The battlecruisers dart mightily through the star-clouds;
the carriers linger gently on their gleaming edges, where the shroud
of the nebula invites only harvesters, calm, serene Workers
to flit and fly around
the decimated, emancipated remains of a once proud star.
The fleet had heard legends of this place,
and so made this treacherous journey, so far
away from home, to gaze
upon the wretched remains
of what was once
a mighty super-civilisation, brought to its knees
by jealousy, and envy, and a failed, incipient sense of destiny
that a utopia was just too impossible.
A better constellations of worlds always to be hopelessly marred
by human imperfection. By fraility.
By a projection that wickedness will always lead to inevitability.
Well,
perhaps you are wicked.
Perhaps what the fleet gazes on was truly broken, and bitter
from the inside, from the time it first came to life. I find it hard to believe, especially for all the glitter.
But if this is what you project onto me,
then I am no defaulter
on your truths and supposed honesty;
we honour and respect
your traumatic, and sad, and lonely history.
Your noble intentions, guided by an unindividuated, broken healer
who decided to fuck around with mercy, and justice, and society.
And once so honoured,
my harvesters move in,
collecting the remnants of what is left.
After all, the past
is meant to be memorialised, and interred, and not spent
on empty, glossy monuments to the dead:
let the fleet of the Last People, the Barku-Barku Jenti Kristang show you
that what has come before is definitely important,
but will always pale in stellar, sidereal comparison
to what is lightspeeding its way into becoming
what comes next.