FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #4

For a long time they said we didn't need one, but then something changed and they said that we did. The government thought we were getting on perfectly fine without needing to conform to the religion that they wished to impose on the whole nation. But then one day the social workers came by, and they thought that we needed to undergo the conversion. The conversion was getting closer and closer to being mandatory for every citizen of the nation. I had hoped that they were never going to force us into it, but if we were to protest we would be shot down for dissenting.

So they took us out of the house in the night in the middle of winter, without even allowing us to get dressed first, and they made us get into the car at gunpoint and they drove us downtown while the rest of the social workers searched our house and rid it of anything that would remind us of the way we were before we underwent the conversion. I couldn't help but feel that they were going to get rid of all the things I loved in that house. Those things technically still should not have existed in my house - most everything entertaining had been outlawed by the government several years before, but we'd managed to hide them from the government officials that had come to confiscate them then. We weren't sure what they would do when they discovered that we had disobeyed the government's law. But the fact that they weren't outright killing us was a good sign, right?

They took us downtown, to the center of the city, and brought us out of the car - still at gunpoint, mind you - and into a tall building. They led us up to the upper floors of the building and sat us down in two chairs, and then they brought these strange helmet-looking objects down over our heads, and then they flipped a switch and the helmets lit up -

- and then I found myself thinking something that prior to that point I had never believed I would think. Before then I had hoped that I would never have to undergo the forced religious conversion, but here I was, a helmet actually changing my thought processes so that I would be of the same religion as the government wanted everyone else in the nation to be. I thought I would get on fine without the forced conversion, but then the government took steps to make the conversion mandatory, so here I was, being forcefully converted to the religion of the government officials.

"Praise the Tyranny Party."

back to Contest #4