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The Fleet of the Moon's Library
by Joshua Kemp
It was 2023 before we, Humanity, set up a sustainable base on the surface of the moon. When I think of all that we learned from the libraries, it seems insane that it took so long. Once we got up there, once we started roaming around, beyond a few hop skips and jumps, that’s when we found it; The Library.
Whoever built it, if they were still watching, must have figured this seed planet a pretty miserable failure. Here we are more than six thousand years into our race's one big shot for the title, and we’re too busy killing each other to get the big picture. Three years after Moon Base Selene I was established, a walker probing for ice found the first entrance to the library. Within a month of active searching beginning we found a dozen more portals to the library, and the world shattered.
They were easy to backwards engineer, surprisingly so. I don’t think whoever left it there was really giving us the best of their arsenal, or all their top of the line technology. They were probably leaving all the things that they knew a bunch of backwards primitives just starting to colonize the moon would find the most helpful. So what did we start with first? The weapons, of course! In any case, armed with its new cache of toys America won the game. Seen as something of a fading star at that point in history as it wallowed in an on again, off again economic recession that had been more on than off for the past thirty years, America suddenly had everything that nobody else did. Better weapons, faster computers, better medicine, better everything. When everyone around you is using jet propulsion aircraft and you can, from orbit, select six precision targets per second anywhere within the hemisphere that happens to be facing you and burn them down with high powered lasers, another technology the rest of the world hasn’t weaponized yet… Well, I repeat, America won the game. That is how we came to have the United World States. Here’s to the White, Blue and Green, eh?
After we got the weapons down, we started our best and brightest working on the computers. This took a while; simply put we didn’t know how to interface with them. We tried everything we could think of, and who knows how much or what information we lost. We’re fairly certain that everything we destroyed while trying to figure the computers out was backed up in different vaults of the Library, but when it comes to the library, who can really say? All we know is that what we got all fit together, and explained basically every question we had, scientifically speaking. Oh, and this is where we discovered there is no God, evil exists and the end of the world really is coming. We even have a date linked to it. The world is going to end in the year two thousand five hundred, give or take a hundred years or so.
We don’t call it “Satan” or “Evil” anymore; there is no more talk about original sin. Nobody runs around saying mankind is the source of all wickedness. Now all we have is the fleet. You see, whoever created the vaults on the moon wasn’t some sort of benign benefactor helping us achieve our destiny in the stars. No, they were a people at war and we, well, we’re a weapon. The human race is a God damn biological weapon.
They set us up from the beginning, first things first they removed the developing life (goodbye dinosaurs) and then they seeded our planet with a number of pre-engineered, hyper-violent species likely to develop into intelligent life. We came out on top. The next step of their plan was simple, and elegant, give us just enough weaponry to make us a threat and force us to fight for our survival.
The Creators, as we call them now, made us just dangerous enough that their enemies, chasing only a few millennia behind them, couldn’t ignore us. So here we sit, watching the sleek black ships of the Moon’s Fleet as they grow imperceptibly closer each day. Now every year is filled with a frantic interplanetary effort preparing our defenses, hoping against hope that we will somehow be able to defend ourselves, save ourselves. Knowing we cannot. Welcome to the real human Race.
©2010