They’d found more of the dreaded artifacts. We’ve warned them against trying to exploit the power within them. They have ignored us, again. I find it difficult to concern myself with their affairs. Though I fear the ramifications of a new release of the flux energy at this juncture. We’d even go so far as to share improved and safer technologies to help reunite the empire. They were not satisfied.
The cold floor and walls pressed against my body. The sensations I felt were by choice. As centuries ground by I’d learned to focus on blocking out pain and discomfort. Which is a boon when you’d found yourself in a prison camp for two hundred years, while our alien conquerors systematically annihilated ninety percent of the human race. I envisioned the water vapor swirling through the darkness from by breath.
Focus.
I waited days more before the knock on the door finally came. The two men who spoke had such rudimentary dialects of the old confederation standard, I could barely understand them. I fear, this era of humanity was drained of civility and hardened by nine centuries of conquest over themselves.
They were right however. I would have liked to see a more enlightened era try to reactivate the cubes. They demanded our help in the use of the devices and other than myself, we’d refused. I was unfortunate enough to be on Ares when this new Imperium ordered our arrest. I’d made it to the Jamestown spaceport but this new totalitarian regime was better at internal security than I’d given them credit for.
The two men dragged me through a long corridor. Concrete, pipes, ceiling lights at regular intervals. I let the experience flow through me. I thought back to when the Conservators arrived on our outer colonies. We had just sacrificed our eldest to secure a reparation of the stars which had been fading since the time of my birth. Humanity had been pushed the the brink, with world after world freezing over as their suns died. On the eve of the rebirth, the first of their ships arrived.
It took centuries to discover their motive. They had observed our war with the Yill Maingess. The stellar decay had extended far beyond our quadrant of the galaxy. The Conservators had suffered greatly as well. They blamed us and our victory over the ‘old gods,’ which held the universe in check. I had heard from the elders that there were theories about the Yill Maingess. They were in fact fighting, something else, on another front since the beginning of our universe. After sending one hundred generations of humanity at them, with little to no more effect than feeding meat into a grinder. We’d finally broken through. Weapons of war that had been long lost, were found and employed during the final assault.
The Yill Maingess fed off gravitational energy and built their technology with exotic matter from an earlier universe. The core of their civilization swirled through the accretion disc of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. ‘Sag A’ they’d called it. Stars swam within the accretion disc, giving us perfect targets for our weaponry. We were poised to crack open the stars and send their entire civilization tumbling into the crushing oblivion just beyond. As we let loose the wrath of our betters, the Yill Maingess swarmed outward and detonated the warheads prematurely, the majority of the human fleets, inner rim colonies and the Yill Maingess armada were gone.
Then, they fled. That was the official explanation in layman’s terms, so I understood. In reality, no one knew where they went. Their ships and vast platforms were difficult to track to begin with and what readings we did get began to reduce. The decay accelerated, faster and faster. Within days the Yill Maingess had disappeared. We’d celebrated our victory and then it began. One by one, the stars began to fade. Starting from the boundaries of the singularity, the habitable zones around our colonies' stars shrank. Planets once rich in life changed to frozen wastelands.
Civilization fled outward. Arm after arm, humanity leapfrogged to the Sagittarius and waited. This was the time of my birth. The majority of Methuselans had fled as well, to a place outside time and space. The early years are vague in my memories. This niche we’d carved out for ourselves was where we’d first discovered the cause of the stellar decay. For a thousand years we researched and pushed further into our realm. Searching further and further into the heart of the universe for answers. Humanity was on the brink and the elders went to them.
One last chance, at the cost of our most precious. Damn them. Humans were like children that never learned. They would place their hand upon the hot plate again and again, suffering a more severe burn each time. It seems that they’d numbed the hand to the heat by this point. Four thousand years before my birth, they had stumbled across the cubes in their dealings with the Lacir.
The eldest of the Methuselans had cracked the technology of the cubes nearly a thousand years before. The Methuselans were human then. Something we unleashed while tinkering with those infernal devices caused our incredulous life spans. We’ve prospered and suffered through the different ages of humanity. Under one dynasty, we were revered as elders and counsel, our vast knowledge and experience was invaluable. Others saw us as cursed monsters that should be jailed or destroyed.
It wasn’t long before the first of the Methuselans, that humanity had finished obliterating the many new species of humans that inhabited worlds, seeded by our progenitors. Under less than ideal conditions and little to no terraforming, evolution had split these colonies far from the expansionists’ view of what humanity should be. It was ironic that in our research into repairing the stars, we’d discovered that humans themselves were once of two distinct species.
The two men dragging me stopped before a heavy door. I heard multiple latches opening and sounds of scraping metal. I chuckled to myself. A thousand years after we’d scraped the last remnants of humanity from the brink of land dwelling extinction. They’d been so hard pressed to subjugate themselves that they’d forgotten to build their house as well as their weapons.
The state of things was truly dismal. Humanity had been a space-fairing empire that lived in the squalor of their pre-industrial roots. All I could hope was that I’d see them returned to what they could be. Previous interventions and uses of the cubes had ushered in ages of prosperity. There was a growing concern amongst my people that things weren’t as simple this time. Those of us still living in our own realm had heard whisperings of a war. I didn’t fully understand the consequences of our enemy’s first move. Who the enemy was at this point and what he was prepared to do with my help, I did not comprehend.
I was lead into a room with a square table in the center. Upon the table lay one of the cubes. A variety of cables were affixed to the device and it was surrounded by scientific instruments I did not recognize. I sat down before the cube and set to work on interfacing it with their power source and computers. It would take some time for me to integrate this hardware. It was antiquated and dilapidated, by my standards at least.
To a Methuselan, humans are in fact, essentially alien. Their technology, ancient and ineffective in comparison to the technology we’d kept alive over the millennia. We had fled the mistakes of humanity time and time again. This time I held out hope for a better age. So I returned to offer council on rebuilding after the consolidation wars. They told me that I was to reactivate their cube. Many of the others had politely refused, I had been prepared to accept their request. The elders did not agree with my assessment and let me go with nothing but my knowledge of the devices.
When the others refused, the fledgling governments threatened to arrest us and force our service. We had decided to leave and observe humanity for a few more centuries. Many of us had escaped, I was not so lucky, even though I was prepared to help. It took weeks of work on the device and their computer systems. Now, I was poised to open the hub gate and reinitiate a new era of hub travel.
Focus.
The gate opened to what was supposed to be the hubspace. Instead we saw grass, low clouds, mountains and a fleck of sky in the distance. We should have seen little to nothing. A team was prepared to breach the gate. They were a mixture of scientists and soldiers, a few of the scientists looked eager. The rest looked very apprehensive. I released the barrier on the gate and a small ripple expanded from the orifice hovering before me.
The team went in and trudged through the grass beyond the gate. They fanned out into a wedge formation and moved in for ten minutes. They stopped and took their readings while the soldiers worked their way into a defensive perimeter. The scientists noted that the atmosphere of the realm they were in did not in fact contain breathable air, yet they were able to breathe it without their respirators. Clearly this new place was purpose created to sustain life of any kind.
Something shimmered near the group. The soldiers became jumpy and shrunk back to the group of scientists. The air began shimmering all around them. The group hurried back to the gate. Something began to take shape in the shimmering. Nothing recognizable as an animal, just eyes, teeth and... death. One solder fell, then another. The whole group was at a full sprint back to the gate at this point.
The shimmering continued and violent, gnashing, monstrosities lashed out at the retreating humans. More and more of them fell, body parts and blood flying through the air around them. By the time they reached the gate, only one soldier and two scientists were alive. The two scientists leapt through the gate and the soldier was not but one step behind, when he suddenly stopped. He looked me in the eyes and I could see a primal creeping fear in his, the shimmering swirled around his body. I saw teeth and movement as he was ripped apart before my eyes.
I closed the gate. The portal bulged outwards and a violent ripple spread into our existence. I looked around me and saw some of the humans fall down, some in violent throes of pain. I myself felt something twisting inside me. There was pain, immense pain. I allowed it to pass through my consciousness and flow out of me. Should I have shut the gate earlier? Would it have mattered? I’m not sure.
Everything changed that day, both flesh and inanimate matter. Our enemy had corrupted the energy of the hub and I had let it loose into our reality. I learned that there was a war going on, a war of the ancients and the divine. We had unfortunately just been caught in the middle. Another two and one half millennia past and mankind grew into a mighty power once again. The energy that had been unleashed upon them, caused a variety of changes in physical, mental and inexplicable ways. Things moved along as they always had. The humans did however join together, though still plagued by infighting, stronger than ever before.
It didn’t help however. The war rolled over our reality like in invisible storm. Nearly everything was obliterated in the maelstrom. It was as this time that I stopped referring to humans as ‘them.’ We were too few now to allow our differences to separate us in this twilight era. I met with the elders that remained, they had searched, but the divines had left the ‘High Seat.’ The universe was truly in a state of ruin with a hollow core. We were left to fend for ourselves. With the remnants of the biomechanical and etherial weapons that remained in the recesses of our reality.
It’s unfortunate now. I know I’ve lived somewhere in the vicinity of five thousand years. Though I can’t recall the exact date or even my name. I do however weep for the loss of everything so soon. I’d expected we’d go on for many more millennia. Now it would appear that we will be lucky to last another two centuries. The snow started falling in the summer a few years ago. I truly believe the stars are failing again.
So... cold.
