HUMANITY FALLEN
Part 2: Never Forget
There’s a common misconception about humans. It was common before we wiped out a quarter of the galaxy’s population, so I can’t blame anyone for believing it now. Hell, most humans believe it, including, I’m sure, most of the people reading this.
The misconception is that Humans are bloodthirsty. Humans love nothing more than killing – killing aliens, killing Gorax, killing animals, killing other humans. Ask anyone in the galaxy which species is the most eager to spill blood and they’ll answer “humanity” without a moments hesitation.
The truth, of course, it more complicated.
Almost two thousand years ago, an ancient empire on Earth found itself at a turning point. Roughly half of the empire believed it was OK to enslave other human beings. The other half disagreed. As ridiculous as it seems now, they went to war over the issue. The civil war split the empire down the middle. It lasted for years and cost tens of thousands of lives. That might seem like a quaint number today, but back then it was a hell of a lot causalities. At the time, the fighting during this war was considered some of the most vicious in human history.
One of the biggest battles of this civil war occurred at a place called Gettysburg. These two big armies met up, armed with simple projectile weapons, little more than long, thin cannons really, and they fought for three days. Nearly 200,000 soldiers met on that battlefield and in the end upwards of 50,000 of them were wounded or killed.
Both immediately afterwards and in the years, decades, and centuries which followed, military analysts and historians examined every element of that battle. As always, the internet is chock full of information on the subject, new and ancient alike. The Battle of Gettysburg has been examined under a microscope in every way you can imagine.
But one metric is, I think, particularly eye opening. After the fighting was done, the field of battle was meticulously picked over for supplies which could not be wasted in the ongoing war. What the generals found surprised them to no end. A significant proportion of the rifles, on both sides of the battle, had never been fired. Many of those unfired rifles contained multiple rounds of ammunition, crammed in, one on top of the other, the implication being that soldiers were pretending to fire and then reloading, over and over again. That means soldiers stood there, under heavy gunfire, and refused to fire back for fear of taking another person’s life.
The plot thickened when soldiers were questioned. A substantial portion of the questioned soldiers either admitted to not firing their weapon or aiming purposefully above the enemy. An even larger proportion admitted to seeing this kind of behavior play out all along the line.
It turned out only a small percentage of the soldiers on either side of the battle were doing the bulk of the killing. Only a select few people were actually inherently capable of drawing a bead on their fellow human being and sending a ball of lead screaming into their guts.
In time, the American Military found psychological workarounds for their soldiers’ resistance to taking life. The techniques they discovered were highly effective, but went out of style when they backfired during the hyper violence of the the second American civil war.
But I don’t mean this to be a history lesson – I’m making a point. Aside from a very small percentage of human beings – an aberrant portion of the population – humans don’t take any inherent joy in killing one another. Left to our own devices, most of us would rather risk our own lives than risk taking someone else’s.
Now, compare humans to the Hiddrell. The Hiddrell gestate for four months and spend the final four months developing outside the womb. The Hiddrell female births a clutch of at least six, sometimes as many as thirteen individuals. Yet, by the end of four months, without fail, only one of the Hiddrell pups is still alive.
The rest do not succumb to any disease or nutritional deficiency – Instead, Hiddrell pups brutally murder one another in a race to maturity. The Hiddrell mother provides no outside nutrition whatsoever during that four month period. Instead, the pups must kill and consume one another, one by one, until only the strongest remains.
That is what an inherently bloodthirsty species looks like. The entire Hiddrell race is inseparably linked, from very the moment of their birth, to volitional violence. They’re born from violence and any Hiddrell with a non-violent instinct, no matter how small, is culled before they can even speak a single word. Yet, somehow, humanity is considered the most inherently violent species in the galaxy?
Humanity is not the most violent species, but rather the most flexible, the most adaptable. Compared to most intelligent species in the galaxy, we are far less reliant on instinct. We are, first and foremost, malleable. More than any inborn trait it is humanity’s environment that defines our behaviors.
This trait has made us extremely susceptible to outside influences. On the galactic stage, humanity was like an impressionable high school freshman. We wanted to please, we were eager to adapt, and that made us easy to take advantage of.
Enter the Loloth. When they first arrived they promised us the stars, and they delivered. We were so eager to get off our tired home-world, so hungry for the change and adaptation that drives our species, that we followed the lima beans like stray dogs, without a thought for what it might cost us.
I don’t need to rehash what we did to the Gorax. It’s been only forty years and even in the middle of all the madness that followed, several books have already been written about what we did. Believe me, I will have to live with what I did for the rest of my life.
What I care about here is why we did it. What drove us to it? Both human historians inside the Bubble and, I have no doubt, Federation historians outside it, are already crafting a narrative that paints humanity as the galaxy’s rabid dog, even more fearsome and uninhibited than the Gorax themselves.
But this isn’t the case, and I can’t stand by and let history corrupt my species for the rest of time. The truth is, we were manipulated. At first indirectly, bred like animals by the Loloth and fooled into believing our fate was our own. Later more directly.
I remember my first bombing run during the war. Our fleet appeared about one A.U. out a Gorax manufacturing world. Our ships were shoddily designed and they shook as if they were made of cardboard when we dropped out of the lima bean’s wormhole. I remember we appeared in system, the planet came up on our scanners, and no more than a five seconds passed before we received the verbal order to fire.
I hesitated. Most of us did, just like those soldiers at Gettysburg. The Loloth fed the galaxy a load of bullshit about their breeding programs and genetic manipulation. They told the Federation Council that they’d succeeded in breeding non-violence out of the human race, heightening our aggression at the level of DNA.
Except they didn’t. After the war, a bunch of their internal memoranda were leaked during the insurrection on Patok-9, deep in the bowels of the giant research lab they maintained there, before the beans smothered the planet in a nuclear blanket.
Their famous genetic engineers couldn’t make it work. The techniques the lima beans developed to tweak their own gene pool wreaked havoc on the human genome. Turns out every effort to genetically modify humanity failed completely, so the lima beans just lied about it. They falsified their laboratory data and called the breeding program a success. The federation didn’t give a shit, so long as the numbers were there. And boy, were the numbers there. One things humans are good at is reproducing, quickly.
So, when the time came, when the rubber hit the road, and a trillion or so humans were given the order to nuke an entire species into oblivion, overwhelmingly, we hesitated. Of course we hesitated, who among you reading this wouldn’t?
But the lima beans planned for this eventuality. That’s why they stationed a bean on every, single human warship. The official line was that they were there to assist in speedy communication or evacuation, that more beans meant getting in and out faster. But that just wasn’t true – we found out later that the gravitational wells on the Loloth ships are almost entirely automated and require the guidance of only a single bean navigator.
The real reason the beans were there was to push, by force of psychic will, past human instinct. The bean stationed on our ship – Commander PanCouLol – had a real sweet voice. Real sweet, like a beautiful woman in a dream. I remember that voice so clearly I can hear it in my head even now, like rubbing your fingers up against the raised skin of an old scar.
I remember when I heard it for the first time, moments after we arrived in that first Gorax system, as I hesitated over the launch button. The voice came at every planet in the beginning, and then less frequently as the war continued and pressing the launch button became second nature. Such a simple psychic command, but so effective, weaseling its way straight past my conscious mind and into my motor cortex.
“Press the button.”
And I pressed. We all did, every time, without fail. We pressed before our hesitation could even catch up. We pressed before we made any choice to press. In that sense, the Loloths had achieved exactly what the old American Empire had once achieved through advanced human psychology.
Except the Loloth could not even be bothered to understand how we thought. They couldn’t be bothered to train us into pressing the buttons ourselves. They literally did it for us, manipulating our minds directly. They did it this way because it was easier, but also because, at core, the Loloth despise humanity. They believe we are a lesser species, of lesser intelligence, and lesser capacity. It was below them to understand how we thought, to acknowledge that we could think at all. So they reached right into our brains and had their way with us instead.
All this raises a question: why the fuck did the Loloth go to all that trouble? Why breed an entire race of soldiers under false pretenses if, in the end, you were going to treat them as little more than automatons anyway? I can understand breeding humans as laborers, harvesting raw materials and constructing warships. But why man those warships at all? Why force human beings to sit at the battle stations and then twist their minds into pressing a button until it was second nature?
After thinking about this for a long time, I can only draw a single conclusion: The Loloth are cowards and hypocrites. The beans didn’t want to tarnish their stellar reputations with the blood of trillions upon trillions of Gorax, at least not directly. They refused to bear the stigma they knew would attach to whichever species was seen at the helm of those ships, and so they offloaded that terrible responsibility onto us, their “war dogs,” and they called it our “natures.”
Don’t misunderstand me – none of this absolves me of my sins, nor does it absolve my species from the atrocities we committed. A year into the Gorax eradication campaign every human ship was an efficient killing machine, with or without any psychic commands.
No, Humanity is culpable, but the Loloth would have everyone, even humanity itself, believe that we were born culpable – that some inborn evil existed inside us which not only let us destroy the Gorax but made us enjoy it. This is a lie. Humanity was an ingot of steel. We could have been molded into anything, and it was the Loloth that hammered us into a blade.
Just as we must never forget the evil acts we perpetrated during the war with the Gorax, we must never forget the authors of that evil. Humanity must never forget the hand the Loloth had in its fate.
Even if we end up trapped in their damn prison for all time, humanity must never forget.
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