He was living in a hovel by the sea.
If he'd thought about it, probably he'd be living in a hovel by the sea regardless of the wars, because he lived in a poor country, a country unlucky enough to be unlucky in the first place and then on top of that one of the countries that had been overrun by the supermen.
The supermen swarmed much of the world without anyone much noticing. Much of the world doesn't care about much of the world, the misfortunes that plague other nations, especially if there isn't much in the way of public interest, some angle that provokes sympathy for reasons other than the plight of people actually trying to live there. This made it easy for the supermen to show up and take power. No one cared. They appeared like warlords, in many of them, and as such were little different from what had been happening for many hundreds of years anyway, and only those at the top of those populations had any clue what was happening, and there was surely plenty of talk in those circles, though the boy didn't exist in such circles. To those circles he didn't exist at all, of course. In the hovel by the sea he could at least catch fish to sustain himself, though trying to find markets where he might sell excess catch was always a problem, even before the supermen.
In those countries where the supermen had sufficient international clout, some claim to territory in a neighboring nation, or perhaps merely inconvenient residents within their own, they were noticed well enough, but the relationships between the supermen were hidden for a long time, although even those who lived in hovels in those countries, were privy to the truth. It's hard to escape the truth when it's important to you. Difficult to do anything about it, but what else is there to talk about?
So for years he lived under the regime of one of the supermen, and when the wars began and he found even his hovel was good enough to be caught in the crossfire, the boy would slip onto his boat into the sea and sometimes wonder if he should even bother finding harbor again, if such a thing would even be possible, later.
Then the wars ended and all the supermen were rounded up, and the boy did return to his hovel, and on the whole, found that it wasn't so different from how he'd left it. Well, it was a hovel. Hard to get much worse. He resumed his life, such as it was, and tried to find markets for his fish.
One day, in the village square he overheard a conversation about the fate of the supermen. Someone claimed they were going to be sent into space. Sent into space! In his country there had never even been a glimmer of a hint of a space program. Very far from it! Somehow this hadn't prevented one of the supermen from claiming it, and yet, the result of that usurpation had granted this man a ticket that was unimaginable to anyone living in the country, where advanced science was something that maybe looked like a water filtration system or plumbing in the village just beyond wherever you personally happened to be at any given time.
He kept listening. He wasn't entirely ignorant, nor illiterate, though good material was scarce, along with everything else. He imagined the supermen being sent to a colony, where they would probably establish a beachhead and send envoys back to Earth for reconquest...
No, no, the speaker said, someone else having thought about the same objection. They would be placed in suspended animation.
Huh. Well. He didn't know how to process that. The conversation around him circled around the idea that it was a virtual death sentence, without the willingness to admit it, without the will to carry it out. Given what the state of the space program was in even the most advanced countries, anyone undertaking deep space journeys was hardly likely, even if they were supermen, to emerge from it in a state to do much about it, even if they woke up somewhere along the journey on their own.
If they did? He made his way home, thinking about it. They'd be up there, among the stars, for many years, and they'd never even know time was passing. If they did wake up? They'd finally know what it was like to live in a hovel by the sea.
Yes, they'd learn that much. He considered it a perfect irony. And he thought no more about it.
