[Writing Prompt] Hyperdrives are the railroads of the distant future.
The Cost Of Progress
In the 1880s, when the railroad first came to a small, dusty town, the residents were overjoyed.
The railroad companies would send spokesmen to the towns before hand, telling stories of the great wealth the trains would bring – refined culture and visitors who would raise the locals up from their station.
About time the locals would think, now our tired little village will really blow up! And for this they could hardly be blamed. After all, the railroads were the future.
But once those trains started rolling through, the reality was always quite different. Yes, there was more money, more visitors, but at what cost. Swindlers and crooks crisscrossed the railways, going from town to town, ruining lives. Brothels and casinos opened on every corner, bringing with them the trifecta of sin: sex, greed and alcohol. Once simple and innocent townsfolk were soon corrupted and cynical.
The railroads were progress, but progress, creation in general, is a destructive force.
Humanity would have done well to heed the lessons of the American west before opening the Portal. When the plans were discovered by SETI humanity should have balked. When the transmitter was built and communications opened up with the Tlelerack aliens, humanity should have hesitated.
But instead, the human race gave in to that once supremely useful, now largely self destructive of our vestigial impulses – greed.
Historians will cite the same high motivations they often point to – human curiosity, the human thirst for knowledge – but that was bullshit. At core, humanity built the Portal because we were greedy. Our eyes were opened to a galactic smorgasbord, a technological buffet table of resource mongering, and we wanted in.
So the population was sold a bill of goods – technology beyond imagining, strange and marvelous species of life, the spread of humanity across the stars – all as technically accurate as the pitches of the old railroad spokesmen.
The Tlelerack came through almost immediately after completion of the portal and, within six months, trade was normalized. Humanity did go to the stars, bizarre and exotic species did come through, and they certainly bore technology no one could have imagined.
Hyper-drives and ship systems, medical devices and universal translators. But also synthetic drugs unlike anything ever produced on Earth, bogus schemes intended to bamboozle and rob. Weapons more destructive than the wildest dreams of the most insane war lords.
All of this was now offered in the newly accessible shopping mall that was low Earth orbit and then brought back down to the surface. Plasma pistols showed up in schools, nanonarcotics turned millions into junkies. Within a decade of the Portal opening the corrupting force of he Tlelerack black-market could be felt at every level of society.
Like the old west town surrounding that shiny new railroad station, humanity once again discovered that progress was not cost-less, and every act of change is also an act of destruction.
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