glimpse of him. The inscription in the stone facade read, Here lies our last soldier.
Ares stopped before the threshold and spoke to the chairman of the council. “Every man deserves the right to die.”
“Legends never die.”
He wanted to reach out and wrap his fingers around her neck and squeeze. Instead, he walked inside, down the corridors he had first seen the day of the fall of the old world and stepped into a tube.
The time dilation saved him the agony of the flow of time, but nothing could treat the emptiness and solitude Ares felt.
Figures appeared at the entrance to the vast chamber and ran to his tube.
Ares stepped out and followed them without a word. Perhaps they had reconsidered. Hope—an almost foreign feeling, rose inside him.
They exited the shrine that held the ark and walked silently into the night. A city unlike any Ares had ever seen loomed in the distance. Skyscrapers reached into the clouds, catwalks crossed between them, and holographic ads marched through the night sky like demons dancing in front of the moon.
A blast severed a catwalk. Another reached between the buildings, setting fire to both. The fire leapt from tower to tower, desperately trying to outrun the fire suppression systems. Another blast went up.
“What is this?” Ares asked.
“We have a new enemy, General.”
CHAPTER 38
Ares barely recognized the world he had brought his dying people to and helped build. It was clean and sparkling but crowded, its people angry. They lined the streets, pushing, shoving, holding signs and shouting.
“Serpentine Restrictions = Slavery”
“Evolution = Freedom”
“Ares is the True Serpent”
At the council chamber, a group of imbeciles detailed the plight of Ares’ beloved world. Intellectual discrimination had segmented Atlantean society, fracturing it into two factions: intellectuals and laborers. The intellectuals represented nearly 80% of the entire population, and as best Ares could tell, spent their days making things with their minds: art, inventions, research, and activities Ares didn’t understand and didn’t care to ask about. The remaining 20% of the population, the laborers, made their living with their hands, and they were tired of it, tired of the subsidized wages and welfare state that kept them in a perpetual second-class existence.
The core of the issue was that education had reached the limits of how much it could elevate raw intelligence. On both sides, the two classes realized that intellectuals would always be intellectuals, and so would their children, and likewise for laborers. Marriage between the classes had become increasingly rare as no intellectuals dared risk their descendants slipping into the lower class, never to return.
The economic and social rift had grown increasingly tense. Accommodations and deals had been made, keeping the peace. But compromise had finally failed, and violence had become the laborers’ only means of negotiation.
The screen detailed the labor faction’s growing unrest, the escalation from protests to riots, to random attacks, to organized terrorism that claimed thousands of lives.
Ares turned the problem over in his mind, barely listening to Nomos, the chairman of the council. “The crux of the issue is our police force.”
“What about it?” Ares asked.
“We haven’t had one for three hundred years. There’s simply been very little crime, and citizen enforcement, coupled with mass surveillance, has meant that any perpetrators were always apprehended. This is different. These people are willing to lay down their lives for their cause—to ensure that their children don’t suffer as they have.”
Another councilman spoke up. “The bigger issue is that the new police force will have to be drawn from the laborers—and we could never trust them. They could overthrow the government and completely take over. And I think that’s what we’re all scared of, even if I’m the only one willing to say it.”
Silence followed.
Finally, Nomos spoke. “Ares, the solution we’ve come to, that we’ve awoken you to… consult on, is relaxing the Serpentine Restrictions.”
Ares failed to suppress his anger. “Those laws were created for a reason—to save us from ourselves.”
Nomos held up a hand. “We’re only considering slight relaxations in two of the three restrictions: removing the ban on genetic engineering—just once, for a single treatment to bring the laborers to intellectual parity. Secondly, we would lift the ban on robotics, allowing simple service droids to handle all physical labor. These changes will create a single sustainable society—”
Ares stood. “If you fools open the box of genetic engineering and robotics on this world, you guarantee that we become a Serpentine world at some point—without even being invaded. It’s inevitable. This is how the Serpentine blight emerged in the first place. We’ll be repeating our predecessors’ mistakes. I won’t stand for it. Put me back to sleep, or better yet, allow me the true death. I can’t watch this.”
“What would you do?”
“Our problem is very simple,” Ares said. “Twenty percent of our people are killing the rest. They’ve got to go.”
Ares looked around at his army in training. If the beacon weren’t floating in orbit, hiding his world’s light from the universe beyond, they would be the laughing stock of the cosmos.
The council had been right: recruiting a security force from the labor class was certain folly. Ares had settled for intellectuals who might fit the bill: models—chiseled, muscular, and well-trained at the art of looking fearless regardless of their actual ability; dancers and acrobats—they moved with grace and precision but couldn’t fight to save their lives; and athletes—they had great aim and comfort in raging crowds but would no doubt melt when people started dying.
Ares watched them train. An army they were not and never would be. But with their uniforms and practiced movements, they looked the part, and that was all he needed.
Ares longed for the days of the expeditionary fleet, but it had been yet another casualty of the Serpentine Restrictions. Space exploration could lead to unknown dangers, or the greatest risk of all: rediscovery by the Serpentine Army.
The thought of it reminded him of his own role in the mission that had led to the end: his capture of a sentinel sphere that opened a break in the line, allowing the great serpent to flow across and port to the Atlanteans’ first homeworld. He would never see that mistake repeated.
The Atlantean dream was a single society on a single world, safe behind the beacon and the immense sentinel army that formed a wall in space around it; an Atlantean world of peace and plenty, stretching into eternity. The dream was built on forsaking three temptations: the easy labor of robotics, the false advancement of genetic engineering, and the fascination of deep space exploration.
Ares realized Nomos was at his side, but he said nothing, hoping the moron would reciprocate. As usual, Ares was disappointed.
“They look more like an army every day,” Nomos said, further lowering Ares’ opinion of his intelligence.
“Yes, they’ll play their role nicely.”
Ares didn’t know when the next attack would come, but it didn’t much matter. The future was a foregone conclusion for him, an equation working its way to a known end.
He rarely slept, and when sleep did come, it was fitful. He sat at the desk in the apartment they had given him, flipping through the letters his wife had written him, watching videos of her, and replaying endless scenarios in his mind, debating about how things might have been different. But the truth was that he had simply played his role, as many had before him and would after him. The avatar had been right. Ares knew it now. Ares wondered how many worlds he had seen rise and fall. A thousand? A million? More?
The avatar had advocated a simple existence, living by a shared code. Ares imagined that on those worlds, every citizen was an intellectual and a laborer, and every life was respected. They had it right.
Ares mused at his own words back then: We’re going to fight.
But there had been no great enemy to fight, only a few helpless victims. There had been no harrowing threat at their door, bonding his people together. The Serpentine Army had never come, and in the absence of a threat, his people had lost the very will to fight. In fact, confronted with the first taste of violence in thousands of years, their solution had been to dig him out of hibernation: a fossil of an almost forgotten past, back to vanquish the barbarian threat.
No, they didn’t want to fight. This was the dark side of the human reality: with no conflict, no challenge, the fire within winks out and without the flame, society stagnates, slipping into a slow decline. There was only one solution to his world’s problems: cutting out the cancer.
Ares dreaded it. But it was a conflict, a challenge, a reason for him to exist. He wondered if it was the only thing keeping him alive.
He walked to the window and