General Notes Section from the Imperial Stellar Passenger Vessel (ISPV) Rumoth:
I’d like to say that I managed a lot of successful interviews of the humans onboard, but I feel like I came away with more stories of them than I learned about them. I recorded as much as I could and will try to submit all that is reasonable, but I can’t submit everything unfortunately.
Some of it for journalistic reasons, some for matters of simple privacy (something which humans are very keen on).
Passenger 1- Jennifer Tineseldale
Jennifer was near 100 human years old for this trip, making her far older than most of the humans aboard. While this does not appear to give her any sort of matriarchal status, she does appeared to be given deference by what few young ones there are onboard.
Her age being what it is and her mental faculties being apparently intact (she was traveling alone), this made her a prime candidate to discuss the changes from pre-imperial homeworld and the post-imperial now.
I was prepared for her to be combative or even xenophobic, but she was neither of those attitudes. Instead she seemed to be collecting stories of her own and acting as a kind of central repository to all who wishes to speak with her, myself included.
Members of the crew periodically stopped by her, some sitting by her for extended periods of time, which is how I came to notice her.
In that way perhaps, she was a kind of matriarch, but more in an honored sense at her age (humans, even with imperial medicine, rarely exceed 100 human years old, but this is a field of ongoing study which I won’t dive into without a grant from the IMS).
[Interview transcription notes]
(Jennifer speaking)
You’ll have to forgive my use of a translator, I need it because I have only a basic grasp of reading, writing, and speaking Imperial Common [human designator for Imperial Standard Language].
I was celebrating my 33rd birthday when the news of the imperial starship finding us broke. It seemed a shock to us all, finding out there was other life in the universe and finding out that it had found us.
Some believed you all would just kill us or enslave us and steal the resources of our planet. Others predicted a kind of grand uplift. Sadly, a lot more believed the Empire had come to kill or enslave us.
Fear was always a major motivator by the human politicians and leaders at the time, so that’s what they stoked. Even before the Empire showed up, we’d been fighting among ourselves with all manner of weaponry, so when I say there was a build up of weaponry, I want you to understand that this was not the raising of one army, but of hundreds. There was chaos, martial law, the repeal of some of the most basic rights as the planet rushes to be ready to fight the lone imperial vessel, never believing for a second that the Empire might come in peace.
I guess I never really decided whether I thought the Empire was coming in peace or not. I’d grown up reading and watching all kind of different dreams of humanity going into space and meeting other beings, some peaceful, some warlike, some indifferent, some beneficial, some deadly.
When the ship actually arrived [journalist note – ISEV Bilix-7] and settled into our orbit at one of the LaGrange points [believe this to be a Tumin orbital point] and sat there watching us for almost 2 weeks before moving closer.
Rumor had it that the militaries had been trying to figure out how to hit the ship sitting so far away, since almost everything they had was oriented towards hitting another country on the same planet.
I still remember my first glimpse of it and I still remember the vague feelings of hope and dread that I got just looking at it.
Once it got closer and even got into our atmosphere, I think it was… uh, the name of what that region currently is escapes me, but it used to be called Kazakstan. I only remember it because all of the news teams reported on it constantly the near instant the missile went up. Kazakstan was the first one to launch against the ‘evil invaders’, despite no obvious sign from the ship that was just hanging in the sky.
Imperial history probably recorded better what happened, but basically, nothing happened. The missile hit the shield [navigational hazard shield, not the war-shield] and did nothing. We weren’t even sure what had happened.
But with the first missile sent, others followed it. As the ship drifted across different countries and territories, missiles were fired.
I honestly don’t think the imperial personnel onboard even noticed.
At the same time though, there were plenty of folks trying to contact them. Lasers, radio signs, massive light shows, everything we could imagine as using for communications.
The silence was almost maddening and the politicians used it against you. After all, if you had come peacefully, you would have announced yourselves and all that nonsense. Never mind that the Empire was still working out how to even talk to us at that point, given that we have so many languages that even a simple translator wouldn’t have done the job.
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Some people even claimed to have been abducted and got temporarily famous spreading their stories. It was all lies we know now, but there’s always somebody who wants to believe.
When the first imperial signal went out announcing who you were and your intentions (exploration, uplift to the stars, mutual coexistence), the fear that was stoked turned into a boiling point.
One of the more famous religious figures of my people preached peaceful coexistence and for that, he was a made a martyr. The imperial signal was met with the same fervor that by sending that message, you clearly wanted to exterminate us.
I see you laughing a bit at this juxtaposition, but it’s true. Humans will often say one thing and mean the complete opposite.
In my younger years, we had a saying – every claim is a confession. We used to say that of many a politician, who often accused their opponents of doing some particular abhorrence, only for the world to find out some time later that that same politician was actually the one committing said abhorrence, making the claim to either dilute their guilt as a kind of ‘everyone does it, so it isn’t as bad’ or as a kind of ‘if I’m doing this, so too must they be doing it or how else would they be a rival’.
It was much the same here. The leaders of the world refused to work together, still fighting each other as much as they were preparing to fight the evil exterminators from beyond the solar system.
It was about then that the first nuclear weapons were launched. [Journalist note – nuclear weapons in this context refer to elemental fission weapons, using mid-level heavy elements being split to produce energetic release, radiation, and a stellar fusion like explosion. These types of weapons are banned under the 351st Imperial decree.]
And still no damage.
And when an actual warship arrived and the first vessel left, we were terrified. Terrified of what perhaps we had actually set into motion. Even with there being no damage and no signs that any being had been hurt except ourselves, we were collectively sure it was the end.
I remember taking the opportunity to simply indulge in all kinds of vices. Food, drinks, drugs, sex. Everything. It hardly seemed to matter in the context of being destroyed, whether by the nuclear fallout or a military under the martial laws at the time or even by someone who simply broke under the stress and started killing everyone they saw, even their close friends and family. I’d stopped going to work. It didn’t seem worthwhile if we were all going to be exterminated and when the warship arrived in orbit [ISNV Hutix-4, Imperial Corvette Grade 23a], I really figured it was over.
(light laughter) If I’d actually known I’d live this long, I might have taken better care of myself then.
Either way, we suffered through the war, if we want to even call it that. And the invasion.
I still remember the military coming through, running from the Centurions. It was one of the few times at that point which I was sober and dressed. I’d come out of the house, seeing the mass of military vessels driving madly in one direction, followed by police forces and even the local militia. It was crazy to watch. And then a small troop carrier of Centurions drove though.
I didn’t know what the imperials looked like, so I wanted to see. Didn’t seem like it’d do me any more harm than kill me and if all the stories were true, that was going to happen anyway.
The troop carrier stopped in the center of my neighborhood and the Centurions got out. I knew what power armor looked like from all those stories, so I didn’t think anything of it. Not really.
It was maybe a bit scary, but at the same time, I probably still had some level of intoxication or I’d have never been that calm.
Centurion Grade 2a Wynick. I remember that name. He looked me up and down from inside his armor, told me to go home and to stay safe, the area was under imperial control until further notice, and to avoid taking hostile actions against imperial authorities. [Note – research indicates that Centurion Grade 2a Wynick – later Centurion Captain Wynick – is from Remisith and would be more correctly designated as ‘they’ or ‘she’ by human linguistic standards. No correction was made by this journalist to Jennifer.]
Even though he was standing at nearly double my height in that power armor, I just stood there in awe at seeing my first imperial. It seemed almost ridiculous. But it was also so… alien.
I must have wanted to ask a million things, everything from homeworlds to the breadth of the empire to how the technology of the power armor worked. But I just was there, dumbfounded.
With a little coaxing from some of my, uh, compatriots, I eventually went back inside. And there was something so surreal about it all that all the food and drugs and sex just wasn’t interesting anymore.
We all just sat there in a kind of pseudo silence, the television [colloquial name of broadcast visual screens] randomly flipping between channels, most showing the same news and propaganda that we’d come to expect. ‘Don’t cooperate. Fight back. They’ve come to exterminate us.’ That sort of message.
About a month later, I was working for the local imperial clinic. I didn’t have much in the way of medical training, but they needed the hands and I was able and willing and it got me fed. And while there were a lot of folks who called me a traitor for joining up, a lot of them ended up doing the same as their supplies ran out and they too needed food.
They still protested and wanted to fight back, steal the technology, reverse engineer it and overthrow the ‘unjust’ Empire for all their meddling, but that was mostly talk.
The popular sentiments of human exceptionalism seemed to die in those years, believed only by those who still rebelled and would fight anyone and anything that got in their way.
My area, we just adapted. We were a small corner of the bigger world and served as little more than a passing through point. ‘Fly-over country’ is what we used to be called, because the politicians and wealthy folks didn’t live in our area, just flew over it.
It mattered who was in charge, but given the last while of martial law and human rights issues and even the bit before the Empire showed up, I’d actually been hoping for someone from the stars to set us right.
Do I think the Empire has done good by that? Probably not, but they’ve given me chances that I’d’ve never had otherwise. Just sitting here on this spaceship. I’d have never been able to do such a thing.
But I will warn you. Not all the humans on this cruise are friendly. There’s still a lot of generational dislike for the empire. A lot of that propaganda took root in enough people that there’s still a lot of people who think with the right time and energy and ‘theft of technology’ that we can take back our homeworld from the empire and make humans the most important ones.
It saddens me every time I hear someone say such a thing, but I have made every one of them who declares such things in my presence sit down and shut up. I’ve lived their human exceptionalism. It isn’t worth it, if you ask me. Reminds me a bit too much of the old nation-states and the endless military rattling that used to happen.
I’ve had more than a few threaten me, but I’m always keen to point out at this point how powerful they must be, being able to threaten to beat up or kill an old woman. A few of the drunker ones have still tried it, but it usually results in them being thrown on their mule [error – possible mistranslation] by more capable beings.
I’ll admit to being a product of my times and I’ll never get the hang of speaking proper Imperial Common. I’ve probably insulted you about a dozen times already without realizing it. So I want you to understand that I don’t mean to insult you and that I’m still learning, despite the pre-empire world I was brought up in. And I’d like to think that intent and taking the opportunity to grow means more than what my little words convey.
Please stop by again. I’d love to hear about your homeworld and some of your experiences. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of stories to tell and I’m always glad to have a laugh, especially at my age.
[End interview notes]
I did circle back with Jennifer several times over the course of the journey. Her stories of the human world, pre-imperial age, and even some of the fantastical stories of far flung human futures, to the best of her recall, seem almost hilarious, but are also a mix of hopeful and depressing.
It is hard to say whether I shall ever meet another human like Jennifer, but I have added a data watcher for information regarding her. Given her advanced age, it is unlikely we will meet again without special attention being paid and at a minimum, I would like to provide an appropriate honorarium when she does expire.
Additional notes to be logged in separate pages. I got a lot of interview notes and sorting them is taking some time.