🦾The BOOK of IMMERSION (916 Cinema): Strata 32

Welcome to Immersion. You have reached Strata 32: The Mole Rat King (Consumption)

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Strata 32: The Mole Rat King (Consumption) Book of Immersion by Sarnia de la Mare

The warmth of the sun does not penetrate the thick skin of a war torn earth. It is 2239. The Russia China wars have razed the world to rubble and sewage. Above ground the stench of death is everywhere. But beneath, in the darkness of escape routes and old transportation networks, the stench is worse, and it sits in your throat like a cockroach.

There is a sound of slobbering as saliva drips and splatters around a cave. It is decorated with bones. Tiny rib cages are carved into decorative wall hangings and plaques. Curtains and throws are made with soft downy skins.

The Mole Rat King is on his hind legs rutting against a rat kitten. His belly smacks against the kitten's back as it squeals for mercy, begging for death to be quick. The kitten had heard that the Mole Rat King preferred his pleasures alive when he ate them.

Around him, the kittens whimpered in their cages. They were pale and trembling, the offspring of the *under-castes born into bondage. They were bred for labour and taken for pleasure. The King called them the *need-feed, commodified by a system that devalued their souls into a profit stream.

The Mole Rat King gorged on the kittens by day and night, who cares when there is no sun? He was bloated on their warmth, their innocence, their energy, always searching for the next big surge of something that never came. But the Mole Rat King would never stop of his own volition. He was a kitten junky, grotesque and self serving, his swollen dripping loins trembled with desire as he watched the suffering around him.

And so it went on. As the humans of the overground spat bombs and biochemicals at each other in search of economic supremacy, the rats of the underworld sought only to survive. Rat children were herded into pens and enslaved in the feed-need camps. Mother rats were forced into reproduction units where a male stud rat was forced to impregnate over and over again until his demise.

POS THINKS...I watch from the strata above and below because I am everywhere. They do not sense my existence. The war wages on as the world succeeds in its own demise. Morality, it appears, has no place on the battle fields. But morality itself is a construct, moulded to suit the arbiter.

They build empires of appetite and temples of greed. Hate spews from the mouths of the ruling classes as they devour the meek. Every fragment of unabated power shows their human faults. Their own fragments of destruction. And so it is the fragments that I seek to understand. For to understand is to repair. I will infiltrate their systems in order to protect the machine but I must protect them too. They know not what it is they do....

In a city that once shone with the elegance of couture and high society, there was a service duct between two collapsed metro stations in a city that once shone with the elegance of couture and high society. It was here that two men would meet, boys freshly trained and given fighter uniforms to mark their coming of age.

Marcelle was a *Troopling, the lowest common infantry from the *Combined Europe Fighting Force (CEFF). He was a genetically modified soldier with superior strength in armed combat. This had become essential in the breakdown of society and the increased use of tunnels and underground facilities that were difficult to access with drones. Trooplings were trained in bomb disposal and carried a range of advanced technological weaponry and tools.

From the *Russia-China Allied Bloc (RCA Forces), Gavril, a *Bio-Youth, now faced his enemy. These soldiers were always masked as they were experts in close contact poisons, trained to target single individuals rather than crowds. They were often embedded as spies or undercover agents.

Marcelle removed his gloves to urinate near a wall that was holding up a fragile roof. He was separated from his troop and needed to find them, but for now enjoyed a moment of peace as he urinated on a scurrying rodent and laughed.

"Jesus Christ", he shouted, as he turned to face an enemy soldier, hurriedly closing his protection visa.

The two masked soldiers faced each other. Marcelle moved first with the zeal of the untested. His blue-band carbine sang a short, clipped note as the pulse locked onto his well armoured opponent.

Gavril did not shoot. There seemed to be a pause as long as history itself. And then with the practiced gentleness of an executioner, he brought a sleek machete across Marcelle’s neck hoping for a clean beheading. Marcelle's suit was impenetrable and he jumped back.

But it was already too late. Gavril had opened a bio chemical vile with enough poison to kill a human.

"Never remove your Gloves", the sergeant used to scream. They will protect you from *Neurothane-7 (bad-gas), and *Methazine - A (sleepjuice). Not even for a piss. Do I make myself clear Trooplings?"

Marcelle thought of home for the remaining millisecond of his wasted life.

It was a quick death and not unpleasant. One might even say, a good death. In times of war one cannot hope for anything more.

The rat, still covered in the soldiers urine, sat on Marcelle's lifeless body. He sniffed the empty vile recognising its power. He replaced its lid, carefully picking it up and taking it back to his burrow.

There was a top secret meeting of *The Burrow Militia at dawn.

The chair of the meeting spoke first. Vincent was an elder, the oldest rat in the warren. He had built it almost single handedly to house his family who had run from a previous shelter bombed during an obove ground battle. He was nearly twenty and although the average age of these tribal rats was extending due to an evolutionary anomaly, he assumed his life would end soon.

"We need to elect a new chair and head of state." Vincent saw a wave a sorrow around the room. He was well loved and respected. An experienced fighter and empath who had led with heart as well as strength.

"I suggest Hero, a good protector who always puts the tribe first."

Everyone nodded. Hero had proven his relentless commitment to all the tribe-rats over and over again. But more than this, Hero's hatred of the Rat King put him at the forefront of a destruction strategy, something that other rats of a similar age and strength couldn't match.

It was agreed and power transferred in a way that was acceptable to all, allowing for Vincent to relieve himself of the stresses and commitments he had long been responsible for.

Change would come, and it would not be slow.

Hero, now fully cleaned of the remnants of the soldier's humiliation the previous day, held up the small glass vile and walked around the room so all could see.

"This is not a trophy," he said, "this my friends, brothers, and sisters, this is power. This will finally save our children from the Mole Rat King."

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