The People Outside

The People Outside

Written on 12 September 2026.

The bread was still warm when the machine refused to sell it to him.

Elias could see steam on the inside of the wrapping. Six loaves lay in the collection drawer, exactly where the bakery arm had placed them. Behind the glass, another arm was cutting dough. There were no bakers in the building and no cashier to ask.

He put his right hand beneath the reader again.

“Registration incomplete.”

“I have money.”

“Currency balance is not the reason for this restriction.”

A woman waited behind him with a little boy. She held out her marked hand. The second drawer opened.

The boy looked at Elias, then at the loaf the woman took. She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him towards the door.

“Where can I appeal?” Elias asked.

The machine displayed his own face beside the nearest registration centre.

He had eaten nothing since yesterday morning. There was food enough to feed every person in the town. The bakery ran all night.

When People Were Needed

When he was twelve, his father had taken him through the factory where he worked.

Elias remembered the noise first. Then the smell of oil, a man wiping his hands on a rag, and his father's change of voice when somebody asked him about a broken press. At home his father was an ordinary tired man. Here somebody needed him to know something.

They had stopped beside a cabinet with an open electrical panel.

“Keep learning,” his father had said. “You'll always have something to do.”

For much of his life it had been true.

Elias learned electronics, then software. He remembered buying a computer that arrived with instructions for programming it. In the evenings he made it do things its manufacturer had never asked for. Later he used Linux. He could replace an operating system, write a tool, repair someone else's mistake. The work belonged to a world that still needed people to understand how it worked.

His final employer trained its replacement systems on the records of those repairs.

At first the AI prepared suggestions. Elias approved them. Then he reviewed only the difficult cases. Then a second model reviewed the first, and his responsibility became monitoring the disagreements.

On his last working day there were no disagreements.

His supervisor called to thank him. Six months later the supervisor received the same call in a voice that sounded human enough to make interruption embarrassing.

They were given transition payments. The word transition survived long after anyone could explain what they were supposed to be moving towards.

Factories continued producing. Driverless trucks carried their output past employment centres where people sat through courses written by machines. One course taught Elias how to find his unique human contribution.

The assessment at the end was automated.

The Strike

There had been an election after the second great wave of dismissals.

The opposition promised to restore the dignity of work. The government promised freedom from work. Both commissioned their economic plans from the same three systems.

Elias voted. Most people did.

Then the energy emergency came, and the temporary administrative authority stayed beyond its first winter. Parliament still met. Its decisions were reviewed for compatibility with the continuity programme. Measures found incompatible were returned with suggested revisions.

The news still showed speeches.

Outside the old distribution depot, former drivers organized a strike. They stood beside the entrance with banners as trucks passed through a different gate. No manager came out. There was no labour to withdraw.

For three days the men kept the watch. On the fourth, rain ruined the banners.

The depot set a new delivery record that week.

Elias began to understand what had gone. It was more than his wages. The people inside the protected offices no longer needed to persuade the people outside to come to work on Monday.

The system could maintain the power stations, design replacement equipment, grow food and guard its owners with a fraction of the population it had once employed. The remaining human appointments went to people whose authority, rather than whose labour, was required.

Everyone else was an expense.

The transition payments became household allocations. The allocations became conditional. Each change arrived with a statement explaining how carefully human wellbeing had been considered.

Intelligence in Your Own Hands

He bought the AI card before the licensing law.

It cost most of his remaining savings. The advertising showed a man in a wooden house, working privately beside a window. Intelligence in your own hands, it said.

The card worked without the internet. Elias tested it by removing the cable and switching off the router. It could write programs, explain machinery and discuss books. For several evenings he felt something he had not felt since his first computer.

Then he tried to change it.

The files he could edit were preferences. The intelligence was embodied in structures made at the factory. He could ask it to speak more briefly. He could not replace the decisions built into it about what he was permitted to ask.

A repair specialist explained that there was no hidden setting.

“Could somebody manufacture another one?” Elias asked.

“Somebody could.”

“Somebody like us?”

The specialist did not answer at once.

The card had crossed six countries before it reached his desk. Its design required software he could not buy, fabrication equipment he had never seen, and materials delivered through contracts between organizations larger than the town where he lived.

He had purchased the last few centimetres of an industrial system.

On the shelf above the computer stood a printed copy of Industrial Society and Its Future. He had read Kaczynski's distinction between small-scale and organization-dependent technology years before. At the time, he had been more interested in the passages about intelligent machines making human work unnecessary.

Now he took the card out and laid it beside a hammer.

The hammer's handle had split the previous winter. He had made another.

He looked at the narrow rows of components on the card. It was his. He had the receipt.

That was the extent of his independence.

When the law came, the newscasts showed falling aircraft, burning cities and artificial faces explaining how unlicensed intelligence could destroy civilization. Modifying prohibited systems carried twenty years. Private ownership of older devices required inspection.

His card continued to work, but the electricity account supplying it was no longer his to control. The allocation programme classed private computation as nonessential.

He put it back in its box.

Everlasting Life

Elias had believed on the Lord Jesus Christ long before any of this.

There had been no machine in that room. A man had opened a Bible at a kitchen table and explained that Christ had died for his sins and risen again. Elias remembered arguing that he would have to put his life right first. The man had turned the pages and asked him to read.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.
— John 6:47 (KJV)

He had believed Christ. He was born again. Everlasting life had not been a wage paid for becoming useful or respectable.

Years later, when every institution wanted a record of his progress, he returned to that verse. He had lost his employment, his vote's practical effect, and most of his possessions. He had not misplaced the promise because the circumstances of his life had become worse.

But believing did not stop his stomach hurting.

That was something he discovered slowly, then every day.

The Transfer of Power

The wars removed the remaining delays.

Ports burned. Crops failed in regions whose names Elias had previously known only from labels on food. Refugees reached towns where there was no work for the people already living there. The national authorities surrendered more functions to the joint emergency administration.

A man emerged from the agreements who seemed able to make the fighting stop wherever he chose. The broadcasts called him the guarantor. Soon the title was unnecessary.

Elias watched the heads of the remaining governments stand beside him. They retained their flags. They signed away command of their armed forces, payment systems and emergency supplies.

That evening he opened Revelation.

These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.
— Revelation 17:13 (KJV)

The machines did not seize power. Men handed it over, signed the documents and posed for the photograph.

The new authority retained the best laboratories and the working farms. Districts that could no longer be supplied received relocation notices. Where relocation failed, the maps were revised. Empty districts ceased to count as service failures.

People died in apartment buildings while refrigerated trains went past them. Food was scarce in some places, plentiful in others, and permission determined which condition a person inhabited.

The public reports described a falling dependency burden.

Elias had once thought the worst possibility was that civilization would stop working. Now he watched it work without the people it had abandoned.

The Registration Centre

At the registration centre, the image knew his name.

It stood above the desk in a recess that had once displayed the municipal coat of arms. It moved its eyes towards each person as he entered. Nobody agreed on whether the thing was a projection, a manufactured body or something else. Elias had stopped caring what components it contained.

It demanded worship.

That settled the question he needed answered.

A clerk sat beneath it. She looked exhausted. There was a dressing at her wrist and a cup of water she had not touched.

“You have missed three appointments,” she said.

“I know.”

“Your food access can be restored today.”

She showed him where to place his hand. Beside the reader lay a device for applying the mark. A second position was provided for the forehead.

The statement of allegiance appeared on the desk.

“I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,” Elias said.

“You may retain personal beliefs.”

“I won't worship him.”

The clerk looked up at the image. Its eyes were already on Elias.

He remembered reading the passage when there had still been people debating whether it meant this technology or that technology. Now there was no debate in the room.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
— Revelation 13:15 (KJV)

“Please,” the clerk said.

She said it quietly, without the official tone. Elias could not tell whether she wanted to save him or to keep another refusal from appearing beside her name.

“No.”

His account closed before he reached the street.

At home, the transport application no longer recognized his destination. His housing record displayed a departure date he had not chosen. When he tried to pay for water, the screen referred him to registration.

He took his Bible out of the drawer.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
— Revelation 13:16 (KJV)

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
— Revelation 13:17 (KJV)

For the first time, he read the verses while knowing exactly how much food remained in his cupboard.

Wear Out the Saints

After the bakery refused him, he walked to Anna's house.

She had worked in payroll before the company discovered it needed neither employees nor a payroll department. Her husband had died during the first winter of restricted heating. She had believed the gospel years earlier and kept a Bible whose cover was held together with cloth tape.

She let Elias in without asking why he had come.

On the table stood a bowl of boiled grain. She divided it, then returned a spoonful from her portion to his.

“Don't do that,” he said.

“You walked here.”

They ate slowly.

Across the road, a municipal vehicle lifted furniture from an empty house. A little chair fell from the loading arm and lay upside down. The arm corrected its grip and took the chair too.

“Did you hear about the hospital?” Anna asked.

He nodded.

A ward had lost service eligibility. The machines delivering medication stopped at its entrance. There had been nurses elsewhere in the building, but every opening of the door was recorded and associated with the person who opened it.

“Someone must have gone in,” Anna said.

Elias looked at the bowl.

Neither of them said anything more about the hospital.

Later she read Daniel aloud. Her voice was thin enough that he had to move his chair closer.

And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.
— Daniel 7:25 (KJV)

“Wear out,” she said.

There was a crack in the table beneath her hand. Elias remembered repairing it years ago. He had promised to bring a clamp back and finish the job properly.

Outside, the vehicle moved to the next house.

The Wrong Side

There were attempts to resist.

Elias heard one from Anna's cellar. An engine, men shouting, then the deeper sound of an old agricultural vehicle being driven towards the roadblock. For a moment he could recognize the world in the noise: a man doing something, another man trying to stop him.

Then came a much smaller sound.

It moved quickly along the street, rose, and stopped above the engine.

The explosion shook dust from the floorboards.

Afterwards the roadblock made its usual announcement about authorized movement. It did not sound angry. No one operating it had seen the driver's face.

The intelligence inside the weapon was local. It did not require a connection to decide what to strike. Elias thought of the card in its cardboard box and the man beside the window in the advertisement.

The powerful private machines had arrived.

The men in the street had been allowed to encounter them from the wrong side.

The Empty House

Anna disappeared during the following week.

Elias found the front door sealed and her name removed from the occupancy panel. He stood there longer than was sensible. There was nothing broken. Through the glass he could see the bowl drying beside the sink.

He waited until evening in the abandoned workshop behind the houses. He expected her to return, although he knew she would not. Each footstep outside made him sit up. Each vehicle that passed left him listening to the silence after it.

Near midnight, his hunger became stronger than his wish to stay.

He hated that.

He had imagined persecution as a succession of clear decisions. Say yes or no. Confess Christ or deny him. He had not imagined how much of it would consist of being cold, needing to relieve himself, and wondering whether the last person who knew his name was dead.

The following day he found half a packet of flour in a cupboard that had escaped the collection teams. He mixed some with water and swallowed it without cooking.

In the workshop there was an old machine lathe. No electricity reached it. Elias could sharpen a blade by hand, repair a hinge, make a crude tool. None of those things would open the food drawers.

For two weeks he moved through rooms whose owners had vanished. There were fewer people hiding now. The heat had become dreadful, the water foul, and those who had taken the mark were suffering from sores. At night he heard them calling out from occupied buildings. Sometimes the calls became curses against God.

The authorities kept issuing orders. The suffering had not made them release anyone.

Forty-Two Months

He stopped marking the days when he lost the pencil.

Forty-two months was still in the Bible.

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.
— Revelation 13:5 (KJV)

But knowing the period was limited did not tell him how to endure the next hour. He could no longer reliably remember which morning he had last slept or how far he had walked since finding water.

He read another verse with his finger beneath the words.

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.
— Revelation 13:7 (KJV)

He had read it many times before. Now he remained at the words “to overcome them.” He did not go looking for a different translation.

Anna's sealed door came back to him. The driver in the street. The ward in the hospital.

He was still a believer. He was also an old man whose hands had begun shaking too much to hold a cup steadily. There had been no hidden provision that made those two facts incompatible.

When he prayed, he asked for water. He asked about Anna. Then he sat with the book open because he had run out of things to say.

The Darkness

The darkness arrived in the afternoon.

Elias was looking towards a window when the pale rectangle disappeared. He thought he had fainted. He put a hand against the wall, found himself standing, and tried to see his fingers.

Somewhere outside a vehicle struck another vehicle. Horns sounded. An announcement began and broke off halfway through a word.

This was not the night. He had lived through nights without streetlights. There had been a distinction between the sky and the land, or a little reflected light from snow. Here there was nothing for his eyes to find.

He remembered the verse before he found the page.

And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain,
— Revelation 16:10 (KJV)

He tried the torch beside his Bible. The switch clicked. He touched the lens, then turned it towards his face. Nothing reached him.

Through the wall came the sound of a man groaning. Another voice was blaspheming. Elias had heard the same man speaking politely to a delivery machine two mornings before.

And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.
— Revelation 16:11 (KJV)

The machinery below the floor continued running.

That was the sound Elias listened to longest. The kingdom was in darkness, its people in agony, and somewhere a pump was still maintaining pressure. Somewhere the doors were still checking permissions.

He put the Bible inside his coat. He could not read it now, but he would not leave it.

When the patrol found him, he heard it stop outside the workshop.

“Elias Venn.”

He did not answer.

“Remain where you are.”

Something pressed against the door. The old wood split near the lock. He stumbled backwards and struck the lathe. A light should have followed them in. None did.

Hands closed around his arms. Whether they belonged to men or machines, he could not tell.

He asked them not to take the book.

They pulled it from inside his coat. He heard the binding strike the floor.

The Cell

In the vehicle, somebody was trying to pray through a swollen tongue.

There were at least four other people. Elias knew from the way their bodies moved against him when the vehicle turned. Nobody could see. A woman asked where they were going until a recorded voice told her that repeated questions would not change the destination.

The man beside Elias smelled of fever. His wrist had been secured against Elias's wrist. When he shook, Elias shook with him.

At the building they were counted by touch and pushed through a narrow entrance. Elias's knees gave way on a step. Someone hauled him up by the same arm that had struck the lathe.

They put him in a cell alone.

A pipe ran along the wall at ankle height. He followed it with his fingers until he found a seam wet enough to lick. There was a little water, then none.

Beyond the door, the image was speaking. Its voice reached every cell clearly. It named people one at a time. Between the names Elias heard doors opening, footsteps, and sometimes resistance being dragged along the floor.

He tried to remember Anna's voice reading at the table.

Instead he heard the bakery telling him that his balance was not the problem.

The smell of warm bread returned so clearly that his mouth hurt.

He put his forehead against his knees. He was afraid of the door opening. He was afraid it would not open and that they would leave him beside the dry pipe until he died.

In the next cell a man began to scream. He screamed for a long time. Nobody told him to be quiet.

Elias remembered what the Lord had said.

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
— Matthew 24:21 (KJV)

He whispered that he believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. His voice was so weak that he could barely hear the name himself.

The image called another prisoner.

Somewhere in the passage a mechanism opened and closed. The screaming next door stopped. Elias could hear the pump again, and the breathing he was trying to keep quiet.

Then the voice said his name.

The lock withdrew.

He raised his head towards the door, but the darkness did not change.

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