Memory Transcription Subject: Ensign Sifal, Arxur Dominion Fleet

Date [standardized human time]: October 18, 2136

David had lost his mind completely. The stress of losing his hometown must have finally caused him to crack, and the flammable industrial solvent he’d been sipping at had corroded the fissures smooth.

“Destroy Betterment?” I said, incredulously. It was blasphemy and treason to even think these as thoughts, let alone discuss them aloud, but I was so fucking far beyond caring at this point. “How the fuck am I supposed to destroy Betterment? They’re a monolith of power that’s loomed large over the galaxy for centuries. You may as well ask me to eat a planet.”

"One bite at a time," said David, matter-of-factly. I tried to calm down and let him say his piece. “Let me start by trying to tell you what I know about authoritarianism.” He paused, and drummed his tiny flat claws on the table. “Alright, to reference our own history, your Betterment reminds me a lot of Nazi Germany from back during the Second World War.”

I nodded. Made sense so far. “Betterment was founded during our Fourth World War,” I offered helpfully.

“It’s not a contest,” David said in the slightly hurt tones of someone who’d just lost a contest. “Besides, we had such a long gap between global conflicts after the invention of fission bombs that we stopped calling them World Wars. Nobody likes a distant sequel to an old franchise.”

I perked up in the middle of that. We’d obviously managed to pilfer everything from the Federation public archives over the years, but on the subject of humans, they'd only had a few short things to say, and David had just mentioned one of them. “Sorry, what was that about the fission bombs? Everyone said you guys nuked yourselves to death.”

David winced. “No, we didn’t, because we’re only occasionally suicidally stupid. We had this concept called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Basically, this all happened at a very specific tech level. We had fission bombs strapped to long-range missiles, but nobody had invented missile defenses yet. Several major countries had the power to kill everyone else at the push of a button, but here’s the thing.” He leaned forward and pantomimed surface-to-surface missile trajectories with his hands. “For anyone who pulled the trigger, their enemies would see the missiles inbound and get a retaliatory strike airborne before the first salvo landed. So nobody wanted to start that fight, since they knew they’d die from it, too.” He shook his head. “That’s why we called you guys when the Feds were on the way, to let you know their fleets weren’t defending their homeworlds anymore. Same principle. They could have just pulled back and defended their homes, but they didn’t. We didn’t think they’d be stupid or hateful enough to sacrifice their own homes just to burn ours.”

An hour ago, I would have chalked that up to prey animals being too skittish to make sensible decisions. I had a far more specific critique for them now. “They don’t use empathy in combat,” I pointed out.

David sighed. “Yeah. Or at all, in this case. Every action we’ve taken has been consistent with our stated goals of peaceful coexistence. They had every opportunity to model our behavior and guess what we were planning. If they’d bothered to get a read on us, they’d have realized they had no need to attack in the first place.” He shook his head. “It’s good that you spotted that, but we’re getting off-topic.”

I quietly beamed at the praise. “Alright, you mentioned Nazi Germany?” I asked. “I saw a regular Germany on the map. Are they related?”

“Kinda,” said David. “It was a new style of government that was running Germany for a few decades. New at the time, I should say. About two hundred years ago at this point.” He gestured towards me. “Same basic ideas as Betterment: certain races are better than others, serve the state without question, keep the war machine alive for the sake of their glorious visionary leader, who gets to wield absolute power. Not sure how you feel about that? Too bad. No asking questions. Asking questions gets you a visit from the secret police.”

I can ask questions, though, right? “What about cruelty?” I asked. “That’s a huge part of Betterment’s ideology.”

David shrugged. “Implicitly, not explicitly, but yeah, cruelty was definitely on the menu. The Nazis’ policy of racism went hand in hand with what I said earlier: ‘those guys over there aren’t really people, so we can do whatever we want to them’. Cruelty towards perceived lessers became performative. It was a demonstration of your loyalty to the ruling party’s ideology.”

That sounded like it more or less ticked all the boxes. “Then what happened to them?” I asked. “You said it only lasted a few decades. Why aren’t they running the world?”

“Because authoritarianism of any stripe is a doomed, self-defeating ideology,” said David, the fire creeping back into his voice. “It can’t be sustained, and a free society will always outperform it.”

My knee-jerk reaction was to get defensive about these insults levied against my government and culture, in spite of my newfound desire to oppose them both. It was a ridiculous feeling to have. A bit like feeling hurt because your friend got to have more World Wars than you. “That can’t be right,” I said. “Authoritarianism, as you call it, offers clarity of purpose. The ruler gives an order, and the order is followed. Have you ever monitored Federation comms during an Arxur raid? I have. Half the time, they’re still debating whether or not to dispatch a defensive fleet while the cattle ships are already full and taking off.” I powered through the guilt and shame just this once. I was an engineer. We weren't discussing atrocities, we were discussing performance metrics. “Where’s the efficiency gain you’re claiming comes from a free society?”

David took a deep breath, choosing his next words carefully while I studied his face. He’d worn a dull and dazed expression when we’d first walked into his lair. Even now, he kept his face still and guarded, but there was an odd spark in his dark eyes that he couldn’t hide, and it didn’t seem like it was just idealistic fervor. What was that? “With authoritarianism,” David said at last, “what little efficiency is gained through decisive action, you lose a dozen times over because the people can’t ask questions.”

Alright, that was a well-structured premise, at least. “Explain how,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the chef.

He adjusted his hololenses, and I lost track of his eyes for a moment. “As a military example, the Charge of the Light Brigade comes to mind. Nearly three centuries ago, before aircraft or wireless comms. A British commander, a member of the aristocracy, was standing on a hill, looking down at enemy defensive positions in a valley below.” Semantically, ‘Aristocracy’ translated quite remarkably well as ‘member of the hereditary elite’, which was not a foreign concept to me. “He spotted a weak point, and ordered his men in the valley to attack the nearby gun emplacements. Then he went to lunch.” There was a twinge of disgust on David’s face. “The problem was, the troops down in the valley, the Light Brigade, could only see one gun emplacement from their lower vantage point, and it wasn’t the weak one. But you don’t question the aristocracy, though, and you certainly don’t bother them while they’re eating, so the troops just followed their orders as best as they could.” David sighed. “Most of them died. The end.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“That’s very tragic,” I said slowly, “but I don’t see the relevance. We haven’t had an issue like that in two centuries.”

“You haven’t varied your tactics in two centuries,” David lobbed back immediately. I did a double-take. Where were those reflexes earlier, during our little sparring match? …Are we sparring now? “Nevertheless,” he continued, “whether it’s questioning nonsensical orders, or asking if there’s a better way to do something, or even just scientific inquiry as a whole, the ability to question authority and the status quo is absolutely crucial to growth, and therefore to the accumulation of strength.”

Again, as an engineer, that certainly felt like it held water. Half my job some days was asking myself if there weren’t better ways to optimize the ship’s engine. Those were mostly questions I asked of myself, but I could see the merits of questioning authority figures, too. I frequently couldn’t, especially not of my Captain, but how did David know that? “What makes you think I can’t question authority?” I tried, varying my angle of attack.

“Because the first question any sensible person would ask is ‘Why does our leader deserve to be in charge?’” David fired back. “When the leader can’t provide a good answer, they lose power, and the system collapses.”

I’d spoken more words in the past hour than the entire month prior, but I was starting to enjoy the speed and rhythm of this back and forth. It reminded me of staff fighting. “The Prophet-Descendent Giznel leads Betterment because of his superior bloodline, descended as he is from its founder, the Prophet Laznel,” I recited, curious to see how David would respond.

David scoffed. “So you’re not even a proper dictatorship, you’re a monarchy. We tried that style of government for ages. The country you’re standing in was founded in the fires of rebellion against it.” He leaned forward, and it seemed like a lunge. “You mentioned earlier that Betterment still had meritocratic elements to it? Through acts of ambition, you could prove the superiority of your own bloodline, or demonstrate through deeds that another bloodline had declined?”

The latter was uncommon, but not impossible. “Correct. Why do you ask?”

“What about the ultimate act of ambition, then?” David said, jabbing a finger forward for emphasis. “What happens if you prove that your bloodline is superior to the Prophet’s?”

I reared back in shock. The reflexive answer--that it was impossible, that it could never happen--I discarded immediately. Once your mind opened itself to forbidden thoughts, you couldn’t just close it again on a whim. Maybe I, personally, lacked that level of confidence in my abilities to raise myself above the sacred line of the Prophet, but the Arxur numbered in the billions, spread across countless star systems. Statistics alone wouldn’t allow me to discount the possibility that someone, somewhere, was the Prophet’s better. And then what? Would Giznel step down? Of course not. “Civil war, probably,” I conceded.

“Exactly,” said David. “So there are questions that can’t be asked.”

“How do you keep people from asking questions, though?” I wondered aloud. “Even if you had a secret police force cracking down on dissent, prosecuting questions requires hearing them and understanding them. Wouldn’t any good ideas start to bleed out?”

David grinned, and I could nearly make out his teeth. This was the happiest I’d seen him. I was beginning to suspect he thoroughly enjoyed arguing just for the sake of it. “Exactly. That’s why the population needs to be kept distracted. You need a common enemy of everything your regime stands for, and your people need to be kept united against them. This leads to a really fun contradiction: that the enemy needs to be simultaneously strong and weak.”

“Wait, what?” I said, as my mind started drifting towards the Federation in general, and the Kolshians in particular.

David held out both hands, and proffered his left. “The enemy needs to be strong enough to be a constant looming threat, and your people need to maintain a unified front to stand against them. It needs to be a full-blown existential danger to your entire people if anyone even hesitates in fighting.” David then gestured with his right hand. “On the other hand, the enemy is weak and pathetic and beneath you, because the party line is about how inherently superior your people are.” David held out both hands. “It’s an obvious contradiction, but it’s such a central component of fascist-style authoritarianism that you can’t even notice it.”

I stared at David, slack-jawed. That the prey were weak and beneath us barely merited repetition. It was their incongruous strength that stood out to me now. “It was the Kolshians,” I said softly. “During first contact, they hit us with an engineered bioweapon. Blighted our cattle--our actual cattle, like you guys keep--and made as many of us allergic to meat as they could. The death toll was catastrophic from the famine alone, to say nothing of the chaos and unrest that followed.” The three humans all looked shocked and horrified. They’d had no idea. “We do treat the Federation as an existential threat, contradictory as that sounds. How the fuck did you guess that?” I breathed.

“Been there, done that,” David said sadly, “and had generations of political scholars cut their teeth on writing post-mortems.”

“What happens after the enemy is defeated?” I asked, trying to reset the conversation. Shocking as it all was, I was still having fun. Like a mock battle with words.

“That’s the thing,” said David. “The war can never end. The Nazis made some early gains, but then they lost the war, and their regime was dismantled. That’s one outcome. Had they somehow won--an outcome which would have required nothing short of an alien invasion screwing up the balance of power--well, the war has to continue. They’d have turned on their allies almost immediately. First Japan for being the wrong race, then Italy for being too dark-skinned.” David gestured at the platter of lamb bones on the table. “And I’m sorry, but if the U.N. allies with the Arxur Dominion against the Federation, and we win? I give it twenty minutes, tops, before Betterment decides that humans don’t count as ‘real predators’ because we eat plants and can’t chomp through our enemies’ bones.”

He sighed. “And then you’d turn inwards. If not civil war, then an endless campaign against hidden Arxur traitors sabotaging your society from within. How else would you explain why post-war life under Betterment’s benevolent rule wasn’t perfect? Because Betterment itself isn’t perfect? That sounds like traitorous saboteur talk to me. Would you come with me down to the precinct?”

All of this had a disturbingly plausible note to it, but there was one thing left that didn’t add up. “That might be true,” I said, “but Betterment’s been around for centuries. The way you’ve described it, an authoritarian regime can’t survive that long. They’d win and collapse, or they’d lose and be dismantled. I mean, to endure that long, you’d have to--”

My eyes went wide with horror. All the little cracks in my worldview added up, and with one last little tap from the hammer, reality shattered completely.

You’d have to drag the war out on purpose.

The Arxur Dominion had been at war with the Federation for fully centuries. Total war, no quarter given or expected, not even to civilians. Prophet’s Nonexistent Fucking Mercy, we literally captured, killed, and ate our enemies! And in over two hundred years, I couldn’t think of a single battle we’d seriously lost. Not one! For fuck’s sake, our enemies didn’t even have FTL comms! They had to coordinate their troop movements via radio waves and courier! They’d never even attempted a single offensive push!

Why the fuck haven’t we WON yet?

I held my head in my hands, and stared at nothing, off in the distance, off through the platter of picked-clean bones. I’d met young recruits who would have murdered their own parents just for a taste of the tiny flecks of marrow inside. That hunger defined us. That hunger controlled us.

I’d found my dangerous piece of knowledge that no other Arxur knew.

“Betterment isn’t trying to win the war,” I said hollowly. “They’re dragging it out on purpose.”