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In this land of square edges, people wear black square helmets with lines in contrasting colour drawn right at the top. With tapering stiff cloaks fattening at the bottom, we rest on this flat piece of charcoal Black Island. We stand tall, our bodies solid and inflexible, but the knees are lithe and give away. However, we are genetically designed to spring back up, stand tall and take the incessant knocking on our helmeted heads. Our life time varies; we hear news of islands, our contemporaries, wearing out with the frontline soldiers’ knees worn out of perpetual thrashing to their feet only to spring back and be knocked again.

With a population of close to a hundred people, our island boasts a frontline soldier squad of 26. This squad is relentlessly battered; under a roar of stuttering knocks on the head, they are the ones who find their knees buckle before the rest of the population’s. More often than not, it is the ones who are guarding the left front, ones with ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘e’, or ‘r’ drawn on the top of their helmets. In our great grandfathers’ times, the strategic location of the soldiers on the front was different from the present times.

Nobody seems to remember the good times. Entire population has conveniently relapsed into forgetfulness; we don’t know when it happened or how it happened. But presently, we are at the mercy of aliens. In my great grandfather time, when our islands were united under the confederation of ‘Remington’, a special law was drafted out and communicated to the peoples. It was intended to confound the alien machines; the committee which studied the consistent pounding of the machines, opined that the lifeless inanimate machine arms exhibit a brisk rapidity of the right arm motion and a slightly sluggish movement of the left arm. The committee consisted of a team of mathematicians ‘1’-‘9’, journalist turned photographer ‘print screen’, scientists ‘/’, ‘*’, ‘+’, ‘-‘, city planners ‘home’, ‘end’ and architects ‘page up’, ‘page down’.

In those days, a pounding machine operated under codename ‘stenographer’ cracked the spines of our soldiers on the front. The machine’s bulbous arms swiftly manoeuvred its long firm spindle like fingers and thwacked the day lights out of our soldiers’ eyes. Captains ‘tab’, ‘shift’, ‘caps lock’ studied the findings of the committee and rolled out an immediate remedial opportunity. Major General ‘space’ sported an elongated crown that had no tag, no whitish line, drawn on its head; he heard the proposals made by the captains and summoned the presidential body. The event that was going to redefine the landscape of our islands was held in 1873; it was attended by the President ‘enter’, cabinet composed of ‘ctrl’, ‘alt’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’, ‘down’ and the others. Among the others were present our philosophers- ‘F1’ the most popular, he produced works accessible to many; ‘F2’ to ‘F12’ save an occasional mainstream work, were largely esoteric and underground.

The idea was to reshuffle our front in such a way that the major victims of the brunt be shifted to the left so they are under the sluggish left arm of the machine. This meant that the pairs of soldiers who frequently found their feet twisted and tangled together, for the machine exhibits a special liking to them, had to be relocated. It was worked out that the female soldiers ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’ over time yielded, clung in desperation to the male soldiers beside them in the same row, locking them in a deathly embrace. As the islanders grew older, this sort of thing happened very often; in old age, the compunction of life overwhelmed the female soldiers, their once passionate spirited screams now turned to that of bemoaning and wallowing cries for help. More importantly, their long shiny metallic bow-like feet drowned pitifully into the ground and this meant that the aliens would tag the island ‘jammed’ and the island was made redundant. With no source of greasy oil to warm their ground, corrosive viruses spread valiantly and led to the eventual collapse of a civilisation. In order to avoid this, our great grandfathers under the confederation of ‘Remington’ enjoyed fecund lands reeling with grease, for a price of perpetual thwacking of the monsterish machine ‘stenographer’.

Since then, down till our times, the front squad’s positioning has been preserved. It is a sign of reverence to the martyrs of those times that we still follow the old principles. These days, we no longer till our land with grease; our feet are not long and spindle-like. Electric currents swathe our ground and render fecundity, it flows through a slot guarded by three lighthouses, one under the jurisdiction of ‘num lock’, ‘caps lock’ and ‘scroll lock’ each. We fit into stiff slots on the ground; our feet are lodged effortlessly into the cushioned slots, times have changed. Indeed our feminist movement of the last fifty years has led the female soldiers to stand ‘head to shoulders’ with our male soldiers. Despite the continuous thrashing of the female soldiers in conjunction with the male soldiers, rarely has there been an incident of malaise or surrender by the female soldiers. More importantly, lieutenants ‘a’ and ‘e’ have turned into role models for the entire left front. But the pounding has worsened too, where there was the ultimate wartime invention: the machine called ‘stenographer’; now there are these paunchy machines called the ‘software professionals’. They are perched atop cotton padded fitments with rims fitted around two winking globules; although their thrashing on our soldiers is less prominent, they are always glued to us and never cease.

You must be wondering who I am. I am the historian ‘backspace’. Although the lofty pithy statement ‘times have changed’ has found approbation in many quarters, I felt obliged to document the times we live in. The environment is gloomy, dark and filled with decadent whispers; our movement is constricted and constrained to the islands we inhabit. The invasion of barbarous aliens has left us bereaved and we are mostly content if the ground is fecund and life is allowed. Our flat island is all we have, we are aware that in this sea of blank emptiness, there are many more islands and a historian in each of them. This is my appeal to all the historians, if you can hear, to rise up and let your voice be heard.

These brutes rested our islands in isolated sporadic places curtailing collaboration. But the times have indeed changed. Recently, our cable workers have dug a tunnel through the electric fencing and after years of concerted disciplined effort, we established connection with the central transmission unit. It is a deserted area of bumpy solidified metal; an inconceivably intricate network of electric impulses keeps this central unit functional. Our heroic acts of revelations ensued panic, chaos and pandemonium in our island. A revolutionary hero ‘esc’ who sat alongside philosophers, publicly humiliated our senseless living; he contended that if we all commit suicide, we won’t play into the hands of the aliens and hence have a chance of attaining martyrdom. Amidst the hue and cry, a military rule was established and general ‘space’ implored the people to tie their patriotic nerve taut. So we did, and thanks to an excellent leader, we garnered strength and courage. ‘Futility of life’ revolutionary hero ‘esc’ called our attempts to read through the cracks in the aliens’ structures imposed on us.

Then we had a breakthrough and all pessimism was washed with cold waters. The super sophisticated aliens, we found out, had built a structure of ingenious networking. Messages could be displayed on these shiny glowing flat rectangular stars propped against each of our islands; they emit a multitude of colours for the new artillery ‘software professionals’ to conceive.

We, the bereft islanders, are the inhabitants of this vast universe invaded by the aliens. The bullies are everywhere; their artillery is stronger with the eccentric machines that replaced the modestly predictable machines ‘stenographers’. In this universe, if any of you islanders, the discontented, have found a way to your central transmission unit, then you can hear us. By the time you read this message, our island would have been made redundant. If even one of you has made it thus far, if you have decoded the message, then our mission has succeeded. Our lives have not been a waste after all, we had a choice, to pucker up, whimper and die or to revolt; we chose the latter. You are not alone.