HUMANITY FALLEN
Part 9: Metamorphosis
For 200,000 years, human beings roamed the Earth. Over the course of just over a single millennium, we spread across the stars. We were poised to be the dominant species in the galaxy, and in less than fifty years, we smashed those dreams to pieces.
It’s true we didn’t do it alone – the Loloth worked tirelessly against our best interests – but had we unified as a species against the Loloth threat, rest assured we would have been victorious. Had we not been torn apart, as we always are, by petty differences, our sheer numbers would have ensured our dominance.
No species as intelligent and as malleable as humanity exists in this galaxy. We know now that we are at the top of the food chain. The Federation species, the Lima Beans, they nip at our heels, herding us like cattle in this direction or that. But if we humanity ever joined together in earnest, we could overpower them all.
Humanity has only one true predator: ourselves.
After the Battle of the Enslaved, when the nuclear massacre ended, the Federation started purging the last remnants of the human race all across the galaxy. Any moral qualm the Council may once have had was overshadowed entirely by humanity’s sheer, unadulterated violence. The Loloth said we were a danger to ourselves and all living things, and given the totality of their experience with us, the Council could hardly disagree.
The Council ordered humanity eradicated, wiped from existence, down to the last individual – and they acted swiftly to make this a reality. Across the galaxy, all non-human populations were called upon to join in the hunt. Humans were dragged through the streets, first to detention centers and then to euthanasia facilities, where Federation processors worked at a break neck pace, killing as quickly as people could be found and brought in.
Throughout this history I’ve tossed numbers around – giant numbers to be sure. I won’t pretend to know exactly how many of us were killed in this final orgy of violence. I suppose it depends on how many of us were even left to kill. Suffice to say it was very nearly all of us, everywhere. Another holocaust to throw onto the pile of galactic holocausts.
It goes without saying, I should be dead. So should you. None of us are supposed to be here, and according to all Federation records, we aren’t. As far as a the Federation is concerned, the final human being was wiped out years ago.1
No, we’re here for the same reason we got into this mess to begin with. The goddamned Loloth.
Like any good gambler, the Loloth understand the importance of having an ace up their sleeve. On the one hand, they despise humanity for what they consider our genetic imperfection. On the other hand, they view us, rightly given our history, as a weapon of inestimable value – and one they have the power to control completely.
At the end of the day, the power hungry bastards just couldn’t let us go. As the Federation annihilated humans everywhere, the Loloth secreted small numbers of human survivors from small, peripheral human worlds. Worlds where the Federation was not looking closely, where a discrepancy with the planetary census of a few hundred individuals would not be carefully questioned. Worlds like Mylex.
They came at night and offered the residents of my apartment building two options: come with them or die. They only gave us a minute to choose, explaining nothing. Some stayed. Others, including myself, went with them. We’d just exited the planet’s atmosphere when the orbital bombardment began and I watched my home of fifty years reduced to ashes.
We were shuttled around the galaxy, kept in the holds of a Loloth cruiser, like cargo. Wherever we stopped the Beans picked up new humans and packed them in with us. The Beans provided the bare minimum, if that, and soon we found ourselves standing crammed in next to emaciated corpses, shuffling our feet for hours, trying not to step on the dead until the Beans made the rounds and let us toss the new bodies out the airlock.
This went on for two months. I was nearly sixty years old when I made that journey, and to be frank with you, I don’t know how I survived it. The only thing I remember is an overwhelming desire not to let them win. I was fueled by hatred, sustained by it, and it saw me through.
By the time we arrived at Earth the hold was full, wall to wall, with desperate, skeletal human refugees. They landed in the Northern Hemisphere, near one of the nearly abandoned cities of North America. Over the last thousand years, Earth had become a backwater. No one had wanted to remain on the planet except the old, the weak, and the close-minded.
My father had been one of the hold outs. He tended his farm until the day he died – years before I returned of course, somewhere in the middle of the chaos of my life. As I write this memoir I can look out the window of our old house, onto the sun drenched, fallow plains. I’m not farmer after all, and we hardly need the food.
They dropped off about a hundred thousand people in total using the largest fleet of Loloth cruisers I’ve ever scene in one place. At least ten thousand ships, bulbous and graceful at the same time. They remained in orbit for about a week, and then they were gone without any explanation.
Over the next few weeks we waited for the hammer to drop, convinced something terrible was bound to happen, but unsure what to expect. No one anticipated what came next.
It started, whether by chance or design, with the North Star. One night, its light just disappeared. Gone. Over the next five months, the darkness spread across the sky, consuming the light of every star, like a giant interstellar blanket being draped over the solar system.
It took us years to figure out exactly what they’d done – Earth’s infrastructure was in shambles and we had to slowly build it back up from the dustbin – and of course we still have no idea how they did it. Eventually the scientists among the survivors got enough equipment working to confirm what many of them already hypothesized.
Black-holes. The Loloth created millions of black-holes. An unbroken sphere of stable singularities. An impossible, impassable interstellar prison. The kind of perfection only the Loloth could even conceive of, let alone make real.
Which brings us to the present. If you’re reading this, than you know all to well what the Loloth did. If you were born here on Earth, than you have never seen starlight. You’ve known only the brightness of the moon and the impassive blackness of the night sky. You know all too well the fate of your species.
Today, I am old. I doubt I will live to see another summer, let alone the light of a distant star. I will die soon, alone and bearing the burden of my sins. But this is a fitting end for someone like me. I deserve much worse.
As I prepare to leave this world behind, the only thing I am certain of is that the Loloth will return and what they find here will decide the fate of the galaxy.
In trapping us here, I believe the Loloth saw two paths for our species.
In the first path, we self-destruct, devour our resources mindlessly until nothing is left, eventually cannibalizing ourselves and finally meeting extinction here in the darkness.
In the second, we persevere. Our species manages, somehow, to survive here, and then, when it serves the Loloth they will use us as weapons yet again, twisting our minds to their unfeeling vision.
I envision a Third Path. A path that sees us become a changed species, a matured human race, without our petty infighting and mindless violence. I see a Path toward true and lasting self-sufficiency and unconditional respect for one another. I see a Way forward that is neither destruction nor mere survival, but true and complete transformation.
If we treat this place as a cage and spend out time gnashing teeth and thrashing against the bars, our fates are sealed and we will be doomed to relive the terrible mistakes of our past.
But if we instead treat this place as a cocoon – if we take care never to lose sight of the past and its many lessons – we may, at long last, metamorphose and emerge from this place as something entirely new.
Humanity must ask itself – must never stop asking itself – what will we become?
What will we become?
- Of course, this does not include the tens of thousands of stray Mad Dogs that disappeared during the Unmooring. God only knows what’s happened to them, out there in the dark recesses of the Galaxy. There were rumors, before the return to Earth, that they found refuge in the Void, or out beyond the galactic rim, though no one knows anything for certain, of course.
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