Weekly Drabble #206: Far and Away (Patreon)

This week's prompts are '24,000 years' from LystAiP (which got rounded up a little bit) and 'humanity's best friend' from Lincoln Neal, bringing us back to the setting of Heresy and Hope. Enjoy!

Far and Away:

Fifteen million years.

You have to sit down. The information is just too overwhelming. You can’t process it and your head is spinning. Fifteen million years. It can’t be right. It can’t be.

“That can’t be right,” someone else protests, taking the words right out of your mouth. “We-we left Earth less than three months ago!”

Eris is standing in front of you, her hands clasped behind her back. Despite her pallor, she looks absolutely human, but something about her triggers every atavistic warning instinct that you have.She never blinks or breathes, never chews her lip nervously, tilts her head, shifts from foot to foot or acts in any one of a hundred thousand different ways a human would act, even when they’re standing completely still. Why would she, though? She isn’t human. This... thing in front of you is like a projection, light shining on a wall. The Purge call it a ‘particle husk’, but Eris hasn’t bothered to explain it beyond that. She doesn’t like you much, but you know it isn’t personal. She doesn’t like any humans. It’s a courtesy that she even bothers to differentiate between you – she can easily tell the difference, but she doesn’t care.

If she weren’t a ‘heretic’, you and everyone else aboard Hope would have been turned into atomic vapour long ago. It’s because of her that the human species still exists. You wish you had it in you to thank her for that, but she is still one of the Purge. You have no idea how many innocents she’s murdered, how many species she’s personally wiped out... or how many humans she’s killed.

The captain had the right idea. He made it a direct order; never ask Eris about the war. That way everyone could at least cling to blessed ignorance and pretend she’d never directly participated in humanity’s extermination. Maybe that was even true. Maybe it wasn’t, but it was better for everyone aboard Hope to believe the former. Every single man, woman and child on this ship had lost someone to the Purge. If they thought that one of the beings responsible for hundreds of billions of deaths was sitting alongside Hope... it could make you go crazy. It could even make you do something very, very stupid. So everyone pretended that Eris was one of the good ones, even though deep down they knew otherwise.

For her part, Eris made no effort to correct them. She wasn’t sadistic, revelling in the extermination of billions and gleefully waiting to share details with the survivors and torment them with descriptions of burning cities and immolated populations. That would have implied that she cared what you or anyone else on this ship thought. A wolf doesn’t concern itself with the opinions of sheep– you wish you knew where you’d heard that before, but even that doesn’t properly convey the gulf between what Eris is and the living souls aboard this ship.  We are so small to her.

If she thought of you at all, it was only as a whole, an undifferentiated mass of verminous flesh and meat labelled ‘humanity’ and only with contempt. Well... contempt, and curiousity as she tried to understand what was special about humans... but that was a whole different kettle of fish and one frighteningly likely to boil over. A problem for another day, though. First, this meeting. Eris had told all of you that there was no possibility of pursuit. She’d been disinclined to explain further until days of questions, insisting, begging, failed appeals to emotions she didn’t apply to humans and even demands that couldn’t possibly be backed up had worn her down. That last one had probably done the trick. She’d been amused by the captain’s ire and his assertion that he’d put her husk in the brig until she became more cooperative. She’d laughed. The sound had been indefinably but completely and utterly wrong. “Brave little scraps,”she’d granted that. You wondered how much more bravery she’d seen in her impossibly long life. How many others had stood up to her? How many threats had she received, how many suicide runs had driven towards her juggernaut body – just how much desperate and ultimately futile courage had she seen and also laughed at?

None. Better to think that it was none. Better to assume she was one of the good ones. Anything else could make you crazy.

So, yes – she’d finally deigned to explain how she had saved Hope.

There’d been more heretic Purge than just Eris; she’d had seven... what? Brothers, sisters, cousins, peers? Comrades. They’d decided to share their revelation with the rest of their species, but the other Purge hadn’t been particularly receptive to it. Disagreement led to discord. Discord led to conflict. Conflict became fratricide as, for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, the Purge warred with one another.

Part of you can’t help but feel glad and wishes you could have seen it. The Purge are monsters and the fewer of them there are, the better for every living thing in the Milky Way, but you’re smart enough not to mention that to Eris, not even to gloat. ‘Now you know what it’s like to lose someone you care about’. You know that that comparison wouldn’t have the result you want. Not yet, at any rate. Maybe later she’ll be more receptive.. probably much later. All that can wait, though.

The Heretics were facing destruction, so they did something truly insane. A new technology that they were experimenting with; the Heretics seized it and used for themselves in a last, desperate act of defiance. The Purge called it a “temporal burn” and through it, Eris and Hope fled from the rest of their kind. Her last two siblings died to hold the burn open long enough for her to carry Hope to safety. You realized then what Eris was talking about. “A wormhole?”you asked her incredulously. “We went through a wormhole?”

The heretic Purge might not care to emulate human body language, but she’s certainly mastered facial expressions. You don’t think you’ve ever seen something that so perfectly encapsulates the emotion of utter revulsion as her reaction to that term. “Call it what you want,”she’d at least acquiesced.But from there, the revelation had followed.

The heretics’ wormhole hadn’t just displaced Eris and Hope in space, but in time. You weren’t just fifteen million light years from Earth; you were fifteen million years in the future as well.

Fifteen million years. With that, you realize that you truly are alone here in the intergalactic void. There would be no surviving human worlds to evacuate, no refugee fleets to locate. The Purge would have lived up to their name and completed the human race’s destruction in the Milky Way. Hope truly is humanity’s one and only hope for survival now. But...

You can’t help it, you start laughing. Everyone else in the room looks at you as if you’re crazy. It takes several moments before you can breathe well enough to speak. “Fifteen million years,” you tell them all. “Don’t you get it? She’s right. We’re free. They’ll never find us this far out or this far in the future. We did it,” you point a finger at Eris’s husk form. “She did it. We outran them. That was what we were supposed to do, wasn’t it? And... it’s done. We’re fifteen million light years from home with a whole new galaxy in front of us. She and the rest of the Heretics saved us.”

You see everyone else’s faces as they come to the same realization. There had only ever been the smallest of chances that Hope could outrun the Purge or that any other colonies or ships might have survived. Now, though... now they really had done it. They really were free.

And then, reminding everyone in the room that that was only true for as long as she still believed there was something about humanity that made you worth preserving and if the day ever came that she thought otherwise, there was nothing anyone could do to stop her, Eris spoke up. “You’re welcome.”