Eat them Young

If we fail, the Republic dies in its sleep. God help us if the people wake up and think we’re the ones who stole their freedom, when we’re the only ones trying to keep it from the dead.

The thing in Yuan’s skin had strolled, not retreated. The difference was a precise calculation of dominance, a statement that the boundaries of her private quarters were a suggestion he could respect one night and breach the next. Muir didn’t move until the digital clock on her nightstand cycled past 06:00. The cold sweat clinging to her silk pajamas was a professional failing; politicians were meant to be better insulated.

She got up and checked on her son. Kian was awake, lined up on the rug with five identical plastic replicas of the Republic’s founding monument, which he had sourced from a second-hand online market—the original, undefaced version.

Kian didn’t like noise, that’s why Muir brought him to the public quarters instead of buying a new apartment across the road like her colleagues. He saw patterns and events that other children didn’t and it made it impossible for the Creche to take him in, the other toddlers were more fascinated with the data slates and that noisy parade onscreen. The other week, he swiped at the Health Minister’s three year old daughter when she danced around everyone with a new telephone watch. Muir literally saw him take a whack at the spoiled brat, because she was next to the girl’s mother in a Cabinet meeting. Yuan just chuckled coldly when the frumpy former housewife jerked her head at Muir, halfway through his speech. Her daughter was still bawling on a corner window screen.

Secretly, Muir cheered on her son.

“The alignment is incorrect, Mama,” Kian said without looking up, his voice flat and precise.

“Minister Yuan’s statue in the Rotunda is twelve degrees off the magnetic north pole. It always has been.”

Muir crouched down, touched his hand gently

“It wasn’t meant to be precise, after the war the designers wanted something that looked welcoming to the people, so they angled it that way to make him warmer”

“Lies are inefficient.” He pushed the center monument to the side.

Muir didn’t know if Kian was a distraction or her anchor. He demanded an unflinching reality she couldn’t afford to give him. She thought of the whispers she sometimes overheard in the Ministry cafeteria—low, saccharine speculations about the Director who couldn’t keep her husband and had a son who “needed special care.” They saw her quiet dedication as a flaw, her single motherhood as a kind of political instability.

She kept her face neutral, performing the role of the stoical director for the benefit of the silent majority and fending off the increasingly bloated post-war bureaucracy.

She watched Kian meticulously arrange his monuments. It was her ex-husband, the former revolutionary, who had broken the political promise of their lives. He left their twenty years of shared struggle for a woman young enough to be his ideological niece, one who still believed in the pure, uncorrupted dogma of the liberation. Muir knew the truth: he wanted a woman who didn’t come with a history or an inconvenient, autistic child who saw the wires beneath the skin of the world. Now, all she had left was her son and the wreckage of the Republic she was trying to save from the Fallen God.

As dawn broke, the city was waking up to another morning of ravenous bounty. The news scrawled across the screens: a new, hyper-realistic personal AI assistant, a limited-edition artisanal coffee flavor, an influencer’s review of a new self-driving drone model.

You can’t really blame the people; a decade of war followed by five years of ‘austerity measures’, with a flood of unpronounceable brands for everything from detergent to watches to hair-cream to pain killers, people had no appetite for ‘nation-building’ aside from what food to put on the table or what clothes to buy for their children ahead of winter. The Fallen God had insidiously reappeared as a toy- someone took his likeness and made him a keychain, a digital pet or something, He was this smiling prosperity figurine, like the ones people still offered burned offerings to in private for good fortune, quaint historical kitsch to be arranged on a living room shelf, much like Kian’s miniatures.

If she told them the Minister of High Council was possessed by an autocratic demon-god, they would ask if the possession came with free shipping and a two-year warranty.

“If I went on television, they would probably ask if the Fallen One had returned as a Money-god AI or something and turn me into a screaming meme.”

She checked her secured feed. One of the quiet warnings she’d frantically sent had been opened. Not by a committee member, but by Colonel Ibrahim in the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF).

“Director. I suggest a meeting at the old sector. Abandon all official channels. Now.”

The old sector. The ruins of the old palace where the first battles of the liberation were fought and the Old One’s torture pleasure chambers were razed to the ground by the peasantry, the perfect stage for its Resurrection. Muir straightened her jacket, the cold brass coin of the Old Demon formed a reassuringly hard disc against her ribs. She was done pretending she hadn’t seen the shadow at her door. She looked at Kian.

“Kian, Mama has to go to work now.”

“Be safe, Mama,” he murmured, still fussing with the twelve-degree misalignment of the Rotunda statue.

“Always,” she lied.

A kiss on the forehead—a ritual she hoped the network cameras hadn’t yet learned to track—and turned toward the political war she could no longer afford to wage in the shadows. The Fallen God had waited sixty years for this moment. She only had a few hours left.

The Minister’s public appearances had, of late, become heavily saturated with the iconography of the Republic’s youngest generation. It was a calculated pivot, an attempt to anchor his ‘recovering’ persona in something uncomplicated and universally adored. Photos flowed across the newfangled social media channels: Yuan, a study in wrinkled sincerity, kneeling awkwardly in a municipal playground, his face a mask of unaffected joy and affection towards the Republic’s toddlers. He spoke often on the utilitarian needs of this new cohort, focusing his political weight on their educational, public healthcare, and psychological profiles.

But his biggest itch was for the children like Muir’s son. He expressed exceptional concern on the data feeds for autistic and special needs children. The public response was saccharine and immediate: the old man, they cooed, had genuine love for kids. The years of revolutionary turmoil had robbed him of a biological legacy, and now he was channeling his grandpaternal instincts to those who couldn’t care for themselves

The Changeling regarded this as highly efficient camouflage. He truly loved these useful idiots like the way Burger-King had sincere concern for the welfare of Bovines, one cannot tolerate poor quality specimens or the cuisine would be ruinous, if not toxic.

The ‘Special Kids’ were scrumptious; a perfect cohort: easily isolated, often marginalized, and their disappearance would create no immediate, systemic economic or personal repercussions. Their parents—typically lower-income or under immense social pressure in the post-war era to produce perfectly healthy, compliant offspring—were a secondary line of defense that could be easily breached. If these children went ‘missing,’ the perverse truth was that few people, beyond the immediate family, would truly miss them.

In the freezing confines of the west wing, Yuan had an involuntary erotic shudder. He would flick the tabs to the security footage in Kian’s room, unbeknownst to his harridan mother. The child spent hours on seemingly nonsensical things, pouring over obscure architectural drawings or making rubber band sculptures. But his skin glowed, with the innocence of the unsullied youth. How did it taste? How would he taste? Anyway, Muir is getting on his nerves and must go sooner or later, but the child was literally ‘fresh meat’

He did a little jiggle and jumped to his feet, the old man “Yuan” or whatever the peasant used to call himself was almost wiped clean but it was typical of these wretched beings to resist, like the village filth that they are. The Changeling was actually getting wet. He felt a surge of liquid warmth between his legs, and a few weeks ago at the Children’s Psychiatric Ward launch, he had a sharp happy jolt. A bolt of happy electricity when he wiped the snot from this useful toddler idiot’s nose. The camera-flashes went wild, the Head Nurse literally started tearing. But the Changeling was actually thinking:

All this yummy Pizza, Pasta and Trattoria-fodder, but what if I put a big monster under their beds?

That was when the miracle happened, a warm trickle of pleasure coursed between his legs, it had been ages since he felt the urge. His grin grew wider and he let the cameras capture that gleam in the eyes.