Rebirth: The Price
09 Dec 2022Astraeius
Growing up on Emerald, I'd never given slavery much thought. It just was. There was little I could do about it, and probably even less that I cared to do. I knew about the controversies, of course. We did not live in a separate bubble. My mother and her circle often discussed the issue in terms of philosophy, speaking of the natural rights that every human should have, but it always seemed to me like these were just the musings of the rich and bored, who had too much time on their hands and thus dreamt up unexisting problems to fill it.Once, I remember, when my mother was lecturing (addressing nobody in particular) about the rights we denied slaves, I asked whether that included the right to poverty. Oh, how smart I felt! I'd even managed to make my father chuckle. I was maybe sixteen, yet I was schooling my mother on her false idealism, defending the righteousness of our Empire, and taking a jab at the Federation all with a single barb. I wonder now whether my father had been laughing at me, and not at my joke.
Still, I'd never given slavery itself much thought. Princess Aisling's speeches sounded much like my mother's, the slaves on the estate never complained, and I supposed they knew better than either the Imperial princess or a bored noblewoman. If they took no issue with their condition, why should I? "Slave" is but a name and, much like Romeo's roses, poverty is the same by any other name.
I've had more occasions to reflect on the matter, ironically, now that I have left Imperial space. Yesterday I was having my ship serviced in the Wyrd system when the workshop's robotic crane had a malfunction. To make a long story short, I had to prolong my stay of a half a day, my starboard pulse laser looks much cleaner than the port one, and an innocent forklift is now scrap metal, betrayed by its mechanical cousin. And, of course, the workshop owner's screams can still be heard throughout the system.
My first though, and I will admit to my smugness, was that two human slaves would never have failed so spectacularly at such a simple task. Sometimes it surprises me how some in the Federation still cling to the idea that machines can match human labour. But of course that isn't true. Machines might never surpass men, but men can make mistakes just like machines can break. And that's where I'd had a terrifying epiphany about our use of slavery.
The idea that, had there been slaves working on my ship instead of robotic machines, my workshop owner would not have been lamenting having to scrap a forklift. He would have had to dig graves. And men do make mistakes. And men, then, necessarily pay the price.