No Man Left Behind

The Outerran Homeworld

. . . Four months and four-hundred light-years later, Hiruta attended the emergency deputation of inter-alien relations officials. The air inside the immense megachamber was filled with thermal and electrical signatures of sympathies and despair for him and those like him affected by the entity now known as Unilife. He drifted through the free-fall environment, peering through the kilometer-long, transparent, hexagonal panels, recollecting the geographical features of his homeworld. The dark orange and maroon landmasses were contrasted by the whitish-blue, overstretching oceans and the peach-tinted, sparse æolian regions. Star-white clouds peppered and streaked the face of the world, not ever marring its beauty. His attention shifted as the convention was called to proceed.

The directors of the alien relations began with their opening statement, detailing their duty to maintain peaceful and lasting dialogue with other beings of the universe. And with that, various officials took the floor. Hiruta regarded the atmosphere as the others recalled their encounters with Unilife, which were remarkably similar to his own: Unilife entered a solar system containing some minor or major establishment, spent some years developing a computational base, and then eradicated everything else in the system.

Other officials put forth a variety of ideas for dealing with the entity. As evidence that suggested Unilife encountered and culled other life-bearing beings in its stellar neighborhood arose, most officials spoke on the action of elimination. But to eliminate Unilife would mean to go against everything their race has strived for since the very first of their kind trekked beyond their sodden, marshy homeworld. Hiruta, personally, was against it, and his thermal emissions reflected his ideologies. Others proffered a compromise: containment. This method would involve the removal of Unilife from the star systems it has spread to, tracing its steps backwards to its own home star system. In the final stages of containment, a barrier would be erected around the star system until Unilife could learn to live with others in the universe. Hiruta enjoyed this notion slightly more. However, he didn't think Unilife would allow them to contain it; through the expanse of space, something is bound to slip through, and with that Unilife would be back to finish the job for good. Few others offered the idea of persuasion or negotiation, as Unilife often outright ignored any communication attempts made towards it.

"I propose we initiate contact with the Human race," Hiruta told the massive globe of aficionados. He could feel new and fresh ideas being toiled through the air.

"And what repercussions would you expect from such an action?" An official asked him.

"Humans are natively familiar with territorial behavior. They are better suited than us at assessing a strategy for dealing with Unilife."

"They have a history of violence unlike any species we've ever known," another official stated. "They would probably default to our first-mentioned tactic, elimination."

"They have a history of savagery, true," Hiruta conceded. "Their primal environment rather demanded that from them. Though I suggest them for other reasons just as well. They have an extremely large industrial base; our most current observations show they're nearly on par with us, technologically. And despite their tendencies, they're just about the most logical alien beings we know of currently."

"We don't venture to other races. They may come to us. That is our way."

"And our way has saved the continuity of countless alien races. But Unilife does not regard our way, only its own. Now that Unilife has faster-than-light capabilities, there is no doubt it will spread rapidly across the galaxy. Humans will soon have to deal with Unilife just as we are now. Should we let them-and ourselves-face this common enemy alone, or together as companions?"

"Would we be helping them by reaching out, or would we be dragging them down with us? That is the real question."

The ambient aura of the room was that of rational consideration.

The starship microcluster Buroto slowly lowered itself from its olympian position theoretically outside the real universe, illuminating sparse and distant Oort cloud objects in a pale violet and white light, among other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. As Buroto decelerated through the nearly nonexistent barrier between interstellar space and the Human-settled star system, Rocinante VI, it exchanged a superluminal transmission with the main human-colonized world, Madeleine, confirming Buroto's identity and trajectory.

Communications and inter-alien relations with the Humans began several months ago via superluminal communication. They were quite eager to exchange information, and Hiruta had found himself allured by the Human's relentless dump of knowledge. Hiruta had only ever "visited" an alien world once in his life: his naked eyes had caught the sunlight reflecting from an alien world's surface from a distance of one billion kilometers. This time, things were much different. They were being invited to this Human world. And it was difficult to admit to himself, but Hiruta always found a strange fascination with the way life on the Human homeworld of Earth had developed. Life there had a certain ornateness and chaotic rhythm to it; a subjective observation which could never be matched by his own homeworld's static, uniform, unchanging presentation at life. Hiruta imagined one day he would meet the Humans-though not through such unprecedented circumstances. He imagined scaling the world's forested mountains and trekking its hardened, arid deserts; landscapes and Earthly complexions carved by a world perpetually at war with its own nature and its own life.

Madeleine was not quite like Earth. It did not share the same physical features, nor did life take any part in its planetary conditioning. From the astronomical quantities of data the Humans gratefully donated, Hiruta knew that Madeleine was one of their terraformed exoplanets. Madeleine's surface was largely covered with artificially engineered vegetation and crops, whose wide, geometrically-shaped patches strangely resembled the color palette of maroon plantlife he was most familiar with from his own species' worlds.

Hiruta's observation of Madeleine continued as Buroto engaged in a low-orbit around the planet, sweeping over the several hundreds of roofed-over habitats composing the central megacity of the world. And not too distant from the outskirts of the megacity, hundreds and hundreds of factories and industries formed a neat ring around the city's outerbounds, spewing out a constant reddish-grey vapor into the thin, largely carbon-dioxide atmosphere. Madeleine was one of Humanity's central industrial worlds, and with the world's relative abundance of heavy or rare metals such as iron, nickel, rhodium, gold, platinum, etc., the manufacturing base was quite immense.

That was something Hiruta admired about the People of Earth. They were industrious and inventive, they were always busy building or advancing something. And unlike his own species, they didn't advance themselves in centralized, independent groups of purpose-seekers. Instead, Humanity advanced themselves as a whole society. All things accounted for, no man left behind. How a mass collection of individuals mutually decide to transverse one evolutionary path was quite beyond him, though he believed the notion hinted at some ingrained drive of theirs. A purpose cosmically larger than themselves which would take them to an era of self-fulfillment. The same could not be said for his own species.

Hiruta trained his perception on the passing, wispy, white clouds below, on the numerous, skittering vessels shooting around Madeleine's central docking station and orbital city, and on the hundreds of thousands of Human faces-featured all across their news networks-on the ground below as they stood their bipedal stance and stared up in awe at the Buroto microcluster traversing the sky.

"Humans," Buroto addressed the population with but a flavor of their humor, "we come in peace."