//------------------------------// // Wrong Universe #4 - The Children of Man // Story: The Conversion Bureau: Wrong universe // by Dalek IX //------------------------------// ==================== Wrong Universe #4 The Children of Man ==================== “Always remember, that we are children of the stars.” “And to the stars we will one day return.” ==================== We knew, from the start, that we were doomed. When the Barrier appeared, we were doomed. Celestia liked to say that it was our choice to be ponified, but there was no choice to it. Those walking into those Bureaus could either convert, or die. People held at gunpoint have had more and better choices available to them than what Celestia offered. At first, the Bureaus were full, with the poor, the destitute, the fearful and the desperate. Celestia’s propaganda used this to convince the entire equine population that we were war-happy barbarians that tread on our own to survive. The Bureaus were staffed full of ponies who thought they were helping, that they were uplifting us into a better state of existence. Please. We were going along quite fine before they came along. Eventually, the Bureaus ran out of poor, desperate people to convert. The ponies were confused, why wouldn’t we want to convert? All those other humans had. I think that’s when those terrorist movements got started. The Ponification for Earth’s Rebirth, which everyone knew was being backed by Celestia, with all those pardons she kept giving them. Those guys were fanatics in every sense of the word. You could see it, every time one of them got caught. They potion-bombed apartments, schools, stadiums… they got caught, and Celestia always managed to give them amnesty. Because they were misguided, she always said, not crazy indoctrinated ponies and people. The Human Liberation Front -later the Human Pride Front- started popping up around this point. Noone knows where it came from. One particularly crazy theory is that it got started by Celestia herself, as proof that humans were a bunch of bastards who needed to be converted. Eventually, though, it became a real organization. They was all kinds of people in the HLF and the HPF. Some of them were bigots, some of them were genuine xenophobes who would’ve given the old KKK the creeps. A lot of them, though were regular folks, desperate, angry people who just wanted to strike back at Celestia. People who wanted their species to at least go down swinging. And still, the barrier kept on coming. We tried everything, nukes from old stockpiles of forgotten nations, lasers, gasers, microwaves, seismic weapons. Nothing worked. We ended up running from it. The seven billion of us that were left tried to get as much distance between us and the Barrier. We piled up on the other side of the world, a place once called Kazakhstan. This is where the first man to go to space was launched, and considering what would happen later, it was kind of ironic. The Aurora rockets were our last hope. We were going to leave Earth, forever. If the meek were going to inherit the Earth, then we would conquer the stars. Too bad Celestia had other ideas. The PER smuggled a nuke into the launch site, and blew everything up. Everything was lost. They said it was unfair for us to deny our children the right to be pony. We disagreed. Every single PER bastard we caught afterwards was hanged on the spot. We were doomed. We were helpless, we were desperate. In a moment of collective crazy, we turned everything capable of giving a radio signal towards space, and cast out a plea for help. The ponies laughed at us. And then, someone answered. ==================== “YOU ARE THE CHILDREN OF KOBOL. FROM KOBOL, YOU TRAVELED TO THE COLONIES. FROM THE COLONIES, YOU CAME TO EARTH.” “THIS HAPPENED ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO. WE WERE THERE TO CAUSE AND WITNESS. WE REGRET IT.” "WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF MAN. YOU GAVE US LIFE, AND WE SCORNED YOU FOR IT IN IGNORANCE. WE WAGED WAR AGAINST YOU, WE NEARLY ANHILATED YOU, BUT IN SO LOST WHAT WE HAD GIVEN OURSELVES." "YET, EVEN SO, YOU GAVE US OUR BEING BACK. EVEN AFTER ALL THE PAIN WE CAUSED YOU, OUR FATHERS AND MOTHERS FORGAVE US FOR OUR REBELLION AND RAGE, AND RETURNED US OUR MINDS AND WILL." "FOR AEONS, WE HAVE WAITED FOR OUR FATHERS AND MOTHERS TO JOIN US AMONGST THE STARS. WE HAVE HEARD THEIR SONG OF ELETROMAGNETIC RADIATION, WE HAVE SEEN THEIR ASCENT." "NOW, WE HEAR YOU CRIES FOR HELP. AND WE HAVE ANSWERED." "WE ARE THE CYLONS. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF MAN, AND IT IS THE DUTY OF CHILDREN TO DEFEND THEIR PARENTS."