Through the Looking Glass
Spoiler
The rat gnawed at the bars of its cage. As a rodent, it was perhaps just trying to grind down its constantly growing incisors. But perhaps it was hungry—the sound was reminiscent of a human inmate banging an empty cup on his jail cell bars, at least if contemporary cinema had depicted the sound accurately. Then again, perhaps the rat was just doing it to annoy the scientist, just to see what would happen, a kind of role reversal that made Kent uneasy.
"Stupid rat," Kent said, shaking his head.
His phone rang, the tone indicating that it was his supervisor. "Hi, Marty. Yeah, still twenty-nine more banks to tend to, then there's the data entry. No, I won't be clocking out early just because it's the weekend. Yes, I'll make sure to lock up the safe this time. Yeah, yeah, enjoy your Sunday, too."
Kent disconnected the call. This job was making him crazy. Maybe another microdose would help him take the edge off? His eyes met the rat's and he thought he detected the hint of judgement behind them.
"Stupid rat," Kent repeated, finishing the food and water restock and moving on to the next cage.
Of course, it wasn't the rat's fault that Kent had failed out of pre-med biology and had been obliged to pursue the somewhat less glamorous career path of laboratory animal technician. It was not the rat that indulged its drug habit to the detriment of making something of himself, nor the rat's choice to mate with Cindy, the on-again-off-again borderline psychotic girlfriend who had just moved back with her mom again. Likewise, the rat had not taken on an imprudently large mortgage just to own a sliver of the American Dream, albeit one with a leaky roof in a run-down neighbourhood, necessitating extra shifts at work just to cover the interest payments.
In fact, Kent reflected, the rat seemed to be doing pretty well for himself. His cage was like a little hotel room, and he himself was the room service staff. It was clean, unlike Kent's own home, and well stocked with food and water. There was an exercise wheel—Kent couldn't afford exercise equipment, and would be unlikely to use it even if he could. Yes, Kent should be so lucky, one day, to be retired and treated so grandly as a lowly rat. Granted, there were the hazards of the experiments to contend with—these particular rodents were on various regimens of psychotropics to study their long-term impacts on cognitive development—but the data showed most of them actually lived a more balanced life than Kent himself. Grunting in hollow despondence, Kent popped the next two rats' doses and fudged the records to cover it up.
Five o'clock came late that day. Time dragged its heels, like an old dog on its last walk. Kent barely survived the commute afterwards, the long evening shadows stretching over yet another accident on the one-six-three. Dinner consisted of beans and hash, or maybe it was just hash? It all blurred together in the haze that choked his thoughts.
And then came time to sleep, to rest and reset for the ordeal of another day. Except all he could hear was the scratching in the walls, as bit by bit an infestation of rodents ground his questionable real-estate investment into dust. Kent's eyelid twitched in the darkness, anger warring with despair for dominion over his soul.
"Stupid rats!" Kent shouted, flinging his bong at the far wall and smashing it to bits. He found a crowbar—the home invader two-thieves-ago had obligingly left it behind—and smashed a hole in the wall that seemed to vibrate like a speaker with the sounds. With shaky hands he raised the flashlight of his phone to the hole he had made, worrying at what he might be capable of in his agitated state if he actually found a rat.
But there was no army of rodents in the wall, not even one, which made him question his sanity. If he squinted just right, Kent could imagine the space in the wall belonging to a network of tunnels, where the back ends of common things formed a twisted parallel world. The back of a light switch was a metal box that looked like swiss cheese—who knew so many wires were required to light a bulb? Exotic fluffs and disturbing dusts mingled with spider webs and pierced by the pointy ends of nails. A network of pipes jostled with duct work for space as they snaked off to somewhere else to be useful, carrying the echoes of what could be scuffling rat feet or maybe just the whispers of air vented from the sewers.
Kent popped another pill and returned to bed, his phone and crowbar clutched to his chest like comfort stuffies in the arms of a sleeping child.
***
Six AM came too early, as it always did. The glaring light confounded Kent's vision, and a wave of nausea washed over him. The pounding of a hangover prevented his scattered brain from connecting the stimuli around him into any sensical narrative. Was that a dentist's drill suspended from the ceiling? Who was playing backwards-talking devil music at this hour? Why did it smell like someone had burnt toast?
Kent raised his hand to rub at his tired eyes and immediately regretted the manoeuvre, for the crowbar did his headache no favours. Squinting into the light, he noticed what looked like a band of slime connecting his face to the receding bar. What the hell was going on?
Kent sat up all at once, making his stomach roil like the churning drum of a washing machine. Disoriented, he looked around his room, or at least what remained of it. His bed was still intact, as was his dresser, but further outward in a spherical shape his possessions tapered to a charred nothingness. Beyond that, there were bars, hatched like an animal cage, and beyond that a vast room full of lights and machines that baffled his imagination.
Something pushed at his chest, flinging him back onto the mattress. It was a beam of green light, only it was substantial in a way that bent the rules of physics as Kent understood them. The backwards-talking music intensified, and the cage was suddenly engulfed in shadow as a giant creature that was all eyes and tentacles examined him with a drooling intensity. Kent quivered in fear, but the ordeal was thankfully over quickly. Soon the devilish music voices receded, the lights dimmed to a tolerable level, and there was nothing left to menace him except the strange hum and buzz of distant instruments.
What the actual fuck?! Kent reached over to his dresser drawer and popped another pill. And then another three, just to be safe. The world around him softened and even twisted a little, but the basic building blocks remained—he was the caged animal now.
***
Eight paces by sixteen paces, that was his world between the bars. Beyond the comforts of his bed and his quickly depleting dresser, there was a two gallon jug of funny tasting water affixed to the wall and a bowl that was filled with cardboardy food pellets on regular intervals. A pair of metallic orbs dangled from the ceiling, which when touched simultaneously would cause his muscles to spasm uncontrollably in what Kent supposed amounted to exercise. A panel of swirling blue light was fixed to the wall with a cushion in front of it, approximating the experience of television without the nuisance of insipid programming. And a tube like a vacuum with a padded attachment proved to be a disturbingly efficient way of evacuating his bladder and bowels.
The days passed, or so Kent supposed, for the rhythm of lighting changes and probing light beams mapped poorly onto his own circadian needs. At first it was terrifying being the specimen in the jar, but familiarity quickly bred ennui. As time stretched out, it even felt as if the creatures that had abducted him began to lose interest. Beams that once held him firmly in place by the middle only glanced half-heartedly off his shoulder, for example. Kent shrugged it off, for he could appreciate the rut such repetitive duties could wear into one's soul. He wondered what the musical backwards-talk words were for "stupid rat".
So Kent spent most of his time lounging in bed and playing on his phone. By digging the outlet out of what remained of his wall with the crowbar he had been able to splice the wires to the two orbs in order to keep it charged. Days turned to weeks, or maybe months, who knew? The date function on his phone seemed set on random, or maybe it was just the algorithm of his phone struggling with the complex fields of space travel? Kent could only guess, and in the end he decided he really didn't care, for in his bones he felt terrifically at ease with the arrangement. Someone else had the job of worrying now—all he had to do was exist, which was just about his speed.
At length, however, the irksome scratching returned. Not an audible sound in the wall this time, but rather a feeling at the back of his mind that grated at his peace. At first he thought it was the lack of internet. With a bit of fiddling in his phone's settings he was able to detect a number of signals that registered as wifi and bluetooth, but nothing his device could make sense of.
More disturbing was his diminishing supply of drugs. Loose protocols at his old job meant that his dresser had started off exceedingly well-stocked, but the little pills could not last forever. Anxiety bled into paranoia about how he might cope once they were truly depleted, and he began to wean himself off of them in order to stretch out his supply as long as possible. It was probably gentle symptoms of withdrawal, he reasoned, that gnawed at his subconsciousness like a rat in the wall.
Or maybe it was the boredom that began to play tricks with his mind? Maybe it was a clearer head as he cleaned himself up? But as the hours built up and the days dripped away the stain on his conscience grew. He imagined distant voices—human voices—weeping and lamenting at the edge of his hearing. The dubious routine of his handlers became scattered, even erratic. Kent began to contemplate the end-game, for how many rats had he himself disposed of, after their experimental usefulness was done? Slowly, but with increasing savageness, the instinct of self-preservation was able to claw its way out from under the blanket of hazy laziness that shrouded his mind.
And so it was, while idling on his phone one day, that Kent was presented with a stark choice. He had been experimenting with creating a mobile hotspot despite his phone's lack of connectivity when suddenly the signal triggered a hatch to open up in the ceiling of his cage. Did he dare stake his existence on the dangerous opportunities of freedom? Where would he go? He was surely in an alien lab if not an alien spaceship ... And yet the scratch scratch scratching at the back of his mind wouldn't let him just close the hatch back up. Anxious reluctance grew into a grim determination as he packed the duffle bag he kept under his bed. Drugs, phone charger, crowbar, bedding. He took the cardboard food pellets he had stashed in the event of the unforeseen. With a bit of prying he was even able to rip the half-full water jug off its moorings and bring it along as well. Then, by pushing the bed onto its edge beneath the hatch, he was able to climb to his freedom.
The unholy hum of the alien instruments reminded him of a hospital as he scurried along the periphery of the room like a mouse, each beep and flash making him startle as if his presence were detected. It had been hard to see the floor from his cage, but it turned out to be strewn with a spaghetti-like tangle of cords, some the size of well-fed pythons, and some even snaking lazily into wall panels that were left half-ajar to accommodate them. And there were other cages, too, rows and rows of them, stacked like crates up to the towering ceiling. The scale of the operation made him feel truly small indeed.
The only cages he could see into were those close to the ground, and these contained people and animals in delirious states. One man raved about the coming of the Jagthura, although he could not define precisely who or what it was. Another cage contained a kangaroo that seemed to babble in human idioms. A third contained only a skeleton, tied to the two orbs with ripped bits of cloth, the electricity causing it still to twitch in a dance macabre. A fourth contained a bed like his own, only when he passed by—
"Kent?!" a woman's voice called out in confusion.
Kent turned to see Cindy, his on-again-off-again borderline psychotic girlfriend, clutching bedsheets to her chest to hide her nakedness.
"Cindy?" he asked, the coincidence jarring something at the back of his mind. "I thought you were at your mother's?"
Cindy rolled her eyes. "Does this look like my mother's, Doofus? You never did have a head for the obvious! That's why I broke up with you again."
Kent was about to make a wise-crack about who was the real doofus who kept getting back together with him when the blankets of the bed stirred again and Marty, his supervisor at the lab, sat up.
"Oh, hi Kent ..." he said, struggling for words. "I tell you, some of these experiments they've put us through ... whoo-wee, am I right?"
Kent blinked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
The kangaroo nodded along from behind its bars. "It's a real dog's breakfast," it sighed. "Or is it a dingo's breakfast? Well, it's all gone haywire now, eh mate?"
"You know, you're just going to get yourself killed, right?" Cindy was saying. Her arms were crossed and her tone was haughty, two tells that she was preparing to shout at him. "Don't spoil it for the rest of us. This is so like you, going off without really thinking things through. Get back in your loser cage! The rest of us need to make what we can of our lives."
Kent thought he heard the distant sound of backwards devil music. He should probably try to free his fellow humans with his phone signal, but time was now of the essence, and it's hard to act in the best interests of someone who is going red in the face dressing you down. Instead he opened his duffel bag and stared long and hard at the pills he still had.
"There's the mother lode!" the kangaroo gushed, ears twitching in excitement. "Don't tilt at windmills, though."
Kent wasn't sure what was real anymore. On impulse he started flinging the pills, at Marty and Cindy and at the grateful kangaroo, too ("Hey, the grass is always greener, right?").
"Wait, is that ... company property?!" Marty exclaimed, pulling out his reading glasses from somewhere under the blankets.
"You stupid twit!" Cindy screamed. "You're going to get caught! You always ruin everything you touch! Admit it! Just ... just give up. It's pathetic watching you ... you ..."
"Chase your tail?" the talking kangaroo supplied as it munched down on gobs of pills.
The sound of backwards devil music was growing louder as Kent turned and fled. He dashed under instruments, squeezed between crates, and clambered over wires the size of pipelines. The backwards devil music rose to a crescendo now, as if the giant alien being was incensed that a tiny creature should dare to escape its bonds. There was no going back to the cage now. No, now there was only the open panel and the twisted labyrinth of the unknown within.
"Stupid rat," Kent said, shaking his head.
His phone rang, the tone indicating that it was his supervisor. "Hi, Marty. Yeah, still twenty-nine more banks to tend to, then there's the data entry. No, I won't be clocking out early just because it's the weekend. Yes, I'll make sure to lock up the safe this time. Yeah, yeah, enjoy your Sunday, too."
Kent disconnected the call. This job was making him crazy. Maybe another microdose would help him take the edge off? His eyes met the rat's and he thought he detected the hint of judgement behind them.
"Stupid rat," Kent repeated, finishing the food and water restock and moving on to the next cage.
Of course, it wasn't the rat's fault that Kent had failed out of pre-med biology and had been obliged to pursue the somewhat less glamorous career path of laboratory animal technician. It was not the rat that indulged its drug habit to the detriment of making something of himself, nor the rat's choice to mate with Cindy, the on-again-off-again borderline psychotic girlfriend who had just moved back with her mom again. Likewise, the rat had not taken on an imprudently large mortgage just to own a sliver of the American Dream, albeit one with a leaky roof in a run-down neighbourhood, necessitating extra shifts at work just to cover the interest payments.
In fact, Kent reflected, the rat seemed to be doing pretty well for himself. His cage was like a little hotel room, and he himself was the room service staff. It was clean, unlike Kent's own home, and well stocked with food and water. There was an exercise wheel—Kent couldn't afford exercise equipment, and would be unlikely to use it even if he could. Yes, Kent should be so lucky, one day, to be retired and treated so grandly as a lowly rat. Granted, there were the hazards of the experiments to contend with—these particular rodents were on various regimens of psychotropics to study their long-term impacts on cognitive development—but the data showed most of them actually lived a more balanced life than Kent himself. Grunting in hollow despondence, Kent popped the next two rats' doses and fudged the records to cover it up.
Five o'clock came late that day. Time dragged its heels, like an old dog on its last walk. Kent barely survived the commute afterwards, the long evening shadows stretching over yet another accident on the one-six-three. Dinner consisted of beans and hash, or maybe it was just hash? It all blurred together in the haze that choked his thoughts.
And then came time to sleep, to rest and reset for the ordeal of another day. Except all he could hear was the scratching in the walls, as bit by bit an infestation of rodents ground his questionable real-estate investment into dust. Kent's eyelid twitched in the darkness, anger warring with despair for dominion over his soul.
"Stupid rats!" Kent shouted, flinging his bong at the far wall and smashing it to bits. He found a crowbar—the home invader two-thieves-ago had obligingly left it behind—and smashed a hole in the wall that seemed to vibrate like a speaker with the sounds. With shaky hands he raised the flashlight of his phone to the hole he had made, worrying at what he might be capable of in his agitated state if he actually found a rat.
But there was no army of rodents in the wall, not even one, which made him question his sanity. If he squinted just right, Kent could imagine the space in the wall belonging to a network of tunnels, where the back ends of common things formed a twisted parallel world. The back of a light switch was a metal box that looked like swiss cheese—who knew so many wires were required to light a bulb? Exotic fluffs and disturbing dusts mingled with spider webs and pierced by the pointy ends of nails. A network of pipes jostled with duct work for space as they snaked off to somewhere else to be useful, carrying the echoes of what could be scuffling rat feet or maybe just the whispers of air vented from the sewers.
Kent popped another pill and returned to bed, his phone and crowbar clutched to his chest like comfort stuffies in the arms of a sleeping child.
***
Six AM came too early, as it always did. The glaring light confounded Kent's vision, and a wave of nausea washed over him. The pounding of a hangover prevented his scattered brain from connecting the stimuli around him into any sensical narrative. Was that a dentist's drill suspended from the ceiling? Who was playing backwards-talking devil music at this hour? Why did it smell like someone had burnt toast?
Kent raised his hand to rub at his tired eyes and immediately regretted the manoeuvre, for the crowbar did his headache no favours. Squinting into the light, he noticed what looked like a band of slime connecting his face to the receding bar. What the hell was going on?
Kent sat up all at once, making his stomach roil like the churning drum of a washing machine. Disoriented, he looked around his room, or at least what remained of it. His bed was still intact, as was his dresser, but further outward in a spherical shape his possessions tapered to a charred nothingness. Beyond that, there were bars, hatched like an animal cage, and beyond that a vast room full of lights and machines that baffled his imagination.
Something pushed at his chest, flinging him back onto the mattress. It was a beam of green light, only it was substantial in a way that bent the rules of physics as Kent understood them. The backwards-talking music intensified, and the cage was suddenly engulfed in shadow as a giant creature that was all eyes and tentacles examined him with a drooling intensity. Kent quivered in fear, but the ordeal was thankfully over quickly. Soon the devilish music voices receded, the lights dimmed to a tolerable level, and there was nothing left to menace him except the strange hum and buzz of distant instruments.
What the actual fuck?! Kent reached over to his dresser drawer and popped another pill. And then another three, just to be safe. The world around him softened and even twisted a little, but the basic building blocks remained—he was the caged animal now.
***
Eight paces by sixteen paces, that was his world between the bars. Beyond the comforts of his bed and his quickly depleting dresser, there was a two gallon jug of funny tasting water affixed to the wall and a bowl that was filled with cardboardy food pellets on regular intervals. A pair of metallic orbs dangled from the ceiling, which when touched simultaneously would cause his muscles to spasm uncontrollably in what Kent supposed amounted to exercise. A panel of swirling blue light was fixed to the wall with a cushion in front of it, approximating the experience of television without the nuisance of insipid programming. And a tube like a vacuum with a padded attachment proved to be a disturbingly efficient way of evacuating his bladder and bowels.
The days passed, or so Kent supposed, for the rhythm of lighting changes and probing light beams mapped poorly onto his own circadian needs. At first it was terrifying being the specimen in the jar, but familiarity quickly bred ennui. As time stretched out, it even felt as if the creatures that had abducted him began to lose interest. Beams that once held him firmly in place by the middle only glanced half-heartedly off his shoulder, for example. Kent shrugged it off, for he could appreciate the rut such repetitive duties could wear into one's soul. He wondered what the musical backwards-talk words were for "stupid rat".
So Kent spent most of his time lounging in bed and playing on his phone. By digging the outlet out of what remained of his wall with the crowbar he had been able to splice the wires to the two orbs in order to keep it charged. Days turned to weeks, or maybe months, who knew? The date function on his phone seemed set on random, or maybe it was just the algorithm of his phone struggling with the complex fields of space travel? Kent could only guess, and in the end he decided he really didn't care, for in his bones he felt terrifically at ease with the arrangement. Someone else had the job of worrying now—all he had to do was exist, which was just about his speed.
At length, however, the irksome scratching returned. Not an audible sound in the wall this time, but rather a feeling at the back of his mind that grated at his peace. At first he thought it was the lack of internet. With a bit of fiddling in his phone's settings he was able to detect a number of signals that registered as wifi and bluetooth, but nothing his device could make sense of.
More disturbing was his diminishing supply of drugs. Loose protocols at his old job meant that his dresser had started off exceedingly well-stocked, but the little pills could not last forever. Anxiety bled into paranoia about how he might cope once they were truly depleted, and he began to wean himself off of them in order to stretch out his supply as long as possible. It was probably gentle symptoms of withdrawal, he reasoned, that gnawed at his subconsciousness like a rat in the wall.
Or maybe it was the boredom that began to play tricks with his mind? Maybe it was a clearer head as he cleaned himself up? But as the hours built up and the days dripped away the stain on his conscience grew. He imagined distant voices—human voices—weeping and lamenting at the edge of his hearing. The dubious routine of his handlers became scattered, even erratic. Kent began to contemplate the end-game, for how many rats had he himself disposed of, after their experimental usefulness was done? Slowly, but with increasing savageness, the instinct of self-preservation was able to claw its way out from under the blanket of hazy laziness that shrouded his mind.
And so it was, while idling on his phone one day, that Kent was presented with a stark choice. He had been experimenting with creating a mobile hotspot despite his phone's lack of connectivity when suddenly the signal triggered a hatch to open up in the ceiling of his cage. Did he dare stake his existence on the dangerous opportunities of freedom? Where would he go? He was surely in an alien lab if not an alien spaceship ... And yet the scratch scratch scratching at the back of his mind wouldn't let him just close the hatch back up. Anxious reluctance grew into a grim determination as he packed the duffle bag he kept under his bed. Drugs, phone charger, crowbar, bedding. He took the cardboard food pellets he had stashed in the event of the unforeseen. With a bit of prying he was even able to rip the half-full water jug off its moorings and bring it along as well. Then, by pushing the bed onto its edge beneath the hatch, he was able to climb to his freedom.
The unholy hum of the alien instruments reminded him of a hospital as he scurried along the periphery of the room like a mouse, each beep and flash making him startle as if his presence were detected. It had been hard to see the floor from his cage, but it turned out to be strewn with a spaghetti-like tangle of cords, some the size of well-fed pythons, and some even snaking lazily into wall panels that were left half-ajar to accommodate them. And there were other cages, too, rows and rows of them, stacked like crates up to the towering ceiling. The scale of the operation made him feel truly small indeed.
The only cages he could see into were those close to the ground, and these contained people and animals in delirious states. One man raved about the coming of the Jagthura, although he could not define precisely who or what it was. Another cage contained a kangaroo that seemed to babble in human idioms. A third contained only a skeleton, tied to the two orbs with ripped bits of cloth, the electricity causing it still to twitch in a dance macabre. A fourth contained a bed like his own, only when he passed by—
"Kent?!" a woman's voice called out in confusion.
Kent turned to see Cindy, his on-again-off-again borderline psychotic girlfriend, clutching bedsheets to her chest to hide her nakedness.
"Cindy?" he asked, the coincidence jarring something at the back of his mind. "I thought you were at your mother's?"
Cindy rolled her eyes. "Does this look like my mother's, Doofus? You never did have a head for the obvious! That's why I broke up with you again."
Kent was about to make a wise-crack about who was the real doofus who kept getting back together with him when the blankets of the bed stirred again and Marty, his supervisor at the lab, sat up.
"Oh, hi Kent ..." he said, struggling for words. "I tell you, some of these experiments they've put us through ... whoo-wee, am I right?"
Kent blinked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
The kangaroo nodded along from behind its bars. "It's a real dog's breakfast," it sighed. "Or is it a dingo's breakfast? Well, it's all gone haywire now, eh mate?"
"You know, you're just going to get yourself killed, right?" Cindy was saying. Her arms were crossed and her tone was haughty, two tells that she was preparing to shout at him. "Don't spoil it for the rest of us. This is so like you, going off without really thinking things through. Get back in your loser cage! The rest of us need to make what we can of our lives."
Kent thought he heard the distant sound of backwards devil music. He should probably try to free his fellow humans with his phone signal, but time was now of the essence, and it's hard to act in the best interests of someone who is going red in the face dressing you down. Instead he opened his duffel bag and stared long and hard at the pills he still had.
"There's the mother lode!" the kangaroo gushed, ears twitching in excitement. "Don't tilt at windmills, though."
Kent wasn't sure what was real anymore. On impulse he started flinging the pills, at Marty and Cindy and at the grateful kangaroo, too ("Hey, the grass is always greener, right?").
"Wait, is that ... company property?!" Marty exclaimed, pulling out his reading glasses from somewhere under the blankets.
"You stupid twit!" Cindy screamed. "You're going to get caught! You always ruin everything you touch! Admit it! Just ... just give up. It's pathetic watching you ... you ..."
"Chase your tail?" the talking kangaroo supplied as it munched down on gobs of pills.
The sound of backwards devil music was growing louder as Kent turned and fled. He dashed under instruments, squeezed between crates, and clambered over wires the size of pipelines. The backwards devil music rose to a crescendo now, as if the giant alien being was incensed that a tiny creature should dare to escape its bonds. There was no going back to the cage now. No, now there was only the open panel and the twisted labyrinth of the unknown within.
[close]
). Getting back on track, this story punched hard for me because I have exactly two kids myself (no plans to run out on them, but it would be horrible if they were cut out of my life for forty years). So top marks for insight into the human condition, pulling on my emotional strings, and twisting the script at the end.
), but we've had lengthy debates in the past about contest administrants submitting their work. One school of thought says it's biased, because they already know what the topic is ahead of time, and another school of thought says more stories makes the competition more interesting, so what's the harm? The unofficial compromise has been that contest administrators can post stories but then declare that it's not a "real" entry and therefore can't be voted for. You're new, you didn't know, and since I was in the second school of thought it doesn't really bother me, but to keep the peace I automatically discounted voting for you. 
The doubling of the "stupid things" with the second task fits the theme, but the repetitive nature of the punishments made it hard for the story to gain traction in my imagination. "High Coup" was slightly better, having started with a punny title. The juxtaposition of an ancient leader condemning slavery and a modern one encouraging it was thought provoking, although highly selective (the majority of ancient leaders had no issue with slavery and the majority of modern elected presidents strongly oppose it). I liked how it seemed like the slaves would carry the day, although I struggle to see what is doubled. 
