End Game - A PlanetSide 2 Short Story

[Shiaari]

For all its material advantages the sedentary life has left us edgy; unfulfilled. Even after four hundred generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.

~Carl Sagan.

End Game
Where had we come from? Why had we left? What had we set out to accomplish? Who had we left behind? When the war began we forgot these things. As it dragged on we forgot more. Who we were, our lives; we even abandoned our names for monikers like 50percentgenius, KittensAkimbo, and Hehehehe. Oh, we tried to remember in our own way. The Terrans insisted they knew what it meant to be human, and the New Conglomerate’s answer was, is, and shall always be: Freedom; and they will die, and die, and die some more, die over, and over; wake up in the morning, die before lunch, die after dinner, die before bed, and wake up the next day, and die getting dressed; dying to be free.

I would die to be free from dying.

In the meantime there is work to do, and things to remember.

The World Atlas 2637, and the San Francisco Travel Guide, both sit on my tiny desk because my great, great, great, great Grandfather refused to leave without having something to remind him of home. According to family legend he was walking down Mission Street when the word came and he ducked into a tiny shop for something, anything. And here they sit, slightly yellowed but no worse for wear after so long. Plastic truly is forever. I remember when they came to me: in a flimsy steel box dug out of the rubble of my childhood home in Shadespire Village.

Back then the very talk of disloyalty got you in front of a firing squad, let alone harboring a traitor. That’s what we were accused of. The sentence was handed down thousands of miles away and delivered from an orbiting gun platform. I was out with the new boy—the, “traitor,”—and running back to the smoldering crater of Shadespire he blubbered something about his parents joining the New Conglomerate, and that he was really, really sorry. I understood he was sorry and felt responsible. I understood that he was completely innocent, and I liked him too. But, no amount of affection and forgiveness could distract me from the haunting memories, or the lament for those memories I don’t have.

Earth. A collection of fading images printed on archival polymer. Are these really humans in these pictures? They look human. They smile and they drink cocktails, and ride cable cars to and fro. They buy innocuous things, like gifts, and books, and sex. Where are their weapons? Why aren’t they wearing body armor? What happens when they die?

Death. It hurts, but it also teaches. Check those corners. Don’t waste time. Don’t sit in one place for too long. Don’t get caught with an empty side-arm. Listen for engines. Don’t linger under overhangs. Be quiet. Look up. Remember your knife. The one in front of you takes a bullet so you can take one more step. And in a flash you’re back where you started to do it all over again. Repetition can teach anything. Humans on Earth must be experts at living. Auraxians are experts at dying.

The boy—now a man—couldn’t reconcile himself with my obsession with Earth and its people, or the time I spent studying radio interferometry. I spent days at a time at the Aurxicom radio observatory, days that he felt should have been spent with him. We had survived, after all, and no one in the Terran high command seemed to care. It was a miracle. We were star crossed lovers. I was merely obsessed with the stars, and he was obsessed with freedom. When the war finally broke out he left me for another woman, and for the brief moment I met her she reminded me of those women in the travel guide: confident, self-assured, independent, and captivatingly beautiful. I smiled at her, bade her take care of him where I could not, but she scowled back at me.

“Don’t you have a fucking clue what’s going on?” She asked, shaking her head at me as if I'd never read a bit of news in my life. Of course I knew. Open rebellion, but what is a revolution to the deep time of the cosmos? What is freedom worth when our true home is out there somewhere still, waiting? She wouldn’t have it. I was an academic and clearly out of touch. And that’s where I spent the opening salvos of this Auraxian War, now into another millennium, behind my radio telescope array looking for home, yearning to stand in San Francisco where my ancestor walked free and found these books.

For a while the war was all you could find on the data nets. Conglomerate blank clashes with Republic blank, over blank, as many as blank dead. Like all things in the universe there was an order to this conflict, and it would end when sufficient blood had been spilled in order to balance the equation. My money was on the Republic. They had all the resources and all the logistics, but the New Conglomerate was an indomitable foe. With men and women like that man I once thought I loved, how could they lose? They could lose through mere attrition. They were outnumbered, and every slain NC rebel was one less body to hold a gun. The TR rarely went on the offensive in those days.

It was just after a particularly bloody battle when the Vanu played their first gambit. Rebirthing technology. The Republic was furious. Scientists from across Auraxis were arrested and charged with treason. Those who wouldn’t cooperate were executed immediately in the very court rooms they were sentenced. Oh, the technology wasn’t new to us, but it had been carefully obscured, and study of it forbidden by the authorities. It wasn’t so much that the Vanu cult released this technology to the entire planet, including the Conglomerate fighters, but they had mastered it. It was like having a cat in a bag, and opening it to discover a tiger.

The equation changed dramatically. That last and final fear holding back the oncoming conflict vanished. New Conglomerate ranks swelled with the angry, disenfranchised, and highly motivated people who hated the Terran Republic and everything it stood for. NC guerilla tactics gave way to full on armored columns advancing on every Terran facility on the planet. It made the Terran’s flinch, and when their response finally came it was sheer, utter, incomprehensible panic. Their government collapsed. Every soul that could carry a cycler was given one, including every administrator, every lawyer, every judge, every magistrate, every cabinet member, advisor, teacher, firefighter, ordinary citizen, and child. The entire TR population—that didn’t join the NC—became a military.

To this day their seat of government remains empty, for there is nothing left to govern that can be shot at. The capital city is a ghost town. The once common administrative messages and requisitions have gone silent. So too have the trials and the executions.

But, the dying goes on.

When the Republic military finally arrived at Auraxicom to press us all into service—their compelling propaganda reinforced by the fact death was no longer a permanent fixture—I had already been contacted by Vanu leaders—backed up by the same compelling propaganda. They had taken an interest in my research, if for nothing else than to deny the Terrans a leading astrophysicist who spearheaded their contact directive.

It was after I joined the Vanu that I made my first real breakthrough. Examining a cluster of stars I discovered a pulsar with a frequency that matched one on the old charts dating back to the initial expedition. Using that pulsar as a guidepost I looked for more pulsars, and determined with absolute certainty that the wormhole dumped our beleaguered civilization much closer to home than we had first thought. We hadn’t left the Milky Way. Earth couldn’t be further away than about a 120,000 light years, and was statistically probably much closer than that. It meant light from Earth’s sun had already reached Auraxis. All I needed to do was look for stars in the same spectral class. Perhaps, if I could get enough signal resolution, I could even catch a spectral whiff of Earth’s atmosphere.

And that was the end of my career.

Heresy, they call it. Those we left behind are nothing like us, and our future is transhuman. When I protested I was reassigned, and my work scrubbed. They are, however, partly correct. After eons of non-stop war, dying countless times, our bodies so heavily modified by alien technology, and reborn in inexorable, infinite transubstantiation, there is no doubt. I have nothing in common with my ancestor except a few latent base pairs. But, I want to know. Vanu teaches us that knowledge is a power unto itself, and who knows how knowing where the homeworld is might empower our civilization? How much stronger would we be if we, not the Terrans, were to restore contact with Earth? I explain this to my superiors, but they see right through my pretense. They know me. They know I want this war to end.

They know I want to go home.

They say this is home, and it is our divine right to conquer it.

No civilization can endure a thousand years of war and not be changed by it, not even the intellectual might of the Vanu Sovereignty, which devotes so much of its immortality to learning, but still too much to death. I cobbled together a sizeable telescope array using a virus to surreptitiously hijack observatories across Auraxis, and continued my search in secretive solitude—when I wasn’t hosing my more primitive relatives with white hot plasma.

And that was ten thousand subjective years ago.

The planet seems to soak up our rage like maize in fertile soil. Auraxis thrives on our perpetual conflict. It gifts our bloody sacrifice with tantalizing new bits. We knew the ancient Vanu were masters of space and time, but we’re still not prepared for just how deep their mastery still goes. Their empire didn’t just spread out across the galaxy, but across time. Auraxis was—is—one of their worlds. They are still here, but not where. When?

We couldn’t have noticed it before, not until I started measuring those pulsars. They are all red shifted. And it’s not just the pulsars. Every nearby stellar object is red shifted at the same rate. This phenomenon should only be observed in very distant galaxies, but even those have the exact same red shift. In the Auraxian sky, every star, every galaxy, everything, even the other moons in the Auraxian system, are either moving away at the exact same speed, or something is dilating the light as it approaches the planet.

It is as if the planet is encased in its own time dilation sphere of several orders of magnitude. Who knows how many years—millions even—have passed since our arrival?

The Vanu protected their civilization by hiding behind walls of time, encasing their planets in spheres of temporal displacement, while they thrive some other time. Are they in the future? Or the past? That doesn’t matter. Yet. What is important is how long Earth has been beaming these signals at us, and when we can expect their ships to arrive.

They’re probably already here, wondering why we haven’t sent anything back. Until today. I’ve calculated the necessary blue shift to have an intelligible signal outside the temporal envelope. My finger hovers over the transmit key, ready to squirt ten thousand years of Auraxian history into deep space carried on half a million giga watts of microwave radiation and fry every superconductor slaved to my program. The atmospheric refraction itself will scramble every computer from here to Esamir.

The Ten Thousand Year Auraxian War ends. Right about… now.