An ode to anonymity
03 May 2017Vadatajs
You might be thinking, who is this asshole and why do I care?The answers are, respectively: no one, and you shouldn't.
Last I checked, there was no galactic census, so whether there's 150 billion assholes out there in space, 1 trillion assholes, or 15 trillion assholes of humanity spread across the stars doesn't really matter.
I'm just one of those assholes. Keep that in mind when I'm trying to remind you of your place. (Really, I'm doing this for myself to remind me of MY place; but if it bleeds over to whomever you are (and I don't CARE who you are), fantastic. Congratulations on joining the convoy of the jaded.)
Did you know I've killed over 1500 people? It's a pointless statistic. It doesn't tell you anything about me. What does tell you something about me is that I didn't feel a thing. Not for a single one of them. Many might say that makes me a sociopath. But...I'm sure humanity will survive. For all I know, they were bad people (at least the system authorities seemed to think so): who am I to question them? I've got money to make, and they were paying. Those 1500 people? They were nobodies as well. Nobodies killing nobodies. It's practically victim-less.
I've survived the odds. I should not be alive right now.
That wasn't due to "my skill" or "planning", or anything else those other survivors in the Pilot's Fed will tell you.
That's due to two things:
Dumb hard luck.
Being a coward.
Just don't risk it. Run away soon, run away often.
I see these online forums for all these people who believe they're special; announcing to the galaxy who they are, what they've done, and where they're at. They're not special. They're idiots. That's the first way predators look for victims. Might as well just announce to everyone that you're giving away free cash. Hey mister, please rob me.
For every live space jockey there's three or four twenty year old kids on some backwater planet playing the latest spaceship simulator game who, if given the startup capital to go into space, could blow the most hardened Imperial and Federation veterans out of the sky. But...for every 3 of those kids, there's 9 kids in some slave mine gulag; and we in the Pilot's Fed just cruise around the galaxy all happy-like buying minerals from any damn place that sells em. Anything for a profit.
Fact of the matter is; the majority of our species is still downtrodden, exploited, used. They'll never get the chance to be free. And this, too, doesn't matter. Humanity will still survive, with or without them.
No...some of us like to believe we're independent, that we're doing some kind of good in this universe; but wag a little incentive in front of our faces and we'll discard any of the false morals we have...all just for a little scratch or sometimes, even, for the promise that those with some shiny trinkets can provide something that'll keep us alive.
I'd say we're on the razor's edge, but, we're nowhere close. We're immersed in the chaos, sure, but we're contributing to it, not driving it back. Even if the chaos is disguised as the introduction of human order. Human order is just additional layers of complexity on everything, really, no better than the chaos of the cosmos...in a lot of ways, it's worse.
We're indifferent to the plights of anyone terra-bound.
We're indifferent to the plights of most space stations as well. If we do help, it's for that sweet scratch. Sure buddy, I'll get you a few tons of Basic Medicines, but first, pay me.
Even those dedicated to exploring (who claim it's for the betterment of mankind) cash in their discovery scans for cold hard at the end of a journey into the black.
Altruism? Hah.
You think the press of humanity diminishes your agency as a being that matters: try going a little space mad and taking a trip into the void yourself. The bubble of human space is an inkling in our galaxy, and that description doesn't even give the utter scale of our insignificance a scope with any relatable meaning. You just kind of have to experience it for yourself. (Passenger trips only 3 million credits a person for a 13,000 LY journey, ask now while rates are low. Pay me.)
If you're ever out on the edge of a spiral arm (not that our little pocket of space isn't), you can actually see a few distant galaxies. You'll never get there. No one alive today likely will. Even if we resurrected the technology used in the generation ships and strapped some mummies into a ship with a modern frame shift drive; the sheer amount of void between here and there isn't realistically surpass-able. By the time our seeds get there, humanity in this galaxy will have fragmented into so many different evolutionary paths that the humanity left in this galaxy won't recognize the seeds we have sent over to that one. We'll be spreading the legacy of a race of beings that died to evolution.
Just look how far we've come in 3000 years of written history compared to the billions of years it took us to evolve to our modern form. You'd be a fool to think another billion years won't change us.