Black Sun: What you hide finds you 1

It was supposed to be easy. A small little planet out on the edge of the galactic arm, whirling around  a star no one had claimed or seemed to care about. The six of them would land, snatch up some slaves and pop back out again. No hivequeens would be implicated since they were all ‘exiles’ and couldn’t be traced back to any of the Merchantilians. The locals were supposedly bipedal, with prehensile tails that could be used like a third arm and relatively sharp senses that would make them valuable for guard work once properly conditioned. Hesthet had taken the job after doing her usual research. The money was in mineral wealth, rare metals that could be traded in half a hundred systems. It all seemed perfect.

They’d landed fairly easily. The natives were just figuring out how to use steam, namely because they were so well adapted to their environment that technology had only started developing out of pure curiosity and had no real selection pressure backing it up. Sleek, smooth skin with hundreds of iridescent denticles lining it, they glowed faintly in the amber light of their day. The first four had been easy to catch, they’d walked right up to the ship. There wasn’t much on the planet big enough to eat them. They didn’t fear anything, their huge black eyes blinking curiously as they used their eyelids like strobes to see the ship in UV. Hesthet found them haunting, beautiful as she seized their minds with a thought and forced them to walk into the stasis deck. They were not active – they had no mental defenses – but she could feel the horror in their bright, eager, adaptive minds and it told her that they could probably be broken. Some hive queen somewhere would be getting herself some quality slaves.

“Hest.” Her second, Mrevket, walked around the ship. He was large for a male, with long lean limbs and a lanky face, dotted with fine hairs no matter how often he shaved. Which was often, as she found body hair annoying. “We haven’t heard back from Tren, Nirren or Klahet.”

“I can’t imagine they’ve run into trouble. These things barely understand how to hunt local game.” She pointed to one of the hopping fuzzballs, which was as near as they could tell the most numerous prey item on the local menu. “Unless those three somehow got spooked off of a cliff, they should be fine.”

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Just a general “Head’s Up” because I haven’t been using this site or really doing much of anything lately. The Holidays really depressed me, as did my annual No ideology, no matter how positive or negative it is, can be accurate swirling depression. It wasn’t helped by getting into the usual binary internet argument where someone argues not with you, but with a straw man they constructed and makes statements that indicate you can’t realize that all of human society is constructed by humans and thus not truly accurate, in terms of pure truth, without immediately going to live in a cave. I can recognize the limitations of human cognition and reasoning and understand that all ideologies are ultimately invented by humans to give their lives meaning without immediately abandoning human society. Understanding my own limitations doesn’t make me immediately want to abandon my wife and my cats.

Anyway, yes, monstrously depressed, completely in full fledged rejection of every -ism as being ultimately inaccurate, constructions from a limited perspective that do not see the world as it is and never can, and ultimately just tools we use to get through the world for good or ill.  This of course leaves me with the question “What, then, is the right choice of action” in a life very poorly equipped to answer that question. One could argue that the only correct course of action would be to engage in the search for truth while always admonishing oneself that truth cannot be found by a limited intellect that will live at most another 60 years or so, but my word that’s a depressing and exhausting notion. Live your life engaged forever in a struggle you can’t possibly complete searching for a concept that doesn’t actually exist, and which you can never define anyway. Yeah, that sounds like a party.

It’s strange that I feel humans are essentially all self-deluded hoisting flags and banners for whatever causes they favor, all of them wrong. Is that what I’m doing? If it is, what flag am I unfurling? Am I just bitter that I never found one with a really cool border?