A White Death
A boy, somewhere in his late teens and with brown reddish hair, lies motionless on the ground. His eyes are closed and his mouth is only slightly open, his knees drawn up to his belly fetal-like. His hands also rest there, firmly clutched around the waist. Underneath the belly is a pool of blood, slowly drying on the frozen ground.
He has been lying there for a while, white snowflakes slowly falling down on his lifeless body. His soft, rounded cheeks and slim, boyish build give him a pleasing appearance even now, perhaps even more so than at any point in life. For this climate he seems awfully underdressed, with only a light black shirt and tight blue jeans that press sensually against his curves.
The sight of the boy seems oddly fitting to this wintery landscape, his body resting on a dirt road that curves through the snow-covered pine forest. The blood on the ground gives a suiting contrast to the surrounding white and brown shades, the peaceful expression on his face fitting perfectly into the slow descent of the snowflakes.
His mouth is tilted in a small smile, as if he was dreaming of something pleasant. He looks very much at peace here.
To Live and Die for the God-Emperor
The party in the Menovian asteroid belt has been going on non-stop for ten millennia now. People drink, do drugs and have sex in the open, with only occasional interruptions from the Space Guard. Those first fifty unlucky enough to be spotted are immediately drafted to the war effort, with things then continuing as normal. As soon as people tire and leave to rest, new people will come in to replace them.
Life is wild in the Holy Stellar Empire.
The war has been going on for ten million years, long enough that nobody but the God-Emperor has lived to see its beginning. Nobody cares about history – with machines doing every possible job, all that’s left for us humans is to party, party and die in the God-Emperor’s sacred war.
There’s laughter as a dance involving several men and women spontaneously degenerates into a group sex session. Nobody cares about contraception anymore, especially not the women – the only way to avoid drafting is to be pregnant or have a child under three, and modern medicine is advanced enough to heal any possible disease. The God-Emperor wants to have plenty of subjects, all to die in his ancient war.
Naturally the machines could just as well carry out the fighting, and they do – every major victory, every single step of progress that is ever made is accomplished by robots and artificial intelligences. But the God-Emperor is bitter, vengeful at a humanity that allowed his beloved to die in an accident. So to avenge the wife who died while checking on a supposedly harmless border dispute with the aliens, trillions upon trillions of humans and aliens both are to die.
The Holy Stellar Empire spans over a thousand billion star systems, with new ones colonized every day. Every day, millions of battleships are produced all across the Empire, and every day tens of thousands of fleets engage in battle with their alien adversaries. Every day, hundreds of planets, both those of the Holy Stellar Empire and those of the aliens, are wiped out of existence by immensely powerful planet-killers.
In the beginning the aliens tried apologizing for what had happened, tried placating the God-Emperor by gifting him countless of star systems. They did everything imaginable to make sure nothing would threaten the harmony that had existed between the empires for eighty thousand years. But the God-Emperor, who had only recently ascended to godhood with the help of technology, would not stop mourning for his beloved, would not stop blaming incompetent border guards on both sides. All those pleas went to naught, and so the fleets encountered each other in battle for the first time.
There is no true reason to this war, no real purpose – step by step, the Holy Stellar Empire is winning, but at a pace slow enough for it to take another ten million years for the aliens to finally succumb. For the last three million years, research AI’s and think tanks of superintelligent enhanced humans have been coming up dry – there is no new technology to be discovered, no more mysteries of the universe that we would not have solved. Nothing can stop the steady carnage of the Imperial Crusade, nothing but a peace settlement which everybody knows will never come.
And every morning, as the day dawns on the ancient human capital of Terra, the God-Emperor stands by a window and stares into the rising sun. He stands in the palace of the holy capital, long since purged of any lesser beings, the soil sterilized for his undying glory. And there, staring right into the blazing star he swears that today, today my love, you shall be avenged once more.
The Chamber of Sounds
I stand here, in my small closet, locked away from all other life.
For as long as I can remember I have been here, nutrient tubes running to my veins keeping me alive and filtering my wastes. I imagine there must be a ventilation shaft as well, to keep me supplied with air. I don’t know if there is – the multitude of sounds always drowns it out.
I believe I am in a space ship, for far away I can hear the thunder of the engines. Maybe this is a maintenance space of some kind, for surely it isn’t normal to hear so many sounds: the bubbling of water in pipes, the whirling wheels of maintenance robots, the constant clicking of communications relays. All this I hear but cannot see, the darkness of my closet enveloping me at all times.
And then there are the voices, the automated electronical voices spitting out status reports in binary. I cannot make out what they are saying, cannot grasp the inhuman tongue of the machines. There are many of them, and they all sound the same, their bizarre sound giving me a sense of peace, of order.
I believe it is a chasm I’m next to, from the way the sounds and voices echo. A deep, huge tunnel full of wires, full of pipes and full of voices. Surely it must go on near forever, lasting miles and miles and perhaps never end. Maybe it is lined with closets like mine, filled with people kept inside for eternities.
Who I am or why I am here, I do not know. At times I ponder these things, but those ponderings never lead me to any end – after all, this is the only world I’ve ever known of. The one of sounds and the one of machines, the one of peace but not of quiet.
As the stars burn and the ship’s engines burn I stay locked here, locked here for eternities as I always have. It is just me and the machines, and all is as it should be.
The Flailer
A cold wind blew as Shaelin watched over the landscape.
The flail she held in her hand was growing heavy, heavier than it had felt in the whole of the battle before. The blood of the men she had slain was still splattered on her armor, the memory of their dying cries burning her soul. It had been her choice, her decision to take this castle. Her decision to lead the troops into battle.
Her choice to risk her unborn child in combat. Assault this place now, breaking the peace treaty and slaying all the people within. Just to prevent the risk that the people here would one day do the same, attack her people and her child when she was unprepared. She could never risk that; she’d rather sentenced the people here to die, even if it meant spilling some innocent blood.
“You have seen”, she whispered to the starry sky above the battlements. The stars saw all that happened below them – right or wrong, they’d be the ones to cast judgment. “Sentence me into an eternity of hell and brimstone, I do not care,” she said softly.
“For my child is safe now.”
The picture of the flailer is drawn by Muhrri. Used with permission; it is not covered by the usual Creative Commons license on this site.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
In addition to making a public comment, you may also send me anonymous feedback.