Titus watches the ashes of Camelot V alight onto the ground. Faint showers of sparks create a golden haze when they catch, producing shadows against warped steel and noxious smoke.
The few remaining fires are being methodically extinguished and Titus calculates.
Metal sheets and sparking wires are now the grave markers of his planet. There is nothing to mourn besides the navigation charts with coordinates that will never be reached and a glimpse of the shield generator Shawn promised would hold.
This burning wreckage is all that’s left of years of preparation and research. A lifetime Titus gave in his brother’s name to serve as a Chief Scientist. Decades spent away from the capitol, in empires who were wary when not blatantly hostile to the work Titus dedicated himself too. He barely knew his own family when he returned to witness his brother’s election to the highest seat on the Scientific Council.
The timing was only overshadowed by the fact Titus didn’t hear the news of his father’s passing until a week before the funeral. (On the Convergence station halfway between Osmid and Terra Gravis two light haulers complained about delayed shipments and detours past Waseda.)
Not long ago, watching his planet disappear past the horizon of the Davenhope Wormhole, that distance seemed a small price to pay for his dogma.
Titus’s gaze is drawn to the brilliance of ship’s engines before they are engulfed by clouds.
The air is still in this silent space created by the final pieces of the hull settling when two soldiers run up to face him.
The fire in Camelot V’s bridge finally shudders out.
“Doctor Titus, our rescue teams are initiating their scans of the wreckage.”
The only mark of a soldier on the man to the right are his gold eyes and the crest on his sleeve.
“In the absence of central command, military leadership is being transferred to the Sovereign Scientist.”
The second soldier does not move from her place beside her companion. Blood from her forehead joins with a trail from her lips, steadily soaking into the protective under suit at her neck.
“Commander Jonas was unable to locate His Esteemed Authority. From Commander Jonas’s report…it is improbable he survived the explosions.”
Titus meets the second soldier’s eyes. She does not flinch. She does not tense. He lets his arms fall to his sides. The second soldier lets a drop of blood gather on her eyelash.
Titus looks back to the clouds for a moment. The first soldier opens his mouth to continue his report so Titus lifts his arms and points.
“An escape ship fled. It must be brought back, no matter the cost.”
The first soldier’s mouth snaps shut and the the iris in his eyes rotate but it is the second solider who moves first. She bows with her arms crossed and her spine curled. The first soldier quickly follows in her steps even after they vanish into the last remnants of Camelot V’s hull.
How strange.
Titus moves towards the bridge.
He didn’t know androids learnt the First Rites.
Once he reaches the base of the largest intact section of the ship, it takes 3 more hours and a lifetime of grief and fury until he finds it.
The ship is unrecognizable from the inside. Exposed rooms and vents are coffins draped in fanwort and mosaic plants. The few wires still sparking stand out like flowers of water hawthorns placed with care. His planet is dead and this ship is her funeral shroud.
All around he can see evidence of alloys bent under intense pressure and heat. The closer he gets to the bridge the more he confirms it’s nothing but an incinerator. The flames licking the outside are gone and now each crack and opening is sealed. Anyone who was inside is trapped in their tomb.
He’s barely meters below the bridge when his suit trills. A yellow light pulses on his arm as he descends, picking up tempo until he is hanging before one small sliver of darkness.
The hole widens easily beneath his hands and the yellow signal settles into a steady glow. Hidden in the transporter, a child peers out.
Lights frame a darkened face shield. Faint rows of photoluminescent fabric illuminate each appendage every time the child shifts and lifts their head. Titus grips his cable in one hand while his feet slide through the opening. The broken transporter is blanketed in darkness with patchwork light only reaching into this space from the threaded wires in their suits.
His feet dangling, he waits a moment and thinks. He calculates. Finally, he takes off the top of his helmet, leaving only the necessary mask on his face.
He stares down at the boy and the child shifts forward.
“How about we get you somewhere safe?”
He softens his eyes and gently lifts the boy from the floor into his arms.
Even with the child in his arms it takes less time to wire walk out then it did to find him. The ground beneath his feet sounds soft as he steps past scorched debris.
If it wasn’t for the flashes of light as they walk they would fade into the landscape. Their gray softsuits stripping away their solitary figures until they are nothing but shifting ash on the remainder of the hull.
A quiet sound draws Titus’s gaze down.
There, resting against his chest, a small armored head relaxes. When they reached the surface the child made no move to remove his face shield and it still covers his eyes. Titus doesn’t feel inclined to argue.
He wonders, furiously, if the boy understood why he was trapped in a box. If he knew his father burned.
Faint sounds of shouting echoes in the distance and Titus continues walking.
Not far from the wreckage he reaches a ship of black obsidian. The only distinguishing markers are phosphorescent accents lining the hull and stretching out to cover the wings.
At the foot of the ramp, a woman stands, gold eyes baring down on him with indignant rage.
He steps up to the entrance and holds out the child to her.
She blinks.
After a moment she warily reaches down to place the arm of an exoskeleton on the floor. She walks closer and takes the child in her arms, continuing to glare at him.
“I need the Last Will of the Scientific Council. I need a weapon.”
She blinks slowly then quickly disappears into the darkness of the ship. He walks away.
In the distance, neon lights are flickering on. The fires have died out and the nights are long in this waste.
It is not the paradise they were promised, yet it will be the planet they consume.
Titus walks. He makes a plan, and it must work.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
The boy takes to the ship easier than his ancestors.
Era sits at her workbench and watches as the boy looks around the ship slowly before his gaze finally rests on hers.
In the soothing lullaby of engines, shields, and lighting, they watch each other for long minutes stretched out further than the disparity brought by time dilation.
This moment is meaningless in the face of its future recurrences.
Now: They watch each other.
Now: The boy watches her after a long day of carefully scuttling around her home, staring at screens and wires, and blueprints.
Now: She watches space through the observation windows on her ship due to one glance from the boy who looks at the stars with both wonder and calm.
Now: She watches the boy cry in his sleep and wake up from night terrors.
Era settles into this habit longer than she likes.
She lets herself watch until she could no longer afford to just watch.
Patience is self-indulgence, and there are other timetables to be held too.
He’s still young when she places a data pad in his hand and snarls that he will learn to build. His ancestors were younger than him when they wrote their first lines of code and built their empire on nothing but intellect.
You will know, she promises as she guides his hands towards an android.
Habit turns to action like a ritualistic erasing of the diplopia formed by past and present. Disjointed in its similarity, the boy settles into this new routine easier than he did his new life.
Now: She watches him as learns.
She glances up from schematics to see him practice with drills, computers, welding.
She analyzes coding and errors between moments as he grows, big and strong with hands calloused and quick, and his eyes hard and sharper.
She watches as he goes from a boy to something else.
Sometimes, in those silent moments, when the boy jerks from his sleep, or his eyes linger on some isolated sadness, she spares mercy and makes herself remember.
Her fingers recall the motions, a lingering muscle memory in her hands. Lifetimes have done little to erase the knowledge gained by organic fibers.
A rasping voice echoes in her mind demanding she do more.
She ignores the reflections on the cabin walls to brush the tears from his eyes and hums soothing words to drown out the illusory drops.
Forcing her hand to rake gently through his hair until he drifts back into oblivion, she is left clenching her fists in rage.
The ship hums near silently around him on his tenth birthday, when he stops fiddling with a small metal robot he designed and finally asks her ‘Why?’.
She cuffs him then shoves an exoskeleton part into his hands.
She watches the boy, until she can no longer.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
The Great Scientific Council of the Ninth Empire met 200 years ago to declare Primus Ritus. A decree usurping all previous Rites dedicated to scientific discoveries and installing new directives within the technocracy.
Era remembered the day when she stood beside Doctor Ingus, the Ninth Empire becoming the first to declare androids the intellectual property of the government.
Later that night Ingus clutched her hands in his own and ordered her to go to ground.
“You and your people will be next. They will not allow the existence of creatures who live in-between their rules and their ideals. To them, you will be an abomination.”
Three weeks following, on the same night Doctor Ingus was assassinated, the Dissembling began. By the time a new technocracy was put in place, Era was the last of her kind.
Within 100 years, the Ninth Empire contained two dying worlds and more androids than people.
Era sees the boy sitting cross-legged on his desk. Tools and parts scatter around him in a messy array her mentor would never tolerate.
He turns his face up to meet her and a smile nearly splits his face in two.
The dark shadows in his eyes are faded to pale imitations of themselves. He’s happy now.
He’s ready.
A blueprint is locked in a room she never enters. Ingus taught her the importance of patience. Of planning. The necessity of cunning in a world where sheer knowledge held the highest authority.
There is irony then, that the blueprint was the antithesis of rationality. Its sole purpose was assured annihilation.
Still, Titus asked for her help.
He named the program.
A proposition hidden so deep in the Manuals of Applied Governance only two members of the Scientific Council knew its name.
Only one person outside of it was present when it is was fabricated.
Aluminum weighs heavy in her hands. There is no choice, in the end. Ingus prepared this and Titus guaranteed it.
She steps close to the boy and holds out her hand.
Come, she asks with a steady stance.
The boy smiles, following eagerly.
The workplace in the back of the ship is dark and quiet.
She hopes this does not take long.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
He wakes up silently.
He does not scream or speak or even whimper.
Gold eyes turn to her without accusation.
After the tests, he turns away from her.
It’s not blame, but this feeling is close enough.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Afterwards, he grows in his own way.
She sees it, and feels it, and disposes it’s influence.
The tools of his youth are no longer objects to practice on. The designs and mechanics he used to fabricate his sovereign’s army are not applied solely to the androids he creates.
She’s soldering a circuit when she observes him pick up an electrostatic rifle.
He stands for a moment, then walks outside their ship. His shirt flutters briefly in opposition to the stillness of taking aim and firing.
80 feet from the ship, an insect’s swarm becomes visible as they burn.
The rifle is lowered slowly and they both watch the swarm become ash. Something changes in the moment between him grabbing the weapon and when he turns to face her.
Walking back to his seat, his hands pass over the metal used to make exoskeletons and rest on the materials she laid aside to make a plasma knife.
They don’t speak of the change.
In between developing soldiers and workers, he’s found a new purpose. When he steps outside to practice, it is with a diligent, fierceness in his movements she’s surprised brings her pride.
Era doesn’t know what kind of weapon Titus wanted.
Whether it was someone as precise and collected as himself, or it was this: a boy who is becoming a solid mass of barely-controlled rage and unstoppable ferocity.
A boy who doesn’t know the violation of the past his very existence creates.
She wonders what his ancestors would think of the weapon he’s becoming. His true ancestors.
Not the ones who ordered a genocide with same ease and efficiency as their work in labs.
No, the ones buried on Waseda, with their bodies draped in oil and rust.
She hopes when the time comes, Titus buries them the same.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Titus returns on the boy’s eighteenth birthday.
The boy glances at her, a heavy wrench in his hand and an uncanny discernment in his gold eyes.
“So this is it?”
Titus inspects the boy but all of his attention is on her.
Era nods. Her eyes are sharp as flint.
“It appears the program worked better than expected. His instruction is complete. I need him now.”
Titus grins at her and the boy frowns.
12 years and he never learned why his home was a ship. He was born to travelers, true, but his future was once filled with promises of planets. Concentrated cities surrounded by untouched wilderness. Towering buildings made of steel with transparent solar panels lining each side. In the heart of it all, an architectural innovation baring the words: Hic non requiescimus.
All that’s left of that dream is a ship with yellow lining and a planet covered more with corpses than inventors.
Maybe, one of the three here will join them.
She walks over to the boy, the wrench now held loosely, and nods.
She presses her hands to his cheeks, trying to memorize the openness in his face and the ease around his eyes she wonders if he’ll lose.
Go, her eyes say and in the end he grabs his bags and walks over to the traitor.
They walk up a ramp.
Ships used to be lined in photoluminescent designs, serving as symbols of advancements none of the 11 empires surrounding them could ever dare to achieve. The ship they enter is practical in its coloring only.
It seems Titus realized something in the years after his brother’s death.
Era watches the ship leave.
She wonders what kind of weapon the boy will be.
She wonders what kind of man he would have been.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Eleven months later, on the Grain Convergence, the Botanist enters the ship with no warning.
The two women stare at each other.
Era takes in her counterpart.
Green sigils trail down the sleeves of the Botanist’s coat until they meet hands that look as if they were dyed by too much time spent in soil. Faint fluorescence manages to trickle from behind folds of heavy fabric. Despite the shorn hair on her head, the markings that designate her station stand out on her scalp. The Botanists’s eyes are brown but filled with disgust.
The moment presses on a second more, then an agreement is reached.
The Botanist sits down and Era continues her work.
“He has become infamous, though few know his true lineage. It is still possible for him to fulfill his father’s promise.”
From her position, the Botanist cannot see the way the other woman’s eyes harden.
Era shakes her head and knows it cannot be.
Nearly a year past when the boy left her care and too much has changed.
The Eighth and Tenth Empires are virtually destroyed. Revolts broke out in the Fourth Empire two weeks ago. The Eleventh and Twelfth Empires entered into talks to merge their territories.
On a wasteland,10,000 people are praying for the first time in a millennia.
The Botanist would understand if the histories stayed truthful.
If she saw the way the boy’s eyes changed with each prayer answered with destruction.
Era knows what happens when a people wait for salvation because of the promises of betrayers.
He deserves more, her eyes say and the Botanist glowers.
“Him, or you?”
Not long ago Era visited the newly designated Waseda Prime. Wreckage from years ago remained unmoved and much of the landscape looked frozen in same moment Era left it.
What is changed is an abomination. An insult to the Great Scientific Council. If Titus guided his empire to a republic it could never reach the same magnitude of insolence.
200 years ago, nine scientists signed a paper changing the course of the Twelve Empires.
They knew a technocracy is only as strong as the scientists who build her.
(200 year ago, nine scientists willingly massacred their own people.)
Era holds out her hand. The Botanist tenses before her eyes are drawn down to where Era is carefully pulling off her glove.
The worn leather slides off easily and the Botanist’s eyes widen.
He cannot rule that which hates him. Era places her hand on the Botanist’s own.
Silence rests for a second until the Botanist lifts her face from her lap. There is no sympathy or fear in her eyes. The same derision twists her features into a pitiful echo of her ancestor’s in the face of parallel revelations.
“I did not know it was your choice to make.”
Simultaneously, light reflects off the Botanist’s face and Era withdraws her hand. She doesn’t answer except to turn her back to face the work table filled with small gears and paint.
The Botanist huffs and leaves. Era clenches her fist.
The Botanist was wrong, she knows.
It became her choice the second she willingly took him into her arms.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Her ship is landed on a mountain when they begin their rebellion.
Six weeks after the Botanist left her ship the fragile alliance between remaining humans of the Eight, Tenth, and Ninth Empires resolved into one final offensive.
They are trying to kill the traitor and somehow, rid their fallen sovereign’s heir of the traitor’s control.
Era knows they will fail.
When their true sovereign emerges and his eyes are an unnatural gold, they do not hold their weapons in defense until it is too late.
These people were told ghost stories of this weapon’s power, but the Ninth Empire never believed in ghosts. Instead, their rebellions require a goal to succeed. It seems the Botanist led them to believe in a false one.
A people mired in science failed to follow its most crucial rule.
It’s fitting, somehow, that a society once admired for its intellect will collapse because it did not ask enough questions.
Inexplicably, the Botanist turns to Era and in a valley filling with corpses her eyes beg for help.
On the mountain Era watches the weapon lead the traitor’s army. The gray earth turns to rust when the rebels fall. The traitor’s army does not leave the same marks.
The weapon does not hesitate as he passes through his father’s people and the Botanist cannot afford to will Era’s aid with nothing but eyes that once held hatred.
Era reenters her ship.
They will all die it seems, at the hands of the man they might have called “Sovereign”.
Later, she cries at the weapon he has become.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Era travels to Waseda.
By the time Shawn, Designated Sovereign of the Ninth, ordered the final evacuation of the planet, it had been ten years since Era last set foot on her birth world.
Camelot V left after seven months of failed geologic experiments and unanswered distress calls to her sister vessels. Twelve ships were sent ahead to provide detailed reports and prepare any colony for the rest of the population traveling on the Camelot V. None of those ships made it.
Era intercepted the Camelot V in time to watch her break apart upon entry into Waseda Prime’s atmosphere.
In that moment, a choice was set before her.
For 200 years Era survived on the shadows of her people. There were secrets written in the coding of her nerves and her body unwelcome evidence to truth. Doctor Ingus warned her of the imminent threat, but neither of them anticipated the awful existence waiting on the other side of surviving an extermination.
When she finally found strength to leave she intended to never look upon the Ninth ever again.
Watching the destruction of the Camelot V, she knew a chance presented itself.
These people were not their forebearers. They did not have resources to squander and knowledge to spare. There was need in that moment. Survivors banded together in the face of tragedy and if there were ever a moment for her to take back the life ripped from her people’s hands this was it.
Era could claim the existence she was long denied.
She landed under the black cloud billowing from the destruction yet when she stepped off her ship she stopped.
Stared at the twisted pieces of debris and the burnt remnants of the lives of seven million people. The ground beneath her wasn’t stained but the overwhelming stench in the air matched.
She knew what Ingus would have wanted.
She knew what her people deserved.
Ingus’s smiles lived in the victorious shouts of scientists on the edge of a discovery.
Her sisters and brothers lived in the warped metal turned red with heat.
As the wreckage creaked and burned, Era didn’t search for survivors.
Her small inspection of the surrounding area turned up enough supplies to last her until she could make her way to another Convergence for trade.
She wonders, as the Davenport Wormhole looms before her, if this was her last terrible mistake.
Lingering in the shade of her memories, clinging to her grief for a few more minutes.
Titus intercepted her. Gave her a command.
He wasn’t her sovereign. She owed no allegiance to a deteriorating Ninth Empire.
Era took the boy anyway.
Waseda is a disappointing sight in the front window of her ship.
She does not need to land. The view from the air writes the facts as clearly as any readout.
Any forests that used to live are dead. The ground is dull where it has not been churned and ripped apart.
Buildings crumble without hands to care for their cracks.
A scan informs her no life remains.
People, plants, cells.
All gone.
She sets her ship down on the barren lawn outside the Sovereign’s lab.
The ship trills alarms as she opens the doors but she disregards the warnings of poisonous air.
Her feet sink into the soil. A small cloud of dust disperses with each footfall, a pale imitation of suits lighting up the darkness.
The journey to the Sovereign’s chamber is soundless.
The vault looms before her and she opens it for the first time since it was sealed 200 years ago.
If she cared, she would note there was no longer power to maintain the data storage containing centuries of policies endorsed by Sovereigns and Councils.
She ignores it all to grab the only container of material information.
The box looks no different from the servers holding data, but Era delicately presses her thumb against the side corner.
She pulls out the contents and leaves.
Exits the vault, the building, climbs into her ship and does not look back as Waseda recedes behind her.
As her ship makes its way to an abandoned colony planet, she looks down.
A watch rests atop a small bound journal.
Doctor Ingus loved historical items too much for a man charged with leading a society of innovators.
He knew how easy it was to hide secrets in places people overlooked.
Era opens the journal and carefully flips through each page.
Stares at each drawn face.
Looks over every note written beneath each name.
On the back cover there is one word written in the bottom corner. A code.
A reminder.
She glances up to watch the stars streak part the observation window.
Era knows why she took the boy.
She knows why she pulled out the blueprint.
Her fingers trace along the pages’ edges.
(There are eight thousand seven hundred and forty-two names written in the journal.)
She is lonely.
It isn’t vindication, but there’s nothing close enough.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Titus arrives a few weeks later, with him at his side.
The weapon regards her with nothing but guarded vitriol on his face and lines carving deep around his eyes.
Era sets down the knife in her hand. She doesn’t blink as she meets Titus’s gaze.
“It seems you’re the last threat to the Ninth.”
They stare at each other for a long moment.
Go ahead, her stance challenges, and Titus grins.
The weapon moves from his position and comes to meet her.
She closes her eyes and remembers.
Arms wrapped around her.
Equations on a cluttered desk.
Textbooks in an empty park.
Sketches written on shared tablets.
Golden light shining through muscle and skin.
Laughter in a home.
Deliberate strokes on paper.
Small fingers resting in her palm.
Withered hands squeezing her own.
A black pit barely refracting off blood-drenched metal.
Agony.
An empty grave.
Space stretched out before a cold ship.
A boy.
Smiling with oil on his cheek.
A small metal creature cradled in his hands.
The Last Will steps forward and she opens her eyes to meet him.
Her hand leaves her pocket before his can touch.
Titus roars in rage but she does not care.
Not as she cradles the boy’s head in her lap and cries for the man he will never be.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
In the end, Titus meets his doom at the hands of the cyborg he helped create.
The Botanist watches in disbelief while Era clenches her fist.
Today, the people of the Ninth Empire are not alone on Waseda Prime. Revolutionaries and armies from across the Twelve Empires fight side by side in a show of unity Era wishes Ingus lived to see.
The few who once fought against the Last Will initially do so with caution. The moment Titus falls at the boy’s hands, everyone rallies.
The people of the Ninth Empire are shaken and desperate; nevertheless, there is hope.
Era wonders if it will last, until sitting at her workbench, she finds herself hoping it does.
The fighting across the empires ends decisively. Without a Great Scientist commanding them, the Synthetic Army cannot launch a cohesive assault.
The day the Ninth Empire restores the Scientific Council celebrations erupt on every space station and outpost.
Peace will not last forever. This brief glimmer of euphoria will die with the naivety of those who have yet to lead. The Ninth Empire was never known for its gentleness; days spent with data and study did not lend itself to fostering empathy. Era’s seen how empires change under their own hubris, but today this calm is enough.
When fireworks light the sky, Era grasps the Botanist’s hands in her own and looks ahead.
They need more than most can give, her eyes say, and the Botanist understands.
In the shrinking shadow of the dismantled Camelot V, Alana becomes a Sovereign Scientist of the Ninth Empire, for a reason a handful know and only two grasp.
When a coin is placed in their hands and the people rejoice, she watches.
She watched a boy become a man, a man become a weapon, and a weapon become a leader.
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
Era clenches her fist and watches Titus burn.
He came to her, a plot formed in his head he believed led to a future guaranteed.
She frowns at the fire.
He should have known.
You do not give a woman a child.
And you do not expect a mother to raise a weapon.
Era smiles softly through the flames as Daniel grips Alana’s hand in his own.
You should expect her to raise a son.
