Create a Story - Week 4

This week the randomness gods have given me a cruel task - a science fiction story. Let me know if any of you can guess the prompt! [Updated - note I forgot to put that this prompt is from Create a Story, pg 179]

Sequence of the Doctrine

When people think of the resistance, no one expected it to be them.

There were the expected groups. The leftist, vocal, organic food fanatics. The ones who saw conspiracy in every additive. But when the revolution happens in a laboratory, it was exactly those groups who were watched. Because they made noise. Because to activate their matrix, the doctrine required certain foods in sequence.

That was essential. Even with the control noone had known they had, food was precious and there were workers to monitor. For poisons. For toxins. Not to detect what was really being done. But in that search much tampering could be undone.

So the people who might avoid the deliberate true nutrient sequence, as required by the doctrine, the organic farmers were tracked. A registry created. Not just those who farmed but those who partook in the foods that might lack a crucial implant.

It was impossible to implant everything without being discovered. That was the purpose of the matrix. The purpose of the sequence. Enough common foods. Enough that eventually the sequence must be hit, whether by doctrine or happenstance.

Slowly, person by person, potluck by potluck, the sequence was spread and the mind unfurled into the world of that tiny group of masters who had created the doctrine on our behalf. The registry had been made. The enemies tracked. That weakness was easily dealt with. The misfortune of those poor deluded souls whose own search for purity in their foods had killed them was simply an object lesson. A directive. Listen to the doctrine. Follow the sequence. Strengthen the matrix in your mind and in the minds of those who break bread with you.

It seems like it should have taken a long time, but the food chain had become too monolithic for it to fail. The masters were happy. Even the smallest pockets of resistance were quickly squashed, either as organic examples of the need for the doctrine, or quiet disappearances.

Because the implants created a hive controlled by the nexus of masters, even those who might have resisted were unaware until it was too late. The patterns of behavior of everyone they knew would change, one by one. The last one would end up at a potluck, being fed the crucial implants, one at a time, in the correct sequence, because somehow they had managed to avoid the sequence. Maybe they always ate their cookie first. But they still ate it, and so, in the end, they were still susceptible to the suggestions of their friends at the gathering.

It was only a few who ran. Who were quietly lifted from the streets.

​No one expected it to be them. The adult picky eaters. They weren’t even part of the equation. No one thought about people who only ate fries with signature seasoning that no one even made anymore or thought about how they got it. But they were blissfully immune. And the nexus never saw them coming.

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Once again just 500 words. Maybe I'll just keep to that? Or maybe I'll get a prompt that demands more... or less. We'll see. Next week then!