I have become obsessed with long term nuclear waste disposal warnings
I suspect (and hope!) the whole thing will be of more interest to historical anthropologists than anyone else. If you’re technologically advanced enough to understand and detect radioactivity, at minimum a site like this tells you:
- The culture that made this understood radiation and knew it was dangerous to them.
- They had some ability to process and use radioactive materials, but not enough to render it completely inert. The exact composition of the waste will probably give them some pretty specific ideas of our abilities.
- They used radioactive materials for *something*
- The amount of radiation in the site was dangerous to them, but the amount outside the site was considered acceptable
- They knew that this stuff would far outlive them (they did not expect to live forever)
- They thought it might be dangerous to future humans and/or other life forms and they cared about that.
- They wanted to communicate with those future people, and expected very, very significant barriers to that communication.
- Radioactivity scared them shitless in ways that other similarly deadly and long lasting stuff (like arsenic) didn’t.
Human attempts to communicate with people vastly separated from us (in time, distance, or biology) fascinates me, but mostly for what it says about us.
Protecting future species from radioactive nuclear waste, even when he humans probably no longer exist?
scifi is cool but space as a “frontier” needs to be dispensed with
space isn’t to be “conquered.” triumphalism go away
the vacuum of space isn’t the antithesis of life. spent nuclear waste in the Southwest desert is disruptive to life, human like us and otherwise. it is not a wasteland because it does not exist for our sake or even its own sake. it simply is. so goes for the airless gaps between worlds.
space as an object of conquest and exploitation is Elon Musk technofashy futurist bullshit ideology, yet it is accepted as self-evident by and large by left-wing ideologues as well.
fashy turdboy coward can’t leave his post up so i’ll just say nobody’s crying, but i am keeping in mind whose head deserves to be cracked by a baseball bat
Fundamentally the thing about outer space is that there is a whole fuck of a lot of it, and nobody using it. So if some people want to do things in space, and put buildings on other planets, and have kids on other planets, this can be done in a chill and cooperative manner. This is fundamentally different from conquest, in that conquest pretty much by definition involves people getting involved in someone else’s business and stealing and killing and generally making a mess.
In conclusion, outer space does not have a brain or a purpose, so humans can do whatever they want with outer space as long as they aren’t dicks to each other about it.
Wuktish nervously groomed one large, clawed arm with his mandibles. His servant and assistant, Gavros, had already polished his old carapace to a dull gleam and he only managed to sully it with his saliva. The little ape was close by his side and scurried over with a cloth in hand to fix her handiwork. They were standing alone behind thick purple curtains, the only light shining from a sole vanity mirror in which Wuktish could see his lacklustre reflection. On the other side of the curtain, the crowd chattered with itself, and there were spotlights that would glare in his eyes and cameras to drink in every bit of his image for the galaxy to see. For the first time in a long time, Wuktish felt self-conscious about how others perceived him.
“Big day, huh?” Gavros tried to make small talk as she furiously polished the splotchy, red and black shell. She wore an all blue jumpsuit with holes for her head, hands, feet and tail to stick through. A black leather satchel hung around her shoulder. Dark brown fur used to cover everywhere but her palms, the soles of her feet, and her face, but the fur had grown grey with age. Two large, green eyes focused intently on Wuktish’s claw as she worked and her tail whipped back and forth mindlessly, the once razor-sharp bone protruding from the tip dulled with age and use. Wuktish’s employer, an incredibly wealthy and philanthropic Zezik by the name of Ensset, had offered him an entire team of professional cosmetologists to help him prepare but he did not like the idea of entrusting himself to the hands of strangers and had tasked Gavros with making him presentable. The little Pedinoid had done her job to the best of her ability and succeeded in making Wuktish more appealing for the cameras. She told him his decrepit old exoskeleton had “character” and made him look, if anything, more respectable. He was glad for her kind words.
“Yes. Very big.” Wuktish agreed in his slow, guttural tone. The hulking Oyroy stroked the fabric of the decorative robe draped over his shell with his free claw as Gavros did her work. His thick shell didn’t allow him to appreciate the soft and luxurious material. He didn’t normally wear anything over himself and he felt somewhat constricted in the flowing white and green robes but this was an event that called for formality. His shell was splotched dull red and black with age, marked with scratches and dents from previous fights and accidents. Wuktish was overdue for a moulting but he would rather address the galaxy wearing an old, ugly shell than none at all. Gavros had brightened the colours of his shell somewhat, using vegetable oil, and had even covered up some of the uglier scars by pressing an epoxy into them and then painting over it to match the patchwork coloration of the rest of his shell. Soft, yellow flesh lay beneath the shell but all that could be seen of it were the long, pallid eyestalks that protruded from the top of his head.
“Don’t worry so much, this is going to go off without a hitch. I have your notes, right here. You’ve prepared for this for a long time, I’ve no doubt you’re ready,” the little primate produced several thin, plastic tablets from her satchel, on which Wuktish had instructed bits of information for her to etch into them, to keep him on track during his speech. The outer surface of the tablets was white but beneath it was all black so that the writing could be seen easily. “I can tell you’re excited. A lifetime of work all culminating to this… I’m a little nervous too, to tell you the truth.”
Wuktish clicked his mandibles in reply, feeling a little sick. He appreciated the little Pedinoid’s attempts to ease his troubled mind but he was feeling nauseated nonetheless. Gavros had served him since he left the Dark Suns when she was very young, and she had grown old in his service. However, she was not the first Pedinoid to enter his employment; during the course of his mission he’d gone through six others, five of which had retired after growing too old and one which had perished as a direct result of the mission. A lifetime of work, for her, was an understatement. To Wuktish, it was nothing. The Oyroy did not weaken and die with age, as the Pedinoid or so many other races did, but grew stronger and more virile with each moulting. Wuktish had never bothered keeping track of his age; it was as meaningless to him as the number of stars in the sky.
Wuktish carefully took the plastic tablets in his free claw. Most people had moved from the archaic method of information storage to electronic tablets, which held the advantage of weight, storage ability and flexibility, but the tiny buttons and touch-screens were unresponsive to his touch. Gavros finished polishing his other claw and he began carefully flipping the tablets over and asserting they were in order. He wished he had taken the time to actually write a speech instead of simply having Gavros carve down bits and pieces of information. At the time it had seemed like a good idea; he usually felt more comfortable talking about a subject than writing about it. His employer, Ensset, had offered him a writer to make a script from his notes for him to follow but Wuktish didn’t trust anyone aside from himself and his servants with his research. Now that it was time to deliver the speech, however, he was beginning to regret not taking her up on the offer. He had no idea how he should end his speech. From the other side of the curtain, the sound of conversation ebbed and was replaced by Ensset’s voice.
“My friends! My friends! Oh, how long it has been,” her unnaturally amplified voice rang out. A voice in the audience answered “Too long!” and was responded by the laughter. “Oh, too long indeed! Let me be the first to welcome the Oyroy of the hour, my associate, longtime friend and the one responsible for this momentous occasion… I sent him away three hundred and seventeen years ago to uncover everything he could about the Signal and he has finally returned with a translation… please welcome the esteemed Wuktish!” With this, Wuktish walked forward to the stage. Gavros stood off to the side, where she could not be seen by the audience but could still watch her boss.
“You’ll do great!” Gavros raised her thumbs at him, a Pedinoid sign that meant ‘good’. Wuktish chittered affectionately before stepping onto the stage.
Wuktish walked onto the stage to the sound of polite applause. The first thing he noticed was that the lights weren’t nearly as glaring as he thought they’d be. There were several small cameras on tripods around the stage but they were very different from the large, clunky devices he had seen commonly used for important broadcasts before he had left civilised life to begin his mission. Had he really been away for so long? The crowd wasn’t as large as he thought it would be, either; it was composed of the high-class friends and associates of Ensset, as well as several other high-profile individuals, seated at tables with various, species-specific meals in front of them and a cylindrical screen in the middle showing the pictures Wuktish’s various servants had taken during the course of his mission. Wuktish recognised the bright red robes of the Listener, the head of the Holy Canev, and the gilded scales of the Ralharan’s new Queen. He gave a nod to a sole Oyroy seated near the back, Yokdur, that he remembered from his time lecturing at the Gorox University. Yokdur had been pursuing a research grant at the university and Wuktish had put a good word in for him. Oyroy rarely left their homeworld and those that did would occasionally cross paths and come to know each other. It was a lonely existence for an Oyroy away from home. Their people didn’t die of old age, as almost every other species did, and it was a difficult to come to terms with the ephemeral lives of their intragalactic neighbours. He recognised a few familiar races and outfits signifying royalty or wealth but he did not recognise his old employer.
When Ensset had first reached out to Wuktish she had already passed the prime of her life. The Zezik Wuktish met still had the lustrous feathers of her youth, her beak shiny and black and a sharp glint in her eye proclaiming her steely resolve and cold, calculating logic. Ensset had made her vast fortune by spearheading the terraforming initiative when many other entrepreneurs had written it off as a ‘mad pipe dream’. She had cornered the market while everyone else was focussing on satellite cities to combat their population growth and by the time the galaxy began to notice the work she was doing her ‘pipe dream’ had become a reality, and she was making more credits than she knew what to do with. She decided to use her vast wealth to fund research into answering questions that had long perplexed the galaxy and herself, and even finding new questions to be answered. If it was yet to be discovered she would undoubtedly have a hand in discovering it, from uncovering dead civilisations, discovering new sentient life, creating cures for sickness… and, of course, decoding the Signal.
The Ensset Wuktish knew was different from the one he saw before him. Always caught up with her work and the various projects she was funding she had never had time to start a family, let alone stay in touch with an old employee. He had sent her regular progress reports but hadn’t seen her face-to-face since he left on the mission. The colourful, shiny feathers had all fallen out, revealing pale and flabby flesh underneath. She was wearing a flowing robe made of a dazzling material which shimmered in the light as she shifted in her chair, as though to compensate for her featherless form. Her black beak had faded nearly to white. She had once stood taller than Wuktish on long, scaly legs but was now confined to sit in a wheelchair. Several thick tubes led from a strange apparatus on the back of her chair to a metal device embedded in the middle of her chest. The Zezik were much shorter lived than the Oyroy and it was obvious to Wuktish that she had extended her lifespan through mechanical means.
“Ah, I must be quite the shock to you. As you can see, Wuktish, I’ve been waiting quite patiently for a very long time.” Ensset’s voice was somewhat more hollow than he remembered but he could still make out her accusatory tone. When she laughed it sounded gravelly, a horrid imitation compared to the musical laughter she used to possess. Wuktish avoided her gaze, partially in shame. The steely glint in her eye remained, as sharp as ever. Everyone wanted to know what the Signal said, but did she really want to know it badly enough to go to such great lengths to extend her life? “Oh, relax, old friend. I knew it would take a long time, that’s why I hired an Oyroy. You think I’d miss out on the Signal’s translation? It’ll take more than old age to stop me from tasting the fruits of your labour!” Some members of the audience laughed and Wuktish felt a little more at ease. Ensset had always called him friend, or partner, but he had only ever known her as his boss.
“Thank you, Ensset. It is an honour to be here.” Wuktish glanced over at the Listener. The Canev wasn’t the only religious organisation based around the Signal but it was certainly the largest and claimed to be the oldest. “I just hope we can all leave here knowing a little bit more.”
“Me too, Wuktish, me too. Now, I think I’ve been up here long enough. Hell, I think I’ve been alive long enough!” Laughed at her own morbid joke. “So, my friend, please tell us the true meaning behind the Signal so I can finally die in peace.” The aged bird still held the dark sense of humour she had during her younger years and the audience laughed and clapped as the old Zezik wheeled down a ramp to take her place at her own table. All eyes were on Wuktish and he was suddenly alone. The laughter and applause died down quickly and the easy atmosphere was replaced by a tense feeling of anticipation. Wuktish adjusted his notes and stepped up to the podium, finding it the perfect height for himself. A tall glass of murky, lukewarm brine water had been placed on it, as well as a microphone for him to speak into. Ensset had put a lot of thought into making sure Wuktish was comfortable during the big speech. He looked up and saw her in the crowd. The cold look in her eye had been replaced with one of curiosity.
“Before I can discuss the Signal we must first understand the Still Ones. Their ships can be found floating all throughout the galaxy, or occasionally stranded on planets, but one of their fleets, known commonly as the Dread Fleet or the Gods’ Grave, persists in our galaxy. The fleet, numbering two hundred and forty-seven identical ships, remains unaffected by the forces of gravity and magnetic attraction and seemingly untouched by the passage of time and impact of space debris. For generations, we wondered how and why they have remained intact for so long, and for generations, it was attributed to the work of the gods. We know now that the Still Ones are responsible for the Dread Fleet and are not of this dimension. Whether or not the Still Ones are gods, however, is still up for dispute.
“The material that makes up the impenetrable hulls of the Dread Fleet is no known alloy or element. There is no known method to damage the ships and so I could not take any samples. Instead, I had to rely on remote-controlled drones to study the ships closer. However, any attempts to observe it remotely by drone led to one mechanical failure or another of the robot, and any electron microscope images recovered from the drones appeared black. I hypothesised that the matter that makes up the Dread Fleet is, like the matter that we are familiar with, made up of condensed energy, but condensed more densely than anything found in this universe. As such, it has… unusual properties. Properties that have lent themselves to the ever-persistent nature of the Dread Fleet, but also to certain, strange phenomena.
“Contact with the Still Ones’ ships seems to disrupt minor flows of energy, Like an EMP disrupting the flow of electricity, except with almost any kind of energy. This explains why all of the drones ceased to function, why any electron imaging was fruitless, why we faced constant technical errors on our ship during our time there but, most importantly, the death of one of my servants, a Pedinoid by the name of Kurja. You can feel a strange tingling sensation simply by being in the proximity of the Dread Fleet, which I merely dismissed as an interesting but ultimately harmless effect of being in the ships’ presence. After half a decade my companion’s health began to deteriorate rapidly, seemingly without cause. He died shortly thereafter. I took tissue samples and found that his DNA had been damaged significantly. Suspecting the worst, I broke open my own shell and took live tissue samples from myself; the cellular processes involving the transformation of chemical energy, the creation and bending of proteins the duplication of DNA and many others were all erratic. Fascinating, now that I look back on it, but I was terrified at the time. Finding myself alone on that ship, I decided the meagre knowledge I could gain from remaining wouldn’t be worth the personal risk. I did not know if it was the natural longevity of my kind that saved me or merely the vast size difference between Kurja and myself but I left. The Gods’ Grave could have very well been my final resting place.”
Wuktish took a moment as he flipped over one of his plastic tabs to, very carefully, take the glass in one large claw. He poured some of the brine over his head, soothing his tired eyes. As the water trickled through the cracks and grooves of his head and face and into his mouth he could imagine he was tasting the salty spray of the ocean. He placed the glass carefully back onto the podium before continuing.
“We may never know where the Still Ones came from nor why they came here. However, there is something that has become quite clear; their intentions were not peaceful. Before I came to work for Ensset I had spent quite some time travelling the galaxy, studying dead civilisations. The conclusion I came to then was that almost all of these civilisations were related; they shared similar architectural styles, farming patterns, building materials and even worn statues seemingly depicting the same bipedal beings. Throughout the galaxy they have been known by many different names, such as the Before, or the Old Ones, or the Faceless, just to name a few. I believe these ancient peoples’ are one. For simplicity, I shall refer to them as the Extinct. Judging by the proximity of Still Ones to the planets where the ruins of the Extinct remain, as well as the damage inflicted on these dead cities, it is evident that the two were at war.
“The Extinct cities and the ships of the Still Ones permeate the entire galaxy. There are billions of planets with Extinct cities and these are only the ones we have been able to find. It is possible there are other ruins yet to be discovered, and ships to be found. The scope of the war was… immense. It was a galactic war, possibly stretching out to other galaxies as well. We cannot say what started it or exactly how long ago it was, or even where it began. We know very little about the war. What we do know is that it involved the Still Ones and the Extinct, possibly other dead races which we’ve yet to distinguish from the Extinct. We also know it was very one-sided. We have never found a way to damage the Still Ones’ ships and we have never found one that was not wholly intact. On the other hand, we have found the ruined remains of the Extinct’s ships throughout the Galaxy. Entire planets littered with their ancient hulls, asteroid belts consisting solely of their demolished fleets. It is easy to lay claim that the Still Ones were the victors; after all, it is not their dead civilisation that lays in ruins throughout our galaxy.
“This was my first conclusion but it left one question unanswered. Why would the Still Ones leave so many perfectly good ships behind? They clearly wiped out the Extinct, why not bring their ships back with them? Or use them for the further conquest of our universe? Why leave them floating aimlessly through the void? That is when one possibility dawned on me. The Still Ones did not win their war. It was at this time that I decided to risk the journey to the origin of the Signal.
“For a very long time we have known of the Signal’s source, but to reach it? An impossibility. The mad pipe dream of an adventurer. My generous benefactor, however, was all too familiar with turning the fantasies of dreamers to reality. The Signal is located midway up the Black Arm, a branch of this Galaxy which, for previously unknown reasons, has gone dark. For much of our galaxy’s history, we thought it void of anything. All we knew was that it was dark, and cold, and dangerous. There are no stars dotting the dark expanse of the Black Arm to guide your way, and there are automatons, Sentinels, older than written history with arms long enough to wrap around entire moons that haunt that infernal branch. Traversing the Black Arm is treacherous, to say the least, so Ensset had the ingenious idea of minimising the risk by making the journey from a neighbouring arm, through the sparse solar systems in between.
“There is nowhere to stop for fuel in the Black Arm, and no stars to guide your course. Ensset had a fleet built and manned by an army of mercenaries to guard my vessel against the horrors that inhabit the Black Arm as we navigated towards the Signal’s source, with enough fuel to travel there and remain, on low power, for a decade or so before returning. It was difficult to plot our course to avoid the dark solar systems and thereby the sleeping Sentinels and on more than one occasion we strayed into their notice. These automatons were colossal, propelling themselves through the void through unknown means. They lack conventional weapons but were equipped with long, powerful arms, which they used to attack our fleet, stealing ships and taking them away.
“The ships they took were brought to mass graves of the Still Ones, where their ships had been bound to dead planets en masse through the liberal application of some unknown adhesive. The Extinct knew they could not destroy the Still Ones, and so sought to entrap them instead. However, for every living Sentinel we encountered there were ten more, deactivated or destroyed, either by the Still Ones or simply due to the passage of time. It was a genius, though temporary, solution. The Sentinels, designed to simply subdue the Still Ones, crushed our own ships. Of the hundreds of ships and thousands of people who went with me to the Black Arm only a handful returned… but what we discovered in the Black Arm, I believe, was worth it.
“We found that the suns were not missing. Nor were they merely extinguished. The Extinct had encased them in vast spherical structures, which I hypothesised were used to harvest their energy. I decided to call these the “Dark Suns.” The Sentinels were clearly still drawing power from them, even after millions or billions of years. A veritable source of unlimited energy, it was difficult to believe that the Dark Suns’ sole purpose was to power the Sentinels. We spent years searching for one which was uninhabited by Sentinels and once we did we set up our base of operations. It was a simple matter of tapping into the Dark Sun to power our own ships and, upon further study, I was not only able to confirm my hypothesis that they existed for energy harvesting but also that they were transmitting that energy wirelessly by firing a powerful laser at a specific location in space.
“It did not take long to find and study the trajectory of the laser. The Dark Sun was sending energy to the origin of the Signal, and the other suns were presumably doing the same. Imagine, an entire arm of the galaxy doomed to eternal night in order to draw out all of its power and send it to a single pinpoint in space. While I was studying the Dark Sun, the mercenaries had not been idle. Leaving a reduced guard in the event that a Sentinel should appear, they went and retrieved any dead Sentinels they could find, for my study. These automatons are large enough to embrace entire moons and built to grapple with the Still Ones’ ships; it would have been futile to blindly force our way through the Black Arm. We needed to know more about them if we were to travel in relative safety to the Signal’s source.
“We found one Sentinel which was almost wholly intact. Not destroyed by the weapons of the Dread ships, but merely deactivated after spending so long fighting with them. The first thing we did was dismantle the arms of the robot. Five mechanical arms situated around a giant mechanical eye were the norm among the Sentinels but it wasn’t uncommon to find them missing a limb or two and still functioning. We quickly found that the alloys used to create the Sentinels were far stronger than anything we have invented, though still far beneath the indestructible nature of the Still Ones. It took weeks to dismantle the arms and three days to isolate the onboard computer, then another year to repair the damage that had been inflicted merely by being in close proximity with the Still Ones for so long. The Extinct were not able to nullify the energy-disrupting effects of the Still Ones but dulled them somewhat by keeping the general design of the Sentinels incredibly simplistic. The computer which controlled the Sentinel was encased and engulfed in some kind of hardened polymer-based foam. It was simple enough to drill through and remove. I believe the liberal use of this material provided incomplete but effective shielding against the energy disrupting effects of the Still Ones. It was difficult to restore functionality to the computer. We were working blindly, and we had to start over twice. When we finally brought the dead Sentinel back to life I was both amazed and relieved.
“With no possible way to interface with the Sentinel, we had to measure its responses to stimulus manually. I proposed that, since it was attacking our ships, the instruments of the Extinct were, like ours, unable to discern matter from the Still Ones’ dimension. I postulated that the Sentinels were able to see in the near-complete darkness, from the light of distant suns. We inserted electrical measurement gauges into certain areas of the computer and experimented by driving different ships in front of its solitary mechanical eye and measuring its response. It took only a few days to learn that it paid no heed to ships beneath a certain size; namely, two to four-person pods, usually meant for emergency situations or short distance travel. It was then that I made the decision to travel to the Signal’s origin without the remains of the army Ensset had hired.
“We took the two largest pods that we dared and tore out much of the hardware unnecessary to the mission or the overall performance of the pods to make room for the instruments I thought I’d need, a haphazardly installed water recycling system, my servant who would work the instruments for me,” Wuktish held up his large and ungainly claws for the audience, which incited a small rippling of laughter through the room. He hadn’t meant it as a joke, but continued unperturbed. “a small cryo pod for her, and enough nutrient capsules to keep us barely alive for several decades. These pods are not built to travel long distances. Instead, I had a trajectory for the Signal’s source and we were torpedoed towards it, to conserve the fuel we did have. I froze my assistant and I went into hibernation for fifteen years while we waited to get to the Signal’s source.
“When we arrived and awoke I immediately knew I had made the right decision to travel uncomfortably, rather than ask Ensset for another army. There was one source of light, the rapid flashing of the lasers as they hit what I presumed was the energy gathering mechanism of the Signal’s source. This light was enough to show me that there were hundreds of sleeping Sentinels perched upon or orbiting a relatively small Dark Sun, as well as others drifting aimlessly through the void of space around the local planets. I don’t believe there exists an army large enough to subdue that many Sentinels. However, the mechanism that gathered the pulses of light, the source of the Signal, was nowhere near the Dark Sun; it was orbiting an insignificant planet, with vast, frozen oceans. Specifically, the third planet from its sun.
“We travelled as closely as we dared; this relatively little satellite was channelling the energy of an entire arm of the galaxy. The machine orbiting it resembled a large, dark rectangular prism, with a small cylinder coming off the side to collect the energy that had travelled across the galaxy, but it was apparent that, despite sending out the Signal for aeons, it had not been activated since the time of the Extinct. We tethered our ship to the satellite, well away from the furnace of the collection port, and began scouring the old structure for answers. What we found was… unnerving. Terrifying, even.
“My assistant, Gavros, stumbled upon a room filled with ancient terminals,” Wuktish paused for a moment in thought. This was supposed to be his discovery but was it really his? The journey wouldn’t have been possible without Ensset, so it was hers, too. Similarly, he wouldn’t have been able to operate the terminals, and the information stored within would have remained undiscovered unless Gavros had been there. In fact, he owed a lot to the Pedinoid. More than they could ever know. He looked at the little grey primate standing off to the side, out of his spotlight. He gestured her over and she meekly obeyed, unused to being the centre of attention. “This is Gavros. She discovered the old terminals and is responsible for uncovering this galaxy’s darkest secret.” The audience neither clapped or even seemed to acknowledge her contribution but, for a brief moment, all eyes were on the old Pedinoid. She kept her own eyes firmly on the floor. “None of the terminals worked. However, upon opening one computer, we found that almost all of them were made of interlocking pieces, each one shielded with the polymer foam we found within the Sentinels. All of the pieces in almost all of the computers were irreparably damaged, either due to the passage of time or something else entirely but we eventually were able to piece together a functioning terminal.
“Through experimentation and sheer luck, Gavros was able to interact with the Extinct computers, through an operating system and user interface older than her entire species. She discovered something truly remarkable; footage of the Extinct, and the final moments of the war with the Still Ones. For the first time since they died out millennia ago, the Extinct have a face once more. Without an interface with the old technology of the Extinct, we could not take the files with us, but Gavros had the idea to film it directly off the screen. What you are about to see is an event predating all written history. Be warned, it is somewhat… shocking.” Wuktish stepped out of the way with Gavros as a large screen lowered behind them. The video and audio were somewhat distorted due to being filmed with a handheld device, not to mention being older than all known civilisations. Alien voices began speaking. They were either wholly alien or completely garbled due to degradation of the files but it was unintelligible either way.
Three tall beings, the Extinct, stood on the screen. One of them was slightly shorter than the others and had short, brown fur on top of its head, and transparent lenses in front of its wide, brown eyes. Another, with long black hair, stood on its right. Its eyes were somewhat narrower and darker. The third stood off to the left and was wrinkled and its head was shiny and smooth, with huge lenses magnifying its large, blue eyes. All of them wore long white coats, and the black haired one held a small black rectangle in a five-fingered hand. Behind them, a window overlooked a massive adjacent room. Each of the Extinct spoke in turn, gesturing to themselves as they did so. Their voices came out in different tones like musical notes, before the one with the short brown hair walked towards the screen, disappearing behind the recording device and bringing it closer to the window to pan across the massive room beneath and beside them.
Through the window, they peered into the gargantuan enclosure. It was all blue and was well lit but completely empty. The opposite wall was bare but, as the video panned left and right, it was revealed that there were massive steel pipes and cords to be seen lining either side. The video panned right, to the Extinct with the long hair, who raised an opposable thumb in affirmation. The ancient being pressed a large red button before the video quickly swung back to show the right wall of the large room. Arcs of electricity jumped between the chrome mechanisms and there was suddenly a tear floating in the air. The rip grew larger and larger until it superimposed the entire right wall. Through it the grainy but distinct image of a strange planet could be seen in the distance, surrounded by a Still One fleet. The ships immediately turned towards the tear and began rapidly approaching.
The camera swung to the Extinct with no hair. It didn’t look up from the window before pressing another large, red button. The camera swung quickly towards the left side of the adjacent room. Electrical arches appeared similarly as they did on the right side but with such intensity that the image on the screen was momentarily gone, replaced with nothing but white. The white faded to reveal another portal, though this one shimmered dangerously in comparison with the last. The camera turned to the right once more, just as several ships exited their own dimension into the large room. Suddenly, a gurgling screech exploded through the room, like the screams of a thousand creatures being boiled in tar. One of the audience members fell off his chair as the camera swung to the right to reveal a writhing mass of tentacles and teeth rapidly leave the left portal, momentarily fill the room, and then exit through the right portal. The bright room was dark after the being passed. A moment later several lights flickered back on, dimly illuminating the scene.
The camera turned shakily to the left to show that the bald one had collapsed. It turned to the right. The one with the long hair was bent over, its face obscured. It shuddered and shook, making sounds like it was choking. Bright red fluid poured out of its mouth and onto the ground. The camera was finally turned around, shaking the entire time, to reveal the operator of the camera had also fared ill. Dark red blood was seeping from the corners of its wide eyes, and from the two holes in the middle of its face. It said something before baring its pearly white teeth. The video cut to black and the screen began ascending out of view.
“It is difficult,” Wuktish cut in before the murmuring of the audience could overtake the room, “to understand what we just saw. It is even more difficult to explain it, given what little evidence we have. I will do my best. I believe that the Extinct, facing their hopeless situation, decided to make a final stand, knowing or ignorant of the fact that they would die but willing to take the risk either way. They harvested the energy from somewhere between twenty-five and a hundred billion stars to tear a hole into the higher dimension of their attackers and then another hole into another dimension much higher than that one. If the Still Ones are not gods then the cosmic horror the Extinct tore from its own dimension and forced through ours and into theirs certainly qualifies. Perhaps more hideous than we could have ever imagined and as uncaring as it is powerful but a god nonetheless.
“Similar to the death of my assistant, Kurja, at the Dread Fleet, this cosmic horror was able to disrupt life processes, though to a much greater extent than the Still Ones ever could. Merely passing through our dimension was enough to wipe out almost all life in the galaxy, if not the universe, including the lives of the Still Ones piloting the Dread Fleet. Some life remained, of course, evolving into the beings you see around you. Trapping the beast in their dimension would have ensured a complete and thorough eradication of all life. There would be no coming back from that. The Extinct knew they would die and decided they would rather die on their own terms and, in the process of doing so, kill the ones who forced them to make that decision.” Wuktish paused. Gavros stood awkwardly beside him. He took the glass of brine and poured it over his head again, relishing in the cooling water. “We can never truly know or understand the Extinct, nor what they went through. However, we now know their motives. Or at least, what could have been their motives. Their technological progress was, in desperation, driven further than ours ever could. Their sole motive wasn’t survival; it was spite. Their relics have stood the test of time… Perhaps with which they wished for whatever came after to remember them.
“I…” Wuktish paused again and shuffled nervously on the stage. He looked over at the Listener. So many of the cultures in the galaxy took root in the Signal and their own interpretations of it. “I failed my mission, in the end. I could not translate the Signal.” The atmosphere of curiosity, wonderment and even fear had, in that instant, been replaced with cynicism and disappointment. He noticed the Listener looking somewhat cocky, his vibrant red robes as resplendent as ever. He couldn’t bear to look at Ensset. “I am terribly sorry. It is an impossible task. That, or one that is beyond me. Thank you for your time,” Wuktish mistakenly glanced over at Ensset. The steely look in her eye was harder and sharper than ever. “…and I’m sorry for wasting it.” Wuktish left the stage, hastily shuffling behind the heavy curtain as the murmuring of the crowd grew louder and louder. Gavros climbed up the podium and took his notes before following the venerable crab backstage.
———————————————————————————————
“Wuktish? Are you alright?” Gavros asked when she caught up with him.
“Yes, I am alright. Perhaps… no, they will never be ready. Go prepare my ship. We must leave before Ensset catches us,” he directed her.
“Not another step,” a familiar voice commanded. He had spoken too soon. “Where do you think you’re going, Wuktish? Do you know how much money I’ve spent to fund your little journey across the universe? How many credits I’ve thrown at extending my life? I’ve spent my fortune giving you everything you’ve asked for this journey. I’ve spent my life waiting for an answer.”
“I… I know. I’m sorry.” Wuktish could not turn around to look his employer in the eye.
“Don’t feed me that line of shit, Wuktish,” she spat. She paused before speaking again, her tone softening somewhat. “I-Isn’t there anything? Some… some small chance that you could have missed something?” For the first time in a long time, Ensset’s voice wavered as she spoke. Wuktish turned to face the old Zezik but kept his eyes from locking with hers.
“I’ve been as thorough as possible. There was nothing.” Wuktish kept his eyes firmly away from hers. Behind him, Gavros shifted back and forth, unsure whether he wanted her to follow through with his original command, now that Ensset had caught up with them. Wuktish had never been one for confrontation. At least, not the verbal kind. He braced himself for the tirade that Ensset would unleash.
“Oh,” she eventually replied, defeated. There was a pregnant pause before she spoke again. “I guess this is goodbye then, Wuktish. I think… I think it’s time I finally stopped. It hurts, you know. It hurts to extend your life for as long as I have… Ah, but what would you know, you’re an Oyroy.” She paused for a moment. The sound of conversation had grown significantly and was drifting in through the curtains. “I just really wanted to know what the Signal said, y’know? Thanks for everything, old friend.” Again she called him friend. The old bird turned away, ready to die. Wuktish stood, frozen, as the old Zezik wheeled herself away. The chatter on the other side of the curtain had turned to joy, and Wuktish could hear laughter. No doubt at some joke cracked at his expense if the context of his speech hadn’t already fallen to the wayside.
“Wait. Ensset, don’t go,” Wuktish called out. “Not yet. There’s something I need to tell you, first.” Ensset’s wheels stopped turning before spinning her around slowly. Wuktish scuttled towards her, Gavros following close behind.
“Wuktish, the only reason I’ve stayed around for so long was to hear what the Signal said. Let me go rest, my friend.” Ensset looked older than ever, her eyes dull.
“I haven’t been completely honest with you. I… I know what the Signal says.” Wuktish hazarded a look at Ensset. She had perked up in her seat, her eyes lighting up with curiosity and suspicion.
“Go on.”
“In all honesty, I’ve known what the Signal says for centuries,“ Wuktish confessed.” Before I was under your employment, long before you were even born, I spent hundreds of years studying dead civilisations. One of the Extinct’s cities that I visited was orbiting the Pedinoid’s homeworld. It was there that I found an ancient manuscript, preserved almost perfectly in a sealed container for millennia. It was a manual, of sorts, which translated one of the dead tongues of the Extinct into a series of glyphs that I did not recognise at the time as hand signs. There have been countless such artefacts found throughout history but they have only translated between the many different dead languages of the Extinct. However, my guide at the time, a Pedinoid who’s name I can no longer recall, recognised it almost immediately. What I had discovered was a translation to the first language of the Pedinoid, known as Sign Language. Their ancestors must have inherited it from the Extinct before they went, well, extinct. This language used to be used widely on their planet but now exists only for their mute to communicate. From there it was a simple matter of translating the Signal between the unknown tongues of the Extinct and into the ancient Sign Language of the Pedinoid.”
“Then… then why did you let me waste so much time waiting for you to return from your expedition? If you had known all this time… why did you go on such a long and dangerous mission? Why not just let the galaxy know of your discovery?”
“I… do not believe that the galaxy should know what the Signal says. It is in everyone’s best interest to remain ignorant. Call me arrogant, if you will, but I have come to terms with my decision to withhold that information.” Wuktish conveniently ignored her first question and addressed the second instead. “We have so many religions and cultures based on the Signal. Entire ways of life rooted in it. If we took it away… if we nullified their interpretations, or worse, gave them something solid to interpret… the backlash would be incredible. People would die. I think it would be best to let them hold onto their perception of the Signal and assign meaning blindly.”
“Yes, well, I don’t care about their interpretations.” Ensset waved a featherless hand dismissively. “I want to hear yours. I want to know the translation.”
“There was one thing I did discover on the mission which I withheld. Emblazoned on the Extinct’s machine was the word ‘Mjolnir’.” Wuktish told her. Ensset stared at him, waiting for him to explain it to her. “There is no known meaning of the word. It could possibly an acronym but we can never know. Not until a translation can be found, assuming one exists.”
“So their final super-weapon was called Mjolnir. I didn’t know that I wanted to know what they called it… but what of the Signal?”
“The Signal, yes.” Wuktish took a deep breath, feeling the filtered air rush passed his gills and into his lung. His eye stalks felt dry and he wished he had another glass of brine water to run over them. “It says…” Wuktish paused for a moment more. “I think… I think it would be best if you read the translation for yourself. Gavros, the last tablet if you would be so kind.” Gavros gave him the tablet without a word. Wuktish looked at it quickly to affirm it was the right one, then handed it to Ensset to read. “At the very bottom.”
Ensset sat for a moment before looking up at Wuktish more confused than ever.
“I believe it wasn’t meant for us. I believe it was meant for the Still Ones,” he explained and Ensset’s face instantly lit up.
“This is what the signal says? Oh my gods, if people knew that this is what the Signal said… haha!” She laughed in glee. She laughed and laughed, cackling and shaking in her wheelchair until Gavros started laughing along with her. Wuktish stood awkwardly. His kind did not laugh.
“Do you see why I kept it to myself all this time? At first, I was certain that I was translating something wrong but that’s what it says. That’s all it’s been saying since the war.” Wuktish habitually cleaned one of his claws. He couldn’t wait to get out of his constricting robe.
“Ah, that’s hilarious. Thank you. Thank you for this, Wuktish.” Ensset said as her laughter died down. She took on an accusatory tone once more as she looked up at the Oyroy. “But you still haven’t answered one of my questions. Why did you let me waste so much of my life waiting? Why let me waste so many credits sending you all over the galaxy? If you had gone somewhere nice I’d believe that you were simply scamming an old Zezik out of her money to go on vacation, but everywhere you went was a total shithole.”
Wuktish thought about his answer before putting it to words. “Ensset… I have known for so long what the Signal says. Now I know what it means.”
“I guess we both do, now. Alright, Wuktish, you’re off the hook. I can finally die happy. Gods, it’s been a long life.”
“Too long,” Wuktish replied, though whether he was talking about hers or his he couldn’t say. Ensset laughed. “You can keep that if you want but please… for the sake of everybody, don’t let anyone else read it.”
“No, no, I understand. I’ll melt it down before I go,“ Ensset assured him as she turned around in her wheelchair. "Thank you, again, Wuktish. This wouldn’t have been possible without you.” Wuktish chittered something at Gavros and she scampered out a nearby door to prep his ship. He scuttled slowly behind, wondering what he would do next.
———————————————————————————————
Torib had been a servant in Ensset’s house for thirteen years now. The old bird had passed away recently and she had wished for her property to be sold. She had no close friends and no relatives that she didn’t hate. The fortune in her bank and the credits to be made from liquidating her assets would be distributed evenly among the various surviving scientists and scientific organisations she had hired over the years to answer her ludicrous questions and make discoveries in her name. A final thank-you to the ones who made her life worth living. Torib gave a deep sigh. He would have liked to receive some of that money, too.
Torib was vacuuming the floor in Ensset’s study. He took the nozzle head off to get all the dust out of the corners where the wall and the bookshelves met the floor, and underneath Ensset’s old desk. The great big chair which had predated his own employment had been removed when she found herself wheelchair-bound, so there was nothing to move as Torib vacuumed behind the desk. It was a nice study with tall windows to allow plenty of natural sunlight. During the cooler seasons, there was a great big fireplace at Ensset’s back to keep her warm. It had been a while since somebody had disposed of the ashes. He placed the nozzle back onto the end of the vacuum as he considered how he would go about removing the ashes. Torib stirred them with a nearby poker and placed a feathered hand on them to make sure that they were, in fact, cool, before taking his vacuum cleaner to make short work of an otherwise tedious task.
“Ugh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Torib groaned as his vacuum cleaner began making an ear-splitting whining sound. Grumbling to himself, he removed it from the fire pit and turned it off. The whining stopped and ash fell out of the end and onto the carpet, followed by the culprit of his woes, a partially melted piece of plastic. “Aw, piss. Stupid fucking vacuum. Why’d that old bitch need to have fucking carpet by her fireplace, anyways?” he swore as he turned it on again and tried to fix the mess. He had always worked silently but found himself being much more vocal about his displeasure ever since Ensset passed away. It was easier for him to curse on the job without his boss possibly rolling in on him. Torib looked at the melted plastic out of curiosity as he struggled to get all the ash out of the carpet. Most of the writing was completely unintelligible, but at the bottom, one line could be read clearly, despite the ash and disfigurement from the heat.
Eat shit and die.
Torib did a double take before looking around the room, half expecting the ghost of the late Ensset to be glaring at him after seeing his accident and overhearing his colourful language. Realising his foolishness, Torib shook himself back to his senses.
“Yeah, fuck you too, you greedy old crow.” Torib threw the melted plastic in the trash and kept vacuuming, bitter that he hadn’t been squeezed into his former employer’s will.
Cet calmly cut down the fleeing inhabitants with a steady beam of burning light as Uahl and Seld intercepted the single ship that had managed to make it off the ground. Cet slew perhaps more species in those few hours than he had in his entire military career, and the unarmed people of BN-225 were hapless before him. An orchestra of death howls surrounded him as the settlers burned, and he could hear screaming from one of the nearer huts as Sab helped himself to some poor individual; gender and species mattered not, so long as Sab could find a hole he liked. Cet chose to ignore him and his barbarism. Finally content with his work, he smiled as he lowered his beam focuser. The tubular lens radiated heat from the prolonged exposure, and he allowed it to cool before he began polishing it carefully with a fine cloth and a little mineral oil. Sab had left his empty plasma thrower lying in a puddle outside of the hut. The soft, damp ground beneath his feet felt spongy as he made his way between smoking corpses to the administrative building he had cleared out earlier. The computers would hold a plethora of information on the inhabitants as well as allow him access to the existing scanners to amplify their own.
The sky was a cool grey, and the local star’s light was dampened severely before it could reach the watery surface of the boggy world. BN-225 was a small planet, but an incredibly old one. One of the officials on Cet’s homeworld had suggested that life had existed on BN-225 before anywhere else in the galaxy, though at a glance it did not appear to have evolved much. Most of the life on the planet was plant or plant-like and thick groves of trees and vines spanned the globe. Cet wouldn’t have been surprised if the planet had been covered by a single ocean at one point, or if the plants were simply covering the water, accumulating enough dead organic matter to rot above the hidden seas to form soil and mud. He shuddered as he imagined what horrors the untold depths might hold, though he told himself that it was due to the chill in the air.
Cet slung the pristine beam focuser over one shoulder as he walked up several metal steps to the main entrance of the administrative building. Corpses littered the ground, and he was grateful that a sophisticated weapon like his cauterised instantly rather than allowing his victims to bleed everywhere. They were, after all, going to have to clean up and live here for the untold future. Cet waved a six-fingered hand before the computer tower as a scanner detected his species and the keyboard warped and reformed to suit his own needs. He had been a little worried; most computers had millions of keyboards and billions of languages to suit the broad array of species that may use them, but he had held no delusions that a forgotten settlement this far out would have the information on file for an ourou, his own race.
A greyscale holo-screen projected before him, and he activated the little gear widget to change a few settings. He expertly adjusted the projector to display a colour spectrum accessible by him and his comrades before he went delving into the records. A few deft activations and several keystrokes later he had the information he wanted. The planet had been home to a total of seventy-two settlers. Three families of kikn from SK-356, one family of eutphon from RT-579, three individual skur from SK-998, two humans from XT-110 (though the record said one had died several cycles ago), and one gurg from PT-293, all of whom had lived there for quite some time, with little contact other than with occasional supply ships and infrequent research vessels. Cet made a face. He didn’t remember killing a gurg, and the thought of one running loose on the planet filled him with apprehension for their mission. Cet closed the projector as he pulled his communicator from his pocket.
“All clear on this end. The computer says there are seventy-two individuals, but one of them is a gurg. I’ll have Sab help do a body count,” Cet spoke clearly and concisely into the black rectangular device, though his voice was likely to be garbled due to the cloud cover.
“Copy that, Cet,” Uahl called back, his voice crackling through the small device. “We just sent their transport down in flames, we’ll be right there.” Almost as if on queue, a massive explosion rattled the entire building, threatening to topple Cet. He remained upright, despite its efforts. Cet waited for a moment for an aftershock, then checked that his beam focuser wasn’t damaged before proceeding out of the administrative building. When he finally found Sab he was still busy with the corpse of the poor thing he had taken into the hut earlier.
“Put that thing down, Sab. We’ve got work to do.” Sab grunted in reply. “I need you to do a body count. There were seventy-two sentients on this planet before we came, and among them was a gurg.” Sab grunted again, too concentrated on the task at hand to dignify Cet with a proper response. “A gurg, which, I may not have dealt with. So if you want to sleep soundly tonight, you had best help me find out if it’s dead or not.” Rolling his eyes, Sab dropped the cadaver on the ground before collecting the nearby bodies and lining them alongside the first one. The hulking brute was bigger and stronger than an ourou had any right to be, and as dumb as he was stubborn, but he got the job done and that was all that mattered.
Cet sat on a rusted old pipe attached to a nearby water purifier and took a small orange triangle from his pocket and squeezed it slightly. The holo-screen opened up on the same page he had left off on, and a tiny triangle guided him to the exact spot he had ended on previously before it blinked out of existence to let him read unabated. He had always enjoyed reading mythology, especially those from other species. It was interesting to see how different myths and legends could be but even more so how similar. Certain trends appeared and reappeared despite vast differences in origins, and Cet found immense pleasure in connecting them together. The story before him was that of a valiant young Arrhun named Oedilek, who had gone into a mythological monsters den. The monster in question was a Turrurru, or in an old tongue of the Arrhun, “Many-Eyed.” The legends said that it took the eyes of any who looked upon it for itself, killing its victim instantly. Cet had read of several monsters now that killed those that viewed them; they turned their victims inside out or forced them to age rapidly, or even changed their flesh into stone. Cet’s concentration was broken as the gravity engines of their ship, the Forerunner, thrummed loudly in the atmosphere, slowing its descent to the muddy ground.
Seld waited until the ship’s stairs deployed before descending, followed by Uahl. The Forerunner was under Seld’s command, Sab’s older brother by a cycle and a half. Despite their relation, Cet couldn’t think of two ourous more different; Sab was a lumbering brute, the perfect soldier in His majesty Emperor Whel’s army. He frightened the other recruits into line, and was a literal monster on the battlefield, wreaking havoc with a plasma thrower and his huge hands; Seld was a relatively reserved and soft-spoken individual, and he maintained a cool head in the heat of battle. Seld’s aim with a beam focuser rivalled Cet’s, and he was a better pilot than not, as well as an exceptional gunman on the forward charged particle cannons. Sab had been Seld’s first pick when he was granted their mission.
“Cet, I’m transferring you the coordinates of the transport. Uahl and I have to set up the connection with their deep space scanners, and I need to report to homeworld,” Seld’s voice was barely audible over the sound of the cooling engines as he tapped his communicator screen several times. A thin mist had gathered at ankle height, weaving between the huts which made up the settlement, and dancing around the landing gear of the Forerunner.
Cet hadn’t forgotten the mission; BN-225 was the closest settlement to an all but forgotten hyperspace tunnel, and it was their job to monitor it and notify their homeworld in case a fleet happened to make the jump. The tunnel itself had begun to decay due to a lack of maintenance, and it meant nearly certain death to attempt a jump through it, but the Emperor’s generals were taking no chances. They would not risk His majesty’s royal army to some unforeseen flanking. Seld’s team were either to monitor jump activity from a cramped ship for an indeterminate time or take the closest settlement by force and set up their own scanners there to do their monitoring. They chose the latter.
Cet lightly brushed a delicate finger over his spot in the text as he shut off the holo-screen, placing the small orange triangle into a pocket and nodding in compliance. He carefully removed the beam focuser from its sheath on his back, chrome plating shining despite the dreary lighting. Sab dumped the last body in the line (fifty-three in total, none of which being the dreaded gurg) before sitting down on the front step of a wooden hut. Cet called upon Sab to join him, and he grunted in annoyance before standing up once more. Uahl had already begun unloading the delicate dishes from the Forerunner to prepare their satellite array.
“We’re going to go here,” Cet indicated the tiny map on his communicator screen, “and count the bodies on the ship.” Sab looked at Cet with dull eyes, mild annoyance briefly interrupting his glazed over expression. Upon happenstance, Cet spotted a pile of wood on the edge of the dense bog, with a large machete of sorts lodged into a tree stump. “Go grab that, Sab,” Cet said. Sab smiled as he saw the big blade, and he quickly collected it before he and Cet delved into the marsh. He swung it a few times, hacking off a couple tree limbs and slicing some vines. Looking pleased with himself, Sab followed Cet contentedly. The ancient trees were spaced out evenly, but Cet quickly lost sight of the Forerunner as the mist enshrouded their companions.
The ground in the settlement had been soft and damp, but beyond its boundaries, the mud sucked noisily at the two ourou’s feet. Vines beneath the mud threatened to trip Cet as he gingerly picked his way through the muck, and Sab had fallen once, nearly losing his new found toy in the ancient bog and ending up soaked from head to toe in the vile decay. Cet almost tripped over his own feet when he found a solid bit of ground. Looking down he could see a pattern of old stones laid out beneath the cloudy water but above the mud. To his left the hidden path appeared to lead back to the main settlement, but to his right it looked as though it snaked in the general direction of the fallen transport. Cet showed Sab the hidden stones, and together they splashed onward towards the crashed ship and, hopefully, their missing gurg.
It wasn’t long before they came upon the ship. It hadn’t landed very far from the old stone steps, and the water, mud and vines had absorbed the impact, preventing it from gouging out a path due to its speed and trajectory, dissipating that energy throughout much of the surrounding area. Cet saw that most of the plants within the immediate vicinity of the crashed ship had been blackened or burned, but there were no fires to be seen. Steam still rose from the hull of the ruined ship in the cool air. The plants were too damp, and the air too humid, to facilitate so much fire and flame, and he was not shocked to find the ship extinguished and inert. Part of the hull had been torn away, allowing them a view of its burnt tenants. Cet and Sab stepped back into the muck to move around the ship and perform a body count, Cet holding his beam focuser close to his chest and away from the filth around his legs, Sab skewering bodies upon his machete and flinging them out of the ship and into the mud. Cet counted the bodies as Sab threw them out… fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. He counted seventeen bodies. That left two unaccounted for, and Cet still hadn’t seen the gurg anywhere.
Just then, Sab gave a massive grunt and Cet heard chitin cracking and tendons tearing as Sab wrenched the blackened corpse of the gurg from twisted metal pipes. One of the pipes broke, sending a short torrent of bright blue coolant pouring into the marsh. Sab threw the large body down, sending up a tremendous splash, nearly getting some on Cet and his weapon. That made eighteen bodies, Cet counted, which left one unaccounted for, but as long as the gurg was dead he could sleep easily. The first bodies had already begun to disappear beneath the shallow water as the bog swallowed them whole, and the coolant had all but disappeared as though the plants themselves had soaked it into their roots. The ship, as well, was partially sunken and would be fully submerged come the following night. Cet wondered; it was almost as though the planet was resisting change. The ancient bog hadn’t changed for millennia, and these mild disturbances gave it no reason to change now. Cet shuddered as he and Sab walked back onto the path.
The mist draped the bog in mystery, terminating the visible path as it snaked between the ancient trees, but Cet remembered that the ship had been to their left when they came upon it. Or had it been right? He tried to check his communicator for directions, but the digital compass only swung wildly, and when he tried to call up Seld or Uahl he only received static. Confused and a little anxious, Cet stood, pondering his conundrum as Sab stared unknowingly, waiting for Cet to make a choice for the both of them. Finally giving up, Cet decided that the path had to lead somewhere, and there was nowhere on the planet besides the settlement of recluses for it to lead back to if his initial decision didn’t bring them back to the ship. He turned to his left and began walking and Sab followed him unquestioningly.
The old growth surrounded them on both sides, ancient gnarled trees with too many branches and too few leaves threatening to grab them and pull them under like giant twisted hands. The primordial trees were peculiarly short and stunted, but their venerable trunks stretched further around than any tree ought to. Cet gripped his weapon tightly, listening closely to Sab’s heavy breathing. He often treated the big lout with disdain, but it was times like these he was glad to have the wall of muscle close by. As the two soldiers splashed through the watery marsh the mist gave way before them to reveal the twisted path they followed. Cet couldn’t say how long they had been walking, and just as he was considering turning back a dark shape materialised and loomed over them.
The structure was not much bigger than the simple huts within the main settlement, though it looked as though it had come from a completely different place. White paint peeled off of the derelict wooden walls, and upon the black tiles of the roof moss grew heavily and lichen dangled from the edges. Squares had been cut out of the walls and glass had been inserted almost artfully, although the glass was too obscured to see through. The humidity had condensed against the window panes, allowing a thin mucous like growth to conceal the contents of the neglected structure. Wooden steps that had once been white were blackened with mould, leading up to a heavy wooden door. Cet would have thought the forsaken structure deserted had it not been for that hideous noise; creeeek….. creeeeeek…. Over and over again, like wind swinging a door open and shut on time-worn hinges, though there was no wind that Cet could feel. Strange music bled through the old building, filling Cet’s ears and mind as though to hypnotise him. Immediately filled with apprehension, Cet turned on his heel to leave, only to bump into Sab.
Sab stood as still as a statue with what Cet thought was curiosity on his face, though he had never seen Sab express interest in anything other than his debased joys. Before he could say a word of warning, Sab wandered up to the ancient building. The soggy old wood should have cracked under his weight, but instead, it simply bent and squeaked when he made his way up the steps. He reached out for the latch on the heavy wooden door, rattling it back and forth before simply twisting it and breaking the locking mechanism. The music and the creaking stopped suddenly and Cet held his breath as Sab pushed the door inward, revealing a dark interior. There was a sudden BOOM like an explosion, and Sab’s corpse slowly teetered before falling backwards, writhing as it fell down the rotten steps.
Cet couldn’t stop staring in horror at the giant ourou. He could see rippling muscles spasm under scarred skin as he gazed in fear. Where his head once sat upon his short neck there was nothing more than shattered bone and torn flesh. It was as though his head had exploded right off of his shoulders… that would explain the loud noise Cet had heard. He jumped back in terror, nearly dropping his beam focuser in the mud as the big wooden door slammed shut. He sat there for a stunned moment. Then ….creeeeek… creeeeeek….. as the strange music seeped through the chilly air once more, trying to draw him closer.
Cet had never run so fast in his life. He ran and ran, his weapon dangling uselessly in his hand as he tried to escape the unknown horror lurking in that evil structure. Ancient sentinels flew by him as he tried to avoid slipping and falling, and he couldn’t say how long he had run before the path finally ended at the settlement. When he finally arrived back at the settlement he was dizzy with fear and exhaustion. He collapsed on the soft ground, finding small solace in the cool earth against his burning skin. His beam focuser lay in the dirt beside him, forgotten. Cet heard shouting, and then felt a pair of strong hands grip him and pull him to his feet, but he didn’t have the strength to resist as they pulled him forwards. Exhausted, he shut his eyes. He dreamt of the terrible unnamed thing beyond that dark doorway.
When Cet came to he was lying on a soft mattress in a dim room, his nightmare faintly etched on his mind, though already partially forgotten. Sterilised white walls and glaring white lights in the hall outside the door, as well as a biometric scanner aimed from the ceiling at Cet told him he was in a med bay, and from the lingering scent of burnt flesh and hair, he knew he was in the administrative building. Cet sat up, and saw at the foot of his bed Seld sitting down in deep thought, and Uahl moving coloured pieces to make patterns in a little game that involved a flat board and different shapes with different colours. Seld looked up at the noise and held out a hand as if to calm Cet down.
“Easy, easy. We’ve got your hydration levels back up and your temperature is returned to normal, but your heart rate still hasn’t slowed much. Can you tell us what happened? Where’s Sab?” Seld asked, his steady voice calming and reassuring. A sudden torrent of memories came flooding back to Cet, and he tried to stutter out a coherent answer.
“I-I-I d-don’t know! H-he j-j-just looked at it, a-and his h-h-h-head….” Cet trailed off, his jaw shaking wildly as he tried to choke out an answer. He avoided eye contact with Seld as though he, too, might spontaneously die before his very eyes.
“Hey, Cet, calm down! You’re safe now. You’re safe. Was it the gurg?” Uahl stood up from the game to hand Cet a couple pills and a glass of purified water. Cet gulped the pills down without question and without water. An artificial peace washed over him as they took effect almost immediately, and he stopped shaking.
“N-no. The gurg was dead, burned up in the crash. But… but we also found an old stone path beneath the water and we followed it. We found a building, a wooden building, out there in the swamp. There were strange sounds coming from it, and I… I wanted to leave. Sab walked up to the door and opened it, but as soon as he saw whatever was inside, h-his… his head exploded,” Cet finished the story, and looked up to see their incredulous faces.
“Exploded? What do you mean exploded?” Uahl asked.
“I mean, he just looked through that old doorway and his head exploded. There was a loud boom, and the next thing I knew his head had blown up and he was dead,” Cet left out the details of Sab’s writhing corpse.
“Did you see what was inside?” Uahl pressured him as Seld stood silently, thinking.
“No! If I did, I wouldn’t be here! I t-t-told you guys, he looked in the building and his head exploded. Th-that’s all I know, that’s all I know…” Cet could feel the fleeting effects of the pills begin to wear off, and he stared intently at the end of his bed rather than at his two companions.
“Listen, Cet. I know you’re scared right now, but I need you to get a hold of yourself. I believe you. I believe you, but we need to go and find out what that thing in the swamp was. Okay? Do you have the coordinates?” Seld asked him gently, seemingly unperturbed by his brother’s death. Cet shook his head. He should have taken the coordinates, but he had been too scared of the unseen horror. “Then I’m sorry Cet, but I have to ask that you bring us there.” Cet looked up at Seld, his eyes wide in fright.
“N-no! I can’t go back! We should just burn the whole swamp down, we should just burn it down. We shouldn’t go back. There’s something evil out there,” Cet reached instinctively to his beam focuser on his shoulder but it wasn’t there.
“Cet, we’ve got to go. The three of us can’t stay here if there’s something out there with ill intent for us. You have to bring us there,” Seld’s tone was firm. Against his better judgement, Cet nodded his head.
“Okay.”
An hour later they had suited up, wearing light body armour and wielding beam focusers. Cet had found his beam focuser lying in the dirt where he had left it and had furiously tried to wipe away the dirt and smears, grimacing as he imagined the filth it had lain in. The path hadn’t been hard to find once they knew what to look for, and Cet led the way through the dreary swamp with his newly polished weapon pointed straight ahead. A half an hour in they found the half-sunken ship, and Cet noticed the bodies Sab had thrown upon the watery ground had disappeared beneath the mud and the vines. It was another hour of walking before they came upon the decaying structure. It loomed overhead as though it were about to swallow him up, and Cet could hear the dreaded creeeek…. creeeeeeek… creeeek… and unholy music emanating from within. Sab’s body had vanished, swallowed up by the swamp… or swallowed up by the unknowable horror inside the wooden building. Cet shivered, and this time, he knew it wasn’t due to the chill.
Uahl placed a hand on Cet’s shaking shoulder as she and Seld stepped by him, weapons in hand. Cet followed closely, standing directly behind Uahl and concentrating on staring at his weapon. Uahl reached out to the door, but he hardly touched it when the old wooden rectangle began to swing inwards with a creeeeeeek of its own. The music and the creaking noise ceased at the sound of the door swinging open, and Cet could see the distorted reflection of the horror in the house in the gleaming chrome plating of his weapon. There was a successive BOOM BOOM and Cet felt warm blood splatter the back of his head and neck as he turned to flee once more. He didn’t need to turn around to know that his two companions were now headless corpses.
He ran as far as his legs would take him, nearly collapsing from exhaustion. Finally, he had made his way back to the half-sunken transport, ducking inside and sitting down in a partially burnt seat as he tried to catch his breath. What was that thing? He had never seen anything like it, though admittedly he had only seen its reflection. Its reflection. Cet would have laughed if it weren’t for the terror which gripped his mind so completely. He hadn’t looked directly at the thing. Seld, Sab, and Uahl had, and now they were dead. Could it be? he wondered. Both encounters with the unseeable terror had resulted in the deaths of his companions but not himself, and it was they who had looked directly upon the thing. Cet let out a nervous laugh. It was just like one of the monsters in myth, which killed with a glance. Perhaps those mythological monsters were based on some primordial mode of life that could actually kill with a glance. It made sense that those creatures would die out as heroes hunted them down, and be reduced to legends, but on an old world like this one, they may still exist.
Gripping tightly to his theory, Cet quickly began working on removing a piece of chrome plating from the inner wall of the slowly sinking transport. The smoke had blackened it, and it had been warped by heat, but it was all he had. He tore at the fabric of one of the seats in the ship and scrubbed at the chrome shard beneath the water. Satisfied with his work, he dried it off and began polishing it with his fine cloth and the mineral oil he had kept in his pocket. He lost track of time as he prepared the makeshift mirror for his upcoming fight, and the ship had all but sunken by the time he was satisfied. Holding it up he could see his reflection quite clearly, and when he held it at an angle he could see behind him quite easily. Cet risked a smile before he began the long walk back to the ancient evil in the heart of the swamp.
When Cet arrived the bodies of his friends had disappeared and he considered turning around and leaving that God forsaken planet altogether. Creeeek… creeeeek… creeeek…. The dreaded sound seeped between chords of the mysterious music and Cet slowly climbed the steps. Holding the polished chrome mirror up to look behind him and awkwardly holding his beam focuser to point behind him, he pushed the door open and the noises stopped.
Within the dim room sat the horror, perched upon a peculiar wooden chair. Upon its lap was a blanket with a floral pattern draped over its bottom half. From its scalp grew tendrils, snaking their way down its wrinkled and sagging flesh. Its face looked as though it were melting and as it turned to face him Cet could see the drooping flesh wobble and shake. Upon its head, or what Cet thought was a head, were several orifices. Two held eyes that glared right through him as though to tear his very soul from his body, and one on the bottom held teeth yellowed with age. Cet’s eyes widened in dismay as all hope fled his body and he felt his bowels empty. His beam focuser clattered to the ground, forgotten in his intense fear.
“W-w-what are you?” he managed to stutter.
“I’m retired, and you ourou bastards are tresspassing!” the ancient horror rasped through its age-old mouth. Cet’s head exploded into a cloud of viscera as Old Lady Kowalski pulled the trigger, her late husband’s 12 gauge spitting hot lead into the invader across the room.
Stech trudged through the thick mud and undergrowth. The wet earth sucked at his feet and the pink and purple vines slithered against his skin as he passed through the jungles of JWP-1e28. Behind him, three other yichtaran conscripts followed, Hitrin, Sebach and Yohktak. Portable pulse cannons were slung over their backs as they prowled the jungle and their packs rested heavily on their shoulders. There had once been five in his hunting party, until Rolhu was shot in the leg. The wound became infected and festered nauseatingly until he could no longer keep pace. Stech commanded he be put out of his misery rather than return the lost cause to base. His ammo and rations were distributed evenly among the remaining soldiers, his weapon properly disposed of so as to avoid acquisition by the enemy and his body given the final prayers and buried. They were getting close and Stech wasn’t about to throw away two days of searching.
Overhead the dense blue foliage blocked out all but a few rays of sunlight and through the close-knit trunks of skiznak trees could be heard the distant mating calls of dozens of animals native to the jungles of JWP-1e28. However, Stech and his team were not in search of any such organisms. Their prey was much quieter, much craftier and much more dangerous than any of the native fauna of JWP-1e28. The yichtarans were not the only invaders of the jungle planet. Somewhere else in the primaeval forest a group of humans evaded Stech and his warriors. Stech smiled inwardly. They wouldn’t be evading him for much longer.
The group of humans hiding in the foliage had been giving the shii'az a difficult time. JWP-1e28 was abundant with a rare crystal, valuable to the shii'az for their weapon production. Processing procedures of the planet were due to begin 0.23 cycles ago but had been hampered and harassed by the elusive group. The shii'az had called back their workers and called the yichtarans to sort out the troublesome humans. Stech and his team of thirty yichtaran hunters had landed 0.19 cycles ago, nearly ten sunrises and sunsets on the alien planet. Since the beginning, they had hounded the humans constantly. Tracking and hunting parties were continuously searching for the humans, using the original shii'az mining offices as a base of operations. Cut off from outside support, communication and reinforcements, the humans had still managed to elude discovery or capture and multiple run-ins with the guerillas had resulted in the deaths of many of Stech’s own warriors. They had initially gone searching in six groups of five until one group was lost entirely. They merged the remaining groups together, finding some small solace in numbers, knowing the humans were less likely to attack a large group. However, as time went by, the humans were able to pick off the yichtarans and no matter how many humans they seemed to kill, the humans always managed to find replacements.
It felt like a war of attrition as Stech watched his original group dwindle down to a mere handful. The shii'az had estimated a human group of twenty but with each passing at one another it seemed as though the humans were far greater than twenty. One of their own would fall into a human-made trap or be shot by one of their primitive projectile weapons and at the same time, two or three or more humans would be mortally wounded with yichtaran weapons, natural or otherwise. Stech had even bitten off the arm of a human with a patch over one eye, leaving her to bleed out in the filthy morass. Her blood had been red and warm, like the embers of a fire. Stech could still imagine the taste. Both groups would retreat to recuperate yet the human numbers never seemed to lessen. Two yichtarans, Alloch and Garro, had remained at the base. Stech was so close to finding the humans’ hidden camp he dared not ask and wait for either of them to join him lest he lost the trail. If he failed to wipe out the last humans with the three other yichtarans with him, he would need to notify the two warriors of the coordinates so they could leave the planet and disintegrate the guerilla camp from orbit. Stech was no longer interested in his bonus. He was going to see these humans dead, even if it cost him his life.
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Yiirt turned the pages of the tome listlessly. The human letters swam before her eyes, their strange curves and alien edges making sounds to make words to make sentences. Sentences piled up into paragraphs and then into pages. Somewhere among the endless pages was the information the shii'az coveted so, though these pages simply regaled a story of something called a ‘Hobbit’ and its search for treasure amongst the horde of something called a ‘Dragon’. The books, a human invention, had been numerous. The shii'az knew the humans kept their knowledge in many forms and these books were just one of them. The cramped room Yiirt found herself in was something called a ‘personal Library’, previously belonging to an incredibly wealthy human on the moon of EHY-1n19, a garden world if a moon could be considered a world. Yiirt had heard that the full sized Libraries of the humans could span entire blocks, large enough to house several civilian-class starships but, instead, housing millions and millions of books. Yiirt was grateful she hadn’t been assigned to scouring such building.
Yiirt turned the last page and slammed the book shut. Nothing of value was held within those pages. She sat back in the comfortable wooden chair, sinking comfortably into its padding. She tossed the book into a discard pile, slightly annoyed that the previous owner had been so careless in his or her organisation. The shii'az scribes had discovered that the Libraries were often sorted into ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’, a breakthrough that had cut their research times by more than half. The humans were notoriously interested in creating and digesting falsified information as a popular past-time. However, the old owner of the house she had taken up temporary residence in had simply put all of their books together, not following any of the protocol that was used in regular Libraries.
Yiirt took the liberty of spinning herself in the comfy chair, grateful that the humans had been so akin to the shii'az that their furniture would fit her comfortably. The biology of the shii'az and the humans were analogous, at a glance. The two races were very similar, as alien races went. Both had two legs which bent the same way and both had two arms with manipulators on the ends. The shii'az and the humans both had heads where their eyes and brains were situated. However, the humans had no tail, only one opposable thumb per hand rather than two, hair on their bodies rather than smooth skin, two forward-facing eyes rather than six and they came in different shades of skin rather than the deep blue of the shii'az. That was the only way she could tell them apart; by their different coloured hair and skin. They could, apparently, discern between one another just by the slight differences in their very uniform facial structure. Still, the differences between their race and hers were relatively far and few between when one looked at the other races in the galaxy. It was a shame their people had to fight. They could have been good friends if the humans hadn’t been so unnecessarily tenacious.
The war with the humans had been going on for the better part of the last three cycles and countless lives had been lost on both sides. It began as a territorial dispute with the shii'az; Yiirt’s people had purchased a tremendous territory from the Galactic Conglomerate, the closest thing the galaxy had to a centralised government. It just so happened that the homeworld of the humans occupied part of that area and the shii'az were eager to begin processing of the unique planet. The shii'az were not cruel; several worlds were offered elsewhere in their newly purchased territory for the humans to populate with their displaced people. However, the humans were unbearably intractable. The world they had spent generations abusing and ruining still, for some reason, held significant value to them and, rather than taking the generous offer from the shii'az, the humans remained stubbornly anchored to the little planet. The shii'az declared war and the yichtaran were compelled to support their long-time allies.
The Galactic Conglomerate was not one to intervene in a sovereign territory and the humans found themselves outnumbered, outgunned and without any hope of outside assistance. The shii'az Directorate were expecting a 0.5 cycle scuffle before the humans realised the dire consequences of their thoughtless decision and accepted the shii'az offer. The yichtaran War-chief expected a brutal 0.3 cycle war before his fleets exterminated the humans entirely. However, as the war stretched on past either the shii'az or the yichtaran predictions and onto its third cycle of constant fighting it became abundantly clear that the humans were unconcerned with anyone’s predictions. They were not going to offer an easy victory if one was to be found at all.
Yiirt spun herself one last time, taking little joy in the brief intermission from her dismal research. The shii'az Directorate had been searching quite some time for a weakness to exploit. With all they knew of the humans it was deemed impossible that they had lasted so long. There was clearly some aspect of the humans that remained unknown to the shii'az. Yiirt halted her spinning by sticking out a webbed foot to catch on the great wooden desk by the chair. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books on wooden shelves. Here and there empty spots widened as Yiirt worked her way through the books and a pile of the rejected books grew in a lonely corner of the room. The only parts of the walls that were not lined with books were the door which she used to access the room and a large glass window that allowed in natural light. Looking through the window she could see the blue grass fields of the moon’s meadows and the barren planet, EHY-1n19, high in the sky. Speckles of yellow dotted the vast expanse, tiny flowers the humans called ‘Dandy Lions’ which had the amazing ability to take root anywhere they were introduced. Yiirt would have loved her time on the moon of EHY-1n19 if she didn’t have to spend most of it in the tiny book room. She gave out a sigh as she pulled another book, titled “To Kill a Mockingbird,” from a shelf. What a Mockingbird was and why one would want to kill one, Yiirt knew not. She began reading.
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Stech sniffed the air. The smell of burnt flesh was faint but it was there. The humans were the only race Stech had ever known to prepare their food in such a strange way. They would kill an animal and, rather than eating it fresh, would almost always suspend it over a heat source. The flesh would spoil from the heat, even turning black and burning at some parts. Only once the flesh was ruined and unappetizing would the humans indulge in eating it. It was a revolting tradition but Stech couldn’t help but feel an intense satisfaction come over himself as he smelled the acrid stench. He had been following the smell for a little while now and it had been growing stronger. Their disgusting habit would be their downfall.
How the humans had succeeded in enduring the yichtaran attacks for so long, Stech would never understand. The yichtaran were a proud warrior race, bred and trained from birth to kill. A mouth full of pointed teeth, four limbs tipped with razor-sharp talons, infrangible bones, substantial strength, twin tails tipped with knife-like ends and a durable scaley hide; their natural physiology made them a formidable foe. Their natural gifts coupled with shii'az pulse weaponry meant there was very little in the galaxy that could stop a yichtaran conscript from completing an objective. The humans, on the other hand, were pitiful in comparison. They had no claws, their skin tore like wet tissue, their bones snapped like twigs and their teeth were trapped in laughably small mouths. The waddled around on two legs most of the time and most were too weak even to lift their own body weight. Their faces were dull and seemingly invariable; Stech couldn’t tell one from another except by the shades of their skin.
The humans were clever, Stech would admit at least that. They weren’t smart or wise in the sense that the shii'az were. They hadn’t even developed faster-than-light travel by themselves; they had traded for it. The weapons they were using against the yichtaran and the shii'az were, by principle, the same weapons their ancestors had used on one another generations ago. They weren’t well versed in Conglomerate law and were unable to transcend their narrow perspectives but they were clever. The guerilla fighters had to make due with what limited supplies were available to them on JWP-1e28. They had pulled together crude traps of all sorts, from hidden pits filled with sharpened sticks to spiked branches, bent and poised to swing should a hidden length of twine be stepped on. Stech had lost eleven good soldiers to the myriad of traps the humans had laid out.
Still, the human cleverness could not explain away their success so far. Reports came to Stech of hunting parties being ambushed by groups of humans numbering between three and ten, though the reports were shaky estimates at best and wild guesses at worst. One or two warriors would be shot, maimed or even killed. The humans would face casualties of their own. The reports almost always involved the humans melting away into the trees bearing fatal wounds. Wounds from pulse weapons, lacerations and maulings from the claws and teeth of the yichtaran. Yet no matter how many reports of human maulings Stech received, there were always more humans to ambush his groups further in the jungle. Sometimes the humans would leave behind a bloody trail to be followed but there were never any bodies at the end. Stech knew the humans were hiding the bodies, perhaps burying them the same way he did with his own. Respect for the dead seemed to be the only thing that the primitive aliens and the yichtarans had in common.
“Stech. Here, look,” whispered one soldier as he placed a clawed hand on Stech’s shoulder.
The young but promising recruit, Hitrin, pointed a talon at a blackened patch of solid ground. Upon closer inspection Stech recognised the tell-tale signs of a temporary human camp; a ring of stones and the grey ash that the humans left whenever they prepared their food. He pushed a hand into the ashes and felt the warmth of what had once been a fire. Pressing his nose to the ground he could smell the faint scent of rubber from the soles of human footwear, leading off into the jungle. Stech gestured towards the others and tore off into the trees. They were close. So close he could almost taste their coppery blood. The taste of victory.
Tree trunks and wide blue leaves rushed past Stech as he ran on all fours, following the malodorous trail. Behind him, the three other yichtarans kept pace. Like them, he had left his pulse weapon to dangle against his body. The weapon and his pack bounced against his back and his side as he ran through the tangles and undergrowth of JWP-1e28. The fetid trail was getting stronger as Stech neared the hidden human encampment. Both of his tails whipped behind him, eager to rend flesh from bone. By his count, the original group of twenty humans was down to its last four to six individuals. Still, it would not do to get overconfident. The humans numbers never seemed to dwindle as they should and Stech was cautious. Hubris kills, especially when facing a foe as shrewd as the humans.
human voices began bleeding through the trees as they neared the camp. Stech slowed his progress and his three soldiers follow suit. Stech took his portable pulse cannon in hand and proceeded stealthily. The humans were few and primitive but the danger they represented was still tangible. Stech was willing to lose his life to see them dead but he would rather he did not need to. Stech paused to step over a suspiciously taught vine and gestured to the others to do the same. Looking around he noticed signs of other traps, cleverly hidden from the untrained eye. He had had too many close calls to dismiss the subtle signs so easily. The voices were getting louder and the reeking smell of human cook-fires began burning at his nose. Stech stopped to listen. They were practically at the human camp, though it was all but hidden by the dense plant life that grew everywhere. Stech sent a prayer to the Great Hunter before he broke into a sprint and burst into the human camp.
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Yiirt closed another book with force and threw it into the reject pile. It was a boring book detailing the many intricacies of human economics. She slammed her head against the wooden desk in frustration before eating another handful of Tyontyon berries to keep her awake. The white juice dribbled down her lip before she wiped it away with a hand. She quickly began to feel the effects of the berries mingle with her intense fatigue. Her senses felt sharp and she felt as awake as ever, though, at the same time, she felt as though she were half-dreaming.
“Just one more book,” she told herself as she pulled a heavy volume from a bottom shelf. “Just one more book and then I’m going to go rest.” Yiirt pulled a book from a shelf, titled “The Life and Times of Jonathan Wang,” determined to find the secret to the humans success.
The shii'az had become desperate. It wasn’t that the humans were particularly special tacticians and their weapons were almost laughably primitive. Their ships were slow out of hyperspace and their soldiers would take relatively little damage before retreating to die on their ships. It was their sheer numbers. It was easy to laugh at their primitive weapons, with their archaic bullets and bombs. Mere nuisances to a shielded ship of shii'az design. That was until there were billions upon billions of the nuisances shattering shields and hammering away hulls, leaving broken bodies adrift in space. Their ships were clumsy and weak, easily outmanoeuvered and outgunned. Alone they were practically non-threatening. They were never alone. Space was never as black and hope never as dim as when the human armadas blotted out the very stars, each one of their harmless ships becoming a part of the hammer and anvil that smashed entire fleets.
It didn’t make sense at all, from a simple mathematical point of view. It wasn’t as though the humans were the most numerous race they had encountered. By initial estimates, the humans had numbered around twenty billion at the beginning of the war, a mere fraction of which were suitable for battle. The cortoeen had numbered at eighty billion at the beginning of their conflict with the shii'az and the sook wa hives had numbered at close to three hundred billion when the yichtarans declared war on them. Both races had faced defeat at the joined hands of the shii'az and the yichtarans, though not without inflicting significant damage of their own. According to current estimates and past projections, the humans should have run out of soldiers long ago. Their armies should have dwindled, just as the cortoeen and the sook wa had. It was nonsensical that they still managed to field as many soldiers as they had when the war had begun and it was completely maddening that there was no apparent decline in quality. The shii'az needed to know their secret.
Yiirt licked her eyes with a long, neon-pink tongue, moisturising them as she shut another useless book, titled “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The humans’ thirst for made-up stories would be the end of her, she knew it. Glancing out the window she noticed the alien sun of EHY-1n19 setting for the third time, marking the thirty-sixth hour she had spent in the lonely room. The sky slowly darkened and the stars began twinkling against the black backdrop of space. She briefly considered calling it quits and returning to her temporary quarters for a little rest and relaxation. Yiirt spun herself in the chair as she considered her options.
“One last book. The very last,” she promised to herself. From a lower shelf, she selected at random a heavy textbook, titled “The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, sixteenth Edition.” Yiirt carried the hefty book back to the comfy chair and set it down none-too-gently against the heavy wooden desk. “Oh, hey! This one’s got pictures.” Yiirt opened to the first page, slightly upbeat at the sight of the colourful illustrations.
The shii'az had many theories concerning the seemingly unending human armies. Some believed the humans had hidden cloning factories with which they produced endless ranks of soldiers. Others claimed that the humans reproduced and matured faster during times of war and it was a simple means of killing them faster than they could be born. There were even wild rumours that the humans had torn the very fabric of space and time to call on the help of other humans from parallel dimensions and that it was the very multiverse that the shii'az and yichtarans faced. The truth was far worse. Far, far, worse.
“What in the name of the Holy Thirteen…” Yiirt wanted to stop reading but her eyes kept scanning the pages as though they had a will of their own, faster and faster until the images blurred and only the black lettering remained, scarring her mind with their dark secrets. “Oh, gods save me.” Yiirt was hard pressed to believe that what she was reading was, indeed, fact rather than fiction. There were no lovable characters and no apparent plot. “No, oh, no. It can’t! They can’t!” It wasn’t a fiction she was reading. “Th-that’s horrible!” Yiirt cast the unholy tome aside with all her strength. The heavy textbook made a loud thud as it hit the floor.
Within the pages, she had found the truth. The humans weren’t making new soldiers. There weren’t hidden caches of soldiers and they weren’t reproducing especially quickly. They were repairing the broken ones! The malicious textbook spoke of the humans’ vile science, a blasphemy they called ‘modern medicine’. It spoke of ancient and modern human scientists who had strived to know the human body more intricately than any mortal mind had a right to. They desecrated the dead and the living, dissecting and vivisecting, dismantling bodies as though they were mere objects to be taken apart and understood. They had paid in oceans of blood to learn the unknowable.
Yiirt read of humans receiving fatal cuts and then sewing themselves shut, like terrible, living dolls. Bloody wounds that were too grievous to sew were burned to halt the bleeding and preserve their lives. Humans that lost too much blood were injected with blood from other humans. Entire limbs could be removed, purposely or otherwise, and reattached or even replaced with clever impersonations. They created and synthesised poisons and toxins to ingest and inject into their bodies to kill off foreign organisms that their inherent immune systems could not. Injuries causing failure of vital organs were mere setbacks to the humans. They robbed the living and the dead for the organs and even grew and harvested them in godless laboratories, slicing out the defective parts and installing the new ones in one another like spare parts in a machine. Severed spines were spliced together again, forced to heal using specialised cells stolen from the marrow of other humans. Even dying would not stop them. Using electrical currents and chemical concoctions on a recently deceased human, they could tear their very souls from the clutches of death, an undead spirit to pilot what should have been a corpse.
The humans treated flesh and blood like steel and oil, defiled and perverted them to extend an individual’s functionality beyond death. The humans had lingered in an execrable domain for their damnable knowledge and emerged something more than mortal. It was no wonder their numbers were so illogically vast, so incomprehensibly static despite the combined efforts of the shii'az and the yichtarans. They weren’t perishing as the shii'az had predicted they would. The shii'az and yichtarans were battling many of the same soldiers each time they fought, not new ones. An army of undying aliens, nearly imperishable and practically deathless, was what they faced.
Yiirt nearly faded into unconsciousness as the effect of the Tyontyon berries receded. Shaking and shivering, whether from fatigue or fear, she managed to push herself up from her seat. She quickly walked over to where she had thrown the book. The vile tome seemed to stare up at her, its colourful images a mockery of the dark knowledge it held within. Clutching the heinous hardcover to her chest, she quickly fled the wicked room she had once felt so safe within and ran to find a transmitter. She had finally found the truth. The humans had no hidden weakness, just a multitude of secret atrocities and a plethora of unhallowed knowledge of themselves.
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Stech emerged into the human camp shocked and surprised. Triangular tents were spread out in a clearing they had made. Up above a false canopy hid the clearing from view. He saw the remnants of a fire, the blackened wood continuing to send up thin tendrils of smoke. However, that wasn’t what surprised him. He had thought there would be four or even six humans left but there were more. Several humans had been sitting by the dead fire, tearing charred flesh from bone with their tiny mouths. Some other humans had been grouped around a table with a crudely drawn map. Other humans milled about or slept. Stech paused at the sight but didn’t stop to count.
“It’s a lizard!” one human exclaimed as the camp burst into action.
The human that had been standing guard at the edge of the camp lowered her weapon at Stech but he moved too quickly. With a single swipe, the human dropped her weapon to clutch at her spilling entrails. Stech fired his pulse cannon at the humans studying the map but they threw the table on its side and ducked behind it. The steel warped and bent but held. Stech shot off his pulse cannon several times as his warriors tore into the clearing. One human was caught in the leg and fell to one knee, screaming in pain. Hitrin’s muzzle and face were shattered as several human bullets found their mark. He squealed and cried out before another round of bullets put him down.
“Fall back! There are too many!” Stech shouted at the remaining two yichtarans. They hadn’t expected so many humans to remain. Stech leapt behind the cover of trees just as a hailstorm of bullets turned one of his warriors, Sebach, into minced meat. “A thousand curses on the heads of the shii'az, they said there were only twenty!”
Stech could hear bullets hitting the trunks of trees and whizzing by his head. The heavy footfalls of his last soldier, Yohktak, and himself left deep footprints in the soil. The humans were slow but there would be no hiding from them. Considering how far they had come from their base to find the human camp, Stech had only one choice.
“Yohktak, did you get the coordinates of the camp?” Stech asked between heavy breaths as they struggled to distance themselves from the humans. If they acted quickly, the humans wouldn’t have time to relocate before Alloch and Garro laid waste to their makeshift base.
“Yes, by the Hunter, ye-” Yohktak’s words were cut short as he and Stech found themselves suddenly free-falling.
For a moment, Stech forgot he had been running and time stood still. The urgency of the situation disappeared and he felt at peace. Then the sharpened branches pierced his flesh and agony flooded his mind. They hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going and had fallen into a human trap. Stech suppressed a roar of pain as he lay on his back, struggling to pull himself free. One long spear jutted out from his left thigh, two from his belly and another one right next to his neck. Stech looked around and saw Yohtak’s corpse, lying face-down. A length of branch had sprouted out of his back and shoulder.
Stech struggled to pull himself from the skewers but they were too tall. Finally, in desperation, he whipped his tails around and sliced the branches from his stomach. The vibrations from his tails striking the wood was more painful than anything he had felt before. He nearly vomited from the pain as he pulled himself off of the splintered nubs and took hold of the branch that had speared his leg, breaking it as gently as he could. Green blood flowed freely from his wounds and Stech nearly fainted as he limped over to Yohktak. Stech muttered a prayer for Yohktak, promising to come back later to bury him and his fallen comrades. He rummaged through his satchel and found the Planetary Positioning Device, a piece of shii'az technology. Stech slouched in relief when he found it undamaged and turned it on. Deftly accessing the history of the device he found the location of the human’s camp. He punched the location into his transmitter and hit ‘send.’
Stech nearly crushed the transmitter in his massive hand when it read ‘failed to send.’ The distance he had put between himself and his base, the dense growth and the fact that he was several meters deep in his own supposed grave was interfering with the device. Stech looked up from where he had fallen. It was a short climb for a healthy yichtaran but a daunting obstacle for one on the brink of death. Stech took a deep breath and began climbing. The information he held was vital to the success of his mission. Pain racked his body as he dug his talons into the dirt and pulled himself up. His blood had dried against his scales but he began bleeding anew as he climbed. He had a mission to complete and they hadn’t appointed him captain of his team for being soft.
It felt like an eternity in hell as he slowly climbed out of the pit. He shut his eyes in pain each time he had to pull himself up. He felt cold, so cold. Stech clenched his teeth, struggling to hold onto consciousness. He was determined to finish his mission. Finally, his endless climb came to an end. Stech placed one clawed hand at the edge of the trap and felt the warm rays of the alien sun warming his cold hide. His temporary tranquillity was interrupted as the heel of a boot came slamming down on top of his hand. He snarled in pain as he felt one of his talons snap. He would have fallen were his hand not caught beneath the heavy boot. Straining to look up, his glare softened to a look of shock and then one of fear.
“No! No, it can’t be!” he roared at the figure standing over him. “I tore off your arm! You bled out in the jungle! I killed you… I killed you! You’re supposed to be dead!” Stech tried to comprehend how the human with the eye-patch could be standing over him, as hail and healthy as ever. White gauze was wrapped around the stub at her elbow, where Stech had ripped off her arm. Red blood had poured out of her wound like water. Stech couldn’t understand how she was standing above him. The human crouched down to look at the yichtaran.
“I got better.” She smirked down at Stech before standing up. Looking down at him with her dull, dead eye, she lifted her foot and Stech fell back into the pit. A sharpened branch ended his mission.
The serpentine s'k'tras of the jungle planet J3-7566 (locally known as Jora) arrive into this world silent and shiny, bursting out of egg clutches in droves, slick with mucous, and their scales still soft. The mother s'k'tra may reach a length of fourteen feet, with most of the length provided by a long prehensile tail. However threatening she may be, however, Jora is home to some of the most vicious predators on this side of the universe, and she must abandon her eggs so as not to allow her presence to draw any attention to them. She rejoins her family in the trees, and the nomadic tribe will wait with her for her eggs to hatch.
Without a mother to guard them, egg clutches must be laid in caves and holes in order to hide the young from prying eyes and hungry mouths. An indigenous mammal is subdued and paralyzed by the mothers venom for the offspring, and may have to lie in wait for days until the eggs hatch. Upon hatching, the younglings will instinctively huddle close to the body of the beast for warmth, but also to gather sustenance. As you may be familiar with, many species rely on a liquid diet in their first days, usually provided by the mother as regurgitated food or milk. The s'k'tras, however, drink the blood of their prey upon being born. With still developing arms and prepubescent venom sacks, the young s'k'tra rely on their needle like fangs to puncture the hide of the animal. However, once a wound has been made, all of the young will surround it, and greedily lick up the blood that they can. Their mothers venom causes the heart of the beast to beat at an extremely slow rate, so as to ensure that the young do not overeat and die. While the venom is non poisonous to their own species, it is potent, and there is enough in the bloodstream to keep the beast paralyzed until it dies of blood loss. Once the first feeding is over, the young s'k'tra will emit a high frequency cry, nearly undetectable to most of the fauna that stalks the undergrowth. Upon hearing the cry, the mother will descend with only her mate to retrieve the offspring. While the males of the s'k'tra are much smaller than the females, he is able to serve as a lookout, and if necessary, sacrifice himself so that the mother can ascend into the trees with her children latched onto the hard scales of her back.
At least, that was how it was in the wilds of their own planet. As a space faring race, they have long since abandoned the need for dirt holes and paralyzed beasts, instead opting for large hatcheries where the young are kept warm through heated pods and fed a steady diet of blood supplied through tubes, and provided by genetically modified ‘blood beasts’, designed and bred by the s'k'tras themselves. Their people are well known as mercenaries and pirates, their speed and strength gifted to them through eons of evolution on their death world. On my long journey to learn the ways of life, I had the opportunity to work in one hatchery. The young spend the first few days slithering around each other, and are closely monitored. Hatchlings do not have the extravagant coloration of the adult members of their race, and are instead pale shades of green and brown; camouflage in the wilds, in case one were to become separated from the group. While they were mostly helpless, I still have a few scars from underestimating needle tips of their fangs. Even now, hundreds and hundreds of generations away from their wild ancestors, the instinct to latch onto and suck the blood of a nearby mammal still rules them.
In the wide open plains of planet P4-6595 (oddly enough, this planet is unnamed by its inhabitants) there exists the largest land animals known in the galaxy. Or so we thought at first. Gargantuan masses of green fur and taut muscle, these ‘Grehorums’ (as they are locally known) are not truly animals, but a type of plant, who slowly lumbered around the planet, constantly following the sun. These Grehorums ranged in size depending on their age, from the rolling spores that could crush a small vehicle, to the ancient behemoths that could crush a citadel with a careless movement.
With sparse grass and permafrost, the planet did not serve a very hospitable environment, but these lumbering plants did. Constantly moving to avoid the dark side of the planet, their forests of ‘fur’ (which in reality are leaves) provided the perfect environment for the evolution of an entire ecosystem relying entirely on these vast organisms. From the surface of these massive creatures came the kithrit, an almost entirely airborne race of winged peoples. The adults are covered in glamorous blue feathers, their massive wings easily span 13-14 feet, with small prehensile feet dangling from their diminutive bodies, and nearly flat faces. Flat teeth help in grinding up the plant food provided by the Grehorum.
The young are born featherless, with naught but greenish leather skin. Birthing of these young ones was one of the few activities that the kithrits landed for. The mother would maneuver to the underbelly of the Gerhorum, carefully clinging on to the foliage with her prehensile feet and the vestigial claws on her wingtips. The fledgling kithrits are born with more viable wing tip claws, and use these to grip onto the belly grass of the Grehorum. The mother, unable to fly with her litter of up to four, leaves them to eat the soft leaves of the Grehorum. She will return periodically to check up on them, but otherwise they would have to rely on camouflage in order to avoid being eaten by one of the Grehorum’s many other passengers.
Their space aged descendants are no longer rely on the Grehorum, nor are there any Grehorum left. The kithrit never developed very advanced technology, but they are renowned throughout the galaxy today as some of the fastest thinkers and greatest minds. Their society stretched eons thanks to the timelessness of the Grehorum, and their own ability to evade predators. This long lastingness allowed them to watch their sun die and fade into a white dwarf. Unable to provide enough light, the Grehorum all but died out. It was only because of the efforts of a mixed group of researchers who had been observing their development (or lack thereof) that the kithrits were uplifted.
The original kithrits did not have possessions, but they did bring with them the dormant pods of Grehorum seedlings, each weighing several tons but integral to the kithrit peoples. Today nearly all kithrit devote their lives in search of a world not unlike their own; one with open fields and plenty of sunlight, to wake the sleeping Grehorum. However, as a result of the limited room available on space ships, many kithrit grow up never having flown, and it is not uncommon to see adult kithrit with wings shrivelled from disuse.
It was on one such ship that I had the great pleasure of aiding in a birth. Kithrit pups come into this world with their eyes fused shut, and desperately clinging onto anything that they can get a hold of. It is generally a quick process, and the mother is often able to deliver them by herself. I was present simply to ensure that her brood were born healthy. After cleaning these leathery pups, they are gently coaxed onto a hanging crib of sorts. Lengths of artificially grown vines are hung from the ceiling, which the kithrit pups gladly latch onto with their claws, and begin eating the nourishing vegetation. These pups are generally quiet, and do not require much attention from the mother. They are born into this world blind, but may spend the rest of their days looking for a new home.
However, in all my travels, I have not met a more strange birth than that of a human child. I will admit, I do not know much about them, with them being only one of many species recently embraced into the galactic community. However, I will never forget the absolute insanity of their species. I was much younger then, my body still able to support itself, though it was failing. I was waiting on a small planet, with naught but a colony of humans as neighbors. I had landed my pod not far off, and set up shop there while I waited for my papers to go through, to upload my mind into the collective of my own species and join the elders. I made it known to them that I was a practiced and well known medical professional, and that they could come to me if they needed help. There was a lot of baring of teeth and shaking of ‘hands’ at this; apparently their old ‘doctor’ had passed away a few cycles past, and their requests to their homeworld for a new doctor had been, for all intents and purposes, ignored.
“Oh man, you came in the nick of time! I’m Samuel, and you, my friend, are a sight for sore eyes. Y’see, my sweet Margaret is due to pop any day now, and no one on this rock knows nothin’ about delivering a baby.” a wiry young man bared his teeth at me while he vigorously gripped my appendage with one manipulator, and gesturing towards a severely bloated female close by. It looked as though she were going to burst! She replied to him in a strange tongue, which he translated back to me in Galactic Standard.
“Marge is wondering if you ever delivered a baby b’fore. ‘Course you have though, right?” he inquired, his teeth still bared in what looked like a threat.
“Ahem, ah, yes, yes, I’ve delivered plenty of human babies before. I’ve delivered them to all sorts of places!” I insisted out of fear; his incisors looked sharp, and I was unsure as to the temperament of these ‘humans’. The young man let out a sharp gust of air through his nose, and translated what I said to the rest of the humans that had gathered to greet me; they weren’t able to understand or speak Galactic Standard. All of the humans bared their teeth and began to quickly hyperventilate, though I later learned that this was their own twisted form of laughter.
“Yer’ alright doc’. If you’d like, we can set you up in the old doc’s office. Beatrice is still around; she’s, ah, kinda an assistant to the doctor. A nurse, we call ‘em. She might be able to help you out a bit, but I’m sure that someone like yourself won’t need much help.”
As it turns out, Beatrice knew a lot about childbirth. Using a ‘Galactic Standard’ handbook, she was able to communicate with me the basics of human childbirth over the course of a few days, but made it very clear that I was only to there to help her.
“I didn’t get my medical license so that I could play second fiddle to some xeno quack!” as she put it.
It was in the early hours of one morning that a young man came from the town to my ship, speaking rapidly in his own tongue. I went rigid with fear; if a 152cm pink bipedal came at you in the small hours of the morning speaking in a loud voice, you would have too. He froze for a moment, his face scrunching up in thought, before shouting in Galactic Standard “Baby! Baby born! Baby!” Somehow, through his thick accent and slaughtering of the words, I understood the message. I hurried to follow him out, but before I could mount my hover scooter, he forcefully shoved me into the passenger seat of a large rusty human vehicle. A ‘pick up,’ I believe. Absurd. A vehicle designed to pick people up. Ha!
We arrived at the old medical office, around which a mob of humans seemed to have gathered. I was quickly ushered through the old screen door, forced through the sterilizing airlock and into the operation room. The were four people there, including Beatrice, Samuel and Margaret. An adult female, unknown to me, stood off to the side. Beatrice barked orders at her, while Samuel simply stood by Margaret, looking nervous and holding one of her manipulators in both of his and speaking to her softly in their human tongue.
“Hey doc.” he turned and bared his teeth at me. I quickly went to Beatrices side, ready to aid her. Margaret was looking less bloated than before, but on her face was an expression of extreme pain. She wore an ugly dress, and lay on her back on a table with her legs propped up on a pair of metal stands. Beatrice knelt between her legs, and spoke commands to Margaret. I did not understand what was going on.
I will be honest, I wasn’t much help in the operating room. While I tried to observe and learn as much as I could, as I had before, I spent most of the time in there cringing in horror and looking on at the grizzly scene with shock. At one point, I was roughly shoved aside so that they had more room to work.
To put it shortly, human birthing is akin to torture. Not just to the mother, who was going through extreme pain to bring her child into this world, but the all of the people in the room. Margaret, who had seemed so timid when I first met her, devolved into an angry screaming and cursing demoness. Her face was red with pain, and she almost entirely ignored her mates attempts to soothe her. The screaming nearly deafened my delicate ears, and I still have nightmares about it, but I could not muster the strength to open the airlock by myself, so I remained in that operating room for hours.
The process was slow and grueling, and I was forced to watch the whole thing. “Once the child is born, it is going to be quiet. It will be peaceful.” I kept assuring myself, in order to hold onto my sanity. However, once the human offspring was born, it was a whole new screaming. While the mother had finally ended her screams of anguish, the bloody spawn of hers began screaming all on its own! Beatrice brutally severed something from the kicking and flailing child before handing the screaming bloodspawn to the mother, who cooed and bared her teeth at the baby; possibly to establish her own dominance? Who knows. The other humans surrounded the mother, who was still pink from the strain, and her face still covered in tears.
Meanwhile, I huddled in the corner, also covered in tears. I was praying to the divines to whisk me away from this place when Samuel gestured me over.
“C’mon, doc! It’s okay, come meet the newest member of the colony!” he turned to me, his eyes filled with joy but his teeth bared in what could only have been a threat. He must have been angry with my incompetence, but I rushed over in fear. I was still trapped in the room with them after all.
Margaret held her child, mostly dried off now, but with bits of afterbirth on its skin. Even now, the child still screamed with all the rage and pain of a fallen warrior. Beatrice busied herself with the old medical scanner, checking the vitals of both the mother and infant. Meanwhile, Samuel placed his manipulator on my shoulder, and turned towards me baring his teeth, then turning back and baring his teeth at his screaming hellspawn and mate. Beatrice opened the airlock and invited everyone but Margaret and the child to leave and get some rest, and I left without so much as a goodbye.
I don’t remember much about the trip between that human colony to my ship. I left my hover scooter behind in my hurry to leave. However, I will never forget that terrible scene. I am comforted by the minds of the Elder Collective now, but I can feel them cringe away from me when they encounter that memory. I shudder to imagine what kind of mad god would create such creatures, that would come into this world kicking and screaming in such a manner. What insane evolutionary boiling pot would bring about younglings covered in blood and filled with anger?
I still watch the news. Well, not really ‘watch’. Rather, it is streamed directly into the minds of the Elder Collective, and I am one of the few among us who choose to pay attention. Humans have made a name for themselves, spreading far and wide through the cosmos. They preach peace and love, but in their ignorance assume that this message is reciprocated by their galactic neighbors. I know that some of the more empirical societies see them as easy targets. Even now, several peoples have begun mobilizing invasion forces to take from these soft pink bipeds everything they can, though this news isn’t drawing much attention. ‘It’s nothing new among the stars,’ as they say. But I know the truth. I have seen the madness. In the first moments of life, the most base nature of a species is revealed; whether that is to embrace the life giving Grehorum, or slink through the shadows and feast on the blood of the weak. Unfortunately for their enemies, humans are born into this realm kicking, screaming, and bathed in blood.
“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Thank you that’s…very disturbing
It’s not my fault you’re human.
Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.
You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”
“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”
“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
And that’s what a human is!
Well, there’s another few steps, of course.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“
“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”
“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”
And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“
“Like an egg.”
“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”
“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”
“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”
“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”
You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.
“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.
“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”
Everyone waits.
“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”
And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
i don’t think humans are inherently bad i just don’t. once i posted about how i can’t ever get poached eggs right and someone took time out of their day to send me tips on how to make them. they used their finite time on this planet to teach me how to poach an egg with no motivation other than helping a stranger have a better breakfast and if that isn’t proof humanity is worth saving i don’t know what is
Be excited for people and the things they’re excited about. It goes such a long way. My best friend who is one of the most brilliant people I know is currently doing a phd in astronomy and he just told me that he got accepted for this “very very prestigious” research position in NYC for computational astrophysics. All expenses paid and a salary on top of it. Working with top researches in the field. Free food. This guy deserves it all. So I called him as soon as he texted me and he told me everything about it. He said that in his entire life, this is the thing he’s most proud of. And he has so much to be proud of. I kept telling him how happy I am to be able to share his joy with him because it really is a privelege. There was something sacred in that 20 minute phone call. It reminded me of something I read a couple days ago. “God is not in the meal but in the sharing of the meal. Holiness resides in acts of survival made generous.” And isn’t joy an act of survival? And shouldn’t we be generous in sharing it? Is that not holy?
