HUMANITY RISING
Part 8: Humanity Risen
For a brief time, not even the span of a single Human life, the Federation lingered, ostensibly under Human and the Loloth joint rule.
This period, also known as The False Peace, was free of mass bloodshed, but simmered with an uneasy tension, as Humanity exacted a billion petulant revenges on the other sentient species of the galaxy for what the Human’s perceived as millennia of injustice against the Human race.
It was during this time that the first discriminatory statutes were passed by the Human led council explicitly stripping non-human species of property and voting rights. Across the galaxy Human governors consolidated control of individual systems. Taking from their own ancient history of self-subjugation, the Humans instituted imperialist social structures, empowering small ‘elites’ of non-human citizens to police and monitor their own non-human kind. This had the effect of sowing divisions in the theretofore unified front of non-human resistance.
Within three decades the old, egalitarian structures of the Federation had been almost entirely abrogated, and the new Human led society took on the form of a race based hierarchy, with Humans squarely on top and everyone else squarely on the bottom.
Everyone else except the Loloth.
While the rest of the non-human species in the galaxy suffered under the incipient tyranny of Human oppression, the Loloth reaped the rewards of their foul betrayal and extreme utility. In general, the status quo on Loloth controlled worlds remained unchanged – they were even allowed to retain their own local governance, and a hint of their own autonomy. Loloth citizens of the Federation retained their voting and property ownership rights, and could freely travel from planet to planet, where they were widely and universally despised.
Of course, the Loloth dared not push their luck too far. The Human’s kept them on a short string, surrounding each Loloth world with a fleet of Human cruisers, always watching closely for signs of Loloth betrayal.
Always the Loloth’s secretly scanned the minds of the Human fleet commanders, seeking out reassurance of Humanity’s good intentions, and never finding anything to the contrary. Although initially disconcerted by their inability to exert direct control, the Loloth were otherwise secure in the omnipotence of their psychic abilities, never doubting for a moment that the weak minded Humans could not help but reveal to them their deepest mental secrets.
On Loll, the Loloth Conglomeration of Minds believed the threat to their species had passed, once and for all. The Loloths calculated that their unrivaled utility in the galaxy, their ability to move at ultra-luminal speeds and communicate near instantly, at great distances, made them an irreplaceable tool in service of the Human government. Moreover, they knew their gravity well technology could not be replicated or operated by any other species and that, without them, the Federation would be substantially weakened. They believed themselves irreplaceable.
In this the Loloth were not wrong – no purely logical government would be able to legitimize destroying the Loloth. But there were few things as illogically single minded as the Human drive for revenge.
At core, it was the Loloths humanity hated most of all. It was the Loloths who trapped Humans behind an impenetrable wall of singularities, the Loloths whose violative mind control had set humanity against itself and cost millions of lives.
For the tens of thousands of years of their imprisonment, humanity had one shared, overriding goal – to take revenge upon the Loloths.
However, the Human race knew their mental weakness put them at an extreme disadvantage. The Loloths were a physically unimposing species, but in millennia prior the Humans had been highly susceptible to Loloth control.
To negate the Loloth’s primary advantage, a species-wide, strict regimen of mental training was implemented across the Human race. Starting from a young age, every Human child was instructed in mindfulness and meditation, all with the aim of teaching them to control and develope their inner mind. Slowly, over countless generations, trapped behind the wall of singularities, this skill became prized above all others, its vengeful purpose woven into all Human culture, passed down from parent to child, until hiding ones true thoughts, protecting one’s true self, was as normal to every human being as taking a breath.
Still, humanity could not be sure that their rampant hatred of the Loloth’s would be successfully obscured. Indeed, there was no assurance humanity would ever encounter a Loloth again. But then the Kra invasion, and the breach of the singularity barrier, and the meeting with Loloth Commander KyuTanLol in the abandoned base in orbit around Pluto. The first test was passed – the Loloth left the meeting without a clue of Humanity’s insatiable anger and revulsion.
Over the next nine centuries, as the Human race was spread far and wide across the galaxy in preparation for the Great Purge, every member of the Human species held close and silent their hatred of the Loloth. Mental fortitude and control continued to be taught to every new Human being, the ability not only to hide ones true thoughts, but even to think deceptively, show only what one wished to be shown. All the while every human man, woman, and child held onto their one, true goal, the absolute destruction of the Loloth race.
As the Great Purge progressed apace, the myriad Commanders and Captains of the Human fleets fed their Loloth watchers false mental hints and clues – visions of human depravity and deception, as though the endless war were unmooring the human mind – allowing the Loloth to see only what humanity intended them to see, just enough chaos and bloodlust to compel the Loloth to betray the other Federation races in the name of their own protection.
During the takeover of the Federation, and in the three decades of consolidation which followed, the Human ruse continued unabated. Always cognizant of the Loloth mind readers and psychic spies, no Human ever let her guard down. Thousands of generations of mental training held true, and until the final, terrible blow, the Loloth’s never suspected a thing.
At last, in the 31st year of the Human Age, during a celebration of the anniversary of the defeat of the Kra, the death blow came. The date and time was set a year in advance, and at the same, precise moment across the galaxy, as the Loloth celebrated their successes, a thousand thousand human ships fired their nuclear payloads. Unlike the takeover of the Federation systems, the assault was one of total annihilation, a tidal wave of nuclear death unleashed in one, fell swoop, on every Loloth world, into every Loloth ship.
Even as the surface of Loll boiled in sheets of atomizing radiation and the Loloth ships across the galaxy were vaporized, turned to irradiated ash, on every Federation planet and ship, wherever a Loloth could be found in Human company, they were dispatched, viciously: A plasma bolt mid meal; awoken from sleep with an exploding slug; thrown into the vacuum of space; burnt alive within a shower of fossil fuels; or simply stabbed or beaten to death by angry crowds of wrathful humanity. In this the other races of the galaxy often joined in, though never with the aplomb and fireceness born of Human rage.
The final Loloth to die was Commander KyuTanLol herself. As the Loloth Holocaust unfolded across the galaxy, Commander KyuTanLol was seized during a council meeting. Even then, her Human captures, soon to be executioners, could not help but hide their true feelings, their true intentions, no matter that their victory was all but assured – such was the strength of the Human mental conditioning.
And so, as she looked down the barrel of half a dozen human plasma rifles, desperately and futilely plumbing the depths of her assailant’s minds, Commander KyuTanLol could only wonder blindly, in horror, at where her species had miscalculated.
The Loloth Holocaust was complete within two weeks. The Loloth planets were reduced to lifeless balls of ash. No Loloth ship escaped the sudden and unexpected nuclear strike. On every planet in the Federation, epic piles of pierced Loloth bodies, like giant discarded water ballons, their internal fluids seeping out of countless wounds, were set ablaze. Throughout the unfeeling vacuum of galactic space, countless Loloth corpses floated along to nowhere in a frosted rigor.
With their true enemy eliminated, their true goal achieved, the Human High Command officially disbanded the Council and dissolved the Federation. System 1 was rechristened “Sol”, planet 1 was re-christened “Earth”, and the first official act of the new Human government was to destroy every conceivable record of the Loloth people – no matter how trivial, or how small – to eliminate the Loloth from every vestige of Galactic memory.
Once the Loloth were erased from history, the galactic reckoning was reset by government edict to Year One Of The Human Imperium.
Thus ended the Galactic Federation, and so began the Reign of Humanity.
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