For decades the tyrannical Ton had brutally oppressed the Zee minority.
Terror and fear were the trademarks of the Ton junta.
The Zee were slaves. The dirt on Ton boots. They even wiped their arses.
So it had been. So it shall be.
Hope had vanished from the Zee camps. A sense of resignation had set in and festered. A new emotion grew.
Hate.
Hatred of the Ton Horde and of everything they had done to the helpless Zee.
Hatred of how they looked on, smiling, whilst Zee children died of starvation and thirst in the streets.
The eyes of the Ton were the portholes of Hell.
They offended the Zee every time they opened them.
The Ton were also technological. They gathered gadgets around them by the dozen.
Huge TV billboards advertised the latest must-have gismo in all the Ton cities. Tech shops were always packed as the indulgent Ton queued for their expensive toys. Toys beyond even the wildest dreams of the destitute Zee.
The new big thing were smart glasses. They were just in and the Zee could hear the greedy clamour in the shops from their camps.
Smart glasses. What on earth?
It turned out that they were made for an even better, clearer Ton viewing experience. One which came with lots of stats and extra web content visible in the lenses. One which made watching Zees die even more fun!
The Zee were appalled. This seemed utterly barbaric even for the heinous Ton.
Smart specs appeared almost instantly and Zee deaths were recorded in all their detail and shared around the Ton specs community. Data was shown regarding pulse rate, breathing and blood loss to bolster the watchers' excitement, whilst the starving Zee fell to their knees begging for food and water.
Something had to give.
Among the Zee was a pilferer. A thief of super nimble fingers, who had successfully purloined a computer from the Ton masters.
His name was Ozo.
Besides being a thief, Ozo was also of sharp mind and deft computing posed no problem.
He became a gifted hacker.
His family first enjoyed extra rations of food and water as Ozo increased their portion on the Ton database. He then extended this bounty to friends and neighbours, never extending the ruse too far, so as not to be discovered by the watchful Ton.
Alas, one of his beneficiaries was found out, his friend Vee. Vee and his family were dragged to the Ton piazza and in front of the baying Ton tortured and maimed for the name of the hacker.
They remained silent.
Even when sentenced to summary death Vee and his kin never gave up Ozo.
As the Ton executioner drove his tank over their heads, the sadistic tyrants looked on with relish, their Smart glasses revealing every splurt and fracture as the Zee skulls flattened like rabbits.
Ozo was mortified.
He felt solely responsible for the murder of his friends and with breaking heart, his anger burgeoned and he vowed to avenge them.
He would hack the hideous Ton. Somehow he would kill them all.
The answer came to Ozo in a nightmare. As Vee's cranium burst his friend screamed 'an eye for an eye Ozo, an eye for an eye'.
The Smart glasses.
Yes!
If he could somehow break into the central smart hub he could alter the glasses' functions and maybe even their wearers, the loathsome Ton.
Ozo set to work and with fury driving him forward he quickly hacked the Smart portal and was straight into the glasses' dash.
His first hack was to manipulate some Ton into terrible acts of violence centred on their heads.
Ozo was able to force the Ton to ram each other's foreheads against walls and street lamps until their skin was rent open and bone cracked, much to the enjoyment of other Ton, who were duped into thinking they were watching the pitiful Zee.
For a while this spree of harm went well, but too many Ton survived long enough to explain to the tyrant police that something was amiss.
Ozo needed a mass effect. A Ton reaper.
He hacked the system again and this time had what he'd been searching for.
To render the glasses themselves as weapons of destruction.
To make them lethal.
"Pluckers!" He beamed.
The first death by such means occurred when Ozo tested the deadliness on the dreaded Ton executioner himself.
It was during another public slaying of a pitiful Zee captive.
As the executioner was about to board the Ton tank and start flattening, he suddenly grasped his head and screamed.
He screamed and cavorted round and screamed more, all the while clutching his obviously agonised temples.
The shrieking man pulled off his glasses and grasped his face.
"My eyes! For God's sake! My eyes!"
Ozo could hear it all from the back of the crowd, where be secretly held a mobile controller.
"If thine eyes offend thee, pluck them out!"
He whispered this to himself and smiling, he pressed a red button.
All at once the Ton slayer fell to his knees, rammed his fingers deep within the hollows of his eye sockets behind his retinas and tore with all his might.
As his two eyeballs squeezed out of his head he screamed to the heavens, the long optic nerves coming away with a violent tug.
The two bloody orbs where held up in the palms of the executioner for all the Ton to view.
"I cannot see! I cannot see!"
The executioner died of blood loss and shock in front of his fellows, who stood motionless all around him.
Ozo was more than satisfied with the test and moved to the next phase, dialling up the control to 'mass removal' and pressed once again his red button.
Immediately the whole of the Ton crowd and Ton everywhere, at least those many thousands wearing smart glasses, clasped their heads in excruciating pain and eased out their eyes, which fell to the floor, bouncing like whelks.
Some Ton were so shocked that they left their pupils dangling on the nerves.
They trailed from their bloodied sockets, swinging wildly like chestnuts, as the afflicted jostled and spun.
Ozo and his compatriots, after centuries of brutal suppression, skipped and gamboled as their terrible oppressors died in agony or shambled blindly towards their homes, their shoes pressing the myriad of plucked eyes like sick-bed grapes for a now sightless dying race of tyrants.
The Ton were gone.
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