Humanity Endures

Part 1 - The Expeditionary Fleet | Chapter 6

With a thought command, Terxah ordered that the hangar's ship-sized door, separating the Nemesis from the higher levels of Earth's ecumenopolis — a titanic city that covers, or even permeates, an entire planet — be opened. The door obeyed Terxah's command, revealing a sprawling ocean of gold, silver, and steel, all of it catching and refracting the torrent of light from the blazing sun above, while the sea of city's towering spires pierced the radiant heavens. The beauty of Earth's horizon, viewed from the moderately tall perch of the hangar bay, coalesced into a sight that somehow eclipsed all of the beauty that the Capital Complex could provide — there was no wonder in Velan's mind left as to why some referred to Earth as a jewel in the human galaxy, and for once, he felt proud to have come from the place.

An instant later, the Nemesis's gargantuan engines were roaring to life, half-deafening those nearby the rear-end of the ship while the blue flame of the engine's action threatened to bore a hole through the hangar behind it. The next moment, Terxah had the Nemesis gliding through the gleaming, endless cityscape around the comparatively minuscule vessel, and to call the city endless was no exaggeration. As the entire surface of Earth, as well as the crust below, had been converted into a singular, gargantuan city populated by hundreds of billions, even if one were to fly around the planet repeatedly, they would find the city below them endless in the truest sense of the word. Somehow, despite the vastness of the worlds themselves, human planets tended to be rather specialized: Earth was centered around administration, politics and catering to it, with a broad service-and-management based economy; Tehkria, the birthplace of the Tekran Dynasty and the very-martial Empire, was the galaxy's largest researcher of genetic technologies, a major military-industrial hub, and also managed to be a hotbed for vicious politics; planets like Ihndrastar served as logistics and manufacturing centers, and places like Uulcax were renowned for their artistic and cultural wealth. "Every world has its charm," Velan thought, following that thought with another: "Except Nahmatiix." The rowdy world of inebriated pilots that was Nahmatiix was the butt of countless vicious jokes, and Velan was not above making fun of them himself, even if he was an Earther — the target of even more all-too-accurate jokes.

So vast was humanity's presence on the world of Earth that every other building Velan glanced at pierced the heavens themselves, their highest reaches being enshrouded by the exosphere. Long dead was the term "skyscraper" used to denote the mightiest buildings of the past; since structures penetrating the atmosphere and extending into the shallows of space, their massive size sustained through brilliant engineering and selectively applied gravity nullifiers, had become commonplace amongst the numerous ecumenopoleis of the galaxy, they no longer merely scraped the heavens. Their new name was far more fitting, for they were now labelled "skypiercers." Earth's only non-skypiercer buildings were those found immediately outside the Capital Complex's hangar bay, for they had to be shorter to allow the flight of warships; surrounding the land zoned off for these vessels, however, the heavens-breaking ecumenopolis of Earth was as omnipresent as ever, and the spires of humanity threatened to blot out the sun in countless places. As the endless cities of humanity extended from above the atmosphere to the cores of their mostly-artificial worlds, it was not unheard of for people to live, love, work, and die, without having ever gone outside.

On major planets such as Earth, skypiercers were as common as ships in a navy, and the planet's once-natural surface had been entirely subsumed by an unending city, one that expanded upwards relentlessly — worlds like these had a tendency to grow in size each year, and when one considered the length of humanity's existence, many worlds such as Tehkria, Earth, Kalithihar, or Nahmatiix, were approaching the size of even gas dwarfs. "Earth" was no longer a fitting name for humanity's homeworld, for there was less dirt than metal left on the surface. To fuel the construction of such titanic habitations, the "devourer drone," a Kalithiharian invention whose first variants existed before the inception of the Empire itself, was occasionally deployed on uninhabited solar systems. This self-replicating robot would harvest resources at a rapid rate, building more copies of itself to accelerate this extraction, and even organizing amazingly complex logistical networks to transport and organize the surplus they collected. The robot replicated so quickly and could extract resources with such time-honed efficiency that entire solar systems could be reaped in weeks, the drones organizing the resources for transport before then de-activating themselves and sending a signal back to their awaiting human or Tekran masters. So rapidly and so totally did the devourer drone harvest solar systems that the greatest disease to ever assail humanity, the "Devourer Plague," was named in its dubious honor — where the drone consumed planets in days, the Plague had eradicated these planets' people in hours.