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They don't believe us. It's probably a part of the program. The bastard seems to have thought of everything.
We described the Fall and its effects in great detail to the council. They listened with doubtful frowns and dismissed us with raucous laughter. I heard it was worse everywhere else. I'm not sure if we expected anything different.
Tonight's battle will be hard.
.............
They made us watch. The Insight has taken them to a level of darkness we didn't anticipate. I wonder how many of us will fall to this evil? After all that I've seen, it's still unbelievable what a few disturbances in your mind can lead up to. Could they have resisted? Instead of turning to cruelty, could they have chosen self-harm, like the rest of us? I guess I would never know. I would never be able to judge.
Though I froze in a silent scream of horror, I would be lying if I didn't admit it. I'd never felt more alive.
............
I met a guy today. One of the Herd, but he was different somehow. For firsts, he took an interest in me. Flashed a smile as bright as the sun and as wide as the sea. We ended up talking quite a bit. I can't remember what I said. If it was the truth, he seemed undisturbed by it. I can recall all of his words, though. They were like waves crashing on a cliff side - persistent, loud and confident despite their inconsequence. He said he felt drawn to my ‘madness’. That's what they call our Insight. He told me there was some kind of beauty to it.
Perhaps the Rebels going public wasn't as good an idea as we thought.
...............
He kissed me. He didn't even ask me if he could. Do people ask for permission before they kiss? I'm not sure. It's been a while since I saw any movies and the only romance I've seen in Rebel camp was when Dom kissed his gun before blowing his brains out. There was blood everywhere, but it was quite passionate. Im not sure if this kiss was passionate. It felt like sea breeze, soft and liberating to start with, building up to a tempest to take your breath away. There, for just a moment, was freedom, with a spark that brought back memories of a flame Id never touched. I'm not making much sense. Funny. He seems to disturb in me, things even the Fall left untouched.
..

Yesterday, you asked me if I loved you. I had to fight back bitter tears, but I said yes.

I dont see your beauty, my love. I can only hope, or rather, guess that its there. There is no brilliance to your mind. You are just a shell, a reflection of who you were before everything went wrong. But Im in love with your shadow, even if thats all there is to see.

It hurts like hell every time I look you in the eye and find you are only half there. It feels like your heart is a dream that is in danger of fading away for good. Which is why, for you, Ill take back what we lost. Even if it costs me my life, Ill make sure you are one step closer to the dream than I ever was.

If you are reading this, then it means you are finally awake and that we won. It also means that the Rebels are dead every one of us, and the nations are in an uproar as to the cause of such mass violence and suicide. What Im about to reveal will seem impossible, even mad, considering the state of mind youre in, but bear with me. I owe you the truth.
It all began with an experiment. One that proved that human minds can be linked to artificial intelligence. One discovery lead to another and soon enough, someone, for we still dont know who did it, found a way to take over and control the minds of the entire human race. In a matter of hours, everything changed. All with a few bits of code and a device that transmits signals all across the world. I dont have much time now, but even if I did, I doubt I would leave details of the device or the artificial intelligence that helped accomplish something so unheard of, that Im sure youre shaking your head incredulously as you read this. The world has had enough of such science. We have had enough. And if the world were to fall to such disaster once more, I have reasons to believe that all would be truly lost. There would be no defense possible.
I say that not out of bitterness, but because the only defense the world had, the only hope was the Rebels. At least, thats what we called ourselves. And if all went well, I believe all of us have been wiped out, as predicted.
The Fall affected us, Rebels, differently. The intended goal seems to have simply been world domination of some kind, so it kept everyone functional and in order, but with restrictions in what a human mind can do. While we, like every human in the planet lost our ability to create, innovate or discover anything new, we were the only ones who knew what was lost. We called it the Insight. We were the only ones aware of the foreign influence on our minds, the only ones given the choice either to fight a battle in our heads for every breath we took, or to give in and be subjugated like the rest. Despite what we chose, we remembered and so, we suffered, while the rest of humanity lived blissfully ignorant and apathetic.
Some of us did not survive the Fall. Before we realized what had happened and could come up with any kind of strategy, people with the Insight, started killing themselves out of fear and despair, as they saw no way out of their enslaved minds. Some resorted to violence and cruelty of a scale we never thought possible. We dont know how many we lost, before the Foundation of Rebels was created. Once formed, however, we organized missions to find and destroy the device transmitting the signals. We formed camps to take care of each other. That was all we could do, with the limitations placed on us. The closer any of us got to finding a lead, the harder the battles in our heads became. The rest of the world, Herd as we called them, shunned us, vilified some and stigmatized all who spoke of the Fall. Despite the odds, we fought ourselves every second of every day, as we struggled to make some progress in our missions and all it took was one moment to give in, one moment of hope lost, for us to drive a knife through our hearts and end our lives as we knew it.
In one such moment, I lost a friend. Freya, a fighter, like the rest of us. We were all loners, with few friends, but the ones we had, we kept close and depended on extremely. I saw her die long before she fell and hit the pavement, from ten floors above. Id seen it in her eyes, a light starting to fade. I knew it was getting more difficult, because she pushed herself so, and when I told her to slow down, she smiled and asked me not to worry. Never had a smile caused me deeper pain. I knew it was hollow, as was every other smile I saw in Rebel camp. She had been working on a device to counter what had been done by the Fall. She thought if codes can enslave minds, they can very well free them. She stayed alive just long enough to create the counter-signal. What she did was Herculean. If she hadnt already known a lot beforehand about the original source code, creating anything would have been impossible.
It could have all been in vain, though. We didnt use the device. Not at first. We found out that what killed Freya was more than her inner conflicts. The device sets up impulses in your brain that counter the original code. For those without the Insight, this meant going back to who they were before the Fall. For us, it meant a total breakdown of whatever defenses we had set up inside our minds. The device she created, broke Freyas mind when she tested it on herself, leaving her permanently damaged.
So we fell back to our original plan. It took us two years to find and destroy all of the original devices. You could imagine our desolation when we realized nothing changed. The effects of the Fall were there to stay, or so it seemed. The damage had been done and there was no reversing it. Rebels all over the world fell in despair. Our numbers were reduced to a half before we could contain the situation and I was among those who knew that there was only one hope left. One hope for the Herd world and none for the Rebels. We activated Freyas device. We called it the Rise.

You may be wondering if having your mind controlled is such a bad thing. There were no wars after the Fall. Humans didnt kill or maim or torture each other. They were still capable of love. They existed in a world seemingly peaceful. It was everything we, as humans have ever strived for. The Herd hated the Rebels for disrupting what they saw as a perfect world. You seemed very fond of it as well. Well, you were always one of them, even though you were special. I could tell you pitied me, that you thought you could bring me peace with your love, that you could miraculously cure my Insight with a kiss. Some days, I wanted to believe you that there really was more wrong with me than the rest of the world, that my Insight was the disease and you, its cure. Some nights, I cursed my Insight with all my heart. But while you stood for love, I longed for the truth. A world without art or science, a world without beauty or brilliance, was a world I found not worth living, even with you in it. A mind that has once tasted freedom, will never accept slavery, no matter how enticing it may be, and a mind that stands for truth, would rather destroy itself than force itself to believe in what it knows to be false. If you had been a rebel, you would understand why I couldnt live a lie. Even with you by my side.

You told me you loved my madness as much as you loved everything else about me. The deepest of my regrets is that I will never know how youll feel about me, once you realize it was your madness that I was drawn to. Even when blinded and stumped, your mind found a way to accept my reality as yours and in a way, sought after the truth, in the darkness. You were the reason I knew the Rise had to happen. Because humans are not meant to live like the Herd. We create, we explore, we discover and most importantly, we Rebel.

With all of my love,
Aster