from whence they came

I'm still reeling, navigating my ship through the first disparate patches of the Inactive Zone. More out of habit than anything else, as Bezerk has already activated the shields that would stop total shut down. It's been five thousand years since I visited Earth, and at least two thousand since I've touched another Earth-based sentience. But as a species we've barely touched the galactic firmament for at least ten thousand.

After our vicious expansion into the galaxy, powered by primitive fusion tech counterbalanced with an unnerving willingness to die for just about anything, we turned our galactic arm into a relative no-go zone. The local civilisations were left to fall under our heel or be ground to dust. I knew the atrocities we committed, I was a frontline mercenary. After thousands of battles and at least one galactic cycle, I was human only in memory, mostly shifting from one piece of battle hardware to the other. I didn't care though, whether it was engineered or learned, I liked being told what to shoot, then shooting it, no matter what I was riding in.

It wasn't until I was stranded on a disputed system's jovian that I got a little perspective. My thought processors were ejected after the ship I was manifesting got trapped in a gravity well. My subroutines figured it was better to be shot into space as a memory core then sucked into a sun with my hardware. I landed on a small planet, filled with simple, gaseous creatures. I spent over three thousand years observing them with my rudimentary sensors. Watching them go from basic communities, to an organised technical culture. They actually reminded me a lot of my early terrestrial days. They got high on their planet's substrata, fought each other for the best patches of methane, and slowly learnt to want more than they had. They stumbled upon me in their proto-science phase, and were able to establish a direct connection. In return for access to their sensor network I acted as a sort of rudimentary bureaucracy. Managing their data, organising their resources. I could have become a tyrant, but I wasn't interested, I was just traded some processing power for a better lifestyle. As they developed, I watched them become more warlike, their powers making them more destructive, more combative, until they clashed with a neighbouring system, and were wiped out.

I'd been nudging their development to space flight, and drew what little resource available to build and inhabit a ship, and flew out of there. About 30 years later, a phase shifted blip told me that the planet I'd called home for the past few thousand years had been destroyed.

In an act of symmetry, when I arrived at the nearest sign of civilization, and registered as a non affiliated sentient, I discovered that Earth's galaxy spanning empire had been ground to dust in turn, relegated to history in the same way the savages of Earth's terrestrial past were. Remembered, studied, but abstract, almost mythical.

There were very few Earth based sentients around, and while I've run into a few of them, we never stick together long. We probably don't want to be reminded of the atrocities we committed in the name of our furious growth.

So I'm left floating through a part of space that couldn't have even been conceived of in the history of Earth, an entity almost older than human civilisation itself, left wondering, what could humanity have to do with all of this? Improbability and cultural extinction aside, I must admit, it definitely has a human flair to it.