Torpedoing out with glass and lasers flying all around him, the kid plummeted toward the ground. A deafening roar shook the earth, shattered the windows, and blew the leaves from the trees. And just before he hit the ground, the kid thought, You know what would be cool? A spacemobile! And then was sitting in a pilot seat, and he grabbed the controls, and thrusted upward into the sky. He was free! Soaring in the clouds, untethered, unbound.
Down below, the hopeless students, workers, and slaves, looked up and saw the spacemobile shooting from one horizon to the other. Bewildered, they looked down at their shackles and back up at the child and asked, “Little boy, what powers that spaceship?”
He called down, “The power of my imagination!”
And then they cried, “But how did you get free?”
And he repeated, “Through the power of my imagination!”
And he repeated, “Through the power of my imagination!”
And the slaves looked down at their chains and imagined they were free, and their shackles fell off. When their masters come with gleaming eyes and screaming mouths, the freed men imagined that they too had spacemobiles to escape from the deadly laser beams. Under the leadership of the boy, the freed men grew into an army of Imagination Fighters, spreading freedom across the earth. Across the sky they flew, opening the minds of all who saw them.
The masters of the world hated him, for his power was a great equalizer. While the masters would have their slaves toil for their wages, the Liberated men could imagine that they had enough to eat and it was so. While the Liberated went about setting up Heaven on Earth, the masters waged war against the boy and his army.
As he flew, they trained their rockets on Utopia and fired. Red streaked the sky and heat parted the clouds, and all the world stopped for the piercing squeal of missiles headed toward Utopia. But the Liberated could not be so easily defeated. They simply imagined that the great city had a magnificent shield that could obliterate missiles. The bombardment met with an invisible force field in an awesome display of fire and crashing, but the people resided in quiet safety.
Then the boy led an elite squad of Imagination Fighters to the leader of the masters to try to spread the good news of his wonderful gift. At the palace, he walked through halls of gold and white and was led by guards to a throne room. The master of the masters reclined on his throne. His belly stretched against his robes, and his golden crown titled lazily in his grey mane. Sneering, he bellowed, “So this is the child that’s caused me so much trouble! Tell me, little one, don’t you know the order of things?”
“No”, the kid replied simply, “I left school.”
The master of the masters chuckled dryly, then his face fell flat. He approached the boy until his massive body towered over him. Looking down his nose he pointed down at him. “Child, you need to learn this truth and learn it well. Imagination isn’t real and it never will be. This world that we, the masters have created, is the only thing that exists.”
The boy laughed out loud. “That’s not true!”
“It is the greatest truth. You have to abandon your silly fantasies and learn to be practical. Then you can live up to your full potential as a contributing member of society.”
Impassioned, the boy stepped back and spoke expressively. “But your society isn’t fair! With the power imagination, people can be all they can be!”
The master of the master’s eyes flashed red, and a shock of scales erupted across his skin as quickly as they disappeared. “I told, you, you need to forget those child’s fantasies and live in the real world or we’ll have to beat them out of you.” He roared, “Imagination has no power!”
The boy yelled back, “You’re lying!”
With that, the master of the masters let his true colors show. His skin transformed and was covered with scales of grey and gold, and he expanded in height and size until he lumbered over 10 feet. His silken robes stretched and ripped, and his crown looked comical atop his oversized head. His face was no longer human. His jaw protruded, revealing dripping fangs, and his reptilian nose matched his gleaming, angular eyes. And his roar shook the entire palace.
With the roar, a blazing fast laser beam blasted from the monster’s mouth toward the boy, who somersaulted away just in time to avoid becoming a smoking hole in the floor. Shrieking, the cowardly guards scurried away. Then, the boy imagined that he had a laser beam deflection shield in one hand, and a laser blaster in the other, and he ran circles around the master, shooting lasers in every direction. But the lasers only burned through the robes and deflected off the scales, shattering lights on the chandeliers and ruining the banners that hung on the walls.
The master bellowed, “You’ll pay for this disruption, child!” His scaly tail swept back and forth and knocked the boy to the ground. Winded, the boy squirmed as the monster stomped around him, crushing the stone floor. The master spat, spraying the boy with tiny, searing beams.
The boy rolled back to his feet and shot a few useless blasts at the towering humanoid dragon, but the monster just spread his arms and uttered a deafening cackle as the laser bounced away from him. “You’ll never defeat me!” He laughed, “Your imagination is useless!”
Then, an idea sprang into the child’s mind. He smiled, breathing in the sizzling air. “No it isn’t!”
On both sides of the shredded throne room, the walls exploded as two large, red-plated orbs bounced in. When they reached the monster, the orbs unraveled revealing two giant armadillos. The armadillos had bright blue eyes and razor-sharp claws, and they circled around the master, looking down on him and grunting. The master of the masters shifted back and forth and turned around, realizing that there was no escape from his predicament. In disbelief, he cried, “You - you can’t do this!”
The boy grinned from ear to ear. “Yes, I can. I can do anything I put my mind to.” With that, he walked away as the imaginary armadillos began tearing into the monster.
After overthrowing the master, the boy was able to spread the power of imagination to the entire world and establish an egalitarian society where nobody was in want and everyone could live up to their potential. The Imagination Fighters grew in numbers and strength until they were able to use their imagination spacemobiles to spread the power of imagination from planet to planet, slowly chipping away at the iron grip of the masters. Soon, the boy grew into a man - a handsome, formidable warrior and the strongest wielder of imagination known to the Cosmos. Under his leadership, the Imagination Fighters blossomed into an elite army of humans and alien species from all of the freed planets.
One fateful day, when warring to free a human planet, the man found himself fighting alongside a formidable warrior - a woman whose talent was unsurpassed, and whose beauty even he could not imagine. From then on, they stuck together. They married - an unstoppable power-team of strength and love. The childlike wonder that fueled their imagination was also the source of their strength, and it drew them closer day by day, year by year, as they hopped from planet to planet empowering the powerless.
But after years of steadily losing huge expanses of the galaxy to the Imagination Fighters, the masters decided to form an Interplanetary Coalition to put a stop to their antics once and for all. The Coalition formed a sealed perimeter around Imagination-occupied galactic space and started corrupting freed planets again. Soon, entire planets were losing faith in the power of imagination and accepting that the masters were right all along. If asked about their time in Utopia, the reconquered would simply say,
“It was all a dream.”
“A fantasy.”
“None of it was real.”
Losing space fast, the Imagination Fighters had no choice but to attack the coalition head on. The man and his wife lead the Fighters to the frontlines. It was a battle like none other seen in the history of the universe. The Fighters waged war, surrounded on all sides by the evil Intergalactic Coalition, whose sleek, dark spaceships embodied the oppression they cast upon the galaxy. Their untraceable lasers were dark like the blackness, contrasting with the bright yellow beams from the Imagination Fighters. Alongside his wife, the man twisted and maneuvered, his imagination spacemobile, spiraling through lasers and wreckage. All around them, particles of friends and foe, obliterated into smithereens, the heat of laser beams against the unfathomable iciness of space in lightspeed flashes. They fought valiantly, but eventually the spinning and explosions stopped, and the man and woman hovered alone. They were the only Imagination Fighters left.
Around them, an enclosed sphere of Coalition ships trained their guns on them. There they sat in the still silence of space until half of the sphere parted, making way for what can only be described as a demon. It was an enormous, deep purple orb that hovered closer until to took up their entire field of vision. Protruding from the orb, were two humongous eyes that reflected deep space - or nothing at all - swirling streaks of stars flashing at a dizzying pace.
The man tried to imagine any scenario that would get him out of this situation. Any amazing feat, twist of fate, deus ex machina, but his imagination failed him. It was completely stunted in the presence of this monstrous demon.
Over the radio, the woman whispered, “I’m scared.”
The man whispered back, “Me too.”
Suddenly, a voice erupted from the orb, so deafening that they clasped their hands over their ears, only to realize that it blared from inside their own heads.
I AM THE GALACTIC OVERLORD. YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME.
The man replied, defiant. “I surrender to no one.”
The voice intensified, BY WHICH GROUNDS TO YOU DEFY ME?
“I fight for freedom, justice, and equality through the power of imagination. You fight power and control using fear and oppression. We will never surrender to you!”
The Galactic Overlord paused, as if considering. WHO IS “WE”? THERE ARE NO IMAGINATION FIGHTERS. EVEN NOW, WE ARE OVERTAKING THE FINAL STRONGHOLDS OF IMAGINATION AND ERADICATING THEM FROM THE GALAXY. YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME.
Tears welled up in the man’s eyes, and for a moment, he was just a boy again. He screamed, “That’s not true!”
YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME.
“You can’t defeat us,” he sobbed, tears streaming down his face. We have the power of imagination on our side! You can never stop us!” He strained to conjure up something, anything, to no avail. The giant orb pulsed, with what seemed like laughter.
YOU ARE BUT A CHILD. YOU THINK YOU HAVE POWER OVER ALL THE IMAGINATION IN THE UNIVERSE, BUT YOU NOT RECOGNIZE IT IN ITS PUREST FORM. BEHOLD THE TRUE POWER OF IMAGINATION.
His wife gasped, “It can’t be!” Suddenly, she was careening toward the demon, blasters firing, then she stopped, as if suspended, flames sputtering uselessly out the back of her spacemobile, yellow lasers hanging in space. A third black space opened up in the face of the demon, this time swirling with the deepest red the man had ever seen. Then, the universe was an ocean of blinding, blazing red. Then. Nothing. His wife… was nothing. Only the demon remained.
The man choked on his sobs, then they came in a long, continuous wail. He screamed as anguish flooded his mind and blotted out his thoughts, but even that anguish was overpowered by the chanting TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER TO ME YOU WILL SURRENDER
***
The master of the masters sat on his golden throne, swathed in thick, opulent robes. His grey beard spilled over his chest, and his dulled eyes squinted across the throne room as two guards dragged in a young boy. The boy wore tattered rags that were the same color as the dirt in which he toiled. But his eyes had a bright fire, and his face a set defiance that declared that, despite the guards’ shoving, he was here by choice.
The master recognized this attribute, and he squinted through his glasses as he approached the boy. Kneeling to the boy’s level, he looked into his fiery eyes. Finally he spoke. “I hear allegations that you’re spreading this imagination nonsense about. Is that true?”
The boy shouted back, “It’s not nonsense! It’s real!”
The master pursed his lips and shook his head. “You’re wrong, little child. Imagination is not real. It has no power. And you’d best stop spreading this foolishness before someone you love gets seriously hurt. Do you understand?”
The boy stared back at him intensely , even as the tears welled up in his eyes. “It’s not foolishness! You just don’t get it! We can make the world a better place! We can save the galaxy!”
Abruptly, the master stretched open his mouth and shot a searing, red laser through the boy’s heart. He sighed wearily, watching the small body crumple. As he strode back to his throne, he ordered, “Find that boy’s village and wipe it off the face of the earth.”
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