Amnesia in Emsia

A true fictionalised account. Highly unbelievable. Entirely concocted. A figment of our imagination. A story so absurd that there just cannot be an iota of truth in it. Any resemblance to anyone at all, alive or dead, must only be accidental, unintentional and coincidental. All wrongs reserved. Read at your own risk.

By Dream Onn bin Dare & Don Dat

Not Too Long Ago, In A Galaxy Not Too Far Away, there was an awesome planet called Emsia where everyone lived in peace and harmony. It was ruled by the good King Dunku. All the inhabitants of Emsia – the Yellows, the Browns and the Blacks loved their Dunku. They honoured him as the Father of Emsia. For he was the very first King Emsia had after invaders from another planet, Inkland, had been kicked out of Emsia.

The inhabitants of Emsia were basically one species called Emsians, but because of slight local differences and external historical factors lost in time, they displayed varying features. One of this was their outer coloration. That was only skin-deep, but for convenience they came to be often referred to as the Yellows, Browns and Blacks, for obvious reasons. But only so that they can be easily distinguished one from the other for the purpose of identity.

King Dunku was a Brown, in fact a Royal Brown, but for all intents and purposes, he was colour blind and ruled all Emsia fairly. Such that Emsians for many years did not focus on, or were in fact even aware that they were in any way differentiated by colours.

After all, they were Emsians, first and last. Everyone was content, and perhaps the most contented was King Dunku and he often referred to himself in the early years as the Happiest King in the Galaxy. And no one could have imagined how this could have all changed in a matter of a few short years.

For the good times did not last. Good times seldom do. Dark clouds loomed in the horizon. There were going to be many dark and stormy nights ahead.

An Evil Sorcerer who was coincidentally a Darker Shade of Brown – something one would term Brown-Black – had arisen in the land and had begun quietly weaving his spell.

His tactic was so Machiavellian and Nefarious that for too long, it was almost unfathomable and a complete mystery to the denizens of Emsia. His actions were Unmentionable and he came to be known by the same name too. He whose Name Could not Be Mentioned had however been conferred a dishonorary doctorate from the Machiavellian University of Fine Arts for his extreme Machiavelliany and Nefarious behaviour. For convenience therefore, he was then often referred to simply as Dr N.

For things had been so good and peaceful in the lovely planet of Emsia that in the normal course of events there was no way he or his evil ways could have gained any traction in his obscene quest for power. He would have been laughed out of court, rejected and dismissed outright by all Emsians and summarily consigned to the rubbish heap of history before he could even emerge as a force of any kind.

But they had not counted on the evil genius that is Dr N …

Dr N’s devilish plan, concocted in a nightmare of spite and hatred of his own people, was to first systematically break down, dismantle and destroy the entire fabric of Emsia, and smashing it up unto to little bits, however long it might take.

Eons might pass. People forget. Then when the whole planet was in tatters and riddled with corruption, and wallowing in hate and fear, he was to finally emerge many eons later, almost in another incarnation, as The Ultimate Friend of Emsia. He could then proceed to pick up the pieces!

By then he would have been almost unrecognizable in his previous role as the Ultimate Fiend who had wreaked havoc throughout the land in the first place – the very land he subsequently proposed to save, almost in another era! He counted on the fact that people have a short memory and would soon have forgotten.

The legacy of good men through the ages like King Dunku would be wiped out from the annals of history as all Emsia would begin to hail their new King for the new age, Dr N.

So how did he come to spin his evil web on the unsuspecting Emsians? Only now, many eons later, had it begun to emerge, thanks to our extensive research and Wikedpedia.

Dr N had been systematic and focused, he clearly had a one-tracked mind. Taking advantage of devastating riots which had broken out in Emsia, he had first prepared the grounds by penning a filthy poisonous book “My Dilemma”. This drove sharp nails into the very fabric which held the Emsian society together. It was definitely no solution to the riots, though it had been ostensibly portrayed as such. It was in fact the exact opposite, laying the grounds for a far deeper and even more insidious problem, not the solution! It could best be compared to “My Camp”, another book of a similar genre written by the evil HitHer, well recognised as a particularly horrid Monster among Men, which had ultimately led to the Second Universe War.

King Dunku the wise, saw the threat posed by “My Dilemma” and promptly took steps to ban it, but it was too late and it had little effect. Pandora’s Box had been opened. The poisonous fumes had been released, it was too insidious and had seeped into the very core of the planet. King Dunku even took the drastic step of sacking Dr N from Ohno, the party ruling Emsia, but the seeds of discord had been sowed and it flourished in the dung heap Dr N had created, its roots dug deep.

The book undermined the very peace and tranquility of the planet. Amidst the confusion, the government of King Dunku was suspended, power placed in the hands of a Notionally Operating Council and eventually the good king Dunku himself was replaced.

Years passed. Two kings came and went. Spooked by the garbage propounded in “My Dilemma”, Kings II and III enacted laws which amplified any natural differences the people of Emsia had, and drove a wedge between them, with predictably disastrous results. They called it the NewExclusive Policy or NP.

Each and every Emsian was officially classified as being Brown or Non-Brown, and differing rules applied to each. The Non-Browns were subject to a whole range of discriminatory laws to keep them apart. They became second class citizens in their own country. NP was best compared to the universally condemned racist ApartHate regime of another generally despised planet in the southern galaxies.

Emsia, clearly one planet, effectively became two, split down the middle. Everyone became suspicious of his or her neighbour. Everyone, though not a suspect, walked on tenterhooks around one another. It was no longer a fun place to live. The happiest little planet of King Dunku’s reign became a distant memory.

The worst thing was that under the guise of the NP, instead of helping the poorer Browns (which must have been the original intention), all the wealth came to be concentrated on an exclusive group of rich Ohno members – who became the NewExclusive. The poor became poorer, even destitute. Dissatisfaction was rife throughout the planet.

The time was ripe for Dr N to make his move! Things could not get any worse, so it was generally thought.

Little did they know. It came to pass that amidst all the confusion Dr N had adroitly shoved aside all his rivals and emerged into the limelight as the supreme leader of Ohno. The man who had been spectacularly sacked from the Ohno party by King I was transformed into its leader not many years later and assumed his position as King IV! Oh no! The whole planet would have cried, if only it had known.

Dr N clearly could not believe his luck, so with some alacrity, he then began to put into motion all that he had postulated in My Dilemma, which he promptly turned into Emsia’s Dilemma!

He concentrated all powers in his office, cut the powers of the judiciary, and curtailed press freedom. Emsia was now wide open for exploitation by whoever was the Ohno leader. All checks and balances in the planet which could have curbed his powers were systematically dismantled.  Anyone who opposed him was jailed. Dr N came up with grandiose building projects, in which it was alleged his commission was 10 percent, hence he came to be referred to as Mr 10 percent.

He was also involved in the steel industry, which should rightly have been called the steal industry for the millions lost and stolen, and even launched an Emsian Car.

He promulgated a new policy to turn away from Emsia’s traditional and well-proven trading partners. He launch an official policy for Emsians to “Buy Inkland Last”, and instead encouraged to “Look Beast” towards Jepun, the last planet which had invaded Emsia and whose soldiers had committed particularly beastly atrocities against the civilian population of the planet.  That was during the Second Universe War barely three decades before, which many Emsian then alive had suffered through and could never have forgotted!  Dr N clearly did not care.

He also tried to corner planetary tin and currency markets with predictably disastrous consequences. Billions of dollars were lost!

In his business and finance disasters, Dr N had been aided and abetted by a close associate, Mr Dime A’Dozen, who later became Finance Minister during his reign. Mr Dime could best have been described as Dr N’s partner in crime, and in the general grime which marked that disastrous era.

For a quarter of a century – the longest reign of any Emsian king – King IV was able to wreak his havoc, basically at will, on the people of Emsia.

Dr N also seemed to be an Undisputed World-class champion of Extreme Nepotism. Under his reign, two of his sons became billionaires in the oil and telecommunications industry. A third one remained in politics, was appointed state governor and seemed to have been groomed to take over Dr N’s mantle as king some time in the future.

Towards this end, Dr N personally chose King V to take over from him. King V turned out to be a particularly ineffectual bloke. Which was probably why he had been picked in the first place. Often accused of sleeping on the job, King V soon found himself the target of attacks by Dr N when he resisted following through with the latter’s pet projects.

Under a barrage of attacks from Dr N, King V eventually lost the support of the Ohno party and was summarily replaced with Dr N’s next pick, King VI, who was part of the royal line descended from King II.

He might have seemed a safe bet, but King VI was deeply flawed. As Defence Secretary under King V, he had been involved in a multi billion dollar purchase of Scorpion submarines from the planet Prance, through a close associate. It was subsequently determined by a Prench court that there was clearly corruption involved in the payment of a “commission” of some 11% to the close associate.

Bad as that seemed, everything so far seemed to have been in line with the generally accepted practices of the Dr N era under the NP. But the Scorpion deal had a sting in its tail when things took a decided turn for the worse! The translator for the deal who was also the mistress of the afore-mentioned close associate was spectacularly murdered in a crime that shocked the whole planet. The two murderers who were convicted and sentenced to death by an Emsian court, were personal bodyguards of the Defence Secretary and her body had been blown up by military grade C4 explosives. She had apparently been asking for her small share of the “commission”. It was clear that something was not right in the planet Emsia.

But as no evidence emerged in the show trial that he had any direct links with these crimes, King VI was able to assume his position, though it remained under a cloud. His position would have best been described as vulnerable, which seemed to be the way Dr N would have liked.

Like his unfortunate predecessor, King VI initially undertook to follow through with Dr N’s abandoned projects, but later simply ignored them and pursued projects of his own. Remember that for each project, often awarded to their cronies often without an open tender, prices were inflated to allow for huge sums to be siphoned out as commissions.

His fate was sealed. King VI’s own hair-brained scheme turned out to have been inspired by Dr N’s own projects whose main object had all been about how to rip off all Emsians for his personal benefit. Realising that he would not be likely to have a quarter of a century to do his dastardly deeds as Dr N did, he had to come up with One Massive Disaster (for Emsia), shortened to 1MD.

But when 1MD proved true to its name and floundered on the back of billion dollar outflows of funds, his mentor became his tormentor! Dr N unleashed a barrage of attacks, even calling upon the services of other planetary authorities to target Emsia’s own King!

As the attacks mounted up and turned vicious, the timing seemed propitious for Dr N as King VI had called for an election.

The results stunned everyone! King VI suffered a shock loss in the election, the first ever defeat for the Ohno party since the time of King I, the good King Dunku.  Twists and turns there were aplenty, for the new government was actually made up of a coalition of disparate parties led by Dr N who therefore astounded everyone by emerging as King VII, against all odds.

Even more surprising was the fact that his coalition seemed a particularly fractious one, comprised as it was, of parties led by individuals Dr N had fought against for decades, and even incarcerated and cast into prisons before, when he was King IV!

In fact, Mr Andwho IsThatHim,  the leader of one of the major coalition parties had actually been languishing in jail on election day!

To his credit, Dr N soon fulfilled one of his election promises, which was to take immediate steps to free Mr Andwho and get him a full pardon, as the latter was the leader of the dominant party in the government coalition. The second part of the undertaking would be to hand over power to Mr Andwho within two years, but it remained to be seen whether that would actually come to pass.

Could a leopard change his spots? Dr N had maintained that he was a changed man but as he was less effusive about apologizing for his past mistakes, any change seemed to be only superficial.

From Dr N’s chequered past, it appeared highly unlikely that he would have truly been transformed into a true reformist, but all Emsia hoped to be proven wrong.

If the truth be told, things did not look at all promising. As King IV, Dr N had dramatically passed over three deputies and other promising candidates who had each been in line to succeed him at different times over two decades. Since he had thought that they had posed a threat to him, he soon found ways to nip their ambitions in the bud.

The last of these ill-fated deputies had in fact been Mr Andwho himself, who was spectacularly accused of sexual crimes and corruption, and jailed on trumped up charges. And considering all he did to sabotage the reigns of his own erstwhile chosen successors Kings V and VI, clearly Dr N was loath to relinquish powers to anyone else.

The fact that Dr N’s old partner-in-grime, Mr Dime A’Dozen had also been given a new lease of life as chairman of the Advisory Council of Elders to the government, also did not bode well for it.

… to be continued (fingers crossed)