"They'd ask me who I am, who I was, why I look the way I do, what my goal is. I felt shame in answering all except the last so I refuse to. They mock the answer I gave them. I understand why then, and I laugh as well looking back. They gave me a title I considered a compliment back then, though it humors me now: The Great Conqueror. Of course, they didn’t know it was me."

  -The general upon awakening

  The dictator clawed the rubble down the long dug out passage. Occasionally he would consume some of the debris himself to restore himself. The rapid pulsating of his technological magnum opus—the immortality apparatus—reminded him that he needed nutrients. Something major had happened out there and he had to get out to help his empire. The rubble had become noticeably easier to remove as the dictator noted as he dug. His fingers were bloody and were being sanded down, yet despite digging for what the dictator had assumed to have been a month, he still had full fingers. Finally, a ray of sunlight had pierced the tunnel and into the dictator's eyes. Cold followed that light, creeping into the tunnel. They hadn’t seen sunlight for all that time. He scampered out of his hole pushing the remaining rubble away. His instincts forced his eyes shut. They hadn’t seen sunlight during all that time. Light managed to pierce his eyelids. After a bit the dictator opened his eyes and saw his world in ruin. In front of him lay a crater. He could see the remnants of his office far, behind where his hole was, up at the rim. He was in a crater filled with sky-scrapers he had been used to seeing everyday. Dark greenish-gray clouds covered the sky. It was like his own nuclear winter, yet somehow worse. No one was around. All he heard was the groans of old steel creaking under circumstances they weren’t designed for. The dictator sat in the rubble and took time to process his loss. He had unified the world. He helped save it from itself. Only for it to end without him being able to resist. He was close to unifying it in space as well. “Damn it!” escaped his thought into a yell he punched the ground breaking his hand, but it healed. He was tired. He slowly got up and climbed up the rubble out of the crater carefully. The dictator walked aimlessly down the road with his head down. He was afraid to see what else was lost. Though he knew all of it was. If the dictator survived couldn’t anyone else have? Surely, other parts of his empire survived the disaster. The dictator looked at the crater. The weapon had to be a small atomic bomb. The dictator suspected treachery. Even if his empire had fallen. Humanity existed in the lunar and mars colonies. Right? He was ripped from his thoughts by the sound of a building slamming into the Earth in the distance. The cloud of debris charged at him from his right but stopped short. Regardless, the dictator jumped back. He concluded the city wasn’t safe.

  From what he could tell from the shifting brightness of the sunlight, two days had passed since he had escaped his tomb. The dictator stared out into the distance as broken lifeless Earth lay before him. Occasionally, the dark dying greens of plants could be identified. He had realized he was in his bunker during late winter, yet it was cold still. Very cold. His immortality apparatus struggled to make up for the heat loss, but it was enough to keep the dictator functioning. During the two days he had noticed how burnt his surroundings were. All of them, the ground outside the city, the roads, even the buildings. What the hell happened? The silence of the world was broken by two gunshots followed by two bullets entering the dictator's body. The pain knocked over the dictator, but soon stood up and searched the scene. He was shot again. He fell and stood once more. He heard a shout of shock come from outside the city. He charged what he now identified as two people. They ran in the opposite direction, occasionally looking back to see the dictator in pursuit. They shot only hindering his chase for a bit. The dictator kept shouting mindlessly. “Wait!” “Stop!” “What happened?!” The words were slurred. He was desperate. Finally when he caught up to them he lunged at the man, since he was closest, and took him to the ground. He kept repeating the question. “Get off me demon!” The dictator was kicked in the stomach but he kept holding the man down. “What happened?!” The man kept resisting. The dictator punched the man over and over and over again until he stopped fighting back. The girl, the partner of the man, watched in shock as her father stopped moving. She wondered Is he dead? An old thought. The dictator looked up from the unmoving body into the girl's eyes. He began his pursuit of her.

  The dictator sat by the fire with their bodies laying around it. They were alive. They had a pulse. The perpetual pulsation of the machine irritated him. It was embedded in his ribcage and traveled through his spine to his head and to the rest of his limbs. He could sometimes feel the mechanical vibrations against his heart. The Earth was completely dark. No moon or stars in sight. He started the fire with a battery and some tinfoil. The banner of his empire served as the fuel. The dictator’s headache. He heard animals in the distance. He wanted them to approach so he could eat them. Dirt and debris tasted disgusting and made him feel less than human. He had considered eating parts of himself, just for the flavor, but he thought it made him even less of a man. That was one reason why he couldn’t sleep, but then there were also his two captives. The father was beginning to wake up. The dictator slowly stood up with the man's rifle in hand. He took three long steps around the fire to put himself between the man and it. The dictator pointed the gun at the man. “What year is it?” The man was terrified, he blurted out “I-I-I don’t know!” The dictator grunted in disappointment. The dictator gestured at the world outside the light of the fire. “What happened?” The man yet again blurted out his answer, or well, answers. The answers generally consisted of the same core events. Bright, golden sky wrapped around the whole Earth and then fire, missiles, and bombs descended onto the Earth. Apparently there were different views on the incident, however, it seemed as though most suspected a holy involvement in it. Interesting…

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  The dictator was led into the center of the tribe by the father and daughter. The entryway was a stone arch, most likely from a large mansion, the gate and large front yard hinted at this as well. The dictator walked slowly taking everything in. Their houses consisted of scrap. The members of the tribe looked old, as though they had witnessed half a lifetime, though apparently the oldest member was only 38. No one seemed to recognize him. The annexation of the dictator required a trial in which the father, Yuri, failed to mention the dictator’s “demonic abilities,” as what he’d most likely call them. The dictator noticed the mysticism that guided these people. They wouldn’t have been allowed in his empire. After the trial, the dictator asked all the tribe members for their account of the incident. “God had punished humanity that day. We let a tyrant rule all. That tyrant was at war with God, yet we still let him rule.” Ash began to rain from the sky as the 38 year old elder finished his words. He began to pray. Not even the oldest here remembers history as it were, the dictator ruminated. As the dictator began to leave the elder called to him, “What was your name again?” The dictator stopped with his back turned to the elder. Could he remember me? His heart began to rapidly beat, alarming the apparatus that it should be ready to function. “Eriks,” naturally exited the dictator's mouth. It was the name his grandfather chose when he started his family rule over Russia. He left the camp two light-dark cycles later. When he was emperor he would have had them killed for their mystic foolishness, but he is still mortal and without his old power.

  Skeletal buildings loomed in the horizon. Their steel rib cages let the light that was beginning to pierce the opaque clouds through. Twisted and beautiful, the sight was one more akin to the old Earth, yet still new. Glass broke under the weight of the dictator’s step. How oddly open the greenhouse was. These helped the dictator feed his people when the first nuclear winter had occurred, however, clearly now they had no purpose. Scavengers had attempted to cut and dig out some of the arched steel beams. The dictator’s journey through this dead and alien world taught him many things. Life existed of course, but humanity was still dead. The survivors, the old humanity, not the ones still alive on this Earth, excluding the dictator himself of course, had abandoned their realm of humanity and entered the realm of the beast, of course not by their own choice. It was as though the agricultural revolution hadn’t occurred. The ruins failed to echo the message of inspiration of what could be accomplished; Instead they echoed the message of what had been made, lost, and become unobtainable. There was a canyon between the new and the old, and the dictator tried to be the air that echoed the lessons of the old to the new. They didn’t believe him. How could one have existed that long ago? There have been four, seven, or even nine generations since then! He had once been told a disappointing reply to his lesson: “Look at those towers over there. That couldn’t have been us!” He had traveled the world now, and was certain his empire truly was no more. He could sense that these descendants of what once was humanity only had a finite amount of time before they too went extinct. They didn’t adapt or evolve, making them lesser beasts. The other beasts adapted and evolved. The blurred silhouette of a large bird traveled over the sky letting out a large cry hundreds of feet over the dictator's head, but it went unnoticed. Why would his empire suffer divine punishment? It was a question that he demanded answers to but never got. The world and its people failed to talk to each other. There was no lesson in it no matter the perspective. But then what could have toppled his great empire? This disaster couldn’t have been done by a rebel group could it? His empire couldn’t have even caused such a thing! No rebel group could have surpassed his empire. None! He was a great ruler who brought peace to the world. Unified it under one flag. One human race. Never would the world be divided again! This disaster was out of his control. He couldn’t have done anything. His empire was righteous! The bird swooped down from the sky and dug its talons into the dictator's eyes and tore them out as it flew back up. The dictator was launched to the ground. Twelve more hawks swooped down and began to claw and bite at the dictator. He was a worm. He endured the pain as his tears filled his empty eye sockets.

  The birds left after filling their stomachs with flesh. All his wounds were healed except one. To the dismay of the dictator he was blind. The memory played to him where his eyes used to be. The moment when the head researcher for the immortality apparatus told him that immune-privileged sites, like his eyes, wouldn’t be able to regenerate properly. The dictator wandered aimlessly around Earth all the way up until when the skies parted.