“I have seen the stars, and I have seen men die; neither sight moved me.”

“Have you killed men?”

“Yes, not just men; I’ve killed beasts, machines and aliens alike.”

“Why?”

“I had to.”

She frowned, weary of the golden warrior’s unstable mood. “Was this when you saved humanity?”

“Yes”. His perfectly synthesised voice carried the word across the space between them with distinct, metallic alacrity, “but everyone has forgotten that; now I’m merely a demon of the past, a violent pragmatist who has fallen out of favour with his cousins Morality and Truth”.

The Gold One gazed out upon the night sky like a wounded bird; memories of flight seemed to flicker through the silent figure, memories of joy and pain, memories of discovery within the limitless expanse above where the eagle had soared and had hunted.

“I lost her out there, out there in the blackness of elemental loneliness, the silent Devourer we called it. I fought, and we succeeded, but there was a price.” His maudlin brass head turned to face her. “There is always a price. The Devourer demanded its pound of flesh, yet I had none to give, so it took something else instead.” He looked up and swung his head to and fro as if trying to encompass every star shining above them with his tortured gaze.

“It hurts me.”

“I wish I could help”, she replied meekly.

He paused. “What I did, they will never forgive me for. Once they know I’m here, they will come for me. My lost brothers, my vanguard. We fought, and we died in each other’s arms. My own brothers will hunt me down and deliver me again to the Great Devourer. To pay my pound of flesh - the one commodity I can never give. I did it for them, and I did it for everyone, and they will never forgive me.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

The Gold One became statue-like, the soft moonlight solidifying on his armoured form; the brilliant golden efflorescence of his figure had been smothered by night’s cloak and replaced by lunar cement.

“I vanquished innumerable souls. I truncated lives. They couldn’t have known what they were doing, but they still did it. The world eater, the Devourer, they had given it wings!”

She didn’t want to think he was mad, yet sometimes when he talked like this, she was inclined to believe that he might be “What happened?”

“I stopped it. I killed my brothers, and I stopped it.”

“What would have happened had you failed?”

The Gold One grabbed her shoulders in cold, lifeless gauntlets of metal and composite, which felt like the touch of a tombstone upon her flesh. “Death, death and mutation and change and horrible, horrible change for us all. I gazed upon our future, and it was the single most horrifying sight one could ever bear witness to”.

“Why reveal yourself now? They might find you.”

“I realised my sacrifice wasn’t enough. The Devourer may find us again, and we need an Ark.”

The girl looked to the sky and found Cruor just above the horizon. “Chalice?”

“Yes.” He gazed up again. “I have sent a message to the angels of treachery, a message that I am coming.”

___

-Im fucking everywhere, Fred.

Maxwell keyed into the local news service, watching replay after replay of the incident. His shotgun flashed, and the flyer was struck out of the sky like a fragile green pigeon hit by a cannon ball. Again and again, his insides lifted and fell to the ground, satisfaction twisting and heaving in a perpetual wrestling match with its greatest adversary: guilt. The casualties were shown in close-up and gory detail, the woman with shrapnel shredding her leg and the crushed corpses of those hit by the falling flyer. Eyewitnesses bled their emotional accounts to the pin cameras, invariably horrified. Experts called it necessary, heavy-handed, brutal, unforgivable or courageous. Speculation raced in circles, chasing the true nature of the weapon he had used. Was it military? Or custom? Was it legal?

A resounding no for the latter.

Where did it come from? No one could find the model available for sale. There was hours of commentary just on his bloody outfit. Ridiculous and puerile; a costume. No, it had functionality, one observer pointed out. A proximity scan revealed processor components and a great deal of other hardware—definitely armour.

When did I get scanned? He thought.

Fame was blossoming like a bold red rose, growing and flourishing in the light of a thousand cameras and screens. Then it became loud, like an obnoxious toddler cursed with the ability to age nearly instantaneously. His face was becoming ubiquitous, his figure a recognizable symbol. What he would come to represent hadn’t been decided yet. Maxwell had never been more frightened in his life.

-You wanted this, didn't you, Fred?

-You wanted this, Maxwell. Why else would you dress like an antiquated symbol of street justice?

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

-You know damn well.

-Because you couldn't protect your family?

Maxwell felt the jab keenly, and he clenched his teeth.

-You’re a heartless, manipulative psychopath, Fred.

-Amusing, coming from such a curiously damaged individual. I’m not a person, Maxwell; I simply cannot be a psychopath. Unfortunately, you do not have the luxury of the same exemption.

-You’re more than capable of appreciating how fucked up you are. You've got a brain the size of an asteroid.

-Appreciate or care?

-You probably should care.

-That's debatable.

-How long before they connect this to Tanir?

-Not long, I suspect. There will be a means of linking the weapon to his business. Whether he becomes filthy rich or is assassinated in the next day or two remains uncertain.

-What will happen to me?

-That is up to you, as it always has been. However, I anticipate your safety has become a far more fragile commodity.

The news service began displaying images of Tanir, presumed to be the source of the outlawed weapon. Bad luck, Tanir.

-They think I’m your enforcer, Fred, how funny.

-Do you feel honoured?

-Soiled, actually.

-You soiled yourself, Maxwell. However, that stink may yet protect you from an even greater shit-storm.

-So figurative for a metal box. Is that an assurance?

-No, of course not. It may, however make certain individuals hesitate. Certain individuals with power.

-The Angels?

-I’d imagine many more than just that group of ruffians are pondering your demise.

-Thanks for the heads up.

-You’re welcome.

___

“A stranger to history may have predicted that humanity would attain some kind of neat, predictable paradigm of existence. Perhaps the most popular, the old and much loved; earth destroyed by our own self-centred exploitative or violent machinations, or perhaps by a terrible alien menace, with the remains of humanity left to colonise and terraform, or perhaps forever exist as a Diaspora of aging starships? Or perhaps the second most derivative: humanity enslaved by intelligent machines of our own creation?

The first of many issues with these paradigms is that they ignore humanity’s constant drift towards mediocrity, towards equilibrium and balance, towards boring, because life is boring, all it really wants to do is keep living, breathing and reproducing. No nuclear Armageddon. No pollution so severe the earth suffers a stroke and coughs us all into oblivion. Any dooms day prediction you can come up with has a much simpler, less painful solution and bless Occam and his razor because he has saved us more than a few times. Consider the Cold War. Despite the largest arms race earth has seen and all that politicking and spying, it was much easy to engage in a handful of proxy wars to satisfy everyone’s desire to do something than launch the nukes and reduce our precious civilisation to radioactive dust; a world for the cockroaches.

‘But what about the Cuban missile crisis?’ you say. The world’s doomsday clock was a millimetre from striking midnight; we were a hair's breadth away from oblivion. Well, I say to you: that clock doesn't even deserve the name. Who designed it? Some kind of nihilistic scholar with a fetish for practical jokes regarding the fate of humanity? It didn’t even function like a real clock. It flipped about willy nilly and then hunkered down at 11 o'clock for years on end like it was keeping an each-way bet; as if to say “You know it could all end now, and I’d still be right because, you know, I was on 11 o’clock and that's pretty close to midnight…. But if it doesn't all end, I was also right because I didn't strike midnight, so there”. If it was all over, who would be around to change the time to midnight anyway?”

He was ranting again. He went back to the script.

“But back to the Cuban missile crisis, I regard this event as a testament to my point. Just about every last straw you could imagine was drawn, and at each point, at each final threshold, someone made an excuse not to do anything. No fly overs. They flew over. Better not shoot my plane down. They shot the plane down. And that was just at the end of it. Who knows how many other lines in the sand each side would have excused each other from crossing after that?

So, we avoided the obliteration of Earth, but what about AI? The thing about AI is that it’s even more likely to maintain the status quo than we are. Imagine if it had been robots that had evolved on earth instead of us. How boring would history have been without ‘real’ spontaneous emotion? The answer is even more boring than what it is now. Do you remember what happened when real ‘artificial intelligence’ was first created? Sure, there was the usual emotional knee-jerk from some of the population, “kill it!” some said. Most just marvelled briefly at yet another achievement in our technological progress and then went back to working, drinking beer and fiddling with their personal computers. Better yet, Dave, our first AI, fell in love with us as soon as he was switched on. What wonderful people these humans must be who would spend all this time and money creating me. Thus came Dave’s Syndrome. Most artificial intelligences identify as part of the race in which they were made. There are varying degrees of this phenomenon displayed to this day, but most agree it is still the norm.

He eyed Misses Wilde, he had made a bold assumption, and he was anxious he may have overstepped himself.

“Once we had created Dave, and it became possible to make many more Dave’s if we wanted to, it became apparent that we didn't need to. By that stage, we had quantum computing capable of wonders, so why build super-intelligent human-like minds to plot air traffic or organise waste disposal? We had the reasoning, and our algorithms could crunch the numbers. Despite what you may think, there is usually an ideal solution to a mathematical problem, and we have spent quite a bit of time building the tools we need to find it. Arguably, even today, there is no real need for droids, drones and androids, but hey, we did all these other fancy things like invent faster-than-light travel and laser cannons that, at some stage, everyone became so blaze about the issue we were like “why not have super-intelligent robots in our community?”. The irony was that as soon as it was common place, they became people, too. For all intents and purposes, they were super-gifted humans trapped inside metal containers or all shapes and sizes.

So, not robots either, so perhaps other organic life stepped in to clobber us? There is a variety of outcomes: beat them, get beaten, get enslaved, become monsters ourselves, and anything in between. Luckily for us, we just meshed into the galactic community like the boring, do-gooders we fundamentally are.”

Arlo fell to silence. Already, he felt the shame of speaking in such verbose terms, and his cheeks reddened.

“Well done, Arlo, perfectly didactic, full of assumptions and hyperbole. How did it feel?”

“Horrible - it felt wrong to make a speech like that.”

“That was the point, Arlo, to stretch your mind and show you what can be achieved if you disregard objective thought and careful reasoning. This is how a lot of people speak; this is how a lot of politicians speak.”

Noah smirked. “Arlo could be a politician.”

Arlo cringed. He hated politicians.

Misses Wilde looked content. “Well done, Arlo, you captured the brief perfectly. Have a seat.”

Arlo fled the bright young eyes in the room and moved back to his seat near the garden. As he did so, Erica’s gaze slid off him like water from wax. He rejoiced and despaired simultaneously.

“Xavier, your turn. Please come to the front and state your topic.”

Xavier’s slim frame extricated itself from the desk and, after a pause, filled itself with such confidence in a visible shift in character so obvious Misses Wilde raised her eyebrows.

“I will be speaking about ongoing Jar’ron-Human relations. The title of my Unchecked Opinions speech is: Sleeping with a Wolf.”

Arlo leant in.