A dream, an idea, a fear.

They came and took us all hostage. I don't know if it was just the one man or several, but what was most alarming was how easy it was to get us to cooperate. We were told there were too many of us. We were cluttering the earth. Whether this was happening just with our class or all over we weren't told. Honestly, we never thought about it, because you stop thinking about other people's problems when yours are immediate and your life is at stake. You switch into a survival mode that puts everything on a new perspective. It was similar to the Japanese book where a class of people was placed on an island and told they all had to kill each other if anyone was to survive in order to harden the Japanese youth and get them to respect authority. But this wasn't about authority. I don't know what it was about, really. I became a piece of the puzzle. I didn't have all the answers. I just wanted to survive. They had our class to weird drills to see who would live or die. They wanted to make it seem like it was chance who lived and who died, and they killed us in groups. The losers of the games were killed, and people who opposed the rules were killed, so we did our best to keep quiet and win. They separated us in groups, and when I did things like do-ci-do in a train of our schoolmates for 10 minutes, with fire in the corners and chains around our legs, I tried not to make eye contact with anyone. For some reason, the girls that I liked in school came to me as a source of support when everything was dark and nobody was listening. I was torn between my intense feelings for them, my heart twisted for them, and a coldness that I wanted to keep from everyone to keep from getting hurt when they were killed. I wasn't responsible for everyone around me dying, and very likely, I would die as well if I got caught doing something they didn't like, like make friends in the dark. They put us on a ship in the middle of the ocean, and that meant we were trapped. Men had guns and ran us like circus animals. One night, we were woken up to gun shots and lay awake for a long time wondering what it was. The next morning we were told that a couple of our classmates, losers by my reckoning, had tried to attack the men in power and had been shot. Honestly, I didn't take them for people that had any sort of initiative to do that. Maybe the men just came in and shot people at night sometimes if they didn't like them. Each day, a group of people who had lost the "game" of the day was killed. Perhaps 5-10 people a day, maybe more. After several days of this, I got to wondering: why weren't we rising up against them? Why were we complying? The danger was very real, but for some reason we figured we could make it through to the next day, and that was what was most important. The most disturbing thing for me was that I got it in my head that we were complying because they weren't killing people we cared about. I was worried about my friends dying, but they were still alive. It was as though the killers were making their point: there were too many of us. We were extras. A lot of us. We wouldn't be missed. Our class could do without the chaff. I couldn't name the names of anyone who was killed. Just one day they were with us, and the next day there were less people doing the games. Their absence was barely tangible. It was a dark feeling, a shadow. With the turmoil, emotional, the survival instinct shot into us, we couldn't even put a name to anyone who was killed. That's why we complied, because deep down we hadn't been hurt yet. All the games were a facade. The results didn't matter. Although it was made to seem random who was selected, it must have been bullshit. The men in charge knew who was going to die before hand, and only put us through those games for some sort of psychological effect on us. I don't think they intended to kill all of us. Most of us felt we were in danger but that if we kept our heads down we could survive this and go on to live our lives.