The Storyteller stood upon the cliff’s edge, staring into infinity. He stood upon the surface of a forlorn, lonely, and insignificant rock adrift in the vastness of space. It had begun its journey of accretion as interstellar dust particles gently tugged across the eons. Until their intersection with a suitable stellar mass and its accompanying pull occurred sometime long ago. No one had bothered to date it, not this arbitrary beachhead taken and made a staging ground. As was his wont, the Storyteller imagined they had anyways.
He visualized those particles of dust, inexorably spun out of the aether and rubbing with each other, their new neighbors, and any other late-comers to the planetary system formation orgy. Slowly but surely, under the gentle tug of gravity and its everlong pull came organization to endless motion; dust grains were brought together which formed masses which in turn formed rocks which in turn formed mountains.
Was the rock once part of a world that knew love and kindness? Did he trod upon layers and layers of a violently stolen history as rich as his own? No one had bothered to check but as was his wont, the Storyteller imagined that it had been anyways. That was, after all, all too common an occurrence as they neared the death throes of the cosmos. How long ago had it been, since the first battle of this all encompassing war? That he didn’t need to imagine.
They’d certainly kept track of that.
All the better for the Universe’s last coalition of sapient entities that they had, or else he wouldn’t have anyone to tell stories to. He guessed the rock they stood on was maybe 16 billion years old, with half a billion to give or take either way. Formed around the time his ancestors sported the latest in motility in the primordial soup; behold the flagellum, fellow single celled prokaryotes! Now we’re going places! By then, the war in the heavens for their right to exist was 2.6 million years old.
His reverie was interrupted as one of them soared through the portion of space occupying his field of vision. She flew on kilometer long fiery wings through the foreground of his—as arbitrarily chosen by a squinting-enforced reference frame—vision, past the ‘cliff’s’ edge, temporarily disorienting him. He had lost track of which way he had decided ‘up’ was for the purposes of his daydreaming. Cliff or base of a ravine; it was all a matter of perspective in the absence of any real gravity to speak of.
He shook his head and accepted the synthesis of anti-emetics in his bloodstream, but maintained his refusal to engage his cybernetics back on when prompted by the Xenial AI.
Here was the eve of the final battle for the fate of all creation, and the Storyteller intended to spend his final days as close to baseline—small ‘h’—human as he was still able to be. He turned to face the congregated masses that had gathered to hear him and floated into position before the podium. Some came for the nostalgia it alluded to. Others for the novelty. A message, a summary of events, a tale told entirely through the low bandwidth modulation of air waves? When they could all share in a real-time merging stream of communal neuro/somatic consciousness? Well, it was novel in this here and now, even among a good subset of the Humans.
“Please correct me if I’m wrong, Commander…” came a query from Sgt. Latrimanax Te’Ungwell, Larry to his (Human) friends. Not that either name really captured the true name of the Goman ‘man’. His silicate based golem-like kind had no vocal cords.
“We’re going to go over all of Va’nyrian history using this speech thing?” Larry asked. His response came in the way that his thoughts were given music by the Xenial AI shaking the air around the listeners for him.
The Storyteller bared his teeth in a predatory grin; “We sure are, Larry.”
“Won’t that take forever?”
“We have more rest cycles than things to do in them, soldier,” the Storyteller said. His expression turned momentarily stern and his tone was harsh, just for the barest of moments. He reined himself in. He had to remember that this was for the troops as much as himself. His grip over their aegis was slipping the longer the battle went on, and the horrors were beginning to leave their marks, leaving them all short tempered.
“You can indulge an old war dog with the offer to entertain you, and still make the mess hall on time,” he added.
“Uh, Commander,” said Cpl Austen, one of the Humans in his platoon. “Didn’t you order us to assemble?”
“Semantics,” replied The Storyteller with a wink at the crowd. It felt right, to go with the whims of his neurochemistry again after so long. He’d almost forgotten the allure of showmanship, charisma, and little white lies. Fruits long since pruned from the tree of Humanity thanks to the little change of being able to understand each other down to the soul with the aid of technology.
“Now, listen up and listen well,” The Storyteller opened in a showman’s booming roar. “Today I share to you the secret story behind the war of good versus evil. Righteousness versus depravity. Life against that which has never known being.” He turned half of his body towards the audience and gestured at the center of the stage.
A flash of light gave life to an intricate 20 feet tall representation of a tall and slender helmeted humanoid figure encased in a distinctive set of vacuum battle-armor composed of smoky black ‘glass’. A dim-orange light pulsed underneath the surface of the armor as dozens of fiery-plasma tendrils reminiscent of wings extended from the figure’s back, fading into the edges of the holographic-medium display beyond view.
“Some would say it began with him,” The Storyteller said as he gestured at the figure of their Commander-in-Chief. “In most ways, that is the truth. However…” The Storyteller grinned, mirth tugging at the wrinkles around his eyes. “This is a Human tale. As is tradition, it really began with one of them, am I right?” he quipped.
A chorus of jeering good natured boos and sarcastic cries of ‘Human Exceptionalism, as expected’ resounded through the assembled warriors representative of a dozen wildly different species, whose evolutionary trees touched none at all. Some didn’t even have evolutionary trees, not in the strictest sense.
“Settle down and get comfortable,” the Storyteller said, his voice lowered conspiratorially. The effect still held, despite the AI reproduction ensuring the same whisper was heard by all. “Hear me as I tell you the tale of how William Fisher stumbled onto the battle for life itself, befriended our respected elders, and led Humanity into the stars paving the way for the Consensus,” his whisper rose to a crescendo. “This is the story of the beginning of our end.”
The image on the large hologram shifted from the ethereal alien soldier, to that of a small human child. A boy, roughly 7 or 8 years old. Hale and healthy if a bit on the lanky side. With dark brown hair cut smartly, and a slightly gap toothed smile that was currently nowhere to be seen. Instead, he was crying.