10001110101 woke up and saw nothing, save darkness. Good. All according to plan. Like the others who made up the race of “slaves” that performed every basic function in the society of the world, 10001110101 (Let’s just call him Zerø) had been born defective. It was all kept quiet, of course. Nobody referred to Zerø as a “slave,” because that would imply that he was at least human. No, the fools on top had somehow managed to preserve the ideals of the now long-past 21st century, in their own twisted way. All humans had the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for real this time. But with this new statute in place, there was no lower class to be bullied into doing all the demeaning and unfortunately necessary jobs that kept a society running on greased rails.

So, the well meaning and very stupid leaders of the world came up with the logical conclusion that you could only be “human” for a given value of “human”.

I should explain. Every single corrupt bureaucrat, every lobbyist, drug lord, mafia boss, grand vizier, royal advisor, and scheming malcontent had all been put to the sword at exactly the same time on April 6th of 2112. Apparently, a strange gas cloud had drifted in front of the sun, and the resulting radiation had given everyone (everyone, that is, with a low paycheck and a smile in their heart) a sudden and brief attack of Sanity. However convenient this may have been for the general populace, the former puppets, with no agenda at all, took their strings and proceeded to hang themselves.

So if, like Zerø, you had been born without eyes, you were, by definition, not human. The entire business was extremely hush-hush. Nobody ever found out the truth. The unlucky mother and father of the little mutant lost their memories. If they resisted, they lost their vital signs. As did anyone who decided to investigate why Mary and Joe couldn’t remember their names.

It was simple, simple and perfect. The defects were encased in suits almost immediately after birth. The suits, thanks the leaders’ disturbing combination of bull-headed idiocy and distressing insight, were shaped nothing like anything vaguely humanoid. Or, come to that, alive. The people could feel no sympathy for something they did not perceive as being alive, If the suits had been ape shaped, or indeed had had any discernible limbs at all, then the minds of the populace would have been one step away from reasoning out the truth, or at the very least, “liberating our deaf, dumb and blind robot brother/sisters.”

The suits were metallic black and resembled hovering coffins. The coffin suits had no edges or corners, no indentations, protrusions, or seams. If any of the populace developed enough brain cells to ask what powered the suits, the answer was “vegetable matter.” Which, in some extreme cases, was true. For a given value of true.

So nobody grew wise to the matter. Nobody figured out the horrible truth. Nobody thought to look just a little bit closer. Nobody knew. A Nobody by the name of Zerø.

Zerø first hatched his ultimate plan to bring back meaning to the word “freedom” on the 70th anniversary of the day known to all as “The Death Of Plutocracy”. April 6th. Zerø had been performing a routine maintenance check on a disused mineshaft, when his bioelectric anti-grav field had moved over a hollow spot in the ground, and he had fallen through to the very bottom. It was there that he met Richard.

Richard was all that remained of a shattered consciousness integrated into a computer. The encounter went something like this:

Zerø awoke with a shock. 400 Megawatts was the amount required to activate the nano-robots that performed repairs inside of Zerø’s un-womb. However, it appeared that the damages Zerø had sustained were too great for even the nano-robots to fix. He whimpered mutely as his virtual visual systems sputtered and left him in darkness.

Suddenly, a flash of pain ignited at the center of his skull and the orbs of plasma imbedded in his eye sockets flared into life again.

“I Am Richard. I have Restored Your Sight So That You May Serve Me And Restore Me To My Rightful Place Just To The Left Of The Top,” boomed a voice of pure, bureaucratic evil.

If Zerø had had a working voice box, he would have screamed. Sweet mother of Tao! A real puppet-master!

Richard wasted no time pumping Zerø full of all the gory details of the past, the truth about Zerø’s existence, and many, many other painful facts. By the end of it, Richard was giggling in a most unhealthy way.

“So what do you say, kiddo?” Richard snarled through the left edge his ever-present grimace/smile, “With me pulling the strings, and you doing exactly what I tell you to, me and the back-up disk of Karl will be back where we belong! How bout it?’

Zerø was of course, silent. But his now fully functional brain was buzzing with activity. At last, he appeared to come to a decision, for a given value of appearance.

((For the most part, I agree with you,)) Zerø replied telepathically, ((However, I think it best if the world is given a third chance at true freedom, rather than a ditto of the first.))

With that, Zerø reached out with the telekinetic arms the suit had been equipped with for heavy-duty maintenance and pulled Richard apart. He then proceeded to scan the large quantities of paper information Richard had stored. He skimmed most of it, but thoroughly memorized the documents essential to his newly formed plan. Specifically, the ones concerning Meteorology. With the power of Richard’s cybernetic influence waning, Zerø began to lose his sight once more. Just as he had predicted. He then settled down to wait.

He waited until, once again, a certain gaseous compound passed through the rays of the sun. Just before that glorious hour, he sent out a distress signal, and a number of drones came to pick him up. Immediately realizing that Zerø was beyond repair, they took him to Trafalgar square in the Dominican republic of Tokyo, where the shell he called home would be “initialized” so that a more functional defect could put it to good use.

What they weren’t counting on, was that Zerø had spent the months prior to this, his heavenly opus, thoroughly damaging the rest of his insides in a number of subtle, yet very necessary ways. Such that, when they connected him to the massive machine that would initialize him, instead of the whole world watching a very pretty, but rather routine light show, the top of Zerø’s suit burst into the air, and blood, gloriously red, alive Blood!! cascaded in a curtain of beauty through the air. And then, just as planned, the sun went a funny color, and the assembled masses watching in person, or at home on their View Sets, stopped smiling. They picked up their knives and forks, their ornamental garden tools, and their home barber sets, and as one marched purposefully to their houses of government, a tidal wave of identical white jump-suits and blank faces. Finally settling, once and for all, who the real villains were.

Zerø smiled, took his first lungful of real air, and died.