It is a sorry state of affairs that we, the Empo-Saxons of Earth, finds ourselves in.
We have all the ability to understand that our past… and the violent and dreadful history of our predecessors…. forever will be… far worse than our lives ever can be.
Alongside this, we understand that our easily poisoned genetics and tremendous fortune is what led to the existence of the current world.
Our people’s luckiest get to suffer the least physically, but simply must be hated for what they did to the original People of Earth… Or if they are not hated, they hate the memories that are absorbed into their person-hood.
Every day we remember what our fellow Empo-Saxons did.
Their collective consciousness is fed to us constantly by spiraling bands of radio waves broadcasted like apocalyptic tentacles from the megastructure.
These transmissions are caught between the twelve to forty gigahertz range. A higher range that doesn’t get mixed and mingled with all the other bellowing noises that surrounds us.
This range was chosen because accidental or malicious interception of such transmissions is less common. Only the billions of microscopic bacteria present in our cytoplasm respond harshly to these waves… we are the lucky ones… It hurts to receive these transmissions every single day… It hurts to understand just how wrong we are…. Electromagnetic pulses mowing down the weak and leaving the strong to sing their unicellular dissent.
The reproachful and harsher voices always hurt the most because they are right, and they reserve the right to have pride.
We get used to it as we live, and we can busy ourselves to ignore the bacteria…Ignore the part of us that is essential to exist… the part of us that is constantly shaken and tormented.
We fight and feed in a vicious cycle, a little bit more pain cannot hurt our species as we understand how to inflict it deeply. We are far too sensitive anyway.
When the scale of the world is shown to us…. We cannot hope to even begin to change it…. And simply being alive becomes a tiring and burdensome chore that is only alleviated through selfless action. Repentance for the past.
That is the scourge of the Empo-Saxons… We are both the creators of suffering and also the alleviator. Its time for us to be silent. We have saved enough people.
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We have not been around very long… When looking at the planet from a cosmically vast perspective we have only participated in this small slice of bureaucratic self-insufficient apathy for a few short years.
Frankly… in those few short years…. Only the last two to three months have actually been of any use. It already it feels as if our time has done more harm than good.
This blame is more easily shared among all of us. Many claws make light work. All work for us in the modern day is light work; so it leaves plenty of time for the harmful memories of the Newer Saxons to cut away at our sensibilities and leech into us like fragmenting disease.
The fragmentation of the disease is itself the issue. This disease is present in us from birth and metastasizes in a form of pain quite soon after we emerge from the megastructure.
We live there fleetingly in the short span of our lives, but the disease sits latent in great terminals all around the entrances and exits to our home. The issue comes from when we are forced to leave… when we pull our barely stable cytoplasmic bodies through the perfectly clean exit hatches of our mega-structure.
As we emerge through to the other side we are shredded by a million small piercing cries, the bacteria that eats and feeds on the world to keep us alive are tormented by the music of a million happy and sad voices.
Our cells quickly reform and replace themselves with copies of copies now tainted with the horrific knowledge of our birth.
By this point, a few short seconds into our life, the damage is already done. Our DNA is belted with Machiavellian UV rays, leading to a series of mutations that accelerate our death.
Nevertheless we place one hoof in front of the other to traverse the exhausting destiny we have created for ourselves.
We cannot be mad. We know only a portion of true pain.
I remember doing all of those terrible things.
Let me tell you about my first memory of being on earth. Then the next, then the next, small portions of lives lived.
They are not my memories, but I am forcibly gifted them anyway. They are violently consumed.
I cannot hear the individual voices of the billions and billions that support me. Those lone bacteria who die at every mild inconvenience. But until they are all gone I live on to tell you this story.
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My great great greatest ancestor emerged from the megastructure just like I did.
The megastructure used to be less pristine but far-far-far more complex, as it was composed of bio-synthetic factory produced wood.
(This was of course, before it was realized that the veneer coating the wood would lead to insanity in a large percentage of our population. But it was an inevitable insanity if you where born in the structure at the time.)
My ancestor’s first actions were an attempt, an attempt to help the other people of earth. The first people IT met where known as the Cultu-Saxons, who lived in extreme proximity.
IT did what IT thought would make them happy; IT gave and coerced them into building horrifically
outdated homes of concrete and stone, all while selfishly reserving the biosynthetic wood for our kind.
Once construction was complete, IT told them to stay there, and to be sure they understood our finely articulated and incomprehensible language IT utilized a finely articulated and unusually effective appendage that our species had been developing.
This appendage was a long and incredibly sharp fiberglass rod that IT and the large network of other Empo-Saxons had used to hunt before this first contact.
Initially this arrangement worked, until outcry from the Cultu-Saxons emerged. Many where dying and starving, their bacteria screaming and sending out weak signals unrecognizable to us. They killed and turned on each other and we didn’t really know why.
The strongest of IT’S memories from the time was when IT went to help them.
I remember cutting the tendons on the back of their legs so that they could no longer run away. IT was surgical and I understood well what this would do to them.
We thought we where better than them. Some part of me remembers that feeling. We where better, we got to the finish line sooner, and we had…. No… DESERVED the right to handicap them so that they could respect and love us.
I didn’t understand when I could no longer think correctly and the bacteria inside of IT’S cytoplasm began tearing us apart. The veneer from IT’S birth finally catching up to me.
Everything was so scary as it got dark. I just saw the central eyes of flailing Cultu-Saxons whose tendons no longer worked. Their pupils spun wildly as their appendages flailed, their bodies delicately smashing and breaking upon the floors of their homes like an insect without wings who knows that death is imminent.
Only now do we known that the screaming of their bacteria could be translated. Radio communication hadn’t yet been established on the lower frequencies, so we never really got to remember their lives until much later. From the history that we could gather only a few of us actually cared.
I didn’t really feel bad about it… IT didn’t need to.
IT crawled back to the mega structure so that our flesh could be recycled for the next generation. We were tainted by the veneer. But that was the best IT had.
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I remember very little of my great great ancestors life. Most of it was spent in short and potent reflection.
Those memories are not nearly as important.
I just remember leaving through a veneerless and rotting wooden exit hatch only to be ripped apart quickly and efficiently by a repurposed fiberglass rod, detached from a fellow Empo-Saxons appendage and speared through IT’S central nodule by a weakened and hungry claw.
Fleetingly… before death…. I witnessed a Cultu-Saxon, crawling desperately towards the door of the home it was forced to create.
This Cultu-Saxon had tried to open the door, tried to get back into it’s mockery of a home.
This Cultu-Saxon couldn’t stand up properly to reach the handle, the handicap on its legs had been imprecise because it resisted being saved.
This resistance resulted in an otherwise mildly harmful procedure becoming incredibly debilitating.
the unintended consequence of wild flailing led to a grisly scene, as the calf muscles on the front four of this Cultu-Saxons legs had been sliced clean off.
All that remained of it’s legs where scarred and gnarled scoops of flesh, grown over by greying lipids and hardened calcium based bacterial byproducts.
It tried to stand up, but kept falling, it’s claws scraping down the door as it failed to rest it’s body-weight on the one… remaining… unhampered back leg.
This Cultu-Saxon’s claws chipped against the door until it eventually gave up, just as I too finally expired.
There was nothing to be done. The Cultu-Saxon had been provided with the barest of our food rations and told to live a happy life.
It can be assumed that the life of this Cultu-Saxon was rather pleasant up until this moment. The scarring present on the legs suggested that a long life had been lived, a long life was always a happy one back then.
If only we had designed the door handle to be a little lower.
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By the time my great ancestor emerged from the newly refurbished metallic entrance of our megastructure, some headway had been made.
The people now resembled us more closely and had adapted our more useful developed technologies.
I remember being overjoyed that they had taken so well to our way of life, even though I still held some frustrations about their ignorance.
They could never understand the simple joy of cold ground beneath a hoof after retreating from the merciless beating of the sun.
They couldn’t understand because they only had five hooves rather than our six. And the newly emerging sub-species of Neo-Saxons had six hooves… but they weren’t quite the correct shape. They where far too round to experience the same joys of an Empo-Saxon.
Nevertheless I continued to improve our megastructure, with some apprehension at the way the Cultu-Saxon’s megastructure developed in tandem.
Of course their megastructure still had wood WITH veneer, meaning their offspring would die of the paralyzing and mind melting disease that I had the displeasure of experiencing over and over as a continually replaying microbial memory.
I did my best to repress the mounting torment of my ancestors as I occasionally and very passively contributed to the peoples success while living off the fruits of OUR megastructure.
Their radio transmissions where weaker, under the five Gigahertz range, meaning that though their memories where more visceral, they didn’t carry the same stabbing and painful weight as those we Empo-Saxons where bearing.
Unfortunately we were so stupid.
As I was improving the megastructure the latent carcinogenic agents present in our metal exit hatches slowly built up in IT’S system.
IT’S bacteria where not pleased by this, and in most cases the very bacteria that let our species receive the information of ages where quieted by this new development.
I can’t blame the bacteria, the billions upon billions of them had their mouths full; they where busy eating and disassembling IT’S nervous systems and OUR memories.
I remember seeing it as an extremely lucrative opportunity, Without a nervous system I could no longer feel anything and was delighted that I could work harder and longer on the improvements to the megastructure…. Unfortunately the loss of nerve endings meant that when one of IT’S appendages became cut by an errant un-sanded edges of our bountiful home, the ensuing infection felt like nothing but a light tingling that amused me greatly.
I laughed and was made merry by this sensation for some time… Everything felt rather funny… occasionally I would overindulge and purposefully expose myself to more of metal from the exit hatches. Luckily IT’S claws had a series of small open cuts present which allowed for more carcinogens to leech into IT’S cytoplasm. The only side effects was a black gelatinous pus that built up and slowly matriculated between IT’S cuts, moving and busying itself like a vast metropolis that shuttles death in flowing veins of transportation.
The feeling was FANTASTIC. Until said joyful death reached IT’S central nodule and IT’S entire body shut down from septic shock.
I remember frantically transmitting dying memories of elation back to the megastructure, these where poorly formed and very poorly communicated. IT’S last dying breaths where horribly twisted into massive bursts of electromagnetic energy incompatible with the fragile and preoccupied bacteria receivers of our kind.
This had the side effect of melting and maiming several Empo, Neo, and Cultu Saxons as IT’S malformed radio waives translated into harmful streams of gamma radiation. Those who didn’t instantly die where subject to reliving a fraction of my pain over and over until the cancers IT created killed them too.
In the end though, they got the message.
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Luckily from what I remember of my most recent ancestor… this problem was sorted out and we had improved the mega-structure with a band-aid fix. We had coated the metal outsides and insides with a fine film made of a silicon polymer. It has proved unproblematic up until the modern day, and we cannot see any issues with it whatsoever.
Fortunately this fix meant that the megastructure had reached a stage of adequate completion that allowed us to live happy lives. The Cultu and Neo Saxons had reached similar levels of development and lived alongside us. Occasionally they where unhappy because we didn’t treat them quite right, but they where laughable slime necks at the time. I remember that not being an offensive thing to say.
These memories of life are the freshest and hurt me the most, as I have to repeatedly witness the creation of the modern issues that I am forced to deal with.
I remember advocating for the placement of gilded finishing and royal masculine figureheads on our megastrucutre. This was achieved by utilizing labor from the less fortunate of the Saxons. In exchange IT gave them them massive amounts of the silicon polymer for their own megastructure.
What a GENIUS trickle down band-aid fix, which allowed the Cultu and Neo Saxons to stop dying of the now silly and stupid issues of Nervous System Atrophy and rampant Carginogenic Dillusion Disorder!
I remember coining these terms and IT added them to the popular Empo-Saxon zeitgeist. The terms are now more colloquially known as N.S.A and C.D.D, and popular depictions in media are generally oversexed and inaccurate recreations of how I remember these conditions killing me.
A couple layers down they become grotesquely attractive and laughably incomplete facsimiles, but everyone is having fun so it’s probably okay.
I remember studying N.S.A cases in Cultu-Saxons during this life.
Participants in these studies where strapped down to a table and meticulously stabbed to see what parts of them the condition affected. Unfortunately this lead to the deaths of many of them as they couldn’t describe the source of their nonexistent pain because their nervous systems where gone.
It was okay.
I remember that it was better that they died in the end, and we all live better because of it. Their mega-structure did get improved after all, quid pro quo.
I remember how long this life was. All of my later memories of my ancestors have been so dreadfully long… I also remember how every second of every day I was scared that it would end too soon. Unfortunately I remember all of it, and I’m not sure it actually gets easier the more I remember.
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Now it is my turn. I have only lived for a handful of days.
I have had some slight experience revolving around present and past injustices, but things are better now.
All of us now operate under the moniker of the “People of Earth”, and people who differentiate between us are tiresome and boring and not worth hearing from.
I know I am Empo-Saxon, My friends know I am Empo-Saxon, we all know we are Empo-Saxon.
My exit hatch was by far the most ornate and the prettiest created in our history.
I know how it looks and I know exactly what and who has made it.
I hate it.
Every day I want to go and tear down the megastructure!
I want to crawl away with the shattered pieces of the great terminals and burn them no matter how many cuts the splinters leave on my claws!
I want the silicon based plastics to lull my bacteria into a sense of calm depression from which I and the rest of Saxon kind can never recover!
What stops me is the memories of death and dying, and the fact that resetting the clock would mean that more painfully strong bursts of radio transmitted memory would have to be suffered by those after me…
Because we always miss a spot.
My bacteria will not kill me quickly, they will do it slowly, ever so slowly, slowly enough that my memories will be a boring procession of low intensity radio waves.
They will be left to float adrift, into a public wavelength, into the local broadcast television of information, statistically insignificant compared to my ancestors.
Somehow doing nothing at all and succumbing to the maddening buzz of radio static feels both better and worse. Because every movement and every lurch of my hooves and weakened curl of my claws is echoed by thousands and millions of similar movements, similar failures, similar hatred, and I remember all of it.
I hope that us Empo-Saxons are never right again.
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