149 - We Are, Every One of Us

Recording #20:  Sealed to Dukir, Shashi, Mariush, Homa my daughter, Kyrus my grandson, and Kyrus my great grandson. Kyrus my grandson, I am beginning to fear you will not arrive in time before I die.  I will continue to make these recordings explaining what I’ve been working towards all these years since my father and my older brothers all managed to leave this mess to me.

Homa, you have, through your mother, the Trovi access symbiont as well as the Lainz one through me.  That means you will be able to access more of the deeper programs, much younger than I could.  It was through your mother that I acquired them, actually.

Grandson.  You will aquire all of these symbionts when you are sealed to the Hive, and your son, in turn.  The entire continent is now seeded with all control access codes, against the express wishes of the founders and my father and all these small wars can stop.  Nothing spreads a bacterial, or viral, as fast as a war.  We acquired the Milari controls ten years ago when we sent our warriors over that border river.  You now have an answer for why we Lainz withdrew and gave up so easily, despite the advantage our war-birds gave us.  The Milar and the Lainz swapped control codes as well as draft animals.

We acquired four more equine lines, which will make the terraforming of this part of this continent go much faster and the Milar acquired our birds and our codes... you probably were a contagion spreader all by yourself.  I am certain the Milar have been noticing the change in their mandery and clinery, spreading out from your hiding place.  Of course, your husband – being the surdeniliarch – would have done his part spreading this to his people.  I’m a ruthless bastard when I need to be.

The symbionts are key’d to everyone who is susceptible.  Not every human on this continent is.  Not every human on Perrin’s continent is, either.  But this mutually beneficial, manufactured ‘bug’ if you will, will put us at least on the same level as Prime’s people, when they find out that we are not all dead in the sand a thousand years ago.

With access to ofworld technology it could well be Perrin still sitting in Prime’s place.  I’ve been very cautious about approaching anything of his, lest I be discovered.   

Unfortunately we do not have that kind of medicine, so I am dying quite young for a man of my stature.  Given that I am currently lying flat, my stature is about thigh high.   

I’m sorry.  I will hold on as long as I can.  I’m tired, grandson.  My bees can only keep me so long.  Your bees, when you get here.  Take everything they can give you, 

Kyrus.  It is painful but necessary. You will survive it, even if it feels you will not, even if you wish you would not.  Being taken up by the Great Hive when I was fifty-two was one of the most painful things I’d ever suffered but I survived it.  Homa will not have to suffer it, being taken up gradually as she grows.  I’m sorry, grandson, great grandson.  I wish it were otherwise.

**

Recording 21: My apologies.  I fell asleep, or my crapwaxing irritating doctor put me to sleep to try and keep me here longer, bless him.

Grandson.  I seal my desk to you and to Dukir.  Dukir, in whatever guise he is now... that Amir personality of his perhaps, I trust with my life.  He has saved me more times than I know.  He... and his daughter, Shashi, are the fourth and fifth spymasters of my reign.  Hivelords, these necessary wars, and illness and disasters have taken three others from me.  It might be that the person or persons trying to kill all of my line also had a hand in their deaths.  I don’t know.  Dukir might, though.  Especially by now.  Old friend, I’ve already recorded my thoughts to you in recordings 4 through 12.

Kyrus once you get into the offices and into my desk, you will find a stack of projects waiting that is taller than you are.  Trying to transform this planet into some place where people can live safely without recourse to filters on everything, mist curtains and bleach curtains is too big for any one man to oversee in only two hundred years. The zardukar are working on eight hundred fifty-two immediately urgent projects, with a backlog of less urgent just as big.

We are also doing it under the notice of Perrin and his programmers and techs, adjusting to every tiny shift from continent A... He was apparently going to call it Camelot but decided against.  I believe, from spying on his work, he is calling it Xanadu.  Hubris.  Of course if one thinks that one owns a planet and everyone on it, then I suppose it might go to one’s head.  Slightly.

He always titled himself ‘The Font of All Knowledge’, and everyone under him is kept artificially in their place by the amount of learning and access to technology that they are allowed.  He was turning technology and knowledge into the religion that would put him in his place of power, creating a feudal society in a world where human beings could fly.

Yes, grandson and great grandson.  It’s not magic.  It’s not mandery.  There are human beings on the moon and they are mining it and sending us water every day.  One day this planet will have oceans once more.

I, and the zardukar of Lainz, Mother Thriti and her school, were all working towards getting someone with authority to speak off this world, to the courts of Sol, to reveal that we, the other owners of Chishiki, have been denied our rights and have been presumed murdered by the Prime.  This will have to be your task or your descendants.  The original contract, between Perrin Thurmontaler and Gregor Lainz, is in a sealed box, concealed in my throne under the Great Hive.

Perrin violated that contract even before we came to this world.  He lied to us.  He did not provide us with basic land that we could live on, basic tools so we could build.  When we protested, he tried to kill us all, with the bombardment of ice from the moon.  Our legacy, here, is not to live like stink-tights and roaches on the underbelly of the owner.  We are, every one of us, owners too.