Comment on Random Comics #170 by lemonhelmet

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lemonhelmet · 10/8/2026, 8:24:41 PM · permalink

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mirukitsune · 10/8/2026, 9:16:36 PM · permalink

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lemonhelmet · 10/9/2026, 8:19:58 AM · permalink

The last library burned for three days. People stood in silence across the river and watched the pages rise into the night like frightened birds. Some said the fire was accidental. Others whispered that fires which begin in the history section and end in the church archives are never accidents. By then, there were barely any old men left in Serbia. After the Second World War, every third man was a boy wearing his father’s coat. Villages were full of widows who could sew, carry water, and bury children, but could not read the newspapers nailed to the town square walls. The teachers had died in trenches, prisons, or forests. The priests disappeared next. The churches were locked, then converted into storage depots, then museums explaining why faith itself had been a primitive illness. And because there were no books, and no elders, there was no memory. That was the true victory. The new government arrived smiling. It spoke endlessly about progress, equality, and the future. Loudspeakers were mounted on poles where church bells once rang. Portraits appeared in every classroom: the Marshal with kind eyes and hands of flesh and blood. The children repeated his sayings before they learned arithmetic. “History begins now,” the teachers said. No one asked what happened to history before now. The reforms came quickly. Officials traveled from village to village announcing the greatest educational transformation humanity had ever seen. Newspapers praised it daily. NO NATION HAD EVER ACHIEVED SUCH ENLIGHTENMENT. The slogans were painted everywhere. But children no longer learned how to grow food. They no longer learned how to repair roofs, preserve seeds, build tools, or survive winters without factories. Those lessons belonged to the old world — the dangerous world of independent people. Instead, they learned obedience disguised as sophistication. Dependence disguised as civilization. Every loaf of bread came from the State. Every apartment belonged to the State. Every medicine, every school placement, every work permit flowed through the same invisible artery. The citizen no longer lived beside the system. The citizen lived inside it. By the year 2045, the old villages were nearly empty. Natural birth rates had collapsed across Europe decades earlier. Infertility clinics stood where churches once stood. People spoke of conception the way earlier generations spoke of crop failures — a technical problem requiring corporate intervention. At first, artificial reproduction sounded merciful. Then necessary. Then mandatory. Couples applied for reproductive licenses through the Central Bioethical Authority. Approval depended on psychological stability scores, carbon efficiency ratings, medical desirability indexes, and civic compliance histories. Most people accepted it easily because the process had been introduced gradually, hidden behind the language of safety and science. Children were no longer born. They were commissioned. The largest facilities belonged to Genetek Europa, a corporation so intertwined with the government that citizens no longer distinguished between the two. Inside white laboratories stretching for kilometers, embryos floated in artificial wombs beneath fluorescent light. Genetic defects were removed. Behavioral tendencies adjusted. Intellectual capacities optimized according to labor projections. The advertisements called them “Children Free From Suffering.” Each infant received a registration sequence before its first breath. Not a name. A sequence. Patent-linked. Property-certified. Biologically authenticated. Some carried it invisibly beneath the skin in nanoscopic tissue markers. Others through genomic watermarking readable only by corporate scanners. You could not attend school, receive food credits, travel, or access healthcare without verification. People joked about it at first. “The old priests feared the Mark of the Beast,” they laughed. “Turns out it’s just bureaucracy.” But the old woman in Apartment 27B never laughed. She was nearly ninety and remembered stories her grandmother told her — stories from after the war, when books disappeared and heroes replaced saints. She remembered how easily human beings surrendered freedom once survival depended on permission. One evening her grandson asked why she kept a hidden garden on the balcony when synthetic nutrition tablets were free. She touched the soil carefully before answering. “Because whoever cannot feed himself,” she whispered, “will eventually obey anyone.” Outside, giant screens flickered over Belgrade. A government broadcast announced the newest educational reforms. Children would now begin neural synchronization lessons at age three to improve social harmony and reduce extremist individuality. The announcer smiled warmly as he spoke. Citizens applauded from their apartments. The old woman watched silently. She no longer feared machines or genetic engineering themselves. Tools were only tools. Her fear was older than technology. It was the fear of a world where memory had been erased so completely that slavery could return wearing the face of progress. And somewhere beneath the noise of drones, broadcasts, and factory lullabies, the ghost of the burned library still smoldered.

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mirukitsune · 10/9/2026, 7:53:46 PM · permalink

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lemonhelmet · 10/10/2026, 12:18:51 PM · permalink

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mirukitsune · 10/10/2026, 9:21:45 PM · permalink

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seraphima · 10/9/2026, 9:15:14 AM · permalink

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lemonhelmet · 10/9/2026, 9:37:00 AM · permalink

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