Realm of Technology for the Elite

In an alternative civilisation technology was limited to the ruling class. The ruling elite were headed by a male line of kings. Change was held in check.

The first prince witnessed a powerful alien technology, more advanced than his own culture’s and determined that to advance his realm, technology must be more democratically available. He was advised of a distant place where the alien advancements are commonplace.

The king was against such change. He held that the very basis of his power lay in the control of who could access advancements and in keeping his people simple.

Unbeknownst to the prince the king kept a spy in his entourage. The prince’s guard reported directly to the king and was totally loyal to that end. The king instructed the guard to stop the prince if he went too far while telling the prince he may travel to the foreign land to get information about their innovations.

The prince set off with his guard and a loyal servant. They travelled in the kingdom’s most advanced mechanical boat. They arrived eventually in a far off location. They navigated their boat into a harbour sheltering under was high cliffs topped by arching viaducts. Other vessels were gathered there. Some were vessels that looked like their own, some looked strange, but more wondrous still were machines that skimmed through the sky, a sight never beheld in the prince’s kingdom. There were even more advanced sky vessels that appeared in the sky where moments before there was only empty air, the nature of which the prince could not conceive.

At the dock the prince’s party were conducted to a sky machine that transported them to another civilisation. In a city that seemed to have no limits there were strange creatures interacting with humanoids that were more akin to the prince’s experience. A large arena bustled with beings that were using unfamiliar contraptions but which the prince recognised as functioning for commerce transactions much like a busy market place in his own lands.

When his guard was separated from him, the prince was given a design on paper and told by a lone figure that his guard was not loyal and not to be trusted. The figure moves into the throng before the prince can question further. The guard returned to the prince, convinced that the prince has been turned against him. The guard revealed himself as the king’s man by searching the prince. He did not find the design that was hidden under food inside the servant’s bags.

The commotion of the altercation in the king’s entourage caused the three guests to be brought forcibly before a court. The court was held within a large room headed by a tribunal of different beings in a raised platform behind a barrier higher than a person. The guard acted aggressively in his defence to such an extent that a very tall insect looking being of the tribunal leant over the edge of the barrier and plucked him up with his mouth. The guard was returned naked and drugged, and hung by his hands from the barrier in front of the horrified prince and the servant. The guard could make no sound as he silently gasped with his mouth falling open and shut.

A tall being with a proboscis for a mouth in the tribunal behind the dumbstruck guard leant down over the barrier and bit flesh from the guard’s penis. The guard had no power to express his pain. The court public seated below the tribunal, stood and surged forward. The tribunal being took the flesh from its mouth and handed it down to the closest of the crowd who consumed it.

The repulsed prince and servant saw an opportunity to escape during the crazed onslaught and took to their heels.

It was apparent to the prince that the guard was to be eaten alive. Here the prince’s kind was of no more significance than the livestock that were raised for consumption in his homeland. The prince could see little hope of making it back there but determined that if he did, he would change the political structure and use of knowledge as radically as he himself was changed.

2/5/2023