An Allegory

When scientists discovered the planet they named Veritas, we were dispatched immediately in the hope of discovering signs of life.

We were a small crew in a small ship: five others and myself. On arrival I was greeted with a row of grins: ‘one woman between the five of us?’ was probably what they were thinking. However they got over that pretty quickly, and I was treated as an equal. We shared banter on the outward journey, teasing each other and prying into private lives. We also consoled each other when the days were long and the nights were lonely. We all thought of home and our families, and the uncertainty that lay ahead.

The mission should have been short and sweet. Veritas – tucked away in Venus’s shadow and once mistaken for its moon – was just over three months away from Earth and we supposedly had enough fuel for the journey there and back. Yet somewhere along the way, something went terribly, terribly wrong.

As we approached the planet, an alarm sounded in the main deck. One of my companions screamed something about a fuel leak, and before we knew it we were hurtling toward the planet at what felt like light speed. The ground shuddered violently, the air grew hot, objects flew about the ship: glass smashing, screens cracking. I felt my stomach leap into my throat and then everything went black.

When I awoke, I found all my shipmates were dead.

I was stranded on a strange planet and all contact with my own world was lost; I had to navigate this one alone.

Setting out from the wreckage, I wandered into the strange new land. I came upon a city, much like a city I would expect to find on Earth, except I was dwarfed by its proportions. Everything was huge: doorways, windows, drains, litter. I felt about two feet shorter than I had ever felt before.

The streets were empty and it was dark. Perhaps the inhabitants had a curfew, though there was no one around to enforce it. I meandered through alleyways, slowly adjusting to the size of everything, when I stumbled upon two people huddled together next to a street lamp. I say ‘people’ because they looked just like human beings, but they were about two feet taller than I, and there was a strangeness about the way they communicated with each other. They produced no words, only groans. One of them – a female – was slightly agitated and kept shifting her position. They had not noticed me, perhaps because I was so small to them. As I watched carefully from the other side of the street, I saw a mutual understanding between them, but witnessed no words passing their lips. They understood each other without the need for language.

I left them and continued to search the streets, peering into windows and stopping to regard various posters and advertisements plastered over walls. Not one of them depicted a human being. Instead, they showed a different type of face. The creatures in these images were not monsters as such, but they appeared alien to me, Their skin was a slightly redder hue to my own and their heads were much larger in proportion to their bodies than I was used to. Their faces were long, their eyes were huge and all-seeing. Pupils dilated so wide, I felt their vision penetrate my body.

I later learned that this was the dominant species. I never found out what they were called, if they had even given themselves a name. I presume they did, because they were highly intelligent; more so than the most gifted humans I had ever known. They stood, on average, about nine feet high. The humans, it turned out, were treated as a lesser species and were subject to horrors I never imagined possible.

As the new day dawned I found myself wandering into a complex; all around me I saw concrete paths, neon signs, great plastic models of the higher race (I shall call them Veritans for convenience) with big smiles and wide eyes. It reminded me of the leisure parks back home. As I ventured further into this place, I finally saw a poster depicting a group of humans. They looked content, sitting amongst some foliage and interacting with each other. One male was looking out at the viewer, raising his hand in a waving gesture, but no smile crossed his lips.

I soon saw them in the flesh. I was able to fluidly move through the crowds of Vertians and their offspring who had began to gather in this place. I was so small – even smaller than most of the children – that they did not pay me any notice. The humans were caged in enclosures filled with fake foliage, water pools, props, and surrounded by thick, wire fencing. It was a zoo. I looked closely at one group: a female was lying on her front with her face buried in her arms. There was another, suckling an infant whilst sporting a cold, distant stare. She looked empty; dead inside. I shuddered. As I wandered through the enclosures I saw many groups of people caged for the Veritans’ entertainment. There was a cage full of dwarves (though they were slightly taller than me), with their largely proportioned heads turned away from the staring eyes. There was an enclosure full of hyperactive children, performing tricks and dances for treats which were thrown to them from the other side of the fence. Their teeth were rotten but they continued to open their mouths, ready for the incoming food. This was when I realised why I had heard no words pass these humans’ lips: they had no tongues. They were not physically capable of speaking.

As I came to this realisation, a young toddler came to the part of the fence where I stood and reached his fingers through a gap in the fence. I felt his touch upon my hand and jumped a little. He looked at me with large brown eyes and a look of trust. Trust, despite all that he was going through. It broke my heart that I could not help him, so I walked away.

As I spent more time on this planet I saw more that shocked me. These humans were enslaved and forced to serve the Veritans. They carried out hard labour while they were neglected, starved of food and water for hours on end, and beaten occasionally if they did something wrong. They lifted back-breaking loads in the blistering heat and carried them for miles without rest. I even witnessed some incidents of torture, either out of frustration or fun.

I observed the Veritans in their everyday life. They came, they went, they met and chatted and socialised over meals, and they went home to their families in the evenings. In my bid to stay alive in a world where I was completely unseen, I scrounged the streets for scraps of food. I occasionally found a container with a leftover chunk of meat – I did not know what kind – which I hungrily crammed into my mouth. I craved the succulence of fresh fruit and vegetables, but scraps of meat were the best I could muster. In fact I had not seen much vegetation in my travels.

Then, on the most horrid day of my visit, I stumbled upon a place I would desperately like to forget.

I needed to get out of the city and away from all the madness I had witnessed. As I headed for the countryside I found myself in what I can only describe as a shanty town, filled with fragile structures intended to house families of overgrown and undernourished humans. Their children played in filth, their bellies were swollen from hunger and they looked at me warily as I walked through their village. It was the first time anyone had acknowledged me since I arrived.

I tried to speak to a woman, but all she could respond with was a grunt as she scrambled towards her children and pushed them inside the house. She looked at me once more with – was it contempt? Confusion? Anguish? – before she disappeared inside.

I continued to walk, away from the inhabited areas and toward the empty fields.

Except I soon discovered that the fields were not empty at all. They were abundant with crops, as far as the eye could see! There was enough food growing before my eyes to feed everyone in that town I had just departed, so I wondered why they were not receiving any food. I had not seen the Veritans consume a huge volume of vegetation; they had largely meat-based diet.

In an effort to discover the answer to this mystery, I found a truck filled with harvested crops and climbed onto the back of it. We set off down the lane and drove through numerous fields before finally stopping in front of a huge building with no structural features to reveal its purpose. It was long and white, went on for miles and had no windows or doors that I could see. I jumped off the truck before they could find me, and walked the building’s perimeter for several hours until I found an entrance.

It was a factory.

It was a factory filled with humans. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, crammed into huge pens and clambering over each other due to the lack of room. The crops from the fields were brought here, to feed them. The factory was very dimly lit and it was only after a time when my eyes adjusted to the darkness that I realised what was different about these people. Their bodies were unnaturally proportioned, and it dawned on me that they were being bred for food. For meat, like the meat I had been scrounging on the streets. My stomach turned at the thought.

They were being fed chemicals to promote unnatural growth, and their bodies looked unhealthy and deformed. The sight was horrific. As I looked more closely at their faces I realised they were children, but they were huge: their chests and bellies were swollen and massive, and their legs were twisted and sometimes broken under the weight. They stood in their own waste, on corpses that had been trampled into the ground. With horror I saw that their hands had been cut off and crudely cauterised. The males had been castrated and many had developed gruesome infections in their groins. Their teeth had also been removed, presumably so they were no danger to each other.

I witnessed their slaughter. They were rounded up, chased through tunnels into a room where the floor was stained with blood and the stench of death filled my nostrils. They were first electrocuted with a handheld device, though some remained conscious while they were hung by their legs on a great conveyor machine and had their throats sliced open. They bled out as they were carried away into the darkness.

If that was not enough to send me into a frenzy, I soon discovered another part of the factory where women were secured in cages so small they could not move. They were taken to what I heard the Veritans refer to as the ‘rape rack’ and artificially inseminated, then carried back to the cage where they were left to grow their swollen, pregnant bellies. They gave birth on a filth-ridden floor and screamed as their babies were dragged away to be either killed or sold. In their mourning they were hooked up to machines which mechanically suckled their breasts, and many of them displayed gruesome infections. They wept as they were pumped for their nutrient-rich milk, originally destined for the infants whose fates would remain a mystery to them until their sad, lonely deaths.

I escaped that awful place and vomited in the field. As my body ceased its wretching I watched the Veritans unload the van which had carried me here. I cast my thoughts back to the poverty-stricken town I had walked through.

There was enough food to feed everyone, and yet the vast majority of what they grew was being fed to humans whose flesh would then feed only those who could afford it. What kind of hell had I stumbled upon?

I am thankful to say that I eventually found my means of escape as I timidly stepped inside another factory-like building I discovered a few fields away. It turned out to be a storage facility for aircraft; the kind that would get me home. Needless to say I struggled to do it alone, but in times of desperation we are capable of so much more than we realise. After god knows how long I had spent on this wretched planet, I set a course for home.

When I came back no one believed my story. I pleaded with my husband, with my family and friends, with my work colleagues, with anyone who would listen. My tales of human beings enslaved by an alien race, forced into hard labour, caged in zoos, and being bred for their flesh and milk, were all met with uncomfortable laughter and hostility.

I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the positives. I was back home and away from that place. I was so glad to be back in my own world where these atrocities do not happen.

Yet over the proceeding weeks, as I celebrated my return with a steak dinner and an ice cream sundae, and I took my daughter to the zoo and local farm, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had not left that world after all.