Athlacarta: The First Letter

Dear Adler,


I know we are still human. After all these many generations of vagrancy, when so many of us spend much or all of our lives without setting foot on the soil of any world at all, that does not change what is fundamentally within us. A few hundred years of relative freedom is barely a drop in the evolutionary bucket compared to the millennia we spent earthbound. The human organism is programmed to understand that the world will end under some kind of deafening holocaust of fire. It is the wrath of God, or man's fatal mistake sundering the sky with gouts of nuclear madness. It is the explosion of the sun, the implosion of the earth itself.

That's not how it happened.
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Athlacarta: The Second Letter:

Dear Adler,

I have a dream, often, that always ends here: the five-fingered shape of a black-gloved hand hardens out of the dark, stamping the wall so close to my face that I feel the scant brush of ballistic fiber against my cheek. He pushes off the wall, propelling himself down the corridor in apparent ignorance of me. He is so close I can smell him, even today, sweating cold as I write you this thing in assured peace and safety. He smells of life, of excited sweat, mingled with more artificial traces of singed firing residue and pleasant aftershave. He is human, just like you, or I, or any of the rest of these men who have come to destroy what I have known my whole life as constant. He is human.

I wonder, less often than I used to, if this wasn't the critical juncture... if I had stayed in my bedroom like an obedient station-brat, would I have been able to have seen them as soulless, as demons? If I had been able to see them as demons, (and, subsequently, not come to contemplate all those deeper evils, which come not by nature but by choice), would I have lived to tell you this story?
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