The birds sang. The sun shone. And the City-State peopled (verb). The City-State hummed with a hundred thousand fertile young bodies and minds that grew into old bodies and continuously replaced themselves. The outer territory, the farms and the fishing community, fed back into the urban centre. Meat and crops flowed into factories and food and goods streamed into market places. Thousands and thousands of able workers swam down the City-State’s arteries. If they ran out of energy the entire City-State would freeze and collapse. To stave off it’s destruction the food smashed chaotically into the hundred thousand hungry mouths. Their energy levels were kept steadily afloat until they produced offspring to replenish themselves. They were less prioritised after that and were forced to survive off the scraps of the useful population.
Sewage was funnelled away and treated. Electricity fed back into the lights and sights and sounds of the city state. It’s glitz attracting a thousand thousand hostile invaders. An unthinking brutish mass craving death and blood. With no god but greed and no reason beyond annihilation. The city was quick to convert thousands of the population into soldiers. Propaganda blared and news was fed back into the masses. Soldiers ransacked the Barbarians savage wild-lands and brought back ever greater riches into the heart of the City-State. This was nothing compared to the endless trading and diplomacy and warring the City-State did with a hundred others and nothing compared to technology and science and religion and class struggle and the governments endless endless micromanaging of a million infinitesimals- products streamed and humans flooded from a thousand wombs and terrifying Obelisk’s were built towering over all- the City-State constructing horrific effigies to itself again and again the ultimate narcissist the ultimate tyrant perpetuating the misery of millions in a thousand broad and subtle ways.
What was one man or woman to do against that?
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