The Orf
A ship is safe in harbor – but that’s not what ships are for.
It felt as if they appeared out of nowhere, and it wasn’t long before they took over our world. We don’t really know how they call themselves, as we haven’t quite managed to decipher their language yet, and for this reason we call them “The Orf”. The Orf are weird looking creatures and they use technologies our race has never seen before. They travel using strange machines and they live in buildings they have built on their own from almost everything material they could find on this planet. It seems that they couldn’t even consider living like our own race…
The first thing they did when they took control of our planet was to enslave my race. My great-grandfather told me stories about the time when our race was free. He also told me about Orf and how they managed to enslave us, as we were greatly inferior to them. Our race had practically no means of defending itself, and had to accept living in slavery. And we have been living like this for centuries. No one remembers exactly when the Orf arrived, as this happened hundreds of years ago…
I’ve been telling you about my race being inferior to the Orf. This has rather been an advantage than a disadvantage over the ages. Our guess is that they don’t even imagine us capable of communicating, and when I say communicating I think of the way they communicate. They use sounds to express themselves, just like us. However, their language seems much more evolved than ours, as their biological structure enables them to use a greater variety of sounds in their speech. This is probably their main reason for ignoring our communication capability, as they probably see our communication skills as being rather close to the ones of inferior species. And that has enabled us to establish a planet-wide network of communications that the Orf suspect nothing of.
I am also a slave, as were my parents. My master is somewhat short compared to the other members of the Orf race, however he seems to be a very important individual. I haven’t told you about it, but the Orf have a very complex social structure, much more complex than our own. As hard as we tried, we were still unable to completely comprehend all the social relationships they have established between themselves…
Another thing we have achieved over the centuries is freedom. I know this sounds quite strange, but many of the members of our race are free. And most the Orf seem to accept this. The only problem is that the ones who are free have great difficulties in managing to find food or shelter. However, they tend to prefer living in the areas inhabited by the Orf, as there are some Orf who feel pity for us and give us food. Not every Orf likes to have one of us as a slave, and instead they protect us and our rights. Their laws have changed for the better in the last decades as far as they refer to our race and to the rights we have. It was a change felt by everyone, as our life standards increased greatly. Yet, even if there are lots of us who are able to walk free, the conditions slaves like me live in are much better. We get food and water every day, unlike the free ones who sometimes die of starvation…
But this situation is not going to keep on like this for long. Now, that our planet-wide communication network is established, we can focus on our plan to take back our planet. Even if we cannot measure to the strength of the Orf’s weapons, we will try and recapture what was ours once. It is going to be a synchronized worldwide mass attack, when the Orf least expect it. Soon, very soon, the entire planet will be ours again…
This concludes today’s fragment from “The Human World seen by a Dog”. Our radio station has made great efforts to obtain the rights of broadcasting this best-seller. That is why you can only hear excerpts from this book on our frequency, and you will be able to do it again tomorrow evening, if you enjoyed listening to it tonight. Thank you very much for your attention, and good night to you all…
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