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Baby Twilight Basket
9771da
Ekasarra leans back on the couch, and adjusts herself. She sees my unfocused gaze tracing the curves of her body and smiles, adjusting herself to show more of her body off.
"You're beautiful," I mumble, like the socially estranged idiot I am. Yes, self, you just had sex with her, I think this goes without saying.
"You're pretty nice yourself, even with the weird yellow dots all over you," says Ekasarra. "But I mean that's not a bad thing. Like, they're unique. Characteristic. Shut up, Ekasarra."
Oh good we're both horrible at this pillow talk thing. Great.
I get up off the couch, stand and adjust myself into a better speaking position, close my eyes and clear my throat.
"So, the kiter empire. What did you want to know?"
"Why it doesn't make any sense? What are they doing to this planet? They're tearing down all the infrastructure and sucking it dry of every resource up to and including the rock itself, and that doesn't seem practical. Surely, if I was the head of a giant planetary empire, I'd, well, subjugate the locals, get them working for me under a reasonable leash, not too tight so they didn't immediately start trying to overthrow my rule, and build up the infrastructure they already had. Oh, and use planetary resources sustainably to fund future efforts of conquest and colonisation."
I blink a few times.
"...You okay?"
"How long have you thought about this?" I rack my ancestral memories and find very little on the topic of sustainable imperialism.
"I've spent all my adult life working for a salikai, you learn some interesting things that way. Might have affected my outlook, too."
I don't know whether to feel intimidated or to immediately declare my allegiance to Ekasarra over Sisirri.
"Still! Kiter inefficiency! You raise a good point, and this is a very important thing to understand. It explains a lot about the general ineffective nature of the empire, as well as its incredible wastefulness yet all-consuming hunger. Let me tell you about the concept of the imperial cycle of the stran, the thing that drove me to more and more rebellious lives and more and more terrible deaths, apparently. I mean, I'm like a composite, I didn't literally live all these lives in a sequence, it's more like... oh, never mind. Moving on."
I visualise a circle and paint it into the material world with an assertion that it exists here.
"You know the kiter empire as a strange alien force of malevolence, descending upon worlds and consuming them. I know the kiter empire as a framework for self-perpetuation. We're both only partially correct. The 'kiter empire' as we know it is maybe a few centuries old. The stran are far, far older. From some time immemorial, the stran became fixated on the concept of survival of their species."
"That's not really that strange an idea."
"No, see, they are driven by survival of their species above and beyond their own survival. I have witnessed stran readily sacrifice themselves for what seems like the most arbitrary of reasons. Then again, the stran can only reproduce by being violently torn apart, so this might have something to do with it. They don't breed, they don't intentionally sprout or bud or produce spores, they just coalesce into different entities if they're ripped into pieces."
"...huh."
"The stran do not see each other and themselves as individuals. They see each other as tissue, as organs in a loosely connected superorganism that they are convinced must fill all available space at any cost. But they can't leave this galaxy. And if they consume every world, like a forest fire burning every tree, they'll wipe themselves out. It will all collapse. So they engineered a process. A process with a beginning, and, as of yet, no end. They forge empires to gather the raw resources they need to grow their bodies, large and strong enough to reach more and more of the stars, and stop short of full galactic conquest by engineering their empire's inevitable collapse into mass, interstellar civil war. The stran break away into fleets destined to consume and ruin one another, the carnage birthing new stran with new perspectives. In the chaos, the stran are reduced in number, but retain their information. The species they use as their foot soldiers, their harvesters, their administrators, all get left behind to slowly perish in the ruin of an empire bleeding to death."
Ekasarra stares at me. "That... are you sure these things are super smart?"
"I never said they were smart."
"But they rule the empire?"
"They can barely concieve of the empire. All they can understand is symbiosis and the difference between parasite and symbiote. However, it's worth noting that every species the stran bring into the next incarnation of their empire is one that nearly destroyed them previously. The neburi planetary hivemind resisted the kiter imperium, the ess blood tribes fended off the kiter concordat, the neno fi destroyed their own homeworld in a blaze of psychic fury to take down the kiter collective, and none of them succeeded. They stabbed at the shining facet of a cruel diamond, chipping it, only for the stran to gently turn the diamond and show a new facet."
"Wait. If all the kiter empire species are remnants or whatever of species that nearly took them down, how did they take down an interstellar empire?"
"Oh. Sorry. I meant they nearly took down the stran fleet attacking them at the time, and that stran fleet ended up becoming the dominant force of the next kiter whatever."
"This is... this is a lot to take in. I'm so glad we're not staying in this galaxy."
"What?"
"There's a thing in this facility. The aliens are trying to get it set up to get out of this galaxy and go home. There's no home for me back where I came from, so I was gonna follow them."
"...Huh. Interesting."
Escape. Hadn't even considered that. Figured my life was just gonna be short, painful and pointless again.
...it was a bad idea to tell that to someone with a direct line to the kiter empire in their mind, though. Blocker symbiotes very very important now.
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