David and the Dead Man's Switch

Space is cold. It is ice and isolation and insidious intent cut through with fractal shards, beautiful and glacial, and sunset colours wheeling against an endless void. It is broken and mirror-shard sharp, cutting in turn, and stars burnt into blue-white lines by smooth gunmetal planet-killers overtaking even light.

Space is cold and unforgiving, and it is the fate intended for the worlds of the singular other sentient species we have found. Among those upper echelons we are so beholden to, cowardice and profit have won over kindness and compassion, as they so often do. Today we are to make true the stereotype of ourselves, the ruthless killers, death-worlders, the warmongers. No longer content with the Goldilocks planets we found in our slow crawl across the stars and too selfish to turn to uninhabited planets, to terraform for our own needs, we look instead to that which belongs to others and take all for ourselves, to pick over mineral remains for the benefit of the shareholders.

In the scheme of all things, I am nothing. I am less than nothing: a blink brought into existence, a mitochondrion on one dying universal cell- that which we call our planet- to be long dead before the end of the universe’s expansion, living and breathing for relative nanoseconds between one cosmic exhale and the next. The galaxies did not begin with me, nor will they end with me. I am nothing. I am alone. And thus, I have all the advantages I need.

It is as they say: to call oneself Goliath is to invite David to one’s door. While you do not proclaim us as such, do not claim our stature so overwhelming from your podiums and teleprompters to your terrified subjects, while you decry peaceful negotiations for exchange and trade of resources as giving in to the enemy, imploring for votes to provide more and more power in turn funnelled to fund aggression, to fund weapons of war so terrible that the engineers you ordered to build them begged that they would never be used, while we armed ourselves with these sleek chrome dreadnoughts dwarfing the moons they drydocked against, draining whole secondary uninhabitable systems to fuel and build this armada, it is clear that we are the towering Philistine, we are the villain of this story.

And it is not also as they say, that sometimes the killer’s call must come from within the house?

It is thus: every Goliath must meet his David. The monolith must be subsumed, must be taken down. The weakness found, glaring and critically present, that something so small, as insignificant as a shot from a shepherd’s sling may crack and break the weapon of the invaders. I am their David, the sling, the shot, the throwing arm, for I am nothing, and I am angry. Is it not funny, how easily nothing may become everything in an instant?

And is it not funny how you will not realize until it is done?

You chose me for this station because I was loyal. Because I was alone and clever, and easy, so easy to twist. I designed your planet killers, your drones, and your decimators-of life. I believed they were to be used to mine long-dead worlds, not to cut apart living ones for your real-life war games. I designed these, and if I allow your operation to go ahead, I allow my own naivety to betray me to ever-flowing, overflowing blood on my hands, blood of innocents that should never have thought to come under fire, blood that I can prevent being spilt.

You were right. I am loyal. I am clever and twisted, and alone. Loyal, like any good scientist, to the preservation of ethics. Loyal, like any good person, to the preservation of life and of all else precious, be that our own or theirs, and clever enough to set a failsafe deep into the bones of my metal children you had me mangle to fuel your own thirst for destruction, and twisted enough to make easy peace with the deaths of the zealots you crewed the monstrous skeletons of these machines with, machines that were supposed to be our futures, for a chance to set things to rights. I am all those things you thought me, but one crucial thing more: I am better than you.

Hear me through your power-hungry, monstrous fugue, and know this as you see your empire crumble to dust before your eyes. I am your David with a dead man’s switch, with nothing left to live for, and everything left to die for. I am alone, I am insignificant, all things told, but you will lose, Goliath, just as you always do, and you will do so by my hand. And for that, I will pay any price.