machinery. The slaves can now just bugger off and die, leaving the fucking Elite in peace. Unless, of course, someone wants to brutalise and rape a bunch of them for kicks!’

Ingram paused to take a deep breath. She wasn’t quite sure why Gonzalez was allowing her to go on, especially knowing that she was bound to lose control soon, but she wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. She opened her mouth to continue, but Eloise spoke first.

‘I’ve seen the number of Leeches in Lyon’s slums. I never expected there to be so many of them. They outnumber the Elite in Lyon by what, four to one? More?’

‘At least six to one,’ Gonzalez said matter-of-factly. ‘Probably more.’

‘Six to one.’ Eloise nodded. ‘They could overrun the Elite with sheer numbers. There aren’t even enough guns in Lyon to arm the Elite, and even if there were, most of them wouldn’t have a clue what to do with them!’

‘And how long until the military flew in from their base in Milan? They could level the whole East Side of Lyon in a matter of hours without any need to mobilise units from further afield. They could literally drop explosives from a transport shuttle and the slums would have nothing to defend themselves with. Add a few more hours, and armoured ground troops could roll through the streets of Lyon and shoot every single Leech left. You are suggesting a massacre of nearly half a million people, children and elderly!’

‘But… but they couldn’t just kill everyone.’ Eloise was at a loss for words. Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing. ‘People wouldn’t stand for that. The Elite wouldn’t massacre every Leech for wanting a better life!’ Her own voice sounded strange to her. Maybe it wasn’t the voice itself, maybe it was the words that sounded utterly and unbelievably wrong spoken in such a combination.

‘Which Elite wouldn’t stand for that? The Elite that don’t care about anything but their own spoilt, luxurious lives? That Elite?’ Ingram spat. ‘Do you think genocide and slavery have never happened before? Nazis nearly exterminated the Jews before they were stopped. Europeans butchered millions colonising Africa. I guess the world really would have been a better place if those oppressed had only known that they had to say no when someone was about to kill them.’

Eloise looked confused, and Ingram sighed.

‘You do know the history, right?’

‘Yes!’ The defensive affirmative came out as a shriek. ‘One can hardly write a historical VRP without knowing the history.’

‘I don’t mean the rose-tinted bullshit version of history the World Government propagated and the Alliance repeats blindly. I mean the real history! The one that talks about what happened from multiple points of view, not the one written by the victors that spewed their propaganda while still standing ankle-deep in the blood of those they had just slaughtered.’ Ingram took another gulp of air. ‘I’m talking about the history that includes the subjugated minorities, the oppression, the discrimination, the slaughter. That includes the utter greed and superiority complex that lies at the centre of every armed conflict. Of the Incas slaughtered by the Spaniards, of Native Americans slaughtered by the British Empire, or the Congolese worked to death by the Belgians. Of—’ Ingram stopped herself. She could continue spitting out historical facts one after another for a long time, and it would barely make a dent in outlining just how many people had died throughout history in senseless and bloody ways. And none of that would make any difference whatsoever, since Eloise was staring at her blankly.

‘Spaniards? British Empire? Belgians?’ she asked, tasting the strange words.

‘Do you know nothing of what happened before the Great Collapse?’

‘Of course not! How could I? The world fell apart and the World Government lifted us from the ashes that our ancestors left behind. There was nothing before then worth knowing about!’

Ingram turned her eyes, full of disgust and disbelief, to Gonzalez, clearly lost for words.

It was true that for a long time the World Government had tried to control the information flow, but they never succeeded in erasing all of history. By the time the Great Collapse shook the world, it was simply impossible to erase all the existing sources of information. A lot of the world’s history predating the establishment of the World Government in late 2177 leaked through, often as ghastly stories, anecdotes and gossip. In fact, as long as what leaked through confirmed what a bunch of uncaring barbarians humans were prior to the Great Collapse, the World Government wanted it to spread far and wide, serving as a warning to everyone.

‘The Spaniards were the inhabitants of Spain in Western Europe,’ Gonzalez said. ‘In the 16th century Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish conquistador, began decimating the civilisation of Incas, already ravaged by their civil war, in the west of South America in pursuit of gold and other treasures. They literally slaughtered whoever stood between them and the riches they wanted to pillage.

‘The British Empire, known in its later days as the United Kingdom, originally occupied the majority of the British Isles. In pursuit of wealth, the British had colonised something like twenty-five per cent of the world’s landmass by 1920. Most, probably all, of their colonies had native inhabitants that were either enslaved, worked to death or slaughtered, or if they were lucky, they became second-class citizens on their own soil. By the 21st century the Empire was no more, and by the 22nd century there was hardly anything left of