Forgetting 8.1

The days went by one after the other. Every morning, Nea went to the library to read. The place was perfectly clean, so she gave up trying to clean it and took the Shouk's words literally. He had told her to use it, and she was happy to do so!

During these so-called hours of cleaning, she had only come across him once. The young woman had tried to confront him with her questions and her own suspicions, but the man took a malicious pleasure in either ignoring her questions or not answering them at all, which had the effect of enraging her. This pervert seemed to enjoy poking at her in this way and seeing her rant so easily.

Nea had given up trying to get something out of him, but she had promised herself that she would expose his little game and, above all, reveal what he was hiding. To do this, she set about learning as much as she could about the books in this immense library. And she had learned an enormous amount in the world in which she now lived.

Albarebleu. A land that was seventy per cent desert. An arid world that was very hostile to life, but teeming with resources. It was therefore very rich, but this wealth was poorly distributed. Only a small percentage of the population enjoyed the real benefits of these resources, while the rest lived in misery.

These resources were essentially made up of Sharko'al, an extremely resistant and easy-to-use material that had enabled the construction of cities and the development of cutting-edge technologies. Other materials were added, such as Payet, a precious metal used in jewellery, and Mancholite, a stone with a wide range of colours and qualities, whose multiple uses make it particularly useful. These three minerals are the main resources of this world, but they are supplemented by others in smaller quantities.

One material, however, stands out from the rest. Rizle. It's extremely rare, and so is the documentation on it. All Nea could find was that the magnates of the ore market were snapping it up at exorbitant prices. However, its use seems to be very secretive and she was unable to find any clues as to its usefulness.

Beyond that, the young woman had found more detailed information on the social structure of Albareublian society. According to these books, the origin of the distinction between Manks and non-Manks goes back to the dawn of time. The Manks had been enslaved for as long as life had existed on this planet, according to the great encyclopaedias she had found. The reason? They came from a place from which civilisation had not arisen.

Throughout all this reading, Nea had been struck by the similarity between the rhetoric on the justification of slavery here and on Earth. Those who were different from the majority could not be human, and had to be justified. Except that there was no justification for depriving them of the freedom they had acquired by birth. So a whole battery of stratagems is put in place to ensure this justification.

They are different. They are not civilised. They speak an incomprehensible language. And above all, they are not as intelligent. This deliberate and innate diminishment of the other through sordid justifications seems perfectly normal to anyone who strongly believes in this kind of rhetoric. But for someone who only knows the free world of equal human beings, the deception jumps out like a dirty, deceitful inanity that we can only see.

The universality of the supremacy of humans over others struck the young woman with all the dread it implied. Was Man incapable of accepting himself and his peers in all their diversity without turning into a hateful monster?

She would have liked to believe otherwise, but it seems not. And the abolition of slavery was now being celebrated as a piece of progress that had cost the majority so much and for which the Manks should be grateful, when in fact all that was being done was to restore them to their rightful place. However, no matter how much it was said that they were no longer slaves, they were still not considered to be fully human. The fight was still on. Their only fault was to be in the minority and not to be like the others. Not being as greedy as them.