Creativity Sunday - Pro Patria Mori
Out in the dark depths of space, one star and ten billion lives ended. The sky flashed impossibly bright, and then that was that. In one great onrushing moment, four point seven seconds after the initial detonation, everything was obliterated.
"Casualties" felt like the wrong word. If they were casualties then they were people, and you couldn't erase people by the star system like that. They were numbers; as inextricably linked to the button on the dashboard as the ones and zeros that informed the heads up display. Calliope had pressed the button here, and her computer had provided her the readout there, and then ten billion ones outside transitioned into zeroes. There was no other way to think of it. It was self defence.
It hadn't had to be her. She was good, but she wasn't the best. What she was was the perfect mix of competent and expendable; good enough to sweep her tiny little dagger craft through the Net and launch her ugly little payload, but valueless enough that should things go wrong she could be detonated remotely by the next person up the chain sitting behind a big red button. So she flew, and she fired, and she tried to feel proud when that angry red glare welled up behind her. They had utterly, utterly won. Humanity would never again be threatened with invasion. Just this vision, always, quietly floating across the inside of her eyeballs. A tiny little shape flitting against the vastness of the sun, the briefest of flashes, and then an endless outpouring of brilliant nothingness.
"Casualties" felt like the wrong word. If they were casualties then they were people, and you couldn't erase people by the star system like that. They were numbers; as inextricably linked to the button on the dashboard as the ones and zeros that informed the heads up display. Calliope had pressed the button here, and her computer had provided her the readout there, and then ten billion ones outside transitioned into zeroes. There was no other way to think of it. It was self defence.
It hadn't had to be her. She was good, but she wasn't the best. What she was was the perfect mix of competent and expendable; good enough to sweep her tiny little dagger craft through the Net and launch her ugly little payload, but valueless enough that should things go wrong she could be detonated remotely by the next person up the chain sitting behind a big red button. So she flew, and she fired, and she tried to feel proud when that angry red glare welled up behind her. They had utterly, utterly won. Humanity would never again be threatened with invasion. Just this vision, always, quietly floating across the inside of her eyeballs. A tiny little shape flitting against the vastness of the sun, the briefest of flashes, and then an endless outpouring of brilliant nothingness.