Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Bronson went on. "I'm controlling you some now, Morrow. You can't move.
We're in a hurry so I'll make it brief; there's a job to do. A perfect
calculating machine, maybe the most perfect one in the Universe,
limitless, inexhaustible. Secretly, Freedom Unlimited started releasing
people, clearing them of aberrations, clearing their nervous systems
of sludge, fusing emotion with analytical power, so the perfect
calculating machine could operate. The movement spread so fast, it
threatened various governments, including those in power. The status
quo would rather maintain power and be ignorant and blind than to give
up their power to the final step of progress. There was a pogrom. The
real reason couldn't be revealed of course, so the big powers cooked up
a war to cover up the purge. It got out of hand. The result was that
civilization was about wiped out. The world burned. Freedom Unlimited
had learned the power of the human brain, but they were too few, and
the Psychologists managed to fight them long enough to carry through
the war. Freedom Unlimited fled to Mars. They couldn't engage in
wholesale slaughter. But they had to survive."
It was so clear now in Bronson's mind, as though he were experiencing
it.
"Many of the scientists had been killed, only a few reached Mars.
But they had launched a Plan. They planted basic undying commands,
responses, in the reactive primitive cells of individuals whom they
knew would reproduce in kind. They knew how to treat genes like
chemical formulae. They knew the genes and cells would carry these
commands from generation to generation. The commands led to THE CALL. A
call to come to Mars, that's all. Once they got to Mars, they would be
free."
Bronson leaned forward. "But Freedom Unlimited didn't anticipate the
utter nihilism, the complete inhuman attitude of those who had defeated
them. There were variables. Freedom Unlimited couldn't anticipate the
utter power and suppression put into effect by the Psychologists,
the reflex boys. That they would condition every bit of imaginative,
creative, original thought and action out of everyone but a small elite
who, because of their own destructive nihilistic attitudes, were never
human in the first place, but only aberrated monsters. And all the rest
of humanity became little more than robots, zombies, mechanicals, their
analytical power chopped off, short-circuited completely. They can
only have fun like well-trained moronic children. With bells ringing
everywhere, the Pavlovians turned humans into dogs."
Morrow didn't say anything. His face was pinched and afraid, confused
and helpless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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