The Occupation (Occupy Earth Trilogy Book 2), page 1
The Occupation
Book 2 of the
Occupy Earth Trilogy
Robert Charlton
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Robert Charlton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
The Occupation: Book 2 of the Occupy Earth Trilogy
First Edition
Author website: wherewebe.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Prologue
2045: Newark – 3 years after the takeover
Six-year-old Elena awoke to the sound of shattering glass, followed almost immediately by the sound of her parents screaming.
Bewildered and half asleep, she wandered out of the bedroom in her pajamas and into the living room, where a strange scene greeted her. All three panes of the living room window were smashed, a cold draft was blowing in, shards of glass were strewn everywhere—and her father was lunging at what looked like a large mechanical hummingbird.
The hummingbird kept evading her father’s grasp, darting here and there just out of reach.
Elena’s eyes strayed towards the couch, where she discovered her mother lying slumped in an unnatural position, eyes open, an expression of horror on her face. She seemed to be staring straight at her daughter but couldn’t move or speak.
Elena began to cry, a loud keening wail.
Her father heard her. His head swung around and his eyes widened in dismay. “Hide, Elena!” he yelled. At the same moment a small dart came shooting out of the hummingbird and stung him in the neck.
His legs instantly crumpled beneath him and he fell to the floor. With a last effort he turned towards his daughter. His eyes were open but looked haunted and strange like her mother’s. His lips moved as he tried to say something, but all that came out was a meaningless burble.
Elena was bawling by now, and her bawl turned to a scream as the mechanical hummingbird suddenly turned its attention towards her.
Somehow she found her legs and stumbled towards the bedroom, screaming the whole way. She reached the door and slammed it shut, but she could still hear the angry buzz of the hummingbird’s wings just on the other side.
Putting the full weight of her little body against the door, she watched in dismay as the doorknob began to turn. Then an unstoppable force began pushing the door open. The hummingbird seemed far too small to accomplish such a feat, but somehow Elena found herself being pushed back right along with the door itself. Then the hummingbird slipped through the crack and released another dart.
It stung her in the wrist. She would have wailed even louder but suddenly she couldn’t seem to make a sound. The next thing she knew she was on the floor and unable to move at all. The hummingbird buzzed away.
Moments later another mechanical creature, this one much larger and more hawklike, picked her up in its talons and carried her away. Through unblinking eyes she saw the living room pass beneath her, her parents still lying where they had fallen.
The hawk took her through the shattered window and out into the cold night, flying high above the pavement. She was too numb to be scared; instead, as she was carried away from the only home she had ever known, she felt strangely serene.
She fell into a trance, and when she awoke, she was no longer herself.
Chapter 1
2057: Salesh (once NYC) – 15 years after the takeover
Her name was Lim 127. Once, a long time ago, it had been something else, but that hardly mattered now.
At the age of six she had been taken from her family to one of the domes. By then she could already speak Phant better than her parents, better than any of her friends at school. That was enough to seal her fate. She became a person of interest to the Phants, and they took her.
Lim meant librarian in Phant. Lim was the 127th menial assigned to the library staff, and she was one of about a thousand menials who served the Phants inside the dome-shaped force field surrounding Salesh. That force field was all that protected the Phants from the hostile humans without.
When she had turned fifteen (considered the age of adulthood by Phants), they had begun to let her visit her parents once a month. The visits were more important to her parents than they were to her. When she came, she brought much-needed infusions of Phant currency and supplies that could only be had from the Phant cities.
The visits were difficult for her. She hardly knew her parents anymore, and they had little to talk about. Each time, her mother hugged her and cried over her, and her father got all teary-eyed and gruffly asked how They were treating her, and did she have everything she needed (as if he could have supplied it), and was she getting to know any of her own kind inside the city.
She would answer, yes, the Phants were treating her fine, and no, there was nothing for which she lacked, and yes, she saw others of her own kind every day.
What she didn’t tell them was that, while she saw her fellow menials every day, and nodded at them from time to time, that was about the extent of their interactions. She and the other human occupants of Salesh lived a walled-off existence, each an island unto themselves. Whatever the Phants had done to them, it had had the effect of isolating them one from another.
Lim 127 admitted it to no one, but in truth she felt much more at home with the Phants than she did with her own kind. It wasn’t too much to say she loved them.
It was a strange thing: she knew at a certain level it was because of the conditioning they’d done to her when they’d first brought her in, but at a more visceral level it just didn’t matter. She loved the order and exactness the Phants brought to their lives—and by extension to hers. She loved their love of learning, she loved their devotion to science and art, and she loved their cities, which were orderly and compact—not the sprawl of ugly streets and ramshackle houses on the outside. Except for menials like her, all humans lived outside the domes in grim old buildings that, as far as Lim could see, were devoid of all art other than graffiti.
Whenever she had to leave Salesh and enter the world at large, she felt as if she were leaving a palace to slosh through a pig sty. For this and many other reasons, she kept her visits with her parents as short as possible. She had no feeling of home there.
Her real home was a tiny spherical room in the bilge of the city-ship where she was surrounded by her Phant books and music. There she could pursue her quiet hobbies. By now, at the age of eighteen, she was already becoming something of a scholar in Phant literature, which delighted the Phants no end and gave her real pleasure too. She led a calm, self-contained existence and felt that she was happy. She brought her parents supplie
s because it was the right thing to do, and she spent an hour with them each month because it was expected of her.
But those visits were hard, so hard. She had to grit her teeth each time she knocked on the door, and she always felt flooded with relief as soon as the visits were over.
Chapter 2
These mjinga are the worst yet. I swear they are the most troublesome species we Phants have ever met.”
“I couldn’t agree more. They’re dreadful, simply dreadful. Our biggest mistake was not wiping them all off the face of the planet when we first had the chance. Then we could have had a fresh start without all these headaches. Do they ever stop causing trouble?”
“No, they do not. They—“
The two Phants suddenly stopped talking as they rounded a corner and ran straight into Lim 127, who was busy dusting off one of the endless rows of bookshelves in the Humanity annex.
The two Phants towered over her, each well over eight feet tall. There was no mistaking them for human, what with their giant frames, noseless faces, and wasplike waists. They looked momentarily taken aback, but then they realized it was just another mjinga and passed her by brusquely without another word, ignoring her polite bow of respect.
Both Phants wore black sashes over their white robes, an indication they were Dom—Phants of some importance from the higher floors of the Thuvien. But why they were down here in the Mekt—in the windowless bilge of the city-ship set aside for menials—was a mystery. Most Phants never came down here. The Humanity annex was an afterthought, a place for dusty old texts and artifacts from outside the dome. Certainly the Phants weren’t going to contaminate their own glorious library with this sort of stuff!
Only one Phant, an odd duck named Hun, thought the study of humanity worthwhile for whatever reason, and it was he who had put together this haphazard collection of all things human in what otherwise would have been a barely used storage space in the bilge. It was a strange place, vast and cluttered, full of odds and ends that didn’t belong together. A cast iron skillet might share company with a Rembrandt, or a battery-operated DustBuster with a Bronze Age statue from the Shang dynasty, or an illuminated Celtic Bible with a dog-eared paperback featuring a bare-chested Viking clutching a raven-haired maiden. The whole thing felt chaotic and surreal, even to Lim’s eyes. Since Hun (along with every other Phant) had never ventured outside the dome, he appeared to have little sense of how human things fit together…or didn’t.
Some of the items that had ended up in the Humanity annex had been smuggled in by menials themselves over the years. Menials weren’t supposed to bring things into the domes from the outside, but sometimes they did anyway. A cook might have his favorite skillet, or a maid her favorite DustBuster. Other items, like the dog-eared paperback, might have arrived as packing material for more practical supplies entering the dome. But the vast majority of artifacts in the annex were there because of Hun himself, who had paid handsomely to have paintings and books and curios and whatnot carted in by the truckload.
It was Lim’s job to keep the place from falling into utter disarray. She organized the books as best she could, tried to protect the more fragile documents from damage, and kept the place dusted—a monumental feat that took up most of her time.
On occasion, the rare Phant would come down to the annex out of idle curiosity, just to have a look around at the oddball collection Hun had put together, but Hun was the only one who frequented the place on a regular basis. Over the past year or so, he had struck up an odd sort of friendship with Lim, one that continued to surprise her no end. They talked once or twice a week, always in English, at his specific request. Hun actually seemed to like humans—or at least menials, which was as close as he could get to an unaltered human inside the dome.
Other than Hun, most Phants wanted nothing to do with humans—which was why it was so surprising to see two Phants from the higher echelons of the Thuvien down here in the first place. Clearly they had no interest in humanity, other than to see them all dead. And perhaps they were looking for inspiration on how to achieve just that, here amidst the detritus of a civilization they so obviously despised.
They must have thought they were out of earshot as they carried on their conversation, but Lim happened to have exceptionally good hearing.
“I doubt she understood us anyway,” the one murmured to the other. “Most mjinga can barely speak a word of Phant.“
“It’s really a disgrace,” his partner agreed. Our toddlers speak more proficiently than most of them do. And these mjinga are supposed to be the cream of the human crop.”
“Mmm.” By this time the Phants were passing down the aisle adjacent to her own. Seeing her again, they stopped and stared down at her through the clutter of books with looks of plain disgust on their faces. “You—mjinga. Come over here,” one of them demanded.
Lim, who had been keeping her head down and dusting away with more than her usual vigor, looked up in surprise.
“Yes, you,” the Phant said impatiently. “Come over here. Or can’t you understand me?”
Lim walked over with duster in hand and stood before them with head bowed. “I understand you, sayid,” she replied in perfect Phant, other than a slight accent that all humans had compared with native speakers, whose mouths and tongues were shaped differently. But Lim’s words and phrasing, including the honorific sayid and the plural sayidi, were spot-on. She had worked diligently to make it so. “What can I do for you, sayidi?”
“For starters, you can explain to us what in Gehena’s name is wrong with your species. Why do they take such pleasure in confounding our best efforts to improve them? Why do they blatantly ignore our dictates—dictates that are all perfectly reasonable, or else we wouldn’t have issued them in the first place?"
“I don’t find them unreasonable, sayidi,” Lim replied. “They make perfect sense to me.”
“She’s fixed,” observed the second Phant. “She doesn’t count as a fair example of her species. You do know you’re fixed, don’t you, mjinga? We’re not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“Yes, of course, sayid,” Lim replied. “I was adjusted at a young age before I was allowed into the domes so that I might serve you better. We are a flawed species and require correction if we are to serve you properly. Or so it has been explained to me.”
The first Phant sniffed through vertical slits where a human’s nose would be. “That is essentially correct. I must admit, this one seems more intelligent than most. What is your name, mjinga?”
“Lim 127, sayid. I am honored by your presence.”
“Tell me, mjinga, have you ever ventured outside the dome?”
“I have, sayid. Once a month on visitation day, I visit my parents beyond the walls.”
“And what do you think of conditions out there?”
“Awful, sayid.” Lim 127 was not at all hesitant in voicing her opinions about Newark, which stood just beyond the protective force field of Salesh and had only gone downhill since the arrival of the city-ships some fifteen years ago.
“Indeed they are awful,” said the Phant. “Of course, we never venture beyond the dome walls ourselves, but we do monitor the outside world constantly, and what we see frankly disgusts us.”
“It disgusts me too, sayidi, if I may say so.”
“What is wrong with them?”
“Sayid?”
“Your fellow humans,” the Phant said impatiently. “What is wrong with them?”
“They are…not corrected, sayid. They are in their natural state. Their animal state. Perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?” the first Phant urged. “Speak.”
“I’m afraid it is not my place, sayid.”
“It is your place if we say it is. Now speak.”
“Perhaps you should correct them, too, sayidi,” Lim 127 replied in a small voice.
The two Phants looked at each other for a long moment. “Perhaps we should,” the first Phant replied. “Unfortunately that goes beyond our mandate. At least at present.”
“Meanwhile, we are stuck with these…these hupo,” the second Phant fumed. “Willful. Disobedient. Cruel. Don’t they realize our dictates are meant for their own good? Or are they simply too mjinga to understand?”
Lim heard the Phant word for stupid—mjinga—and took no offense. Clearly none was intended. Her people were stupid. Mjinga beyond belief! She thought so herself, and that had nothing to do with the conditioning she had received as a child. “Yes, sayidi, I believe they are too stupid to understand. Willful and stupid, as you say. But I am no one, sayidi. It is not my place to speak such opinions to such as yourselves.”
