Neriglissar returned home a bit past the first hour of the night, finding his wife and children home already and waiting for him. He quickly changed into his casual clothes and joined them for dinner, eating a beef steak with some vegetables and drinking his favorite brand of Mesopotamian beer, just as he had asked.

“So, what actually happened at your work today? An attempted robbery?” Beletsunu asked.

“Yeah, I guess so. Fucking slaves running wild,” Neriglissar said as he took a gulp of beer. “We are treating them pretty nicely, and they repay us by robbing us of our hard-earned money.”

“What happened to them? Were they killed?” Rimsin, his oldest son, asked.

“Of course. Cops shot them before they had left the square. Well, not all of them. I popped one as well, as he was trying to get into my office.”

“Oh, that’s awesome!”

“Hey, Rim! Don’t say that,” Beletsunu scolded him. “You’re not setting a good example,” she said to Neriglissar.

“What was I supposed to do? Allow him to hold us hostage?” Neriglissar asked. “Besides, I even tried to save our office slave Haneef, but that idiot Gulkishar killed him too. And he was an expensive one as well.”

“They are humans too, you know,” Kuaya, his oldest daughter, said. “They shouldn’t be treated like animals, they deserve a decent living as well.”

“They are slaves, nothing more, nothing less. And we treat them as slaves.”

“Why? Why can’t they be treated same as free people?”

“Because they forfeited their freedom. They deserve their fate. Freeing them would disrupt the order we have established and would signal to everyone that there are no consequences for their actions.”

“There are other ways to punish people for their crimes.”

“Yeah? What, like the Egyptians do, building massive prison complexes to house those miscreants and feed them using the taxpayers’ money? What good would that do? We Babylonians are more efficient with our resources.”

“Even then, most of them aren’t even guilty of anything, they were just born into such a situation. There is no reason to punish them in such a way.”

“Well, such is life. Some get born into a family of farmers and become farmers, others are born to merchants and become merchants, a few are born to kings and become kings. And some are born to slaves and so become slaves themselves. This has been the case for millennia and will continue being so for the foreseeable future.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“It doesn’t have to remain like this. It’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair, kid. And it shouldn’t be. Some have to suffer so that others could enjoy life. And those slaves don’t even have to suffer as much, they could still live decently if they just accepted their place and didn’t try to cause all this chaos. I’m telling you, the members of this Mesopotamian Freedom Front will end up the same way as those of the Assyrian Liberation Army – nothing but a pile of corpses in the end.”

“No, I think they will be more successful. And it will change Mesopotamia for the better.”

“Hey! Stop that. You know this is a pro-slavery household, and I will not tolerate any MFF propaganda here.”

“Whatever,” Kuaya stood up and left to go back to her room.

“So… I suppose we won’t be getting a house slave now after all, right?” Zirat, the younger daughter, asked.

“No… No, I don’t think we will. Don’t want no damn terrorists in my house,” Neriglissar took another sip of beer.

After finishing dinner, Neriglissar went to his bedroom where he picked up the fiction tablet book that he had been reading and continued from where he had finished the day before. Beletsunu later joined him, after she had finished doing the dishes and taking care of other matters in the apartment.

“What are you reading?” she asked him.

“It’s the book I picked up a few days ago. From this series called The Iron Nergal.”

“Oh, I heard about it. Seems really popular now.”

“Yeah, it’s a big hit so I thought I would see what it’s about as well.”

“So what is it about?”

“It’s a pretty weird and terrifying post-apocalyptic tale. Basically, some seafaring barbarians arrive from nowhere and cause chaos and destruction which eventually leads to the fall of most civilizations, except Egypt, which is barely holding on against these invaders. And also Assyria, which has conquered Mesopotamia. And it’s Tiglath’s Assyria…”

“That is terrifying.”

“It is. Really, it’s quite gruesome, but it makes sense as it’s written by a Mycenaean author. So it’s nothing like our soft Mesopotamian literature, and I like that.”

“The author’s Mycenaean? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. Ioulos, son of Ioannis, of Mycenae. He claims to have fought in the Hittite Civil War, so that’s where he got all this military knowledge from probably, as there are lots of detailed battles here.”

“Interesting, I might check it out myself.”

“Feel free to. Just don’t remove my bookmark.”

After an hour more of reading, Neriglissar put down his book and went to the bathroom to wash himself and brush his teeth, before returning back to the bedroom.

“Will you be reading more today?” Beletsunu asked.

“No, I think I’ve had enough of that action for the day,” Neriglissar replied.

“Perhaps you are interested in a different kind of action then?”

“Why, of course! Just give me a moment, I need to set the alarm.”

Neriglissar set the sand clock so it would complete the sequence in ten hours and put it on the pressure plate to finish the configuration of the mechanism, before joining Beletsunu in bed.

Neriglissar Shamashegertu woke up at the third hour of the day, the 10th day of the month, as his alarm clock activated and started playing a Hurrian hymn right next to him on the bed…