2175 C.E.

VII: Gennady Semyonov

SEMYONOV: These African primitives and their Grushan keepers have scanned me. They have traced my neurons and searched my brain for machines. What have they found?

YONG: Nothing to my knowledge. However, your warship vanishes like a phantom upon your command; it may not be impossible for nanites or implants designed by your people to do the same. Or if not, it may be that your people may carry implants on your selves that project your brain waves into another in the same way that a radio sends light waves. In any case, I am reluctant to write off the capabilities of something we cannot observe.

SEMYONOV: Ah, yes. It frustrates you that you cannot dissect a Zaha-Katchem doesn't it?

YONG: It would provide us with greater insight into your people. For example, it might explain why or how the bodies of fallen Zaha-Katchem shift and become entirely different animals upon their death.

SEMYONOV: So you believe the stories of those two American brats?

YONG: I have no reason not to believe them.

SEMYONOV: Then you should at least have the evidence of your own reason. How does a creature shift its very biology upon death?

YONG: You are the ones who would have us believe that the shell of the body is subject to the whims of the mind. Perhaps you have chosen to appear human-like to impress my people. If this is so, then you must forgive my curiosity. What are you really, when you are not dressed up for our benefit?

SEMYONOV: We are as you have seen us. We are the future of your people. We are the time that comes after. We are the potential of all species, the hidden latent gene that awakes one day and creates sentience after millions of years, and then achieves more than greatness. We are the great project of the universe, the final thought that completes the sonnet, the beginning and the end of existence.

YONG: You sound like many in the history of my world who have committed the greatest atrocities.

SEMYONOV: Atrocities, you say? Atrocities? Like the murder of thousands of those whom you now call innocents? The curtailment of freedoms of all in the name of a greater few? The wealth of the few and the downtrodden many underneath? Are these the atrocities of which you speak?

YONG: In general, yes. In specific, the Holocaust of the Jews under the German National Socialist Party; the political prisons of Kim Jong-Un and his predecessors, the mass bombings of cities in the Second Korean War...

SEMYONOV: And why do you call these atrocities, my unapologetically egalitarian friend? I'll tell you. It's because a few have commanded the destiny of many, which you yourself were once responsible for promoting in your government. What if they had chosen to go, though? What if the gulags and concentration camps and flattened cities had been filled with volunteers? Or what if those gulags and concentration camps and cities had been filled with guilty men and women, creates guilty of further atrocities? Would you then call these acts atrocious?

YONG: What volunteer would walk into such a place?

SEMYONOV: My dear Vice President, we are speaking in mere hypotheticals. What if many people decided, of their own free will, to suffer and die horribly, or what you perceive as horribly? What would you say to them? Could you tell them to walk away and continue with a life that, for whatever reason, they have thrown away?

YONG: This scenario is irrelevant. It has no more bearing upon my accusation than the state of hunger a jellyfish possesses.

SEMYONOV: It goes to the very heart of what we are speaking of. Go on; answer it.

[Pause]

YONG: As a statesman and as a leader, I could not force my will upon these people.

SEMYONOV: Then you would allow them to condemn themselves to death?