We dive past the slums that form all that I know. We drive away from the industrial belt that houses all the factories and plants and refineries that tower over my people's lives. We drive into a strange place, a place with paved roads, and large houses, and large yards with green grass and beautiful flowers and metal fences. This is so much stranger than anything I have ever witnessed before. I knew that the overclass lived like this, but seeing it in person is something else entirely. It's beautiful. And it is so, so deeply disturbing. 

We drive over the paved roads and stop at the gates of a tall and strange building. It is far larger than any of the buildings I have seen before. And there are all sorts of shapes and patterns jutting out all over the building, as well as the figures of what seems to be angels, dressed in ostentatious and grand clothes that angels do not really wear. There is colourful glass on the windows. The whole structure is almost too much to take in at once. Though I can tell that it's a very important structure to the eyes of the overclass. That must be why they made it so grand. 

"Come on," the guard barks at me, opening the door and grabbing my wrist. He drags me out of the police vehicle and he drags me up the large stone steps to the building. There are many of these steps and the guard is going so fast that I stumble a few times. Yet, I manage to make it up the steps and then I am shoved inside the large, carved wooden doors. 

Inside the building is almost more grand. Paintings of different scenes adorn different walls. The walls themselves have many shapes and lines carved into them, and there are marble statues everywhere. There are many benches made of polished wood, with carved sides and metal trimmings. The floor is coloured in an intricate pattern. The light comes in in many different colours from the many different colours on the windows. It is amazing, the look of this place. It is amazing. Yet it is deeply disturbing. I have never been somewhere so grand in my life. 

I ask the Great Mother for help. 

We are lead through the rows of chairs and up the steps to a small door at the back. This door leads to a large library, with rows and rows and rows of immaculate, polished shelves that are spaced out and filled with books of all sorts. There are many desks here, large and carved ornately and polished to a shine, with plush chairs lining them. There are large windows that let in a lot of natural light, as well as artificial lights on the ceiling. 

There are many people here, pouring over thick books with intensity. It's bizarre, yet I know that there are members of the overclass who spend all their time reading since they do not have to work. At the opening of the door, some of their eyes turn to me. 

"What's going on here?" An old man asks. 

"This young, uneducated girl thought that she could read and understand the Compedium of Life."

"I'm not a girl!" I protest. The overclass often gets this thing about me wrong. 

"Of course you are!" the guard barks. "Look at you!"

"He is right," the old man begins. "The Great Ruler gives us our bodies and this gives us our genders, we have to be appreciative of His Will."

"I don't care about your Ruler," I spit back. I know I am dead. I know that no matter what I do, no matter what I say, I'm dead. I've gone too far and done too much to be saved at this point. But still, it causes a stone of dread to sink in my stomach to be so rebellious against the overclass. It causes my chest to squeeze in anxiety. 

"Then why are you reading our Book?" a middle aged woman asks. "This Book is the Ruler's Will and His words."

"You all do not know the will of the Ruler. You merely think you do." I am talking right now of course about the Mother, who the Ruler seems to be a parallel for. 

"How impudent of you!" another old man exclaims. "You know nothing at all, you can barely even read, you haven't any knowledge of what came before, and you claim to know the Will of the Ruler? Absurd!"

"Want a bet?" I demand. It feels good, being able to talk to the overclass as if they are equals. It feels good, to be able to say the things I have always longed to say to them. It feels good, feels empowering, feels freeing and thrilling, just as much as it feels abjectly terrifying. And, in a way, I am appreciative of the fact that I am already dead, because that means that I can go out with a bang. And I fully intend to go out with a bang. 

"I challenge you to interpret one single story from the Book," a younger woman demands, "and we can see if you have interpreted it correctly."

"Alright," I counter. "I will."

"Do the story of the emperor's daughter. That is a very fundamental story that explains our world in perfect detail. You will not be able to understand it." These words are spoken by a middle aged man. 

"You are clearly not able to understand it," I retort back, "because if you could, then you would not be holding our people as slaves."

"You are not slaves," the middle aged man replies, "and even if you were, it is alright for good and just people who follow the Will of the Ruler to own slaves."

"If anyone owns slaves," I respond, "then that makes them not good and just, that makes them inherently not follow the Will of the Ruler. And we are slaves, for we have to make great, great sacrifices to work for you under the threat of death."

"Following the Will of the Ruler is all that is necessary to be good and just," the first old man states. 

"The true Will of the Ruler is for all people to be equal," I counter.

"We have studied many texts about the Ruler and His will for all of our lives," the middle aged woman declares. "How could you possibly know what His Will is?"

"I have lived amongst my community for all of my life," I riposte, "and down in the slums we know. We feel the Ruler in our hearts, in every breath we take and every thought or feeling we have. He is in our lives, and He is our lives, and He is our strength and our love, and we know Him."

"Uneducated swine," the second old man comments. 

"Anyways, the story is that a young girl was held as a servant by the emperor, who was the adult in her life. He kept the rest of her people as slaves as well. But the Great Ruler came to the girl and told her to stand against the emperor. This she did do, along with another slave. Yet the emperor did not budge, and so the slaves had to wage war and they were successful."

"You fundamentally misunderstand the story!" the young woman exclaims. "the princess was not a mere servant, she was a princess with a lofty education and much power! This is why she was able to stand up to the emperor and lead the other, uneducated, illiterate slaves in war. It says clearly in the story that she was a daughter of the emperor."

"Was she a princess though?" I respond. "There are other ways of being the emperor's child, without being royalty."

"How, you stupid child?" the middle aged woman asks me. 

"Because," I respond, "first of all, we are all each other's children. Secondly, when you are a child and someone else is the main adult around you, they are the main adult who is there and who exists in your life, you become their child. You become their child because they are the ones here and available to you, and you, as a child, latch onto them and see them as your parent. Even if they abuse you, even if they mistreat you, even if they hate you so much, if they are the main adult around you, then you will latch onto them and see them as like a parent. And thus you become their child, even if you are an abused child."

"What proof do you have for these heretical and unfounded thoughts?" the middle-aged man asks. 

"The servants who go to your houses, the children who you use to do all your domestic labour, they are isolated from their real families and you and your people are the only adults around them. They cannot help but see you as their parents, they cannot help but latch onto you. Even though you guys abuse and mistreat them horribly. Because they are children and you are there. And by them being children and you being there, they become your children. For we were all meant to be each other's children."

"That is absurd, and it doesn't make any sense," the second old man spits out at me.

"You would never understand it unless you felt it," I reply. 

"There is no proof of what you claim," the middle aged woman tells me. "How do you prove that any of this is true?"

"There are various proofs throughout the text. First of all, it says that the girl was a child of the enslaved people, that she was born from them. But then she was living with the emperor and became his child. Who does this happen to? This happens to servants, who are born from among the enslaved people and are brought to the oppressors to grow up and be raised under and near them."

"But that is the very transgression of the princess," the middle aged woman states. "She is from the slaves but the emperor was so moved by her infinite beauty that he took her in as his own."

"All children have infinite beauty," I reply. "But there are other hints at this being the case as well. First of all, it says that the emperor was not just her father but also her ruler. No kind and caring parent imposes themselves as a ruler over their child. That is what uncaring and entitled parents do."

"It was a special case," the young woman explains. "The emperor was an emperor of the whole world. He was the ruler of everyone. So he had to be the ruler of her. This is how royal families work."

"Is it? I doubt I would ever find a kind and loving family where any member sees themselves as the rulers of the others."

"You just do not understand the structure of royal and high-born families," the first old man exclaims. 

"But she wasn't high born," I tell him, "she was born a slave. Anyways, she as a teenager told the Great Ruler that she was nothing compared to the emperor. No child raised in a healthy environment would ever think that of their parent. Only an abused child would. And emperors who abuse their adopted children are not good fathers."

"She simply meant that she had no power compared to the power of the emperor," the first old man explains, "and that her trying to change his mind was impossible."

"That is a possibility," I agree, "but she did not say that her power was nothing against his power. She didn't say that her position was nothing against his position. She said that her very being itself was nothing against his being. She asked who was she against him. Not what was her power against his, not what was her place against his, but who was she, who was she, as a very person, as a very being, against him as a very being."

"That's really a stretch," the second old man says. "She simply meant that her position was nothing against his."

"Even if that was the case, what kind of father gives his daughter no power compared to his own power? What kind of father does not even listen to his daughter's words?"

"You simply do not understand what it was like at that time," the middle aged man presses. 

"I do understand," I respond, "because those times were a mirror to our times and our times are a mirror to those times. Anyways, another piece of evidence is that the emperor says in the same breath for both the girl and the other slave to get back to work. Now, in any society, and according to basic logic, the work that slaves do is very different from the work that respected citizens do. For the emperor to tell both slaves to go back to work at the same time, in the same breath, without distinguishing one type of work from another, this really indicates that the type of work that both slaves were doing was similar. It was both slavery."

"That is a reach," the first old man tells me. "Both of them were told to go to work in the same breath because both of them had work to do, but of course the work that each one had to do was different."

"If it was fundamentally different, then the emperor would have, unconsciously, made a distinction between the two types of work. But he did not. Meaning that the type of work they did was similar. Meaning that everything that "go back to work" entailed was similar for the two slaves. Psychologically that would not happen. The emperor would not talk as if there was no distinction between the work of the two slaves if there was an important distinction."

"You are pulling ideas from thin air, girl," the middle aged woman tells me. I don't comment again that I'm not a girl. "Calm down and look at it through sober eyes. If you can, that is. I doubt that you have developed the capacity to."

"Exactly," the second old man agrees. "It's possible to tell two different people to get back to two different kinds of work at once."

"It is possible, but it's unlikely," I counter. "If the two different types of work are inherently different, then anyone would make a distinction between the two in their mind, and that distinction would show up in their speech. Psychologically, they would not speak about the two different types of work as if they were implicitly one and the same. It's very unlikely. And, seeing as how easily and how naturally the emperor spoke his words, it's more likely that he saw the work of both slaves as being similar."

"You're not sure of anything, are you, girl?" the middle aged man spits at me. 

"I am sure of the people in my community. I am sure of the work they are forced to do each and every day under the threat of death. I am sure of the hunger, the poverty, the sickness, the misery that bleeds through every part of our lives. And I'm sure of how we have to work ourselves down to the bone, down to exhaustion, making you and your people rich. I am sure that this is exactly what the Great Ruler would teach against, would warn against, if She was anyone worth believing in. 

"And I know the toil and the isolation and the abuse and the misery that your servants face. I have seen them and talked to them and cried with them. They are part of my community and they are devastated, devastated, so completely devastated by what you do to them. Yet I have seen them and heard them say that despite all the abuse, they cannot help but cling to you as if you were their parents, because for large stretches of their lives, you are the only adults that they have. 

"I know that these children are the most abused, the most afflicted, the most wretched of our community. And they are from us, and are fundamentally a part of our community, despite being forced to be your abused and neglected children as well. These people are the ones who most have a right to confront you and stand against you and bring you down.