HOW WE WERE BROKEN

I remember how it felt to be a survivor of the death of Earth, one of the lucky evacuees.

The refugee camps had been cobbled together out of defunct asteroid tugs from the junk zone. The immense unlighted 'rooms' there were actually canvas sacks designed to hold kilotons of liquid. They were ancient, and when you were in one, you could hear the air hissing, leaking directly into space. It wasn't just a rumor that sometimes one of these 'refugee sacks' would suddenly rip.

We floated there in the darkness, in zero-g, thirsty and bored and frightened, just listening to that hiss, for years.

Every eight hours, we would get a twenty-five minute turn in the nearest tug-pod, where there was a toilet, an exercise machine, and one porthole no wider than my hand. For thirty-two months, that tiny porthole was the only light I had. I would curl up in front of it and stare at the stars. They looked sharper than they ever had from Earth—brighter, purer, more breathtaking. Gradually, those precious minutes of stargazing became a physical need. I thirsted for stars. Whenever the airhorn blared to tell us that our twenty-five minutes were over, I could have wept.

Somewhere, they said, better habitats were being built. Refugees from our group were sometimes shipped away—rescued, really—in ones and twos, beginning with those who had qualifications as engineers or programmers. I was the exception. Programming has always been effortless to me, but they left me to rot. Somehow they knew I could take it.

The leading cause of death in our sack was 'failure to thrive.' Despair and boredom will eventually cause a body to wear down and deteriorate. But even after most of the other refugees were long dead, I felt desperately strong, like an animal caught in a trap. My bones didn't seem to decay from months without gravity, and I could stand the thirst, and I didn't lose the will to live: I always had my stars to look forward to.

They left me there until the sack ripped.

I don't remember the sound of the actual tear. I only remember thinking, 'Is the hissing getting louder? I wonder—'

And then I was waking up on a bloody floor and everything hurt. Later, I learned that I was on a medical ship, and that it didn't have enough nurses, which is why the haggard doctor who eventually rushed in to talk to me was being assisted by an engineer drone, of all things. It was a miracle that they had saved me. Most of my body felt numb and slimy with necrosis. I stank of death. Over the next agonizing weeks, they somehow patched me back together, and afterwards I was sharper than I'd been in years. I felt like a new person.

Soon I was put to work, and I finally had the time and health necessary to wonder about this painful era that we'd all been thrust into.

There were fewer than one million humans left. No one knew each other from before. We were all strangers, we were all traumatized, all uprooted, all grieving. Existence had a surreal, nightmarish quality. There was no continuity between our past lives and our current desperate condition. It was as though we'd been killed and then woken up somewhere worse. We lived in cold artificial stations, working like ants among damaged people who hated the universe and everything in it. Life was crowded and harsh and unbearably lonely.

In retrospect, it’s ironic. We thought we were in the dark ages, but it was actually our last golden age. Because amid all the dread and grief, we had resolution. We had purpose. Our kill bullets had not yet arrived in yasod space. We would not know the outcome of our attack for over a century, but we thought we understood our situation very well. We were at war, and we were suffering like human beings had always suffered in war. We understood our future too: it would be an endless struggle of maximum aggression against the yasod, and then against whatever aliens came next. The principle of natural selection would be applied to interstellar civilizations. It was a savage future, but no more savage than our past. We would do what we had always done: observe, hypothesize, kill.

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The winning species would be the one that advanced most rapidly in physics, math, biology, neurology, engineering, computing. We didn't have all the answers yet, but we knew how to search for them. Our only fear was that some other species would do it faster or better or first.

The yasod, we believed, must be cunning technologists, more or less like ourselves. I sympathized with them. We might not know their language or art or history, but we were siblings—Cain and Cain. In a way, the innumerable bullets we had exchanged were messages, and those messages would be smashing through the galaxy for centuries, a slow shockwave of mass disintegration, like an echo of the voices of our dead.

And all those messages said the same thing. Not you. Me.

As the centuries wore on, and the light of their dying worlds came back to us, the only difference between we two monsters seemed to be that the yasod had no follow-through. Behind our bullets, we humans had sent self-replicating drones to swarm their whole region of space and exterminate everything alive.

They had failed to exterminate us. Foolishly, their surviving colonies had simply continued to assemble railguns and fire bullets, making it easy for our drones to target them with bombs.

We suffered no further casualties. None of us lived on planets anymore, and our stations altered their orbits randomly every few minutes. No bullet aimed from lightyears away would ever hit us again.

We were unbroken.

Eventually, it became clear that we would be victorious, and some of us fell into guilt, imagining that the yasod were intelligent humanoids. Perhaps we might have been friends, if we had been born into a universe where physics was kinder, where saying 'We come in peace' and waiting for a reply didn't take twice as long as shattering an interstellar civilization.

I remember crying over it, on nights when the kill reports came in, telling of colony after colony obliterated from orbit by our drones, always with an estimated population number: ninety million, eleven million, point six million. We were rooting out the small towns, now. I remember obsessing about the way the yasod and ourselves had been spiritually corrupted by the process of evolution, which rewards species that devour or outcompete others, and punishes the vulnerable. If evolution can be said to have raised us, then we are the children of murderers. And every life form we would ever encounter would be the same.

Extermination would be our future, whether we were giving it or receiving it. At least we understood that. At least we could harden ourselves in preparation for that. At least we had our resolve.

Until the dissection videos reached us.

Our drones, receiving hundred-year-old orders, finally began to attack the few remaining yasod not on the scale of warheads, but on the scale of guns and blades. The recordings they sent back were our first chance to actually see the people we’d been exterminating. We saw how they died, how they behaved. We saw their dissected corpses… and the universe lost all reason.

They were bacteria. Far larger than the normal kinds, but if possible, dumber. They had no thumbs, no brains, no communications, no complex behavior, no art, no language, no science. No sign of consciousness. No apparatus for receiving orders from a smarter being. No mechanism for acting or thinking as a group. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Yet somehow they had manufactured electromagnetic railguns. Somehow they had murdered us.

Our growing guilt turned to confusion, and confusion worsened into dread. We scoured the whole yasod region for evidence of some trick or hoax. We formulated literally thousands of hypotheses to make sense of what had happened, but every year, new evidence arrived that destroyed those hypotheses. Our government promised to investigate the matter, and then ceased all communication with the rest of us and eventually fled into deep space.

What broke our civilization wasn't the next waves of aliens and it wasn't the wave after that, and it wasn't the brain viruses, and it wasn't the ghosts. It was a combination of near-extinction, the loss of our homeworlds, and above all the loss of our sense that we understood the universe.

If we had only understood what had happened with the yasod, if they had only been competitive animals like ourselves, then we could have survived the losses, because we would have felt in control. The bleak future of endless war that we faced would have been tolerable, just one more problem to solve with our powers of reason, just the next stage of the prehistoric kill-and-be-killed struggle of evolution.

But the yasod enigma was only the beginning, and as ghosts and varmids and worse impossibilities continued to appear, we gradually lost faith in our methods of understanding: our reason, our math, our science. Everything we'd had, even mental things like morale, had been rooted in our doctrine that the universe could be understood, and that those who understand it will thrive. That was the evolutionary proposition which homo sapiens represented: not technology, understanding.

And it kept getting worse. None of the other 'civilizations' that we encountered were animals like ourselves. None used technology. None thought, none felt, none spoke, none reasoned. Every one of them, in whole or in part, was an enigma, impossible to understand.

Our faith in understanding itself—in ourselves—broke.

People began agonizing over the holes in our basic knowledge, holes that had been growing more disturbing for millennia. It tormented us that we no longer understood our machines. The software of our AI was a black box to us: through machine learning, they had essentially programmed themselves, and now they designed all our technology. No human had been involved in a new invention for hundreds of years. We could no longer build, maintain, or even explain technologies that we used every day, and we no longer tried. We were constantly surrounded by our own ignorance. The age of our understanding had passed. Just as the yasod had been inexplicable, so were our technologies, so were our new enemies, so, even, were our genetically engineered bodies.

So were our minds. Because, when alien after alien turned out not to think or feel, we came to understand how bizarre it is that we experience anything at all. AI, the closest species to humanity, doesn't really do either. We became afraid that even our fundamental experience of existence was some kind of illusion. We retreated into our feelings, the only things we had left, and now we are—psychologically—cavemen.

But we are afraid as cavemen never were, because cavemen never knew that even their deepest truths could be destroyed by the universe. If understanding itself can be destroyed, why not our thoughts, our feelings, our consciousness itself? Cavemen never knew enough to have nightmares about their humanity being lost.

We do.

Gradually, we have declined. We have begun losing our wars. There are a million times more varmids in the galaxy now than us.

We are like refugees in a fragile sack, weightless, blind, and thirsty, waiting out the years.

Just listening… listening to the hiss.