Wood Chips

It was years after the war when the government of Kleptotania told my people that we would be the proud witnesses to the might of empire.

By the time I was born, the village of Soral, in the province of Katintan, had already been under the rule of the greater Kleptotanian empire for thirty years.

The empire fought a vicious war alongside the Scurrilitians and other allies against a seemingly implacable threat, but after that war was won, the allies quibbled over the spoils and became enemies.

We were so evenly matched that we were in a deadlock. No one could act, but no one retracted their claims to new territory or dared back down in the face of aggression.

We also had ideological differences with the Scurrilitians, which grew more strained as the world seemed to divide itself between supporters of their ideology and ours.

We learned that the Scurrilitians built a weapon of such power that it would make them unstoppable, unless we built such weapons to match them!

It wasn’t long before the military came in and built roads and erected new buildings.

Before then, my village was a grazing ground for herdsman, a planting ground for farmers. Though we’d long been part of the Empire this was the first time we were gifted new technology.

They replaced our huts with houses, ran electricity, and introduced us to marvels which we did not even know existed. We could drive cars and be educated on how to build and maintain these things ourselves.

We became part of the modern world.

I recall how proud my father was. He told me we were the vanguard of a new race of people, loyal subjects hand chosen to participate in a grand expansion.

The first time they were to demonstrate their new weapon they sent scientists door to door to bid us witness the spectacle.

We would witness it many times after as well. They tested it casually, frequently, assuring us we were at a safe distance.

When I was only cresting twenty years of age, and studying at the School for Agriculture, thirty of my fellow students and I were out on a land survey when the bomb erupted in the distance.

An orange and green glow thrust high into the air a cloud which mushroomed out for miles into the atmosphere and rained black ash down on us as we travelled along in our mechanical rovers.

We laughed and brushed it off our skin.

It is a thunderbolt from God, I thought, but was careful to keep that thought to myself, as the Kleptotanian empire frowned on religion.

Later we found a nearby lake, which one student remarked he’d never seen before.

Some supposed it was made by the bombs.

We decided to take a swim to cleanse ourselves of the dust and ash our new superweapon kicked up.

Now I lay in hospice, dying at twenty-nine.

I can’t help but think it has something to do with the mighty weapon which was supposed to save my people from the aggression of the Scurrilitians.

I am the last of the thirty-one people who went on that survey only nine years ago. All my fellow students have since fallen ill and passed from this earth. So too with others in our province, many too young for it to be mere coincidence.

My sister, Aliya, visits often. She says that our people’s attempts to petition the Kleptotanian government only garnered one consistent answer: we suffer from a mass paranoia.

According to them, we got it into our heads that a few untimely deaths are the results of the tests.

Our symptoms, they say, are psychosomatic.

If belief could end this excruciating pain, I would certainly make it so.

I should not want to be caught praying to a God in which I am not supposed to believe, but I pray silently anyway.

I pray for relief, even if in death, and would take my own life if it were not for the further hurt it would cause my family.

Aliya cleans at the military bases, which are conspicuously much farther from the test sites than our village. She overheard two prominent military men talking about the devastating illnesses which continue to befall us.

In a dismissive tone, one of them said: “When we chop wood, chips fly.”

She wept at my bedside as she told me this.

Of course, the implication is clear.

We were not the recipients of a great honor.

Just another part of the experiment.

I will get no justice, but I sincerely hope that if there is a God, He will exact it in my stead when I am gone.

***** * *****

The true story on which this is based is recounted by survivors and their descendants in the 2014 documentary The Polygon, on which I further expound in this Horror to Culture article.