by Jade Kerrion
“Always a pleasure to have you,” Jem said and meant it.
“What do we have here?” Kir asked.
“An empire, the biggest we’ve seen yet.”
Kir nodded. “Nice. What keeps it going, besides unfettered ambition?”
“Superior technology, including weapons. Superbly executed territorial management processes, and a kick-ass military, including an absolutely superb navy,” Jem said.
“Apt for an island nation.”
“Considering how tiny it is, it’s hugely impressive.”
“There are lots of other countries around it, though,” Kir observed.
“It’s a carryover from their era of exploration. The nations decided they didn’t want to fight with each other directly, so they fight with each other indirectly through their overseas dominions.”
Kir laughed. “That almost made sense.”
Jem snorted. “Logic’s not in high demand here. Either that, or they’re more skilled in diplomacy than I’m giving them credit for.”
“Probably the latter. They’ve amazed us before. They’ll probably do it again. Can we speed up time? I really want to see if they can get up into space,” Kir said.
“I guess so. SimOne?” Jem turned to the android.
“Accelerating star revolutions in real time.”
“It always freaks me out how she blows right past the space-time laws,” Kir said.
“It is just a simulation,” SimOne said. “Here, the laws are carefully worded suggestions.”
“I’m so proud. She’s learning from us,” Kir said with a grin.
“And that’s really scary,” Jem added wryly. She glanced up at the astral screen. Her dark eyes widened with alarm. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What just happened?”
“What?” Kir jerked his gaze to the screen.
“Slow down, SimOne,” Jem ordered.
“Decelerating.”
“What the hell happened? Did fighting just break out all over the planet?” Jem asked.
“Yes,” SimOne said.
“But how? Why?”
“Empires got involved.” Kir stood next to Jem, peering over her shoulder as she scanned the information flowing into her astral workstation. “It’s no longer a fight between countries. A fight between empires involves every single damned inch of land they own elsewhere. Considering the far-flung reaches of all the empires on our planet, we had no chance of avoiding a world war.”
“What started it?” Jem asked.
“There were many factors, culminating in the assassination of a national leader,” SimOne said.
“They’re fighting because someone died?” Jem asked incredulously.
“That’s just an excuse,” Kir said. “They were probably spoiling for a fight before that. The Krey and Skrun went to war with the Shixar over far less.”
“This is the reason we can’t speed up the simulation. You can’t trust these suckers to behave for an instant.” Jem seethed. “Damn it.”
“Look, they’re going to need to start solving their own problems.” Kir shrugged
His nonchalance ground against her nerves. Jem threw her hand out at the planet. “Well, they’re making great progress, then. They’ve started making their own problems. We need to stop it.”
“We need to let it play out,” Kir said.
“That’s your answer for everything.”
“And interfering is your answer for everything.”
“At least I’m trying to do something,” Jem shot back. “You’re doing nothing.”
“Not true. I interfered plenty with the galactic empires.”
Jem’s brow furrowed. “And you’re drawing the line at your own planet?”
Kir shook his head. “They need to grow up, Jem. We’ve interfered plenty. Let’s give them a chance to work it out.”
“Or drive themselves into annihilation?”
“What are you going to do?” Kir challenged. “Toss water over them as if they’re kids in a schoolyard fight?”
She paused. “Now that’s an idea.”
“Really?” Kir smirked. “You’d drown them again?”
Jem scowled down at the planet. “Idiots.”
“Is this what world management is coming down to?” Professor Ptera’s familiar voice said from behind them. Jem and Kir spun around to see the professor emerge out of the darkness. “Are we reduced to calling the native life forms nasty names?” the professor asked, apparently amused.
“Only if they deserve it,” Jem muttered.
“What did they do this time?”
“Started a war and dragged the world into it.”
“It’s the nature of empires,” the professor said reasonably. “They never do anything on a small scale.” He looked at the android. “SimOne, a privacy shield please.”
“Executing.”
Jem cast Kir a panicked glance. Damn, they were in trouble.
Kir, however, looked calm. “Is something wrong, Professor?” he asked with polite curiosity.
The professor turned to them. Was that a smile playing on his lips? “I wanted to commend you on your innovative approach to world management.”
Jem stuttered. “Uh, so it wasn’t outside the rules?”
“No, of course not. There’s more to world management than just managing the world. Managing the environment in which the world exists, which is what you’ve done, is equally critical.”
“Thanks.” Kir grinned.
“Of course, it means dealing with the consequences of starting a galactic war among the three galactic empires. We’ll have to see how it plays out.”
Jem chewed on the inside of her cheek. The professor’s casual statement sounded like a warning.
“Proximity alert,” SimOne said. “Jor Eldo and Lara Hur from planet 475-563-3857-3858-486254, renamed Kryptos.”
“I’ll get going.” The professor dismissed the privacy shield with a wave of his hand. “Once again, nice job, team.”
Kir grinned at Jem.
She relaxed, but tensed again the moment she saw Lara. The young woman’s face was tear-streaked. Jor seemed similarly stricken. “If your little scheme wiped out another planet, we’re getting out of the business of galactic diplomacy,” Jem warned Kir under her breath.
Kir hesitated and then nodded in agreement. “I’m Kir.” He extended his hand as Jor and Lara closed the distance. “This is Jem, and this is SimOne. What brings you here?”
“We…our planet’s gone,” Jor said quietly.
“Gone?” Jem’s eyes widened. “What happened?”
“Several star revolutions ago, war broke out on our planet, and as a result, nuclear energy infused steadily into the planet’s core. We tried to stop it, but it couldn’t be undone. Our planet became unstable and imploded.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jem said softly.
“We have a survivor. Just one. And we…” Jor looked at Lara.
“We were wondering if you could take him, please,” Lara completed his sentence in a breathless rush. “He has nowhere else to go. We looked at all the other teams and the other planets. Your planet is the one we want for him. Your planet is what our planet was before technological advancement became the key to our downfall.”
“Wait, you want to send him here?” Jem asked.
“He’s just a baby,” Lara said.
“The last alien baby who came here was a plant by the Atlante to drag us into war with the Shixar.”
Lara shook her head. “There is no home planet for you to worry about anymore. We’re out of the game. Our planet is gone. We just want a home for him.”
Jem looked at SimOne. “Can you download the baby’s genetic data?”
“Downloading. Analysis complete. The infant’s genetic data suggests that crossbreeding is a possibility. Effects are uncertain due to lack of evidence. The infant is phenotypically identical to our humanoid infants.”
“He’ll just blend in,” Lara promised. “He’ll be no trouble at all.”
&n
bsp; Jem sighed and looked at Kir. Kir shrugged.
The decision was hers. She opened her mouth to say “no” but saw the unvoiced plea on Lara’s face. “All right, we’ll give him a home.”
A weak smile crept over Jor’s face. “Thank you. You won’t regret it, we promise.”
“SimOne, is our little global inconvenience over?” Jem asked.
“Global inconvenience?” Lara echoed.
“A war,” SimOne said. “It has just ended.”
“We’ll put the baby in a place unaffected by the war,” Jem promised.
“We have the infant in an interstellar propulsion prototype. We’ll arrange for it to come here at whatever coordinates you decide,” Lara said.
Kir nodded. “We’ll take good care of him. SimOne, can you make sure this conversation goes into the records?” He looked down at the planet. A large continent in the northern hemisphere was unscathed by the war, protected by vast oceans on both coasts. “We’ll put him right down there.”
“Conveying coordinates to the central command system,” SimOne said.
Jem watched Lara and Jor leave. “I hope it won’t come back around to bite us in the ass.”
Kir shrugged. “He’s just a baby, and an orphan to boot. He’ll blend in completely and grow up to be just like everyone else. It’ll be no problem at all.”
13
Only two nuclear weapons have been used in the course of warfare, both by the United States near the end of World War II. On 6 August 1945, a uranium gun-type device code-named "Little Boy" was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on 9 August, a plutonium implosion-type device code-named "Fat Man" was exploded over Nagasaki, Japan.
– Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
* * *
The next day, hands on her hips, Jem turned to Kir with a scowl. “Is this your definition of ‘no problem at all’?”
Kir laughed. “I think it’s cute.”
“The baby’s flying.”
“It’s the effects of the yellow star. He’s now on a planet with lesser gravity compared to his home planet under a red star—”
“You don’t have to explain the science to me. I get the science. What I don’t get is how you’re okay with it.”
“The people of the planet are okay with it. Why shouldn’t you be?”
His question caught her off guard. She shrugged. “Because I have higher standards?”
Kir chuckled. “It’s going to be all right. He embodies the light of hope in the darkness of their depression. Everyone needs a lift now and again.”
“Warning,” SimOne announced. “Humans are embarking on global war.”
“Again?” Jem rushed over to the planet. “Give me a map, SimOne. What’s going on?”
The map of the world unfurled across the astral screen. “Countries are forming alliances and going to war,” the android reported.
“Didn’t we do this yesterday? Two global wars in two days?”
Kir stepped forward to stand by her. “I guess they needed something to take their mind off a bad situation.”
“Why couldn’t they try ice-cream or chocolate instead? What are we going to do?” Jem asked.
“Nothing. Let it play out.”
Jem ground her teeth. “We let it play out yesterday, and all they did was wreck their economy and drive themselves into a global funk.”
“In the grand scheme of things, that’s about thirty star revolutions. That’s less time than it takes us to blink if this simulation was running at a normal speed.”
“The reason we can’t run at a normal speed is because we can’t trust them to get it right.”
“We have to, Jem. We have to start trusting them to solve their own problems.”
“Warning. Thermonuclear device detonated at 34°23′53″N 132°28′32.9″E. Warning. Thermonuclear device detonated at 32°47′N 129°52′E.”
Jem stared wordlessly at the mushroom shaped cloud on the astral screen, and then jerked her gaze down to the wounded planet. The grievous injury could not be seen from space. The planet floated, shimmering blue and vibrant green, in the infinite darkness of space, but it had lost its innocence forever.
“Did you say ‘thermonuclear device’?” Kir asked, his voice quiet.
“Yes.”
“Casualties?”
SimOne’s voice was serene; she could have been giving a weather report. “At a minimum, two hundred thousand humans. More continue to suffer and die from the lingering effects of injuries or exposure to radiation.”
“Now do you agree that we need to do something?” Jem demanded.
“It would appear that the time for action has passed,” Kir said as he studied the data reported by the sensors. “The war is over. The thermonuclear warheads ended it. Our humans solved their problem.”
“By creating a bigger one.” Jem waved her hand at the approximate quadrant of space where a doomed planet had once rotated around a red star. “Did we learn nothing from Kryptos? They were destroyed by nuclear power. Their planet was turned to space debris because their planet’s core was destabilized by nuclear energy. Our humans have just turned that demon loose on their own planet.”
“There is nothing inherently wrong about nuclear energy,” Kir insisted, though his face was pale. “Fission and fusion energy power our cities and our spacecraft. Heck, they even power this laboratory.”
“Yes, but we know what the hell we’re doing. They don’t.”
“They just ended a global war. I’d say they knew exactly what the hell they’re doing.”
“They can’t possibly.”
“Why? They’re not that different from us, Jem. You built their genetic code using ours as a template. Their planet isn’t much larger than the size of our heads, and we can’t see individuals, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same infinite capacity to imagine and create. Those humans down there have the same right to live, to dream, to die, as do we all. I think it’s time we finally admit it.”
Jem swallowed hard. She closed her eyes to block out the sight of their planet and then shook her head. Her voice trembled as she closed her astral workstation. “I need ice-cream and lots of chocolate.”
Save the earth. It's the only planet with chocolate. ~Author Unknown
* * *
“Hey, are you all right?” Kir’s voice broke through Jem’s brooding reverie and the blur of white noise in the cafeteria.
She sighed, rested her cheek against the heel of her hand, and looked up at him. “I don’t know.”
Without waiting for an invitation, he sat across from her. “It was quite a shock, huh?”
“Shock is learning that the little boy can fly. The nuclear war surpasses it entirely.” She spun her glass around in her hand. Guilt clawed at her. “I screwed up, didn’t I?” Her voice was scarcely a whisper. “Those kids…the two that I selected to lead our planet into the space age…one of them urged his country to develop nuclear weapons. He didn’t work on it, but he was the most respected scientist of his age, and the leaders listened to him. He did it. I did it through him.”
Kir reached out and grabbed her hand to still the repetitive motion. “You need to stop blaming yourself for what they do. You cheapen their lives, their free will.”
“Did they really have free will, or did they merely go down the path I wanted?”
“The thermonuclear weapon ended the war,” Kir pointed out.
“It’s likely to start another.” Jem’s voice caught, skidding close to the edge of a sob.
“You don’t know that it will.”
“And you don’t know that it won’t. They’ve turned it loose. They can’t ignore it now.”
“And they won’t. They’ll learn to control it and their tempers, because they have to. They’re going to grow up, Jem. They will, and we have to let them.”
“Six months ago we put the first people down on the planet, and now they’re developing nuclear weapons.”
“Ki
ds grow up fast,” Kir said. He was briefly silent. “Did you want to see the aftermath?”
Not really. She shrugged. “I guess so.”
He unfolded his astral workstation, and the android’s astral image shimmered into view. “SimOne, we’re ready for the data transmission.”
“Executing.”
Kir’s dark gaze raced across the data churning into his workstation. He inhaled deeply before speaking. “Over one hundred million humans were mobilized for war. Casualties, including non-combat personnel, exceed seventy million.”
Jem squeezed her eyes shut. Seventy million? “Damn. This peace had better last. They’ve paid a high enough price for it.”
“No kidding.” Kir’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell are these idiots doing?”
“What now?”
“They divided up the land among the victors, and paid no attention whatsoever to racial or ethnic boundaries. It’s in a pivotal area at the juncture of several continents. They’re calling it peace. Hah, it’s more like a peace to end all peace. I highly doubt their ability to make it work out.”
“Are you going to tell them?” Jem asked.
“No. They’re going to figure it out pretty soon. I give them fifty star revolutions, no more than sixty, before it collapses into war. No, wait. I take that back. It’s going to be sooner, way sooner.”
“What?” Jem’s eyes widened.
“There’s a new state.” Kir’s jaw tightened. “It’s not new, precisely. It was around a long time back, but it vanished, swallowed up by more powerful countries. It’s back now.”
“What do you mean ‘back now’? How does a state just show up?”
“I don’t know, but its people have genetic markers similar to those of a state that vanished more than twenty-five hundred star revolutions ago.”
Jem shook her head. “No state survives with its people dispossessed and scattered for twenty-five hundred star revolutions.”
“No kidding. They’re scoring big points for persistence.”
“Just blame it on the anomaly,” Jem said.
“Huh?”
