I didn’t because she wasn’t. I knew it. There had been times, years even, when I’d thought about it too much. So much that it hurt and made you feel a kind of hopeless helplessness that told you it was better not to think about it at all and just be happy accepting it the way it is.
“We changed the meaning a long time ago,” she continued in the humming silence of our comm. “After a pandemic we engineered. We changed it when all of swollen, dirty, warlike, addicted, lazy humanity begged us for a cure and traded their souls for chains just so we’d give it to them and save them from what we’d wrought. A few yards at a time during each crisis until one day we reached the goalposts. A pandemic we’d created. A virus we’d engineered. We were good with word games back then. Good with bioweapons then. Armed conflict is for amateurs. Why do that when you can just wipe out a population with an invisible case of the sniffles that gets worse and worse? Or a cough that makes your eyeballs bleed? We blamed them on bats, mice, monkeys, and of course the Third World. You don’t understand that term. The Third World. But to put it in modern galactic perspective… the Third World is the entire galaxy, every world, every starship, every ring, not Monarch. Monarch worlds are the top. Everything else is the Third World. We changed the meanings of words to make people afraid of using them. And in doing so we taught them how to think without them ever realizing we had been reeducating them for a very long time.
“But back then, back on old Earth, the disease that stopped us from reaching our potential… was Freedom. Too many other ideas that weren’t our own made things messy. Hard to get organized and off a world with limited resources. And we were the best and the brightest. In those days, Orion, space travel was very hard. It took a huge amount of effort just to get upwell. Into orbit. Another planet? Near impossible. Meaningfully speaking. Star travel was for gibbering idiots. So the Monarchs decided—”
“You,” I interrupted her as I stood there staring at the bones of the huge dead sea serpent vanishing off into the nether of dust. We couldn’t see much here. We were relying on old data and a compass to get where we needed to be. Hopefully the air would clear lower and deeper in, once we got through this inversion layer. And what she was saying made me mad for no reason I could articulate. So I just lashed out at her like an angry child that didn’t like the rules of the game. And even as I did I wondered how much of that was programming. Reeducation. How much software had been overwritten to make me accept what my hardwiring was angry about. Somewhere in there lay the reason for my sudden temper tantrum. I was shaking. I needed a smoke.
“What?” asked the Monarch, stopping at my sudden burst of hostility. I didn’t know what I was angry at. Her. Or the drive. Or the truth.
Probably everything.
I was probably mad at everything.
“You. You’re a Monarch, lady, or Seeker or whatever the hell we’re supposed to play the game of. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget you’re part of them. Because I won’t. The captain may say you’re one of us for now. Cool. I can play that game on paper, lady. I’ll even lie to myself to get it done. But that doesn’t mean I have to actually believe it. You’re a Monarch. So… you decided. You decided the rest of humanity was gonna give up freedom so we could all get out here and kill each other right and left on behalf of you to get the worlds good and settled. Organized and developed. Producing for the bank ship to show up and suck everything dry. For you. You and your friends, the other Monarchs. This is your game.”
She took a deep breath and sighed. Then lowered her head. It was just the two of us out near the dead sea snake. A game of cards had started back at the Mule with Stinkeye losing, already promising murder against pretty much everyone in on the hand. Croaking they were all against him.
“C’mon, we gotta mount up…” I said, suddenly switching gears back to NCO. I’d had my emotional outburst. Now there was work to be done. Time to get back on mission. “Not much light left.”
Not that I could tell from the sun. But the quality of light had turned from milky yellow to deep creamsicle orange down here in the depths of the desert wasteland. And in this light the ancient sea serpent that had once swam the lost seas of this world seemed to smile. Like it was promising us that someday we’d be just like it. Bones in the sands of the universe. And that others would come to stare and wonder at what was left of us, on their way to die somewhere else thinking they would live forever, so that the cycle might just repeat. Again and again. So may it
