The Edge of Reason
Chronicles of Expansion: Humanity’s (Accidental) Journey to the Edge of Space
Chapter 2 – The Edge of Reason
The Exodus Headquarters on Earth 26 housed the most promising minds in humanity’s expanding universe. No other earth had the resources to support a similar launching station. Not after the war, at least. There, a new batch of recruits were part of a chosen generation, which would be among the first to learn the Cone’s true secrets.
Not far in the horizon, a new age of hope and exploration called upon humankind once again. For the first time in centuries, there was no Conglomerate. No iron curtain. No big brother watching over their shoulders. Against all odds, the war had ended (in our favor?). The Cone, thus far closed to the masses, was now open for public viewing. Any student with a permit could go see it on Earth 2, at Gravity Hall, where it continued to work tirelessly for its human masters, birthing their imaginations into a broken but finally peaceful world.
To this day, the cost of humanity’s last war still reverberates through the cosmos. Sixteen Earths were lost. Billions died. Whole worlds worth of people were forcefully relocated, with the ensuing overpopulation threatening most of the surviving planets. The Initiative was more important than ever, but finding a new earth could take decades. Urgent measures were implemented to accelerate both the training of new recruits and the Cone’s construction of next-generation Exodus ships.
No longer classified, it wasn’t unusual for military and educational institutions to stream launches, design competitions, and other works in progress. Most of these feeds looked the same. The Cone in the foreground. An out of focus, undecipherable structure growing away from the (camera). Models, renderings, and expert interviews projected onto the screen in a failed attempt to increase production value. There was no need for embellishments. The construction process turned hypnotizing for any of the burned out recruits, who would spend hours staring at the projections across campus. It’s no wonder so many of them witnessed that rogue transmission.
The projection feed flickered a few times before an old woman, staring straight into the camera, came onscreen. She was in a dark room, her face barely visible behind unkept, bloodied bandages. Her breathing, faithfully reproduced on the cafeteria’s nanospeakers, revealed a long, losing battle. It took her a minute to gather herself, but there was a palpable sense of urgency in the blue eye peeking out from behind red and white stripes. Some recruits thought they could recognize the face. Others pointed out The Last Child, an Old World classic, was playing in the background. The entire cafeteria went quiet once she spoke.
------------- Start of Senior incident Report – Declassified ---------------
There were thousands of us at first… tens of thousands, clumped together into giant metal cylinders, like fucking food from the old world. Now these cans are empty of humans… No more adventurous colonizers! No, no, no…
What’s funny is how most of us did turn into food…
At times, the woman turned around as if to speak to someone out of frame, weakly banging both hands against the metal when expressing her frustration. She was now looking at the wall beside her. Speaking to it.
I can still read some of the numbers here. Let me see… that’s… EX7-RR… something… Oh yeah… Exodus… but we don’t call the ship that anymore. We mostly call it hell, now.
Hell launched a long time ago. I cannot remember exactly when, or from where. All our target quadrants and spacetime parameters were preset prior to departure… nobody told us where we were going, but we were promised a new world… I was even guaranteed a fucking earth during the pre-launch ceremony! That I fucking remember!
Oh, we were so fucking mighty! Masters of the fucking universe… right up until the universe happened. Thousands of brave souls lost in space… Us, food…
It didn’t take long for those of us who survived the incident to be crushed by hopelessness and extreme gravity shifts… and now there are no humans left in hell… no real food either…
Hope defines humankind. Always. It is what separates us from other species. It rises with every new sun and promises us a better, brighter future… but there are no stars here… we haven’t seen a sun for nearly a hundred years now… or could it be longer than that? What’s our future here if not to eat and fuck each other, just like any other fucking animal?
Our cries for help never made it far from the ship, so we now live on the edge of reason. God has come and gone. Science too. The universe has never seemed so vast, or so incredibly dark and cluttered with distant, meaningless dots of light.
We didn’t bring any children with us, but since all we had left was eating and fucking… well… you do the math… not many of them made it to adulthood, and those who did grew old far too quickly. Their situation, and ours, only worsened once the Congs started hunting the rest of us.
I can’t remember when, or why, but a while back some lunatic thought it’d be a great idea to launch our last batch of protein out the main supply bay. Cannibals have become commonplace since then. Their logic is morbidly solid too… Children’s meat is softer, and they cannot move as fast. Besides, what’s a few more, or a few less kids in this place?
Who knows… maybe one of them will be the last child, after all… that fucking song…
There was a loud banging noise outside the room. Metal against metal. The woman froze, turning around to look at the barricaded door behind her. After a few seconds, she went back to serenading her audience with tales of hell.
Somehow, even in the vastness of space, we found ways and reasons to turn against one another. We were divided from the start. Cong soldiers wanted one thing. Us scientists another. The genpo was split almost evenly between the two bands. Now its predators and prey. Lots of animals, but no humans.
The ship never made it to our promised land, and now that we are old and our minds have lost their luster, it would be impossible to find a way there. Not with the massive gravity pull, at least…
Our bodies are wasted as well… I lost my eye decades ago, and I’m missing part of my left arm from a rather close encounter some years back. This is all that’s left of me, Dr. K…
------------- End of Senior incident Report – Declassified ---------------
The transmission cut off abruptly as the woman stood up to show off her missing limb, and a new, more familiar face appeared onscreen. It was the director. He looked unusually pale and somehow worse than his cannibalized opening act. “Please disregard the previous transmission,” he said. “It’s part of an AI training program gone rogue. We now have it under control.”
The whole cafeteria fell silent. He was lying, of course, but recruits knew better than to disobey a direct order. That was no rogue AI. Whoever she was, the woman onscreen had been real. Her wounds and short breaths were real. The numbers she had read were real, matching those of early Exodus models discontinued long before the war started. A metadata cache, extracted from the transmission by a recruit with a death wish, confirmed their suspicions before the next class started.
Year 963 SA
Ship: Exodus 7 – Module RRE-305
Location: Unknown
Participant ID: Classified
There was no need for an official ID. Everyone at the cafeteria knew who the woman was, but nobody could understand why she would be aboard an Exodus ship nearly three hundred years after discovering Earth 25. Questions were in order, and for the first time in a long time, they could be asked.