There’s a story we tell about ourselves, which we call the First Flight.

We know this story isn’t true, in the literal sense. It’s not even clear how close it is, how much truth-value is contained in the story and its ancillaries and the commentaries; the Knowledge Wars, well, the first one took most of our records and by the second one we were left with whatever people had written down on physical media, for the most part. The stories of armies marching on the launch points, of desperate counter-battery fire, of heroic refusals to kill our children as they rose into the sky and of the evils of those who did fire, these are by and large no more true than the stories of our own perfidy; communications crumbling as the skies fell upon the cities of the world, turned not only into kinetic weapons but true city-killers.

What’s left of actual truth is fragmented and contradictory. Stories told to children who told those stories to children in turn, data storage devices left untouched for centuries being found and handed to archivists to find what they could despite the corruption, archeological records stored in someone’s closet that survived not only the Knowledge Wars but also the sins of disagreeing with the oft-repeated tales, and the very occasional manuscript or work-in-progress that existed in physical form. The Speech That Wasn’t is one of those, and it’s typical for the type; maybe it’s a joke, maybe it’s allegory, maybe it’s a speech that Simon never gave, or maybe he did give it, who knows? It was written in one sitting, the experts agree, by someone whose handwriting matches what we have for our first leader; it was written by someone emotionally affected by what he was writing, and someone whose hand shook, but only very slightly.

It doesn’t seem to us to be a particularly good or compelling or moving speech. Is it an early draft? Was the style of speeches so very different in those days? Or is it something we should know about Simon, that despite all of the resources available to him, his speeches were… bad?

We do know this: Earth, the planet that was our home, was dying. We, and by we I mean we humans because there wasn’t any ilk of folk other than that of humans, were killing it. We’d managed to absolutely fuck up by the numbers for almost a hundred years after the Fulcrum Years, and if it was for any one reason, well, it wasn’t for any one reason. Fear, hatred, unwillingness to allow ourselves to hope for a better future, all of these contributed to and underpinned the thoughtless, short-sighted vicious greed and spite that drove it all.

We actually have a pretty good record—two unrelatedly-attested copies of a work of nonfiction, whose author’s works are held to be authoritative and honest, as well as a biography by one of his critics, which is as good as it gets—of what Simon did to try to stop that, though not records of who he was. By the lead-up to First Flight, he was most likely seventy three years of age, and he was rich beyond our capacity to comprehend in a society which was, to all appearances, structured around letting the rich shape the world with impunity. But it turns out that it was more complicated than that; you could use your money, absolutely, but only to do the right things, the proper things.

Buy a city and run it into the ground, using nigh-dictatorial powers to evict the undesirables and hand their homes over to your cronies at a song? Yes, absolutely, this was permitted. Buy a city and build out its public infrastructure to turn it into a genuinely nice place to live? Ah, that’s unfair competition; eminent domain has limits, very serious limits, and for these particular matters you have to use a competitive bidding process that follows the guidelines which guarantee only people in the cabal of insiders will even be eligible to bid, and so on. And these things are not speculation; the evidence is everywhere, in requisition documents and in the concrete details of construction, in a hundred contemporary works and in the recordings of political speeches, legislation, and court actions that survived in private archives.

The Speech is eight double-sided pages long, handwritten in dense script. It’s mostly self-flagellation, on the surface; it’s a litany of his failures, blaming himself for every one of them. But it’s also a declaration of war, war of a particular kind that’s become central to the Fleet’s high-level strategic positioning, and to explain it, I need to go back to the beginning again.

Earth was dying. This wasn’t news; the epochal, millennial year had been the midpoint of the Fulcrum Years, and everyone had known for more than a decade about what the future was going to bring without action. With action determinedly, decisively not taken, things began to get worse, in a slow-motion apocalypse. The sea rose as it warmed and grew more acid; rainfall patterns shifted, leading to drought, flooding, and famine; and the air began to thicken with smoke from the fires of civilization. Previously-stable parts of the world began to spiral into civil war and warlordism, and for those who didn’t, the question arose: how do we stop this?

And of course even those things that we know as best we know, we are not certain of. When they write that the air thickened with smoke from the fires, do they write of fires literal or metaphorical? Sassoon writes that they were metaphorical fires and metaphorical smoke, that they were the fires of anger and the smoke of war. Riva writes that it was a reference to seismic activity, whereas Mijuillo writes that it was the smoke of industry, removing us from nature; and the scholarly consensus is that it was far more literal, the burning of unbelievably vast quantities of oil and coal and wood to the point where the composition of the world’s air was changed. Soil sampling supports this interpretation, but there are competing theories.

Simon tried to change things twice. He went into politics and used his voice the first time, and tried to build and buy enough influence and power to do it from behind the scenes the second time.

The third time, he writes, he decided he would do something different. Voice, loyalty; exit.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Three hundred tons of lift at a time, he started to build something, or rather, to expand something already present. A great demesne in the sky, so high that it was no longer the sky, balanced gracefully between the Earth and the Moon; there were factories there, assemblages of steel, as it was written, though it’s unlikely that most of it was literal steel, great machines that had started being built in his mother’s day. And with these factories they built more factories, and they built homes in the abyss of space, and they began to build a great vessel.

And that demesne grew in people, too, three hundred tons at a time.

Rockets were not, are not a subtle thing. They are a vehicle borne up into the sky on tongues of flame ten meters wide, whose sound alone is a killing stroke a hundred meters from where they stood. And neither was it a subtle thing to carry into space ten people at a time with each launch, ten people whose immensely expensive and limited weight could have been spent on those materials which could only be found on the Earth. But Simon was rich and powerful, and this was the kind of spending that was expected of the rich and powerful; to bring five hundred people in a year from the planet into space was unusual and entertaining to consider, and that they remained was a thing of great spectacle, and then it was forgotten and ignored. They were working, up in their new homes; they were making art, and they were doing science, and they were helping build a future, but nothing they were doing was disruptive to the continued efforts of the few to consolidate ever-more power into their own hands.

These things we know: we know that the rockets flew, and we know when and where, and how many people were upon them, even if we do not know their names. And we know certain milestones of the production of those production facilities in space, and the crater upon the Moon when an asteroid was misaimed and somehow missed entirely, to be caught in a failed orbit, and we know that it was deliberate that it was nowhere near the Earth’s direction, as a safeguard.

And ten years went by, and Simon was no fewer than eighty years of age; his son was with him on the world, and his daughter with her new child was without it.

And the Earth was dying.

The Speech says that it was a long-held truism of the people we once were that in every generation, forces would rise up against us to destroy us. That when things went too well for us, or too badly for others, of greatest importance to the leaders and wielders of power would be that we be brought down; for we were and remain outsiders, and a very convenient scapegoat. Perhaps this is true; we believe it in our bones, even if it escapes our minds, and we live the readiness of those words.

There were ten thousand of Simon’s people in space when the first Worldship became livable and, quietly, without fuss or fanfare, the rockets began to bear first a hundred, then two hundred, and then five hundred people at a time. And there were more of them, and more of them, as though there was a race; as though once notice were taken the timer had begun to count down.

It may very well have been a race. To exit is the greatest condemnation of a system; it says not only that the system cannot be supported, but that it cannot be reformed. To exit on this grand a scope is to say that all those who are not exiting are wrong; that so many people were doing so, that so much in the way of resources was being poured into their departure, is to grant the statement power and meaning. And so it may very well have been a race, but while we have records of the launches and how many people were in each rocket, we have few records that speak to why they accelerated and why they bore so many more passengers.

Those same records give a dust-dry recounting of deaths, if you read closely; five rockets in a thousand in the early years, rising to one rocket in a hundred in the year before The Speech. We believe this to be what that speech refers to as the great pretext; some manner of action being taken on the basis of the losses, of the deaths of those hundreds. But something happened, and every historian and archivist has their own opinion.

What we know is that the records, all of the records, for the month before the speech show that one in three rockets that launched did not arrive.

The Speech speaks of sabotage and, in incandescent tones, of missiles striking down rockets as armies marched and the police deployed. Maintenance records show rushed work and skipped checks, but not enough to account for the losses, and a dozen other sources of possibility present themselves, all disagreeing with each other, many disagreeing with Simon’s speech.

We do not know if the Speech That Wasn’t was ever given, or the document ever disseminated. We do not know if it was ever meant to be given; it could have been an act of rage put to paper and then left as a reminder of his own frailty and what he must not succumb to, as Rachaela writes. The claims by grounder fanatics that we cast the skies down upon the cities have an echo here where the Speech That Wasn’t warns of strikes against power facilities, ports, and critical infrastructure; but we do not know, even if it was given, if the orders were issued, much less obeyed. All of this knowledge was taken from us, burned out by specialized viruses or destroyed by fanatics both within and without. We know that not all of the ongoing recordkeeping was maintained past one particular day, and that many more rockets flew; and we know he did something, because scholars in generations after wrote of the Tenuous Peace and attributed it in part to one speech and to the substantiated threats within it.

And we do know that we reject the spirit and the letter of what Simon wrote, those many, many centuries ago; and if the rockets that flew after that day flew safer because of any of the things he threatened or performed in that letter, we can reject those things and still hold true to those things which are of value. It is one thing to wage war as the Fleet wages war, to surgically remove all of the political leadership which is causing the war to happen; it is wholly another to destroy widely, to use the pretext of defense as a means for communal punishment via collateral damage.

The woman we call Second Sage, under whose guidance we had the first split of the Worldship into the two Worldships of the Fleet, wrote: it is the greatest obligation of the Fleet to leave, when the time comes; this safeguards ourselves, which is a positive fulfillment of the commandment to save a life, and it prevents others from issuing violence, which is a positive fulfillment of the commandment to preserve the soul.

And then she took her first jump, with another navigator whose name is lost to us, from Eridani into Third Haze; and Latja and Tenjin took their second jump, from Eridani into New Newhaven, and the story of the Fleet began as the story of the people we once were ended.