The Great Game 🎲 Aatari Doom & Ataari Prime
Escape from Aatari Doom
— 320 Years Ago —
The guards never checked for explosive devices. The political fabric of Aatari Doom was so deeply woven that they never imagined anyone would think to tear it apart.
Qayam wanted to take down the entire apparatus, but the best he could do at this moment was to save his own skin and throw a spanner in the works.
Long before the first line of bodies got halfway to the Tarry Dot he lobbed a vixion implosion grenade over their heads. His aim was slightly off-center, but it bounced and the rounded slope put it back on course. It landed squarely on top of the Tarry Dot.
He didn’t wait to see what happened, but grabbed Esther by the arm and ran back over the lip of the volcano and through the slowly ascending lines of sacrificial victims.
It was easy for Qayam and Esther to make their way through the six lines because they were starting to break up and scatter. The sacrificial victims saw the conflagration of light above them up ahead. They heard the cries. They saw the wounded Aatari coming back over the rim to safety.
The general chaos allowed Qayam and Esther to make their way past the guards, and get to the interplanetary transport hub. By the time the guards had figured out the problem and had alerted the authorities, they’d already reached Aatari Prime.
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Over the next several years Qayam and Esther made friendships with anyone willing to carry on the revolt Qayam started. The capital was the perfect place to start a rebellion, since it held all the powerful institutions of military and economic power. It also had innumerable think tanks, institutes, universities, and associations, which allowed them to recruit among groups less closely monitored by the Aatari security agents. Aatari Prime was also close to the planet Kollari, which was an enormous tourist resort and conference centre.
Kollari was a planet slightly smaller than Earth, yet it was inhospitable due to the fact that it had winds that blew from 50 to 700 kilometres an hour. The Ataari had constructed thousands of domes that protected them from the colourful havoc of their sky. These domes were two-metres thick and were made of transparent ithion glass, girded by invisible ferridian iron. Beneath thesew fantastic domes, there were parks larger then small countries, conference centres that stretched for a dozen kilometres, mineral spas and art galeries, cafes and restaurants, brothels and dancehalls, rivers and lakes, grand canyons and dune parks, ski hills and scuba reefs, playgrounds and billiard halls, badminton halls and tennis courts, hippodromes and racetracks, campgrounds and casinos, climbing walls and beaches, surfdromes and floating yoga palaces, motocross trails and nature reserves, as well as 90 thousand golf courses crisscrossing the planet (one planetary round took about twenty years to complete).
Aatari Prime and Kollari were two of the places where people from all over the Kraslika came to do business and make deals, to seek rest, relaxation and pleasure, and to dig for information about who was doing what throughout the thirteen universes.
Qayam and Esther were well placed to find out who might be controlling Aatari Doom, and who might be willing to throw grenades to prevent another Tarry Dot. They flooded the information outlets with pictures of the martyred Doomers and their mourning families. They worked especially hard to recruit other expat Doomers, since their training in complete obedience and sacrifice came in handy: it could be turned around to plague the inventors.
Qayam was so disgusted by the way the Aatari Lok government had allowed Aatari Doom to sacrifice its citizens (under the pretext that they were free to organize their society however they felt appropriate) that he made it his life’s work to find out who benefitted from this arrangement.
Although the Ataari Lok government never admitted that they’d allowed such a thing, Qayam found out that several military officials were being paid vast sums of money to feed the Tarry Dot with Doomer bodies. What he never found out however was why anybody would want to feed bodies into a Black Dot, which turned out to be a high density black matter mechanism of some sort, the technology of which escaped the Aatari. As soon as the whole horrible business was exposed, whoever it was that paid for the use of the planet took the machine and disappeared.
It seemed to Qayam that his life’s work had just begun.
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Next: 🎲 The Best Laid Plans
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