When I awoke in the morning there was a strange jacket and helmet beside my camp. I inspected it and considered where it had come from for a long time. I decided it must have been that strange man Zee, but how or why escaped me. After scanning the gear thoroughly I was content to begin my dive. I put on the suit and entered the acid water, leaving my gear and the console behind. I dove through the entrance to the library. The suit held.
The library was sinking into the lake, but there was air once I surfaced through the entrance. I carefully removed the suit and surveyed my surroundings. I reached for the console to scan when I remembered I had left it outside. I resorted to earlier methods. The room was dark. The air was cool and crisp, wavering slightly. I felt my way away from my entry point and down a corridor. There was an embedded console by the door, it got me through and down a hallway. Past a long glass wall, too dark to see past. Eventually I found an admin console and restored a few lights and accessed a map. I continued to the libraries main room and accessed the consoles again. It was as if I was being drawn, but really I think it was just my instinct to discover the secrets from long ago. I was an archeologist after all. I sat in the centre chair by the main console and began to read.
The libraries were ships. They had been sent here from a dying planet. Most recently the settler ships, what I knew as libraries, in the centre of the cities where my people lived. All there had forgotten their origins, if they had ever really known them. Previously there were so called ‘Tech drops’ which contained the resources and blueprints for the cities themselves. They also contained a variety of ‘hobbies’ meant to distract and placate the settlers upon arrival, similar variants could be found in each libraries. Before all that however, they sent the ships filled with hunters. A first strike ship, and a wave of reinforcements meant to kill any intelligent or dangerous life on the planet before the settlers got there.
They were sent to all viable planets within range, including ones with evidence of sentient life regardless of its complexity or intelligence. Some petitioned against the idea, arguing that efforts should be focused on planets with only minimal flora and fauna, devoid of sentient life, mammalian or otherwise. They were ultimately out-voted in favour of sparser quotas and more division, or separation of the worlds people. It's interesting to me that those who petitioned against the plan did the same to try to clean the Earth and stop pollution, all the things we read about in our history as if they had happened, the cleaning of our Earth to a utopia. Those plans would never have needed ships, or hunters.
There were no petitions against the preliminary hunter ships, by that point dissident voices had been silenced. Humanity was catalogued, divided up and sent out into the world. I understand some stayed behind, on the burning toxic rock, the real Earth. Our histories were fabricated to match our provided world view, our understandings of life on Earth. But it was all a sham. To preserve ourselves we slaughtered countless millions, we lost our true selves long ago. Now apart and alone there was no hope, even for me, the simple archeologist with all the pieces put together. There was nothing I could do, no-one I could tell who would listen. No way to contact the other planets and I knew what I’d find there anyway. More of the same, maybe worse. Nothing to be done to change things. Thats why Zee let me live, he understood and now I did too. I wonder how many others knew, had uncovered the truth or known all along. I thought of the old man in the library from before it all began. I thought of my Rome, I had learned about the villages inhabitants after all, it was all here in the Hunter ship database, they had been well prepared. Small wooly mammalian creatures, somewhere in the Stone Age, fondness for gardens and their Sun. Who knows, they might have been good, done good, one day. Better than we did surely.
——
I never left that room.
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