u/Tautological-Emperor

The first cries. The first soul born not on land or sea, not even in the thin skin of air over the cradle, but in the deepest black man has ever known.

Whimpers and cries over the intercom; washing like waves over Sanitation and Industry, Control and Hydroponics. Everything draws in its breath, even the low perpetual susurration of the ship quieting.

They open the cupola, peeling back metal and ice to reveal a river of starlight.

I’ve brought something for today. Still breathing hard running down long corridors to pull it from my quarters. But it’s there, in my hands. Like it was waiting for this moment. My precious few kilograms from Home, heavy with history and song. I pluck the strings while those fresh eyes stare out into the dark. Beautiful, and new and so lost in that endless celestial glow.

The song finds me, and I begin to play.

I was born by the river in a little tent..

He comes to town in the belly of an automated freight hauler. Worn jeans but a clean shirt. No oil in the EVs, he says. Whistling a song nobody’s heard.

It’s not a small town anymore, all the residents know, just the edge of a bigger Sprawl for now satisfied with its expanse. The Empty beyond is shrinking; sliced and diced by autonomous highways, glittering with high tech campuses and telltale dome-blisters of computation.

The Drifter gets a bit of work. His tune follows.

He works at a local diner, in the back. Someone sees his faded jeans and clean shirt checking power lines, hauling fresh battery charges between the hub data centers by the pond. Whistling to himself. He makes quick-cred busking, delivering, cleaning. He’s the prime suspect in a rash of porch piracy, and the lawn bots keep a close lookout. The flocks stay vigilant. Drifter has his eyes low, making histories in the cracked pavement and bird-songing all the while.

When he’s gone, and the whistling stops, the people go on. The automated trucks come in. The Sprawl gleams, a hungry look in its eyes, waiting to turn the lands beyond into steel and glass.

They had come ‘cross country, hammering progress into the ground, one hammer blow at a time.

Men sweated and stank in the heat, every upturned and sneering face turned black with the soot, with the shavings, with the sparking dust. Behind them stood that Iron Overseer, billowing smoke into skies that had been clear ten thousand years.

They drew the lines, pushed back the families, scattered the stories underfoot. The beat of hammers drowned the warnings those luckless few spoke. What use was legend, what coin could be gained, from the savages myths?

Only who tells it to you can say where the fatal strike was struck, when that hammering nail cracked the earth, and the man who sent it was covered not in dust or shook by his swing but sprayed by the salty sting of the sea. Each man carrying an island of the truth as the waves have worn the years.

Only who tells it to you can say how quick the buried ocean rose, or which towns fought hardest against the coming deluge from below, and who fought the longest with levies, drains, canals, locks, stymies. Only who tells it to you can speak to those epic drownings as the land between the Rockies and the Appalachians went down, bubbling, into that Stygian swell.

But no special tale whispered can beat the truth with your own eyes. Out on the water, looking down into that warm, shallow blue. Seeing the shadows glide over something big and forgotten, its dreams of racing from one coast to the other submerged, silenced.

Find her in the streets.

When she turns, dripping in the neon downpour, she seem so much more alive than I. A curse in the upturn of her split lip, the fear everyone feels in their eyes to stay alive, just one more moment, the willingness to do anything to keep breathing. Unapologetically savage, something real in all the glass and steel. This is the part that wakes me. When they all snap out of the dream. When a deeper and uglier humanity sheds the plastic.

She pulls her gun. It’s almost fast enough.

In the downpour and the fleeing crowd, as the air fills with descending drones, I find myself wishing I’m a hair slow. Just this once, I think, let my reflexes fail. A whisper of hesitation, a slip, a miscalculation so tiny the technicians will never think anything of it.

This light is violent in a sea of soothing, seducing colors. Raw.

The rain does not wash away my dismay when I find that I am the one still standing.

This place, the City of Planets, is no fortress. Its residents were the skywatchers, the star weavers, the constellation oracles. They have never wielded a sword, never exacted taxation in maize or flesh. It is said the City was built around an ancient gift, that the first of the People to watch the stars and map their motions so impressed the Gods that they planted a celestial miracle here, to forever mark those supremely talented eyes.

The amassed auxiliaries sack it like they have all other settlements on the road to the Capital, as if this was the home of the Emperor himself. Blood soaks their sandals and drowns the cobblestones. The stars shine in a low red tide.

The black-stone temples rise like islands in fire and massacre. The Temple of the Crescent, the Temple of the Brightest. Their terraced flanks lost in boiling riot.

But only the pale men, the ones on horseback and dressed in silver, believe themselves invincible enough to descend into the Temple of the Sun. The surrounding chaos ends at those enormous steps, ivory like bleached souls.

They hunt for gold, and find only featureless walls white and cold as ice warping their reflections. They call out for terrified women, and find only their own voices twisted and bent.

The steps, too large and widely spaced for a man to take in stride, descend down into the dark. Greedy souls flee far ahead, little bobbing firelights, so certain that just ahead is something or someone worth taking. Chasing glory, shouting, wild with the hope of legacies on stolen treasures.

When the Temple of the Sun begins to shake, it comes suddenly. It brings the steel-armored warriors nightmares of their time on the awful, pitching sea. Mist pours from the icy, slick walls. The angry, screaming mass outside retreats, lost in peeling fire as it engulfs them, incinerates them.

Only those few hidden in the jungle, waiting to return and mourn their city will see the truth. Tell it to the scattered, lessened supplicants who return in time to name and mark and worship the stars. The survivors watch the Temple of Planets rise into the night, stone crumbling from its silvered sides, as it returns once more to the Gods who gave it those long, long millennia ago.