World History
An Apex Short Story
-by Ninmast Nunyabiz-
“History’s for historians to remember,” the drunken cry popped off from Sedhit, who was decrying the injustice of his son’s low test scores on the subject. “It’s in their job title and everything! Let them keep track of it and only bother the rest of us with it when it’s necessary!”
Of course, Sedhit was a Sciuri, an outstanding species among those who joined the Union Defenders for their great agility, propensity for mission preparedness and extremely fluffy, very large tails. Their quick thinking, knack for having whatever supplies are needed and reputation for being the last ones to run out made them both great Defenders and great merchants, despite their relatively small frames and general lack of overall physical strength.
… As well as their rather notorious lack of traditional intellectuals. Give a Sciuri something to count, it was said, and he would never lose track of it. Give him something to remember, and it would be gone by sunrise. Indeed, the Sciuri people manufactured some of the best time pieces and kept the most fastidious notes, referring back to both with nervous frequency across nearly any occupation.
If they were Human, Ash had long labeled the entire race as being both obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit, with enough hyperactivity thrown in that she was grateful they were generally discouraged from consuming stimulants. Every rule had a disastrous story behind it, and it took her very little imagination to picture what must have been behind that one.
It wasn’t really a Friday night, as the Galactic Union used a five-day work cycle instead of Earth’s seven-day one. Instead of five days of work with two days off as the standard model, even Defenders worked only three days on and two off. Any longer was considered unhealthy for most species.
One would think this would mean longer shifts to compensate, but that would have been impossible for most Union species, who lacked the endurance to maintain operational focus for such long periods of time. It had initially left Ash feeling seriously under-worked until she adapted. Still, she put in the maximum amount of overtime at a full eight decisols a day, akin to nearly a shift and a half for anyone else. Even then, however, with the amount of mandatory breaks, expanding it to a full Earth Week, she was barely working the equivalent of a full-time job, and much of it was spent more in waiting for something to happen than actually doing anything.
It had made the Union equivalent of H.R. squawk initially, when she first started posting constant overtime. Concerns about overworking in a high-stress environment had raised a constant stream of red flags, and it took a host of physical exams and psych evals to convince them it was neither overwork nor high-stress to her. If anything, she was being woefully underutilized.
Occasionally, an auditor would come through, see it and flag it again, but it had happened so many times now that a racial exemption was pinned in her file. Anyone who flagged it without checking could quickly be directed to the exemption, and that usually put an end to the matter.
The long and short of it, however, was that, one way or another, the weekend was here, and in the tradition of sapient species across the galaxy, this evening of the last day of labor was a night for unwinding with friends, food and fermentations.
Around the table tonight, aside from Sedhit, of course, were Fiffsy, the Chisay whom Ash would dare to call her best friend on the force, Mator, the amphibian-like Merian with his calm demeanor and scholarly attitude, and Ash, herself, the only Human in all of Union space. In the middle of their table was their standard order, a large tub of vegan dip that reminded Ash of a spiceless guacamole, accompanied by an abundant bowl of grain-flour baked chips.
Mator, measured as always, took in Sedhit’s rant with all of the patience of a man that had heard it all before, whether or not he had actually done so, and then used a long pull from his favored saltwater ale to give himself time to formulate a response.
“Most consider a hearty understanding of history to be an essential social responsibility,” he addressed the squirrel-like man’s protest calmly. “To appropriately appreciate the modern world in all of its easy glory, one must understand the hardships our ancestors endured and overcame to build it.”
“Bah,” Sedhit waved the flowery philosophy away with an irritated flare of his tail. “Once upon a time, we ate like animals off the ground, then we invented tools and built civilizations and fended off predators side by side, jump ahead a hundred thousand years and technology joins us together, kumbaya.”
That such a foreign word came across Ash’s implant while the humanoid rodent’s lips clearly rattled off something longer was one of those rare breaks in immersion that reminded her they were all actually speaking completely different languages. In all likelihood, the Sciuri had used some similar common slogan from another language, and kumbaya was the closest foreign language comparison in her implant’s Human lexicon.
“That’s all you really need to know,” Sedhit concluded, “and any normal person really claiming more than that stuck in their heads is just trying to impress you!”
“That’s clearly all that stuck in your kid’s head,” Ash smirked around her bottle of Union whiskey, which was weak enough that she drank it like a strong beer. In fact, she was nursing her way through her second bottle and was only just beginning to feel the tickle. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bombed the test.”
Mator colored a faint blue of surprise at her blunt insertion, and Fiffsy sat up a little straighter like she was expecting a show.
Sedhit, on the other hand, nearly hissed as he leaned over the table at her. “And what does a predator know about history, hm? Do you really expect us to believe your recorded history goes back any further than your personal number of successful hunts? Maybe you’ve got some oral myths about how your ancestors descended from the great plains of the stars!”
Ash coughed out a laugh as she set her bottle down to hold up both hands. “Sedhit, relax! I’m just saying, there’s clearly an expectation of more than that the rest of the class is meeting. I get it’s your son we’re talking about, but you are letting this get way too personal!” She picked up her bottle again before adding, “And besides, I’m a primate. My ancestors descended from trees, not plains, thank you.”
Her reply made the Sciuri stumble for his words, and Fiffsy took the opportunity of the silence to slightly redirect the topic toward the Human. “You do realize you’re making it sound like he’s right about you, don’t you?”
Ash gave Fiffsy a look while she was halfway through another drink as if she were actually considering it, but then she grinned again, turning her gaze to Mator deliberately. “Well, I have to say that the ‘modern world’ has spoiled me. I no longer have to keep count of my successful hunts, myself. It’s all on record now. All I have to do is go look it up!”
Mator’s scales took on a color of amusement. “While I appreciate you playing along with Sedhit’s accusations instead of taking offense, doing it twice in a row makes it look as if you are dodging the question. Let us phrase it directly, then. Do your people have any appreciation of history?”
Ash ignored Sedhit’s scoff and swirled her bottle in silence a moment as she considered a more serious answer. Finally, she nodded. “I’d say we have a very deep appreciation for it,” she asserted, the grins and smirks gone. “Humans have a cyclical view of history. Knowing our past gives us more than just an appreciation for our present. It helps us avoid the snares that caught us in the past so we can maybe break out of that cycle a little bit at a time.”
“A cycle?” the Chisay repeated, her feathery mane giving her the impression of big, blown out hair one from Earth might expect to see on an eighties rocker gal. “What are you saying, that you believe time, what, loops or something?”
“Hah!” Sedhit put in from across the table. “I told you! Nothing but mythology and woo!”
Ash gave him a flat look, but only addressed Fiffsy. “I don’t mean it literally loops back on itself. We often say history repeats itself, but we’re speaking metaphorically. It’d be more accurate to say it doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. The history of our planet is one of cycles of growth and recession, and Human society hasn’t been exempt from the same processes, just on a smaller, faster scale.”
“Fascinating,” Mator observed as he flagged down a waitress for a refill of ale. “So this cyclical view you mentioned is of these rises and dips in your development?”
The Human nodded in confirmation. “When you go back and look at the data, you start to see patterns in it that precipitate both rises and falls. So, the theory goes, if you can identify the triggering conditions for a drop, or recreate them for a rise, you can avoid the same collapses of the past, or even usher in a golden age.”
“And you spend so much time formulating these potential triggers?” he asked.
Ash sipped from her bottle. “Humans can get very obsessive over pattern recognition.”
Sedhit just huffed. “That’s all well and good for historians! I said they had their place! But the average person can’t even use that knowledge! They’re never going to make decisions on that magnitude!”
Ash just nodded in acceptance of his point. “It’s true that the average person is never going to make those big decisions, themselves, but we expect everyone to be on the watch for trends toward falls, and to ideally support leaders whose policies best recreate rises.”
“Corporate social responsibility,” Mator summarised. “A reasonable expectation from a Civilized species. If your development is so prone to disruption, it makes sense to develop an obsession with said disruptions.”
“But how much of your history can you really recite?” Sedhit forced the matter again like he had a point to prove. “How much can you really retain when it never comes up again?”
Ash arched an eyebrow and that crooked grin of hers returned. “I can roughly recite the history of the entire planet.”
Mator’s blue coloring returned, though it was accompanied by a smile. Fiffsy’s reaction was more colorful, choking on her drink for a moment before she found words.
“Come on, Ash,” she warned her friend, “don’t overextend yourself on a boast. What are you going to do if he calls you on it?”
“I’m not overextending. I’m serious.”
Sedhit looked like he’d found a big, fat nut, and was eager to pull it free. “Scientific or folklore?”
But the human just met his gaze unflinchingly. “Do you have a preference?”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
That made him look a lot less eager, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You’re bluffing.”
Ash upended the bottle of Union whiskey down her throat and waved down a third. While waiting for it, she settled back in her seat as if preparing for the long haul.
“Sol-3’s creation probably goes pretty much the same as any other habitable planet in the galaxy,” she started. “Just shy of fourteen billion years ago, the universe rapidly expanded from a pinpoint in an event we call the Big Bang.”
“Creative,” Sedhit muttered, but was quickly hushed by Fiffsy.
“About four and a half billion years ago, the molecular dust and gas in our little corner of the galaxy reached critical mass and coalesced into a solar system, starting with the star in the middle and followed relatively soon after by the planets, themselves. Sol-3 landed right in the Goldilocks Zone, and all of the conditions for life started to come together. There was some drama with a hungry gas giant that ate a lot of mass in the outer solar system, but the system stabilized before it could move too far in and threaten us.”
“Excuse me,” Mator interrupted. “Gole-dee-locks. That didn’t translate, what was that?”
Ash blinked at the remark. “Ah, that’s because it’s from a children’s story. It’s the habitable zone, where everything is juuuuuust right. If I took the time to tell you the story, you’d get why it’s appropriate.”
“Of course, of course,” he permitted, waving her on. “Names do tend to come from cultural references. Please, continue.”
She nodded and did so. “It took about a billion years after that for single-celled life to first appear in the baby world’s oceans, then another billion before the first photosynthesizers came into the picture, and cyanobacteria started converting the high-methane environment into one rich in oxygen. Individual cells started to cluster together to maximize advantages and then started specializing in support of the whole. Some even started living inside others, creating new, more complex formations.”
“And lo,” Fiffsy interjected dramatically, “multicellular life!”
“Almost,” Ash corrected with a wiggle of her hand she knew their translators would interpret as kinda-sorta. “All evidence suggests they surfed around for another billion and a half years before finally figuring it out.”
“You are running out of billions,” Sedhit muttered around his brew. Little surprise the Sciuri was keeping track.
But Ash didn’t miss a beat. “Sure am. We’re down to only about eight hundred million years ago when the first animals really started to show up.”
Mator’s tone was more curious than Sedhit’s. “And what lucky creature got that exemplary distinction?”
“Sponges,” she answered readily, to which the amphibian nodded.
“So far, you are reciting pretty much the evolutionary history of every known life-bearing planet in the galaxy,” he confirmed. “If the trend continues to follow, I expect next, you’ll tell us about a great upswelling in the diversity of life. My people call it the Great Experiment.”
“We called it the Cambrian Explosion,” Ash replied, “and it took place about five hundred million years ago. By the end of the Cambrian Period, the experiment was over and basically all of the different animal types that still exist today were established. In the broadest sense, of course, and it’d be another sixty million years before the first land animals crawled out of the sea.”
“And these were?” Fiffsy asked with amusement, no doubt wondering if playing 20 Questions would trip her friend up.
“Millipedes,” Ash provided yet again, and took a drink from her newly delivered bottle before continuing.
“Things continued developing from there. We went through a whole host of periods where natural resources ended up being so abundant that Nature super-sized everything. Giant bugs, giant lizards, giant mammals. A lot of seeing just how big things could get and still be practical. Some of those millipedes got half again as long as I am tall. The biggest land animal to ever live, as far as we’ve discovered, lived about a hundred million years ago, was about a hundred twenty feet from head to tail, and weighed in at nearly a hundred tons.”
“That is certainly sizeable,” Mator agreed. “Such … megafauna are not so common in most historical records.” He motioned toward her with one hand. “However, you sit before us very much not … how did you say it, super-sized? Something put an end to this period of hyper-abundance, yes?”
“A lot of things, actually,” Ash confirmed with a nod, “the interconnectedness of which we’re still not entirely clear on. Right around the same geological time, the planet suffered a mass volcanic eruption event, a great ice age, and an impact from an asteroid over six miles across.”
She had to pause to permit the round of choking that ensued from the rest of the table, especially with the delivery of that last one.
Fiffsy found her words first. “Damn, Ash, what did your giant lizards do to the galaxy that pissed it off enough to deliver that much of a fuck off?!”
“That is certainly an … environmental shift,” Mator summarized. “The impact, alone, would be considered a global extinction event. It is astounding that any life survived at all.”
“Only smaller life that required less resources did,” Ash solemnly explained. “It was the end of the reign of lizard kings for our planet and the rise of the humble mammal. In fact, our ancestor at the time was little more than a small rodent scurrying among the surviving forests.”
Sedhit was tapping his fingers impatiently. “So we are now one hundred million years from current day. Or did the impact occur later?”
“About sixty million years ago,” Ash provided. “And it took a good while for the ecosystem to recover and stabilize again.”
“And how much longer before your species finally comes into the picture?”
She hummed a moment as she fast-forwarded through events in her own mind. “The earliest Humans only appeared about three hundred thousand years ago, and by a hundred thousand, were largely indistinguishable, biologically, from modern Humans. By fifty thousand years ago, we had distinct culture, though we were still hunter-gatherers. Music, art and more advanced technology all show up in the archeological record at this point.”
“When did you steal your first cities?!” the squirrel man demanded impatiently. “Did the survivors of those lizards build them?”
More helpfully, Mator clarified the source of the request. “Most Union species plot their development as a civilization from their first true communities. Before then, we often consider ourselves little more than animals.”
“In that case,” Ash answered as she gave Sedhit a weary side-eye, “we built our first settlements about twelve thousand years ago when we started figuring out agriculture. The survivors of those lizards evolved into chickens, small birds weighing about four pounds or so. We’ve kept them as livestock for meat and eggs for nearly as long. By five and a half thousand years ago, we had whole real civilizations, with city infrastructure, government systems and economic trade.”
“Only twelve thousand years,” Sedhit scoffed. “No wonder you had to be found by the Galactic Union. We probably only just missed you cracking rocks together.”
“We’d mastered cracking rocks by the time we started settling down,” Ashley bit back, growing irritated with his constant speciesism. “In fact, by that time, we were already dipping our toes into metallurgy.”
“You are too quick to judge the Humans, Sedhit,” Mator scolded the Sciuri, his scales taking on a purple hue of disappointment. “They have already demonstrated astrometric knowledge of the spark of the universe. That alone requires a sophisticated understanding of the universe and advanced technological capabilities.”
“At our height,” Ashley provided in confirmation of the Merian’s assertion, “we had intrasolar projects, extraterrestrial travel, and orbital telescopes observing the cosmos. There was a planetwide data and communication network, advanced computing and virtual assistants of increasing complexity. We’d mapped the Human genome and were making great strides in printing food directly from protein strands.”
And then she shrugged. “Then something big happened and I woke up from cryo sleep. The end.”
“Those are remarkably high achievements for only twelve thousand years,” Mator reassured her. “Most Union civilizations are a dozen times older than that, and take ten times longer to reach such heights. It is a great pity that you do not know this big something that impacted your species. Do you have any suspects?”
“Oh, we had lots of ideas for what the next apocalypse would be,” Ash nodded after another long pull from her bottle. “A great warming, nuclear war, another asteroid strike. None of that matched what I know of the state of the planet now. Anything that blunt that could have killed all of us off would have taken pretty much everything else with it. I’d have had to have been in cryo for a thousand years for the planet to have recovered.”
“Disease?” Fiffsy offered, and that got a nod of agreement.
“That’s my big suspect,” the Human confirmed. “Could’ve even been engineered, we’d been messing with that Pandora’s Box for thousands of years, and only gotten better at it.”
“Pan-door-hah,” came the amphibian. “Another story?”
“Yeah, a box containing all of the worst curses and afflictions to fill the world, and even knowing that, we were too tempted to resist opening it.”
“Monkeys,” Sedhit scoffed, but the table ignored him.
“As fascinating as this all is,” Mator steered the conversation back, “it seems as if we skipped the most relevant part. We jumped from the foundations of your civilization clear to the end in a mere few thousand years. In such a time frame, it sounds like a shot straight into the sky. What of these dips you made such a fuss over?”
“It’s easy enough to simplify the cycle into a few steps,” Ash answered, turning to focus her attention on him. “Strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times, bad times make strong men. It’s a radical oversimplification, obviously, but it’s the straightest shorthand I can give you. Hard-fought gains become expectations in a few generations, leading to them being lost when the descendants devalue them as inevitable and forget what it took to establish them.”
“That sounds like a very unstable society.”
“It is,” she agreed. “Our successful societies are measured often in only a few centuries of growth, and then a couple of decay before collapse occurs. Even then, the entire time is interspersed with wars, disease and other trials. We require people driven to build even at personal cost to counteract the chaos of the world around us and our own natures.”
“Strong men to make the good times,” Fiffsy recited.
“Exactly,” Ash confirmed. “Unfortunately, we’re habitually prone to decadence when times are good, and that drive begins to evaporate. We stop building and start maintaining. We start taking it easy, and things start breaking down, socially and literally. Eventually, the strength of the society fades enough that a new, stronger society comes in and takes over.”
“By force?” Mator asked, entranced by the alien idea.
She nodded. “Given that this means the new society is necessarily more violent than the previous one, this usually means a period of social regression, what we term a dark age, before things catch back up and the cycle starts over again.”
“What could possibly be the purpose of such …” The amphibian struggled to find the word for a moment. “... turmoil?”
But Ashley shrugged without a ready answer. “It keeps us from falling idle,” she guessed. “If one group doesn’t get something done, another will, so falling behind means the inevitable collapse of your society. It’s a hyper-competitive environment where ambition is rewarded more often than caution. If you’re not on top, or connected at the hip to whoever is, you’re out of the game.”
“That would go a long way to explaining your accelerated development,” Mator reasoned with a slow nod. “And it would explain your obsession with the nuances of your social cycle. Awareness of the points of failure actively extends your own period of stability, decreasing the risk to you and yours.”
“Is there anything about you that isn’t terrifying, Ash?” Fiffsy’s question was accompanied by an expression that suggested good humor - she was joking. “Not content to beat everybody else to the top of the evolutionary tree, you’ve gotta turn spacetime into a social weapon.”
“She’s a deathworld predator,” Sedhit muttered. “What don’t they see as a weapon?”
“Not much,” Ash admitted with a shameless grin and a much more dismissive shrug. “And all this just because I got my education called into question.”
“Yes, yes,” he practically reached the equivalent of a snarl. “You’ve waved your brain about in our faces, good job.”
Fiffsy leaned forward to put her face into his field of vision. “You’re being very bold with someone you’ve already called a deathworld predator, Sedhit.”
“Leave him be,” Ash insisted, reaching in with a chip to try a scoop of dip. “He’s drunk and moody. Alcohol makes everyone a little bolder than they should be. He’ll be better in the morning.”
She chomped down on the chip with a rewarding crunch and chewed it around before turning her focus back to the squirrel once more.
“Just make sure you remember it, Sedhit,” she warned him with that crooked grin of hers. “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”
