Empire Calls - short story

Men may deem their fellow men to be stronger, better informed; even smarter. But no man thinks their peer wiser than themselves, for this would require fathoming the extent of what they don’t know. 

And yet Illyria had been confronted with its own stupidity. A civilisation which has fallen can no longer pretend wisdom when the fallibility of its people is made so plain for so long. Illyria was a planet which had long lived in the ruins of its own glory, and the current mood resembled a party at the end of Times just as the music turns sour. 

Aglaia was pacing through these thoughts as she looked outside the window of an abandoned office tower, a spire of simmering silver against the dark skies of the capital. Dust flickered in shades of gold in the weak sunlight of winter. Light and sounds streaming from the outside and into the thick atmosphere of this empty office, concealing the chaos unfolding outside. She looked into the crowds far below at street level and her stomach tightened at the sight of so many children. They were running, playing, singing, partying; but this scene betrayed the reality that they had been abandoned by their parents upon hearing the great news that had wrought commotion to Illyria.

A notice had been picked up by a comms buoy long presumed dormant. The language was clear: Empire would soon be checking on its subjects. The author wasn’t so obvious. The concept of Empire seemed so archaic so as to be poetic. 

Aglaia was living through the state of general hysteria with Vasily. Vasily had moved to the house next to hers right before chaos exploded and they immediately fell for each other. He lay naked besides her, his skin impossibly perfect and eternally exposed. The end of times weren’t the occasion for modesty and caution. Most of her friends had immediately quit their jobs to live through what was widely presumed to be their last months of freedom. Some had left their children behind. Many disappeared without a trace.

Ultra Terminum had been the name of the Illyrian sector of the cosmos since times immemorial. ‘Beyond the borders’. What borders? 10,000 years ago they had been a colonial outpost of the Empire, isolated from it by the Line, a dark matter filament which made interstellar travel to Ultra Terminum incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Many believe it was the hubristic and entirely unsustainable decision to maintain colonies beyond the Line what sealed the fate of the Empire. The first colonists never expected to return to the core of the Empire they had emigrated from, and their pioneering character had long made the fiercely independent Illyrians at peace with their isolation.

The only inhabitants of Illyria were robots for the first 1,000 years after an expeditionary vessel from the Empire Standard started terraforming it. An atmosphere was first synthesized and enough water was melted from the poles and surfaced from the vast underground oceans to provide for a future human population. Planet x38h9(i) became a mining center for centuries in order to support its own terraforming, until the Empire Standard transferred the world to the imperial administration for civilian use, renaming it Illyria. 

Illyria thrived. The planet thrived through millennia as exemplary subjects of the Empire, contributing taxes and rare earths at a slow but constant pace while requiring little in the way of defence. These were the hallmarks of existence beyond the Line. A slow but peaceful existence. As civil wars and religious conflict roiled Empire over millennia, Illyria developed into a prosperous society, undisputed master of its barren corner of the universe.