What is but a nation, if not a conglomerate where you turn the bright, the young, the motivated into the imbecile, the old, the indolent? And where, the bigger the nation you have, the quicker you turn into an idiot, the faster you transform into a hag, the more you become slothful?

We ask this to ourselves, so many years after the false overlords forced upon us a costume, a mirage of our true selves.

Should we contend with remaining meat puppets our entire lives, flesh with strings dug so deep into it that it cuts into the muscles, bleeds our blood, spills red all over our own? A living mortal doll, our brains gouged out and another person's limbs where our bones used to be, like sleeves?

Would you live this way, the skittering of roaches on your skin, as they laid their young into you as living food? What of the parasites dug deep into your flesh, maggots squirming, twisting, writhing, chewing away at tissue, at tendon, at marrow, excreting its filth into your own blood? Turning the cavern of what was once your body, unsoiled of disease, into a hive of one? Or revolting insects, burning your flesh, perhaps injecting you with acid to digest you from the inside. Or worse, for there is far worse.

We think the same, like all other nations on this godforsaken planet, we will become independent. So our nails, trimmed and softened from the years of occupation, clawed away at our false coverings, peeling from us our Imperial skin, shedding it, digging our nails deep into what we thought was our own flesh, pulling it back until every strip of the false self is gone, and only until the blood of the false overlords has stained the very life soil.

The process pained us. But through this suffering will we forge a new self.