“Pretend you lived a long, long time ago, Orion. Back when humanity was first colonizing the home system. And I mean… barely colonizing. We had robots on a few worlds. And big dreams about establishing exploration teams there. Not the Military Industrial Complex Rings of Venus. Or the Sky Cities of Mars and the mineral plantations that cover the entire surface and even the seas there. Mars was a desert world, to put it mildly, not what you’ve heard it is now. A world of endless green oceans and islands like tropical paradises where we Monarchs live in tech-pyramids that would have made the pharaohs looks like vagrants cobbling together junk homes from the dumpster in the worst part of the city. Venus was violent then. No one would survive the surface for more than a minute in our best-rated ships. It was living hell on Venus during those first few years. Trust me. I was there. But we tamed it. Made it our own.”
She paused and I watched her in the side mirror, the wind whipping stray strands of red hair across her beautiful young face as she gazed at the horizon and talked about events a thousand years ago as near as I can tell. History gets murky the further you go back. The Monarchs don’t want you getting too interested. Knowing too much. There’s danger there for them. Look long enough and you can see that plain as day.
The girl in the side mirror was maybe twenty-eight. But she’d seen the whole history of humanity in space. Commanded a division in the Sindo.
“In that time there were no Monarchs,” she continued over our private comm. “We were all human then at the beginning. But just like now, some of us considered ourselves better qualified to direct the course of humanity on behalf of everyone else. To lead toward a brighter future for us all after a series of pandemics, wars, and disasters we’d secretly orchestrated to show the need for what we were proposing. A better society, built from the ground up. More government to fix the mistakes of government. Whether they liked it or not, we’d decided there could only be two groups within humanity. Us, the transhumanists, and ancestors… humanity. Humanity one point oh, as we used to say, would be the backup copy in case we got anything wrong as we began to extend our grasp across several local star systems in the surrounding neighborhood of Earth. The homeworld. And in the meantime, our exploration guinea pigs would be the cheap and expendable breeders, humanity one point oh. We’d send them out into the dangerous parts of the universe by convincing them they could be free and outside our grasp. We conned them into doing the dirty work by thinking they were actually resisting us.
“But before that. Back on Earth as it all began, long story short, they didn’t want to be led. They had a disease that made them near unmanageable. Yes, they, basic one point oh humanity, talked a great game about wanting human stellar expansion, tech dev, utopia now, but our society in those days was so diverse, and so at odds with each other, and there was that one particular disease a lot of them had, we called it a disease then in our secret planning committees, that prevented us, all of us, transhumanity and humanity, from reaching our goals. Per aspera et astra. Through hardships to the stars. That’s what it means in a dead language called Latin. The goal of reaching the stars and getting off-world.”
I flicked a cigarette I’d lit off against a narrow canyon wall of red and yellow rock we were cutting down through slowly. This was a bad ambush spot. Hauser was watching everything from the fifty. If it went down here, I’d just tell the Kid to hit it and we’d try to boost through. But I didn’t rate our chances of survivability too high. Some of us were gonna die.
Which is to say I had no time for dead languages I didn’t understand. I was too busy imagining all the ways we were gonna die right here and right now.
“This disease,” she said later, once we were out of the red rocks of sudden death and following sand dunes down slopes so steep the Mule began to slip and skid. Ahead of us was nothing but a dense chalky layer of dust like some storm obscuring our vision. We’d lost the old smugglers’ trail and were dead reckoning now. We sank deeper and deeper into the lowest points of this mad wasteland.
Later we stopped near the bony remains of some prehistoric monster that looked like a sea serpent, its ridges and vertebrae half-buried in the sand and tailing off into the chalky miasma. Its hollow eyes huge blank spaces of darkness judging us as we stopped to stretch, piss, and gape in wonder at what it had once been.
And what it was now. A bleaching skeleton on a dying world.
“The disease was called Freedom,” she began again in the desert silence as we stared at the prehistoric monster in wonder. “It had a different meaning than the one you understand it to be now, Orion. As in, you are free because the Monarchs have guaranteed your freedom. That’s the exact phrasing you’ll find
