Overlap: The Other Side

<11/01/149,566 {Avion 148} - 13:15 | Corral Position, Genosis, Altiri Sector Space>

With one class after the other, I had too much passive time to collect my thoughts of the past, the thoughts I wanted to bury deep into the darkest pit of hell. With Reed going to gym class, it would now be my time to tell him all about our Altiri history. There was way too much to say in just a few sentences, so I had to start from the beginning and summarize what I knew at the same time, keeping some of the benign memories at bay.

There is a history for us, a history for them, and a history intertwined in the involvement of us both, but the moment on our minds now traced back to our darkest years in the past, over a hundred thousand years ago. Our world changes ever so slowly, but our upbringing was not without sacrifice, void of any perfection.

All Altiri know about the history of our past, of what happened on September 22nd, 49,139, the fall of Zinod; the very same day we lost more than a million Altiri souls, and the same moment Legasso was branded as the number one enemy of The Unity and all Altiri alike. This is the reason all heathens are the enemy of our kind, and why anybody with even slight similarities to Legasso are seen in the same description...

It took me a while to realize, to become self-aware of the irony in my most recent decisions. By all points, Reed is a male, just like other male humans on Earth, and yet, he isn't really like the others. He isn't drawn to the lure of destructive robot fights and random explosions; he isn't interested in controlling every little thing and person in his life, and he doesn't find any fun in the pain of others. It's not easy to pinpoint exactly which qualities and traits are the same to Legasso, since he was just one specific man, not to mention his horrible behaviors only showed so late in his life, but after studying humans long enough, all of us have reached an interesting conclusion. This trait humans call masculinity, while complicated, and while not a 1:1 ratio for comparison, is still the closest matrix of personality traits we've remembered in Legasso. There are simply men who enjoy the pain of others, the enslavement of others, the abuse and sexual abuse of women, and who prioritize being the alpha. It isn't to say all men behave in such ways, but most men seem to lean into it, as if it were a primal urge or instinct. Every time I see it, there is always this big focus on 'being tough' or 'being the strong, dominant one.'

Is it actually masculinity? I don't really care. I can spot a heathen from miles away every single time, and I'm willing to bet Reed will as well. I don't know why there are rare exceptions to this rule; I'm simply glad that there are. I used to be convinced with the rest of The Unity that no such exceptions existed within humans, but here stands evidence to the contrary.

I had to break down the history of our time in increments as I told Reed everything, from start to finish. We never knew our origin story, but we managed to advance in time either way; us, a superior race of Altiri women, reproducing by parthenogenesis (a human term), until someone gave birth to a male Altiri. His physical and mental differences were noted instantly, and the man was praised for these differences, as most thought he was a god or savior, for whatever the reason.

It pains me to even know this in our history, but Legasso didn't start out as a bad person, or if he did, he hid those traits all too well. None of us know when he began to turn or why. When our race was still so young, trapped on our frozen world outside the stars above, Legasso was there to lead a team, to develop our technology, and eventually set sights on outer space. Legasso didn't do the heavy thinking and heavy work alone of course; he simply delegated the tasks and the research.

Thousands of years later, there was much to show for it. Using what resources we had available in the rocks that fell from the sky, we were eventually capable of reaching space, even though there were difficulties and casualties along the way. It was a very long duration of time afterwards, where peace and calm prevailed, while technology continued to grow, slowly, gradually, and carefully.

It was during the tail end of this calm when I was first born, the exact year escaping my memory. Even though I cannot remember my mother and my neighbor family, I could vaguely remember the tiny town I grew up in; Anncoya. All of us lived in clusters of small towns, each no more than fifty houses span. There wasn't much for us to do back then, unless we were inspired to work for Legasso's many branches of development.

Over thousands of more years, Legasso and his subsidiary departments continued to make things for the betterment of Altiri society, until one day, this development came to a near halt. Progress became insanely slow, and it drew more demand for us to join these departments to work on their projects, always made so vague from the outside. I remember joining none of them.

Whatever was going on inside the government created just enough tension and confusion to warrant the attention of others on the outside, including my own. Something sinister was going on inside that royal temple on the surface, a temple built just for Legasso's sake, though none of us knew for sure, our telepathic powers still unable to snoop into someone's random mental maze of thought. We could sometimes feel the pain and outcry of others, but never understand from whom or why.

I wasn't born during the time, but a mutual acquaintance of my mother was there the day Lady Q introduced herself, passed down on my side of the family through memory transfer. The friend volunteered into the temple as a means of learning whether it was something they wanted to do, while Legasso's worship was always at such high regard and demand. I don't know what Lady Q saw in him that day, or what she was ever thinking. That day she walked in, she made a formal address to the leader, Legasso, challenging his motives as well as his authority, right in front of everyone as if it were no big deal.

It was as if I was among the rest of the crowd, wondering why someone would ever question Legasso's leadership when he brought us so far in our history and gradual development. None of us knew at the time that Lady Q had been practicing with a crazy ability, one that allowed her to intrude on the telepathy of others even when it was meant to be secured and locked down. I think she kept it to herself that day, because nobody would have believed her if she was the only one who could do it.

I now wonder if she caught Legasso in telepathic speech discussing some diabolical plan with someone else, or if he was simply treating his closest members with undue disrespect and malice. I remembered her face when she addressed Legasso though. Lady Q was absolutely certain that something was wrong with the man, and she didn't hide her distaste and disloyalty for him.

All of us thought and expected what happened next would be all there was. Lady Q was insulted by her own peers, as the whole world became upset with her, and she was outcast, banished from whatever neighborhood she came from before, which wasn't a shock for any of us. I don't know what she was expecting to happen, but Lady Q quickly went into hiding afterwards. We assumed that she was out of her mind, that she was the one who was so incorrect and mistaken.

However, not long after her appearance and brazen display of disloyalty, something inside Legasso snapped that day. It wasn't obvious or instant, but everyone eventually realized his differences shortly after. He prioritized the special projects less and less, holding most programs on the backburner, except for the space exploration project. Since he was technically in charge of everything, he didn't need a public reason or an excuse to direct everything as he pleased.

What changed in him first was the disrespect towards many workers under his direct control. He may have hidden the abuse in the beginning, but he hid it much less afterwards. Of course, much of the abuse, in the beginning anyway, was entirely linked to the condition of giving absolute sworn loyalty and allegiance to Legasso, mind, body, and soul.

With the projects slowing down however, that wasn't a commodity traded as often as before, and the more people under him started to think independently of his control, the more those same people were abused, and the more us outsiders began to question whether Legasso's continued control was absolutely necessary for our survival.

We weren't the best critical thinkers of our time, myself included during that moment so long ago. After living in a world of peace for so long, there was little need to learn about the conflicting natures of other people, and little reason to try challenging anything at all. What Legasso was doing was obvious to some, but confusing for most. In many ways, we didn't react to what we should have reacted to, and with Lady Q in hiding, all of us had to stick to our own thoughts and reason, no matter how naive, no matter how flawed.

The escalation wasn't quick by any means; thousands of more years still passed until we finally noticed enough change to make comparisons we could not make before. Though it took so long, independent research and development centers started to crop up, run entirely on their own, outside the confines of our single-ruler government. Our science was not developing at the pace it should have been anymore, with exception to the might of the space program Legasso still controlled, as many more fleets of space ships were constructed.

Some of saw these independent stations as an indifferent existence in our world, until Legasso and his insanely devoted team of Altiri warriors targeted these independent stations, seizing total control over them under the claim that only he could control such programs. It was the first time we could see how much he wanted to control everything, even though most of us didn't realize this was such a dangerous and negative trait.

The ugly dark ages of Legasso continued for years, with workers closest to him becoming so different and vile, aggressive like never seen before. Some of these soldiers were sent into our towns, harassing and hurting other people if they too did not swear absolute loyalty to Legasso, including myself. Still, enough of us thought nothing was wrong with the picture, having nothing else to compare it to, until The Exodus started.

It began slowly, initially as a volunteer program to better survey planet Zinod from afar. As soon as there were enough transport ships and enough willing Altiri soldiers, Legasso started The Exodus program. It had no public mission statement, and no warning as to what it was going to be about. Without warning, hundreds of thousands of Altiri families were ripped apart, the mothers separated from their children. Word got around quickly that children of people like myself were being separated from their mothers, the mothers being thrown onto these ships, sent off to Zinod, and never seen again, led entirely by Legasso's private army.

All of us were helpless to stop it, and some time in between the initial change and The Exodus, something happened to all of us Altiri, something we've never since been able to explain or figure out. We would always give birth at the age of 108, almost like clockwork, but several years after Lady Q made her first debut, it was like a switch was activated, and most of us stopped having children. It even affected me when it was to be my time, expecting pregnancy only to be surprised when nothing happened. It hit a majority of Altiri first, and quickly spread from one to the next little by little, like a disease of some kind.

When everyone was being rounded up, this only made it easier for the Legasso task force to collect our mothers, since there weren't any newborns to replace us. Legasso stole so many people, sent them to Zinod, and then shut down the special project designed to look deeper into our sudden inability to reproduce normally.

Meanwhile, I tried to tune it all out, prioritizing time spent with my mother, as I ignored the rest of what was going on around me. Me and my mother went into hiding, though I still remember nothing about her face, her words, or her personality to this day; only that we spent time together in the snow banks near the dead zones of our planet, or in caves. One day, the task force took my mother away too, while I was forced into one of the larger cities, left all on my own, scared and afraid like many others my age around me.

We were allowed to travel from city to town, wherever we wanted to go, but Legasso and his team of monsters made certain we all knew that our mothers were being exiled on Zinod, for 'disloyalty' in their words. I would have given up right then and there, but when I followed rumor that there was still hope in the town three sectors over, I followed my own path to it, finding where this new hope was coming from.

Lady Q, the same woman who had initially exiled herself made a return, trying to stay out of the eyes of the task force. She gave so many public speeches, words that I would never forget to this day. She explained everything that was really going on, laying it all out before us, and explaining the reason why it was all horrible. Like a new leader, she stood up for all of us, and made promises that we would one day be reunited with our families trapped on Zinod again. We had not the power of long range clairvoyance or even long range telepathy, having not been taught how it works, but Lady Q did have the power of telepathy for any range, and she revealed to us how she learned everything and what she was planning to do about it. She proved to many how vile and evil Legasso was as a person, by sharing her own memory with those nearby, memory of overhead telepathic conversations which she herself intruded into, as well as some other unknown growing conspiracy. I wasn't able to attain this memory, for I was still too untrained to see it, though I trusted my fellow people.

Lady Q knew that most of us were too vulnerable, that none of us knew how to actually fight, where Legasso's growing task force knew how to kill and snap necks. Any mass gathering on the surface would eventually be noticed and shut down. So, she did the interesting thing by attacking the space program, running small, insurgent, private guerrilla attacks on critical infrastructure where it regarded preparing launching ships into space, which kept Legasso grounded for a long time. In the meantime, Lady Q devised a small team of pilots, and launched into space on hundreds of missions, changing the launching and landing point so often as to never give up any key location.

We learned later that she was building a small docking station hidden in the reaches of outer space, and from that docking station, over many more hundreds of years, they harvested more materials from the asteroid fields, used what they could to build more ships, expand the base, expand the docking station potential, and expand the fleet, little by little, all in a manner that hid what was going on from the others.

By the time thousands of ships were built, warning reached us that Legasso was onto Lady Q's plan, and so Lady Q initiated a mandatory military draft of everyone nearby, which included myself. I remember this moment too well, and I was so scared to go into space all by myself. Even though we would be put with teams of people like us, I didn't know anybody there, nor did I understand how to fight, how to fly, or how to so much as maintain a spacecraft. Apparently, Junko didn't know much more than me when we met.

With the draft granting a new fleet close to ten thousand ships, Legasso's biggest conspiracy was revealed, a conspiracy that he had been developing some kind of world ending weapon, using known compounds in some kind of bomb, rumored to be capable of mass destruction on a huge scale, with the purpose clearly being threats and terrorism. Knowing he would ever think to go this far was the wake-up call all of us needed, for the Altiri children and myself included were finally awakened to the evil we were facing.

Secret task forces under Lady Q were sent back down to Karnak to locate and secure these bombs, but their tasks didn't end in success quick enough, most of them vanishing. To counter this, Lady Q expedited her own program, expanding the base and construction so that a massive Altiri Temple could be built in outer space, slated for operations in ship docking, pilot training, and physical combat training, as well as some psionic training. This also took many years, but all of us knew by then what we had to do. This massive fleet, this insane training program, all of it was made against Legasso.

It should have been easy to go after one man after outnumbering him so much, but he had his own task force, those loyal only to him and nobody else. He also had these doomsday bombs as insurance that going after him at random could be dangerous, and so we needed to be trained first. Most of us recognized the leadership being used to help us, and many more were allowed to land on Zinod to see their mothers again, though getting them off Zinod was a challenge in itself with the space craft not being designed for large transport, and the scattered amount of people on Zinod.

Even so, it wasn't enough time. Legasso launched his plan early, flying his personal ship to Zinod, despite knowing it would be seen, tracked, and watched landing there. Rumor had it that he made no attempt to hide what he brought on board with him, the very same E-bomb we feared me might try to use. Our newly appointed queen did not know about this bomb that he carried to Zinod, and neither did the rest of us. So, she sent many of our fleets out to land on Zinod ourselves, to trap Legasso there and box him in.

Little did we know that we were already way too late. Lissy and Sana, from the town of Jue, caught up to Legasso first, only after they had learned that Legasso was - without question – planning to destroy much of Zinod to wipe out their entire population, all as a means to force the rest of us Altiri to submit. Lissy and Sana ensured they could track their target, and upon catching up to Legasso, engaged him in combat, failing to defeat him, but succeeding in slowing down his attempt to flee from the doomed world on his own ship.

Legasso's bomb had a remote detonator, but Lissy had somehow obtained one of these E-bombs herself from a spy, and she set her own with a timer, combined with a remote switch to cancel the detonation. Apparently, their plan was to either capture Legasso and kill him while on Zinod, stopping all detonations afterwards, or to let the timer on the other bomb reach zero, so that Legasso could never escape Zinod from his own devastating creation. In the same instance, Lissy and Sana both sent a burst psionic transmission, a powerful, momentary collection of their exact memories as to what was going on up to their last moment, all so that the events of what would come could be confirmed.

We Cy-Stars of course were the only ones to receive this burst transmission, though we would have been destroyed too if we had flown even a few minutes closer to Zinod. We learned everything that happened instantly, but all of us were too horrified to speak, think, or say anything, for an entire planet smaller than Karnak was blown to bits by the unknown weapon.

Some were uncertain whether to label Lissy and Sana as heroes of their own world, or as contributors to Zinod's destruction, wondering if it was all necessary. We later learned however, that Legasso's plan was to detonate his Zinod bomb anyway, after leaving on his ship, and using that devastation as a means to coerce us into sworn allegiance. We also learned that ten more of these devices existed in his hidden stash on Karnak, and that one of his many plans would have been to use threat of Zinod's fall against Karnak as further blackmail to force us to worship him.

The queen created a special council of Royal Scryers, rounded up every single Legasso sympathizer or previous worker, so that they could be pegged or tortured for information, all so that this would be learned and recorded in our history books. Those who refused to feel any shame or guilt for carrying out Legasso's plan, were killed, and the others who seemed remorseful, were imprisoned for the longest time, to slowly be retrained and reintegrated into our society, even though we were never the same again.

I didn't pay much attention to this though. After watching the world my mother was on burn, it was the moment that broke me and the rest of us. For almost every Altiri survivor, our own mothers were on that planet, trapped there and killed because Legasso couldn't control his ego or lust for power. It was all I could think about, for years and years, slowly breaking me apart, where all I had left was this military, and the team of strangers I got stuck with. We all bonded over our shared trauma, but none of us have ever fully healed from what happened.

This is the reason I will never apologize for my hatred. I will never-ever be made to feel wrong or ashamed for how I see any person who might even resemble Legasso in any manner, especially when this person acts the same way Legasso used to. Everything about his behavior was made public and aware after The Unity was formed, information gathered by the queen and other witnesses, so that all of us could know what to look out for.

Our worst past was then behind us, and we would see better, peaceful days, but none of us would heal, none of us would forget, and none of us would forgive. Heathens were branded as our enemy, my enemy, my sisters' enemy, and if ever one were to be born into our world again, they shall have no mercy.

I split up all I could, telling Reed all of this, bit by bit, leaving out just a few of the personal moments, so that I could concentrate on ensuring he understood the basics of what happened. But the more I kept talking about it, the more each scenic memory brought me back to a place I never wanted to be in ever again. I fought the tears as much as I could, reminding myself of the reason I was telling him this, and afraid he might not see this the same way.

However, to my own amazement, I felt the potent remorse and sadness from him too. It wasn't entirely the same in signature, but his emotions were still so genuine and pure, proof he was really listening to all I had to say, holding it in thought for careful consideration.

"While his specific birth was coincidental, it is a correct assumption that we would have been very critical of any new male Altiri if he were ever to be born. We weren't really having new children at that stage, so the threat of giving birth to another male Altiri was not exactly a real concern to us. Nevertheless, Legasso, and all heathens like him were declared public enemy number one, direct enemy of The Unity. If we ever found one again, our automatic response should be to kill on sight."

"Jesus! You people must hate anyone like Legasso. But that extends to anyone who is male?"

"Specific kinds of men, yes. Those most specifically related to the same personality traits present qualities that your people refer to as masculinity. In a nutshell, they are one and the same. Most of us who survived the event lost more than just our own people. For 94% of all the Altiri, which included myself and my sisters in the Cy-Stars, I lost my own mother that day, when the planet was destroyed."

"Oh my gosh Lumina... I'm so sorry!"

I quickly reassured him that none of this was his fault, but hiding the gravity dragging my mood down was already impossible. I'm glad that he at least has some sympathy, despite believing I don't even exist in the first place.

I then explained to him what came after, that I stayed in the military despite the end of the draft. I had lost my only biological family at that point, and all I had left were the people I was surrounded by, who had also lost their families in exactly the same way. We all became friends, sisters who cared for each other. A while afterwards, Herios came along and invented so many new things, giving us the power to resurrect ourselves shortly after death if done right, nearly halting our slow decline of population, among discovering many other sciences.

Little new things happened after long enough spans of time; the purge had been developed initially as a wild experiment in concept only, then we found Earth, and so on, and so forth. I spent too many days in my sadness to remember every single moment that came after, because I spent so much of my time mourning, not merely about the loss of my mom, but also about the loss to my memory of her, for me and my sisters...

I now wonder, if there would have been a point in time where I wouldn't want to go on anymore, losing all my hope, all my sanity, all my inspiration, and all my will to live. I was right on the cusp of these dark thoughts, me and many others, when the scryers suddenly discovered an alien world, changing everything in ways nobody could have ever imagined.

I don't know what exactly it was that made Reed so receptive to this story, but hearing him listen and occasionally ask questions in between, I don't know, but it made this moment feel better somehow, like some strange weight was removed from me. Then, the school bell rang for the end of his gym class.

"You want me to explain the rest to you in your next class, or wait until you get out of school?"

Reed paused for a moment, perhaps surprised that there could be so much more to this. "Honestly, I feel like my head might explode if I learn anymore! But it's not like I will say no either. My music class is not that interesting."

"Excellent! I can talk to you some more then!"

"Did you actually enjoy talking about all of that?"

How would he think that? It isn't something any of us like to talk about anymore, but, after seeing how much he can care about this, despite our current situation, I felt better about all of this, without knowing why. "I only enjoyed talking to you about it. Other than you, I've only had my sisters to talk to about this for the past 100,000 years, officially speaking."

"Oh, right. The communication ban... That rule is way too harsh! How did you ever stay sane?"

"I really don't know." I don't think I was in my right mind for many random moments of my life afterwards. Pushing away all those dark thoughts was so difficult, and the only thing that saved me time and time again were my sisters, as well as some of my new friends I made later on.

I ask myself even crazier questions these days. Why did the Fall of Zinod happen? Why was Legasso born? Why was he put on our planet, and for what purpose did all his devastation serve us? Why was he initially so calm and innocent only to turn evil many thousands of years later? And also, why did she have to die while I survived?

I can never put a blanket over these questions, even though I have such an important thing to do in this other world. This is who I am, a woman with a horrible past, wanting nothing more now than to help somebody else. I know with certainty Reed has not had a rough life, nothing as bad as I, and nothing as bad as plenty of others... But it's still rotten enough, his soul more fragile and sensitive than the rest. All I want to do is help him hold it all together, no matter what it takes, even if I shatter in the process.