Truth

12.8.24

I walked through the archive, in awe of the endless rows of records. Millennia after Millennia: the entirety of humanity contained within a complex. A complex that required an entire moon to hold. To look up and see the stars or even the planet showing through the transparent ceiling gave magic to the place beyond imagination. Being the size of a moon, no amount of visitors made a difference to how calm and quiet it was. I walked and walked, taking in the spectacle.

At random, I selected documents. I pulled them from the shelves and flipped through them. Images of the yellow grass of Patera in harmony with the brilliant green gemstones decorating the surface. Colonized in 3379 following the invasion of Fallsland when the original settlers fled for their lives. They had no choice but to leave behind everything and head into the unknown of distant quadrant 7B1A. They could have found nothing. They could have died. Instead, they found beauty beyond belief. A living, luscious world.

And there, they devolved. Throwing away technology and modernity in the hopes of a peaceful life. Fallsland was taken for its strategic location: a bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire of war. The writers of Patera said it was worth the injustice that brought them there: “In all the beauty this universe has to offer, the greatest beauty of all is that which we are made to see in the light of suffering,” wrote Blaun Seik, a third generation Paterian. The irony is that the Equitists who later killed Seik and the remaining population of Patera had their own writers: “Though tragedy is the foundation of this world I call both home and beauty, I am here. It is my home. To call it anything other than beautiful would be tragedy itself.”

I placed the sad tale back onto the shelf. Does it matter? I asked myself, Should I care about what happened to those people? In so many years of history, the inevitable happens. There is peace. There is war. There is happiness. There is sadness. And we all die in the end. So what does anything matter? What does anything matter except the people we know who are alive today?

Onwards, I walked. Randomly, I turned. Surrounded by beauty. After some time, I pulled another document: Aragolainian War. I turned to a random page:

By the time the fifth battalion reached the warzone, the Aragolain fleet was destroyed. [12] is the image Captain Renaga took upon arrival. Notable is the helmet in the bottom left corner; it belonged to Lieutenant Paragona, Renaga’s lifelong friend. Ordinarily, casualties took decades to reconcile in the Intergalactic Age: escape pods could flee to the furthest reaches of the stars, lost to time. Quantum communicators would not be standard equipment for another three centuries. For Renaga to come across the helmet of his friend, as captured, would be like searching for a specific grain of sand on a beach and finding it in the first handful.

…The fifth battalion immediately turned and left, leaving Aragolain in the hands of Neo-Christian extremists. Though image [12] was a powerful and iconic symbol for the war efforts moving forward, the battle itself was ultimately insignificant.

For a moment, I paused, then added the excerpt to my collection. I thought about my life, my own past. All the people I knew and loved. Most of them were dead. Others were simply gone. But I knew people. We all know people. That is what makes us human, after all. We cannot exist without knowing or being known. But who would write about us? Who would care about us when we are gone? Who would care about me?

Of all the pains I had ever known, the greatest was the betrayal of those I trusted. Those to whom I was open and honest and to me who lied and deceived. Not that they held malice, rather that they were hurt and broken people: who lied and deceived to protect their own hearts and their own selves. “Image 12,” as the document called it, was in fact not the fifth battalion arriving in the wake of defeat. It was taken in victory. They won the battle and were all that remained. Captain Renaga arrived late. That is why he survived. The Aragolain people won, then Renaga conceded the world to the extremists because what he had fought for no longer existed. Before his exile from the fifth moon of Tralka, he was asked what he hoped to accomplish by coming to his people’s place of refuge: “I thought there was a chance of finding my people again,” was his answer.

Trauma. That is life. That is what millennia of human history depict. Pain and betrayal. Hundreds, if not thousands of times, have I walked these archives. Countless documents have I read. There was never a utopia, never a time of peace, never a “golden age” or anything of the sort. Only two things are fact: science progresses, humanity destroys. The humans of these stories were never the problem. Only humanity. Humanity and its reliance on society. 

I did read a love story once. It was about a man on Zcher who lived a simple life in the blackwood forest. The document made me fall in love with the planet: it was not only beautiful, but it seemed peaceful — something so incredibly rare. The man fell in love with a woman who moved from Iotk, the planetary capital. He wrote the document, so perhaps my reading experience was biased. Though I would argue that only made it more beautiful: I got to see from his perspective. Near the middle, he wrote: “And I sat there, across from her, in the most casual of moment, the most ordinary of day. And I realized, then, that for all I had endured in the entirety of my lifetime, there was not one other thing that mattered. In her, I had found meaning and purpose, peace and joy. She needed not to say a word, not to do a thing, not to be in any way: she needed only to exist; not for her to love me, but for me to love her.”

It really was a beautiful story. To experience someone else’s experience of love so vividly was inspirational. Nothing, however, is more human than is found in the end of that document: “I finally saw that my capacity to love her was nothing more than an expression of myself: that I am capable of love. Perhaps I would dare say that makes me a good person: to be capable of true love. Yet I would never know another person’s capabilities. Because I was blinded by my own. I loved her exactly the same when she told me she did not love me. I wept, but not from heartbreak. I wept because I was alone. I was alone in my ability to love. Because I was alone in my humanity. I had set aside my worldly pains in the pursuit of a life of peace. I had found peace. I had known it. And the entire time, she was merely searching. Nothing — no one — for her, would ever be enough.”

There is much to be gained from human history, but not from the history itself. Only from the humans who comprise that history. I never cared about what happened. The wars and conflicts were all meaningless to me. What mattered was that real people lived real lives that were impacted by it all. Even that woesome man on Zcher: the woman knew pain from the likes of war. Generational trauma and societal diseases left their scars. As good of a person as she was, she did not know her own self. Nobody in these stories ever did. Nobody except for the man in that love story. I know that because for all the documents I have read, only for that one have I wept. I can read of fallout and genocide. I can read of war and conflict. I can read stories of hardship, of immorality, of loss, of injustice, of anything at all. But nothing matters. None of it. Nothing except for those few precious expressions of our humanity. And what is more human than wishing to not be so alone? What is more human than wanting to know someone and to be known? But all the people want to know is history.