Message from a Chosen One

Treats of a Prompt Quest Story

My brother citizen Anton Valery lately feels cast down from the clouds, since the complete destruction of life on our planet, Dios, by orbital flare. Brother Valery now questions the permanence of everything. If an entire civilization can be wiped from a celestial body, what hope is there for mere souls? A question he feels all the more potent for its subject, having forever considered Dios the most able of the outer colonies to withstand assault from the Starpassed Doom. To Valery, Dios seemed invulnerable.

And is it any surprise that my brother citizen is shaken, when such complete annihilation by a fleet is unfound in Data's history? The Doom has attacked many colonies, but wiped out none. Always there have been survivors: citizens sequestered at the extremities of a planet's poles, citizens hidden in deep crust bunkers, or else citizens dwelling on orbital habitats. Even the heat-death of a star has never so utterly overthrown a planet's people. A hundred thousand cities - each one a gloss of steel and concrete by day, a star on the planet's surface by night - have been wiped out with a flash. At this moment, while the rest of the empire's vast tract still basks in opulence unmatched by any of history's golden ages, our once bright flake on space's black canvas has been overpainted. How could Valery imagine that, in all the collections of systems and planets which the empire has brought to harmonious accord, Dios alone has been misplaced?

Calamities such as ours rarely come without a prelude. Chosen Ones pass portents down the swiftly flowing rivers of data. Asteroids and solar flares have their time of arrival predicted far in advance. Even nuclear bombardment begins with a mushroom. In our case, however, the Doom has instantly swept us clear of life. In less time than it's taken me to write to you of the event, every molecule of our planet from the surface to ten kilometers deep was converted to liquid. Nothing remains.

These considerations all passed through clouds, between me and my poor brother citizen. He and I, having always lived biologically and intellectually adjacent to one another on Dios, know each other well. I know Anton Valery to be a man of sound and fearless mind. I find it all the more striking, therefore, that his mind is frightened. Frightened for itself. Frightened for the empire. If Brother Valery is so affected, how much more the unChosen citizen? Only an event of unparalleled surprise and scale can bring such damage. Not physical damage, for there is enough of that already, but damage to a soul.

All the more reason then to ready our souls in the modern sense. All the more reason to prepare. Plan not for what is likely, but what is possible. Hasn't history shown us time and time again how no great feature of civilized space - how no body - flies higher than Ruin's hands can reach? Napoleon triumphed as a conqueror at Austerlitz, and cancer killed him in exile on saint Helena. Earth One's Unitary West, Andromeda, The Great Carbon Market - the most glorious organizations of thought and matter are the ones in whose dispersal lies the heaviest tragedy.

Many of life's participants have pushed their defeat to the very limits of probability. They have put a dozen zeroes between themselves and the decimal with muscled arms, or wealth, or diplomacy, or the yoked energy of a star. But no one can escape probability entirely. And it is while we feel ourselves completely secured that the greatest threat to that security arrives.

Brother Valery once lost his right arm under a floating carriage's vapor field. 'So what,' you may say, 'Let him replace it with an indestructible one of plastic and circuits.' Valery did just as you suggest. And where is that limb now? Gone, along with all his others. The diamonds upon which he founded his mind's peace crumbled as swiftly as sand. Now Valery mourns both limbs and peace.

Brother Valery forgets Time's mutability. No matter how vast a number of hours, days, centuries have gone into the creation of a physical thing, the universe has a way of obliterating it instantly. Every cell of a limb, from the flesh to the bone, instantly reduces to separate molecules under a vapor field. Every unit of civilization, from the individual human to the steel sprawl of a settlement, instantly converts to liquid under the Doom's orbital flare.

We slaves to probability might find some comfort if our bodies and the things which cascade from them fell to pieces as slowly as they came together. But the oxygen which a tree produces across its whole lifetime explodes just as swiftly as the same quantity produced by a habitat engine in seconds. Such is the case in all physical matters; assembled with care, like lightning dismantled. Matter is never completely still, never steady. Even on the frozen, near-zero worlds at the universe's velvet edge, the lonely atoms softly tremble. Can it be any wonder, then, that a colony at the empire's frontier, caught in the middle of swirling force and chemicals, changes states unexpectedly?

This, then, is my council for brother citizen Anton Valery (and for you as well, fellow Chosen One, if you will grant me the space): "Bear up, old heart!" Callous your thoughts to the destruction of all things material. Examine closely all the fires which can burn you. 'But my arm's been evaporated!' Well, were your cells uniquely developed to ignore possible vaporization? 'But imports of cheap Mycollic nutrients have undercut my nation's agriculture!' Was your nation manifestly destined to supply foodstuffs throughout the universe? 'But my whole species has been chemically sterilized!' And who told you your species was to breed forever?

Reflect on these and the rest among chance's greatest perversions. Remember that a material body is no basket in which to set your eggs, and plan accordingly, and you shan't be without yolk. Mere matter is nothing, so unstable that even the zephyrs off a butterfly's wings, a hundred years down the skein of time, tickle the fancies of a hurricane. How many sapiens have lived and died throughout history? Quintillions? Sextillions? How many Mycollids? How many of the Doomed? How many of our imperial citizens have placed their minds in canisters of plastic and brine, and thought themselves Kaschey the Immortal, and thought wrong?

So I would say to brother Valery: face this Doom which has befallen golden Dios, and see that it means nothing. Our planet has been rewound to its early volcanic state, this former unburning star of the imperial frontier which no more reflects the brilliant fleecy clouds. But are we not yet conversing? That planet's concrete and fields and glass and plastic and cells have been cooked into atomic soup. Is that not the fate of all planets? The pure steel world of Valor once gleamed more brightly than our own at the very heart of Andromeda's empire. Now it's a sunless ball of rust in a dead galaxy.

Nor are humans and their planets the only collections of matter drifting closer to chaos with each passing second. Millions of species evolve and perish in the single breath of a star. Those stars which make up the galaxies, be they the kind that burn doubly bright or doubly long, all transform into dwarves, night portals, neutral corpses. Galaxies spiral round and round, until every star's gas is spent, and then they too die. How many celestial spots, which once guided the helmsman at his lightstrider, has time rubbed away?

And if such ancient works beyond the mortal ken must meet their own material end, how can mortal men think to escape? The day will come when all our cities and all our planets will be as ashes before a gale. Any mortal coil, biological or artificial, faces the same end. Orbital Bombardment is one body's end. Plague, another. Old Age, another. Shape, size, material, it makes no difference - dust is everyone's funeral garb.

'Some consolation this is!' you say to me. 'Do you really think your brother citizen Valery wants to hear that hope's a lie?' A Chosen One does not trade luxurious wants, he only gives for free the basics. Well, here is something else that is plain for brother Valery to chew: Devastation is often only a precursor to Creation all the mightier. Many is the breed that, in its extinction, makes space for the apex of its taxonomic class. I once knew a culture steward from Capital, who told me that the reason he feared the Mycollid iconoclasm was that the Mycollid culture would only resurge again in a hundred years, with an even larger following, and an even greater fervor. So it shall be for Dios. Whatever material culture has been destroyed by the Starpassed Doom, the souls of Dios shall establish again in some other colony.

The Doom's fleet wins nothing, for they can never declare truthful victory over souls unbound from one worldly sphere. Dios was not so ideal in the frontier that its splendor cannot be replicated. The planet underwent temperature shifts of three hundred degrees regularly. Its clouds were poison to un-augmented human lungs. Its twin moons produced tides on its mercury sea which, when they solidified in an afternoon winter, became mountains. Places of fairer weather and greener grass lie now within the reach of we exiles from Dios. They wait only for our visit.

So I say that all we brother and sister citizens must take plain truths as comforts. One truth: Time and Probability erase our mortal bodies just as they do the ones which hang in the firmament. Another: no good can come from weeping at the loss. We knew these were the universe's rules, and each of us agreed to play by them when we first developed reason. We cannot change the rules once the game's begun. We only live by them, or we do not live. Time and Probability treat each of us in just the same way; what befell we people of Dios today may befall the Doomed tomorrow. No fleet endures, no species endures. Only the soul, the enduring soul, lasts to the end.

The star lich, Vybon, sought immortality's secret in electricity. Some still remember Vybon the Master; yet his true title must necessarily have been Vybon the Tragic. 'How tragic?' you ask me? Because no matter how many worlds he yoked, no matter how many people he threatened to submission with the lightstrider vessel which held his soul, that soul still dwelt in a body's prison. 'Submit or you shall be snuffed,' he commanded those he conquered, and submit they did, but in the ephemeral sense. 'I am now your master, and I will never die,' said the star lich, yet die he did. 'How tragic?' Because the empire he forged is one of matter. The lich's body has died, and the shape of his empire will die. 'How Tragic?' Because, though the star lich, and the Doomed, and a hundred-hundred other species have tried and sought to step past their material bodies, all have drawn up their accounts, and discovered they added up a step short. Because a Cell is weak. Steel is weak. Concrete is weak. Mountains, cities - they are atoms prettily arranged, knocked down in an instant. Because only the soul endures. Only energy endures. Only data endures.

Brother citizen Anton Valery laments the loss of his city, the loss of his cells. Cell-death has an evil reputation, yet those who besmirch its name never are the ones who have experience in what lies beyond. Brother Valery will realize, in time, how foolish it is to condemn cell-death. In losing our bodies, we set our data souls free. No one can destroy us when the clouds are within our reach.

Farewell,

Cloud Conscious Maxim Ilyich, Chosen One of her imperial highness

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This story was written as part of Prompt Quest #1.

Thank you for reading.