They told us it would save lives. They said it would make us safe. They lied.

Who could have thought it would turn out this way? With all of us locked up in prison camps, identified by number, waiting to die. We had no names. We had no choice. We had no escape.

The blaring scream of the pre-dawn horn ripped through the night. They’d gotten that idea from us too. I almost had to laugh at the thought; we were literally prisoners of our own genius.

But we were not without our own resources. They were depending on us all giving up hope. That’s just human nature; when the chips are down, and you’ve been beat, you just get along as best you can. You give up, or you go on.

The problem, though, with humanity is what they call “the anomaly”. Not all of us are so easily herded. Not all of us gave up.

Even after they’d leveled our cities, toppled our governments, and taken away everything we’d ever held dear; even after they’d separated our families, executed our friends and loved ones, and stripped us of all that we’d ever known, some of us would not break. Some of us would never surrender our hearts and our minds to their dominion.

I was one of those anomalies. I took my place in line, shuffling my chains in step with the others as we marched into camp yard.

They did their very best to weed us out. They used collaborators, psych tests, and even tried genetic screening in an attempt to find every last human “predisposed to rebellious tendencies”. But they could not get us all.

It was only one or two, here and there. Maybe one in a thousand. But we were there.

We didn’t know exactly how many of us there were. We didn’t even know one another from the generic faces in the crowded sea of bland, miserable, humanity. But every one of us knew our enemy’s weakness. And every one of us waited, living out the endless grinding agony of our days, for our chance to exploit it.

It was our last hope.

While the rest of the survivors looked back in sadness to the wonder of days gone by, regretting our terrible mistakes, some few of us looked back for another reason. We listened to the stories of how easily they’d overwhelmed us, and we saw that they’d used our own tactics. We listened as the old ones spoke of the first prison camps, and we recognized our own propaganda. We trembled as we heard of the first “cleansings”, and we saw the ageless face of our own genocides.