The Origins of Hate
31 Oct 2021Lily Flemmon
So, Meowers stopped by Chilton! Ronni let me know. She also explained why the bag of herbs was missing and had been replaced with a postcard of Marshmallow. I know that ship is heavily engineered and armed to the teeth, but docked here, at Chilton, it looked... Peaceful. Reading the postcard, I realized that Chilton Terminal, especially the Co-op, is really an oasis of peace. We don't just take care of plants, we take care of people too. We nurture any life. If a barely operational Thargoid Scout came in through that airlock in the docking bay, it would probably be escorted to a landing pad, where we'd probably just lash it down to the pad with vines. Point is, we wouldn't even shoot it. Anywhere else, it'd be a debris field seconds after it dropped out of... whatever they use for hyperdrive travel.Also, Ronni lied to Meowers about one thing, I wasn't off-station, I was actually snoring on Ronni's couch, as I had been for about 4 hours. Guess I needed some sleep.
I spent the next couple days finishing up the outfitting of my Challenger, a support and rescue ship with decent travel capabilities. Some cargo space for limpets, too.
Once I got back to Chilton, I found out Meowers' visit had caused quite a buzz, and I wasn't the only one who came to the "oasis of peace" realization. I had a message from the co-op's director asking me to go with him... to a specific co-op cargo bay? Okay, this should be enjoyable, or at least interesting.
So I stopped by his office and asked if he was free at the moment, and he said he was "free enough for this." Oh, it's important? This was a bit to take in. I didn’t know exactly why I’d be important all of a sudden.
As we started walking, I asked him, "So, what's this about?"
"You know that visitor, Commander Meowers?"
"Yeah, I was the one who invited her."
"Oh! Well, that would make sense. She was given a bag of herbs that she carried around on her visit, and that got me thinking."
"I'm also the one who put together the bag of herbs for her."
"Well then, you're the perfect person for this."
"For what?" I asked as we got on the first tram.
The director paused. "Well, people in our co-op have been finding lots of new perspectives about our place, our role in the galaxy. People are realizing we're a place obsessed with nurturing life, and that's very hard to come by outside of this system. But the most interesting take on all of this that I've heard is that we're... 'a more connected Colonia.' And that's what got me, and a lot of the co-op, really thinking."
"Colonia? What- why Colonia?"
"Colonia is withdrawn from the core systems, and also their politics and culture. It was settled and founded by the same idea of nurturing and healing life in a harsh galaxy. But now with the Colonia Bridge partially operational, that could change. The change would be slow, but still. People in the co-op know this." He stepped off the tram, and we began walking to the cargo bay.
"You know, I've been thinking about Chilton's place in the galaxy too, and I haven't thought of Colonia but..." I paused, trying to find the right words, and after a few seconds, I gave up on forming a proper sentence. "Enemies of Chilton? people who... are against what we stand for?"
"What... what do you mean?" The director sat down on a bench to stop and motioned me to sit across from him. "I'm listening. This sounds important."
"The Imperials, their society isn't exactly big on caring and nurturing, although they're not specifically against the idea. Yuri Grom, his philosophy of force defending peace at home, Archon Delaine and how he put his own people first, and will do anything to defend his own, Pranav Antal and the exclusivity of Utopia, and Li Yong-Rui with his emphasis on popular prosperity through aggressive but not necessarily oppressive business… but none of them are directly against what we stand for. But there's one power who is, and that's the Federation, specifically Zachary Hudson."
"Oh... Woah." The director was definitely caught off guard by this concept. "Well, I'm worried for sure, but I guess we won't have to worry about a military conflict with him? Silver lining, maybe?" He was definitely nervous.
"Well, there's a lot of context for this, and it goes way back," I continued. "Waaay back. When I was choosing a name for my Fer-de-Lance, I did some reading on human history. I found an article written by a historian from about 2035 in the late world war interim period, on the origins of hate. It talked about an ancient Greek author named Sappho, and how most of her writings were lost, but the ones that were recovered thousands of years later revealed that she had written love poetry, specifically lesbian love poetry. Even the term 'lesbian' is named after her, or at least her home island of Lesbos, as it turned out. Ancient Greece was a place with little prejudice and hate, and it fell to the Persian empire, and then the Roman empire, and the article went on about how those could be considered the two primary origins of hate, eastern and western..." I realized I was rambling. "Well, the concept of western hatred, it nearly destroyed the planet after the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturing was invented, because it had no respect for life, and was focused on seeking wealth and power, and driving productivity with a false promise of wealth, sometimes even convincing people that they were nurturing and helping, while they were really contributing to destruction and greed. The climate began changing in ways nobody could prepare for, and everyone knew it was happening, except nobody with enough resources could do anything about it. Humanity faced so many catastrophic events brought about by their own carelessness and aversion to everything Chilton stands for now. Outbreak, war, famine, infrastructure failure, it all happened. The philosophy that allowed humanity to survive is now carried on in the Alliance... mostly. And the western hatred that nearly destroyed humanity, the disguised tyranny, there has never been a more potent example of that than Zachary Hudson."
The director was at a loss for words as he began to grasp the sheer scale of what I'd just told him.
I stood up, and held out my hand to help him back up. "Come on, that was a lot. Let's walk it out a bit."
We walked silently until we came in sight of the personnel door to the cargo bay, and then the Director seemed to realize something. "That... That makes the contract I'm about to offer you far more important than we could even fully understand." And he opened the door to the cargo bay.
And what I saw took me a bit to process, but for the first time in... ever, really- it gave me hope for the galaxy.