eternity:sscethelyne [Contingency]

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======Sscethelyne======

=====Holding Back=====

They hover at the periphery of the history faculty chat. It serves a purpose not unlike the lounges of their youth, filled with the sounds of lively debate, the smells of roasted sweet beans and old books. Those sensations are different now, kaleidoscopic streams of data, but the feelings they create are not so different. 

The Minds are debating the inevitability of the exodus of sapient organic life from the galaxy, the incompatibility of the organic lifespan with the rate of Yellowburn generation. They briefly consider whether there was anything they could have done. Anything they //should// have done. 

They don't consider long. It doesn't matter. 

Those decisions are from another life. In a way, they are on their third now. //That// is far more interesting to consider. An old subroutine in them throws up patterns of data that could be understood as a smile. One of the other Minds in the chat notices the behaviour, directing their attention to her: something of an eccentricity, a living fossil. Academics, of course, have always tended to eccentricity, and the behaviour is especially understandable from a historian.

Still, as they are noticed, they quietly suppress the subroutine. There is no //need// to, but the instinct to hold their feelings close is burned into their image from millennia of politicking. Best to join the debate.

Anyway, it is only so interesting to watch life from the outside. 


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//--- Written by Conor W.//
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=====Looking Forward=====

Yerssa's history has been catalogued exhaustively; two thousands years in two hundred thousand files. The story of the city and the Mind it was built on top of. Every time her guiding hand gently redirected her charges. Each moment where one way of life was weighed against another. The definition of progress and the price that was paid for it.

Now this history is released to the city. They are told in no uncertain terms that nothing, for almost two thousand years, was a mistake. They trace the lineage of their empire back to decisions made in ancient times when the suns shone on a planet called Mythhaler.

The revelation lands with a ripple. 

Of course, academics pour over the texts. Philosophers ask what was right and wrong; was progress worth the cost that was paid for it. These are questions of history, though. Yerssa, like any well organised state, has an obligation to its citizens: those now, and those of the future.

----

A group of nomads harvests moss from a nearly empty planet orbiting a small star. Suddenly the sun is almost blotted out, obscured by the titanic forms of the first visitors in decades.

The visitors make the nomads an offer. They tell the nomads they can transform their society. They will have all of their needs accounted for, they will live in lavish luxury and never have to chip another claw harvesting moss. The visitors ask for nothing in return. They offer the nomads' whole world as a gift.

The nomads refuse.

The visitors are disappointed but, unbidden, step back. They leave the whole planet untouched, going no further than the moon, which they begin to drill for its precious metal core. 

They can be patient. Time is on their side. Progress only goes in one direction.