Interview Subject: Anonymous A

I want to make something extremely clear: I was never involved in any political decision-making whatsoever. My job was to help coordinate the Federal Palace’s cleaning drones. To use a really ancient word for the job, I was a janitor.

That said, I was cynical and curious enough to use my position to monitor what was going on; in the United Democratic Angurosena Federation, you had to watch your back like that.

Well of course it wasn’t actually a democracy. Wasn’t particularly united either. That said, Angurosena was accurate, since it incorporated the systems An, Gu, Ro, Se, and Na.

Right, sorry, I’m getting off track; you wanted to know how the war started. As far as I can tell, it was High King of An, Alden Gratz’s idea. I never had clearance to get anywhere near his kilometer-wide brain, but I was watching through a robot vacuum cleaner during a meeting where his puppet body was present.

So yeah, there was Alden Gratz sitting around a table with the four other kings. They went through the regular formalities like they always did, then King Ridee of Se brought up the first point of any actual importance. Something about the lower nobility agitating for additional privileges and tax cuts.

The kings of Gu, Ro, and Na agreed that this was definitely a problem they were starting to have, and then the talk turned to possible solutions; there was no way the greedy fucks would give up any of their power or tax income, so they got to scheming.

One of the first things they brought up was setting the commoners and nobility against each other, but that was pretty quickly shot down. Someone pointed out that getting the commoners questioning the right of the nobility to rule could easily result in them turning against the royalty in fairly short order.

Another idea that got brought up was to simply arrest the ringleaders, but that ran into the problem of most of the military being controlled by the various nobles, instead of the crowns. Alden ran the numbers about the likely results of such a course of action, and ruled that the risk of a civil war was simply far too high to countenance. So that was a no-go.

After a few kiloseconds of mulling the problem over, Ovan (king of Na) suggested that perhaps a war could solve their problems. Everyone agreed that it stood a good chance of working; needing to pay for a war would justify increased taxation, and any nobles that didn’t get with the program could be easily painted as traitors. Now it was just a question of which country to go to war with, and how to propagandize it.

I’m not quite sure what they did exactly, but Alden got a report from somewhere that said Nastellan was the weakest serious country in the vicinity, and the UDAF could fully conquer the place in less than a Megasecond. Never mind that they kept showing us up in international events, and that there were plenty of smaller countries around to bully.

Yeah, that really didn’t go the way they expected it. I think they got blinded by the possible glory, and didn’t properly gauge the risk.

No, I don’t know what agency they got the report from; I’m a janitor. I was never cleared to know such things, and nasty fates tended to befall people who got too nosy. So I avoided dealing with spy shit as much as possible.

Fortune-Tellers, PASTMAIL? First I’ve heard of-

Oh, OH. I wasn’t taught anything to do with relativity in school, so the thought of using time travel to get information from the future never actually occurred to me. That said, I really don’t think it worked in this particular case.

Either way, the five kings trusted that report enough to bet their thrones on it. So they started planning out the invasion of Nastellan. Even without any military training, I noticed some really glaring issues with their invasion plans. Possibly the biggest mistake they made was believing all the reports saying their military was at full fighting capacity.

Well yeah, anyone who actually worked on the “ground level” knew the military was massively corrupt and dysfunctional. But it was one massive hierarchy of lying to your boss and him lying to his boss, so that the reports the people on top got had basically no connection to reality.

Didn’t help that anyone actually competent could expect to be constantly sabotaged and dragged down to the same level as everyone else.

Look, in an organization where everyone is corrupt and just trying to get by, competent idealists are a threat. People have a good – or at least stable – thing going, and a well-meaning dolt going around actually doing their job competently makes everyone else look bad. That’s a really bad position to be in, so various nastiness tends to befall would-be reformers.

And now you know why I’m a janitor: no-one is going to get me sacked or disappeared for simply doing my job, because no-one wants to work in a building full of disgusting messes.

Interview Subject: Anonymous B

Yes, I used to work as a propaganda editor, curating the best material that the generative algorithms spat out. I wasn’t explicitly told to start making propaganda to get people ready for war, but it was pretty obvious what was going on.

Look, when you start demonizing a neighboring country at every turn, it’s a pretty massive signal that the higher-ups intend to attack them in the near future.

Particularly obvious was when we started getting told to badmouth Nastellan for building up their military. Like seriously, we’d spent the last year getting the citizenry hyped up about made-up ancestral claims and imagined oppression we could “liberate” them from. Of course Nastellan was going to start arming themselves more heavily. They’d have been fools not to.

PASTMAIL? Yeah I suppose that also accounts for their arming up. If your probing of probable futures includes more and more futures where you end up at war, it makes sense to build up your military.

Anyway, that smear campaign kept going for a good two years before the war started. Er, the customary fifty Megasecond year, I guess? Yeah, I should have specified whose year I was talking about, sorry. And yes, I meant two years after Nastellan started their buildup.

There was plenty more nonsense I had to get ready for distribution before the war started, with my personal favorite being the one about the Nasties spending all their time drugged so they didn’t have to deal with the reality of their living situation. Even aside from being blatantly and factually wrong, being high all the time isn’t conducive to keeping a full-fledged stellar enclosure in good condition.

But yeah, I kept working in propaganda for the entire war, and it was a complete mess. Sure the first couple Megaseconds were basically fine, and we even got some flashy stuff from that massive explosion during the initial offensives.

But once the momentum reversed? Yeah the job got really, really tense. Having to spin our logistics getting completely interdicted as a good thing lead to one of my coworkers drinking herself to death half a dozen times. There was also all the junk we were being ordered to spread about countries supporting Nastellan forcing themselves into economic ruination; not only was the UDAF economy a fraction of Nastellan’s, we didn’t even export all that much!

Then Ro got invaded, the royalty kind of went insane, there were riots everywhere we had to paint as completely unjustified, and then fucking Jaxiana – the country we should have invaded to begin with – jumped into the war as an opportunistic landgrab!

No, I don’t mean that the war would have been justified if we’d attacked Jaxiana. What I meant is that Jaxiana was our weakest and least-developed neighbor, so we’d have actually stood a reasonable chance of victory if we played our cards right.

Yes, invading Jaxiana would have been a moral and ethical disaster too. Seriously, are you trying to make me look bad? I agreed to this interview to share my side of the story, not to… oh forget it, we’re getting off track.

Anyway, getting invaded by Jaxiana was about the point where I went “fuck it”, rounded up my family, and we all snuck out of the country on a hastily remodeled freight Skimmer full of other refugees. Took a while to reach someplace neutral, but it was safe, and that’s what we needed.

Look, I knew an interstellar trip by Skimmer was going to take years when I got on. Years of boredom crammed into a slower-than-light warpship was far preferable to the vast array of unpleasant things that could have happened to my family if we’d stuck around.

I wasn’t really afraid of getting persecuted by Nastellan, no. I knew the propaganda we’d been spewing about them was a total fabrication. I was vastly more worried about becoming collateral damage when our hab got invaded, or some local deranged maniac getting us caught up in a terrorist plot. Seriously, after the garrison forces were deployed to fight Nastellan, things got really fucking bad.

Yeah, the UDAF’s social order was almost entirely held together by fear of state violence. Take the people who’d be doing that away, and suddenly you have millions of opportunistic warlords crawling out of the woodwork. There was absolutely no way I was going to stick around for that.

Anyway, after reaching someplace that would accept our asylum claims, I briefly considered becoming a creative of some description to make ends meet. I tried it for a bit, but it reminded me too much of my old job. So I got certified for some technical skills and went into manufacturing. Good, honest work that has absolutely nothing to do with writing or editing or anything like that.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Anyway, I’ve said my piece. Go away.

Interview Subject: Anonymous C

Probably the worst mistake of my life was joining the UDAF army. I thought I would be fighting for justice, you know? Yeah, that’s not what happened.

I got through training, and then the next thing I knew I’d been stuffed in a warmorph, jammed next to thousands of other soldiers in a dark and cramped landing ship. Yeah, one of the flat disc-shaped ones that get stacked up like coins.

We had absolutely no idea what was going on outside, no-one was telling us anything, and given the acceleration forces we were constantly being subjected to, it seemed pretty clear our carrier was actively doing evasive maneuvers. Either that or they were just driving like a maniac for the hell of it.

Yeah, it only took a few kiloseconds for the bullying to start. Now, you’d think that would have gone really badly given how heavily armed everyone was, but all the enlisted soldiers were locked out of their weapons until we landed. Meanwhile the officers could open fire at will.

So yeah, everyone was getting bossed around to amuse the gits in charge, we were all scared and ignorant about what was going on, and it was generally a really bad time. Suffered through that for about a Megasecond.

Then we got exploded. Like half the troops in our lander died instantly, and I got a front-row seat of the vacuum as I tumbled out into space. The front half of the carrier had been blasted off, the warp drive was totally trashed, and wrecked landing ships were going every which way.

I think that me was probably captured by Nastellan eventually, but I must have gotten out of signal range for my selfstream, because the next thing I knew I was in another landing ship in basically the same situation as before. They didn’t even put me with the same people as before! Got exploded by Nastellan again, obviously. Though I must have died instantly that time.

I must have been put through that cycle of getting stuffed in landing ships with no explanation of what was going on fifteen or so times? I wasn’t keeping track particularly well. Only actually landed on a habitat all of once, and got blasted by artillery within seconds of the ramp opening. Er, no, it was a surface-to-surface missile, not ship-to-ship artillery. Yeah those guys were really dug in.

It gets even worse, by the way! Eventually I got resleeved onto a habitat, and then someone actually told me what was going on. Nastellan was counter-invading, and I was defending a habitat in Ro! So I went out and did what I thought was my duty – only to get separated from my unit and end up behind enemy lines by accident.

Yeah, my worldview took a massive hit when I saw that Nastellan had deployed actual aid workers to help the civilians in the regions they already controlled. Heck, aside from all the battle damage, the standard of living here was objectively better than what UDAF civilians normally had to put up with.

I’d been told all sorts of things about Nastellan treating people like livestock and being hateful for hate’s sake, and this pretty well contradicted all of that.

Yeah, the Stellars found me pretty damn quick; wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if they’d had that drone tracking me since I got separated from my unit. Still, I eventually saw it pointing a laser at me, so I threw down my weapons and surrendered.

Then the fucking assholes I’d signed up with remotely set off my morph’s scuttling charges! I didn’t even know my morph had a self-destruct! And I found myself back on the front lines, being forced to fight Nastellan again!

I must have died another twenty times before I finally managed to defuse the bombs in my latest morph and escape. Snuck over to Nastellan’s zone of control, surrendered, and sat out the rest of the war in a POW virtuality.

They actually treated me really well there; even aside from basically uncensored mail to my family, the simulated living space was luxurious, and they even got me in contact with a therapist.

Not ashamed to admit that I had a lot to unpack with him. I’d been through a lot of shit during my stint with the army, and it had left me a complete wreck. Not to mention the Gigaseconds of propaganda I’d been stewing in for my entire life. I… it took a long time to come to terms with just how much better the Stellars had it than us.

Well yeah, there were books to read and documentaries to watch, but for a long time I thought they were just propaganda, right? Everyone tries to make themselves look good. What really broke my skepticism there was looking into Nastellan’s assorted high-level political scandals.

It’s just… if this place ran anywhere near how the UDAF did, there’s no way such a damning indictment of a setting Executive Council member would have been publicized. Especially not with an election for her seat in the nearish future. But every Stellar I talked to about it didn’t see anything weird about it?

Yeah I worded that badly. They didn’t see anything weird about the coverage of the scandal, but they were all various degrees of pissed about what that lady had gotten up to.

Anyway, I actually filed immigration paperwork for Nastellan during my time as a POW. It eventually got approved, and I went to school for some new skills. Found I rather enjoyed learning about history, one thing lead to another, and now I’m a teacher.

Yeah, quite the life story. And no, I never did get around to meeting up with the other instances of myself that Nastellan captured.

Interview Subject: Anonymous D

Yes, I used to work security. Yes, I worked security at the Federal Palace. No, I wasn’t a decision-maker. I spent my days loaded into a room-sized brain monitoring thousands of surveillance devices, so that if any intruders infiltrated the palace, they could be quickly disposed of.

My life honestly didn’t change all that much during the war; one thing about my position is that as long as I was loyal and competent, job security was effectively guaranteed. The only real change was a distinct uptick in various intruders after the war started.

I must have disposed of fifty different saboteurs and assassins, never mind hundreds of spies.

Interestingly, most of the assassins originated from UDAF-native extremist groups, while most of the spies were from Nastellan. I suppose they simply didn’t see any particular use in killing Alden Gratz.

No, I didn’t really bother keeping track of which extremist groups sent which assassins. I just detected them, reported them to the grab teams, and kicked intelligence-gathering up the chain of command.

Being blunt, I didn’t particularly like my employer – but it was a steady job and kept me out of trouble, so I did it to the best of my ability. Being boring and reliable was safe, in a way that being a big decision maker simply wasn’t. Lots of people would have actually killed for a position so isolated from political scheming.

I actually didn’t know about Alden Gratz sneaking out of the palace until after the fact. He must have compressed himself immensely to fit in a standard brain, but he must have viewed the sacrifice as worth it. Considering what happened shortly afterwards, I’m really not surprised he opted to escape.

Regardless of what happened next, that pretty well torpedoed my job security. I did my thinking really fast, determined I would be completely garbled if I stuck around, and sold out to the next Nastellan spy I could find in exchange for being smuggled out of the country.

Now that was scary. I basically had to compress myself to a hundredth of my normal file size just to fit during the exfiltration. Even then, it took nearly a Megasecond of evading security forces and sneaking around before finally getting off the capitol habitat. From there sneaking out of the star system was rather straightforward, though we weren’t home clear until we met up with one of Nastellan’s cruisers in interstellar space. From there it was as simple as mindcasting myself through a communications wormhole.

At present, I’m actually a chef; I run my own little restaurant serving assorted fried foods, people like what I make, and it pays my bills. I don’t have any employees or partners, though I do make use of a few drones; the establishment is purely mine.

You want to try my fried fish? Sure, but I’m not offering any discounts.

Interview Subject: Anonymous E

For the record, the fact that anyone found me is extremely distressing. I did my level best to cut myself off from my old life for my own safety, and here you are. Still, better you than goons from the royalists, or someone from Nastellan’s intelligence services.

Fine, I’ll give you that interview. Then I’m joining an expedition to another galaxy, one of the ones that doesn’t bring any way to communicate with the Milky Way, and has no intention of ever coming back. The further away, the better.

Anyway, the interview.

I used to work in the Fortune-Teller program, the UDAF’s extremely classified retrocaster array.

Yeah, that’s how intelligence agencies can get reports from probable futures.

I can see why you’d compare it to Nastellan’s PASTMAIL program, but that’s a very misleading comparison to make. Even aside from being officially acknowledged by Nastellan’s government, PASTMAIL actually works.

It wasn’t a problem with the design of the time machines; if it were properly maintained and operated, each Fortune-Teller setup would have been an extremely reliable source of probable future information. It’s just that upwards of ninety percent of the maintenance and operations budget was being stolen by the Elector-Prince heading the whole operation.

Ah, you want to know more about the technical side of how it worked? Alright, I’ll start with Fortune-Teller, since it’s far more intuitive than PASTMAIL.

So, start with a time dilated communications wormhole; keep the ends far enough away that the thing doesn’t violate causality. Now set up a second one dilated in the opposite direction; you want both “present” wormhole mouths on one end, the “past” wormhole mouth on the other end, and the “future” wormhole mouth somewhere between the “present” mouths and the midpoint of the line.

Now, load another mouth of a third communications wormhole into a superluminal catapult at the “present” end, and shoot it to the “past” end. The shot violates causality as it passes the “future” bump, gets dropped into a branch timeline, and pops out at the “past” end there. Now you can badger your probable future selves for information, with as much differential as the time dilation on the first communications wormhole.

Now, you may have noticed the glaring issue that every single shot needs a new communications wormhole, and those are very expensive. Given that both classes of retrocaster are inherently statistical due to the way timeline branching works, this is actually a major issue. A major issue that PASTMAIL doesn’t have, on account of working in a slightly different – and highly counter-intuitive – way.

Like before, you start with a time dilated communications wormhole. But this time you only need one, and you put the superluminal catapult at the “past” end. Now you set an absolutely ironclad schedule, and fire message capsules full of useful information to the “future” end without even the slightest deviation or interruption in that schedule for any reason.

Basically, you’re sending useful information to the past so reliably that your most probable future selves are also doing that. That lets you get around the decreasing worldline amplitude that normally makes the probability of receiving time travelers from the future negligibly small. So as long as you keep that schedule up and running with absolute reliability, you get a constant stream of intelligence from probable futures.

Well yeah, of course maintaining the schedule to that level of adherence is extremely difficult; that’s the entire reason Fortune-Teller works like it does, instead of working like PASTMAIL. But if you can get it working, a PASTMAIL-type retrocaster is a lot cheaper to run, letting you get much better statistical bandwidth.

Technical details aside, we had all of one actually working Fortune-Teller unit to trot out for inspections, and its main actual usage was alerting us to inspections. Aside from that, no-one wanted to be the bearer of bad news, and our boss was dealing us in on the corruption. So every last report from the Fortune-Teller program for the last Gigasecond was forged.

Well of course that was garbage intelligence! But we’d have been executed for treason if we admitted what was going on, even if the admission was to avoid a massive disaster.

The instant we learned that we were actually at war with Nastellan, we promptly fired up the Fortune-Teller unit to figure out just how screwed we were. The answer turned out to be “very”, and I still remember the desperate look on my commanding officer’s face at that particular revelation.

Anyway, that’s why the entire department quietly snuck out of UDAF space before the initial offensive went to shit. It was pretty easy, honestly. Given the high power requirements of a superluminal catapult and the sheer distance between ends needed to get useful predictions, retrocasters are typically built into a set of Voidskippers. So it was pretty straightforward to ditch the communications wormholes, move a thousand light years away from home, and gradually disseminate ourselves across hundreds of star systems.

I suppose I am a coward, for not sticking around and trying to prevent an utterly disastrous war for all parties involved. Counterpoint: I’m still alive, and I definitely wouldn’t be if I’d stepped up like you think I should have. Wouldn’t have prevented the war either.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start planning for a trip.