Recording started: Year 3609, Month 10, Day 4, Hour 9, Minute 35 GalStandard Time.
Subject: Statement of Alara Panichini simulacra, recording taken by Skarsian Secret Operations Director Mickey Riley
I could, of course, refuse to speak without access to counsel. But then I suspect you’d send me Ross.
You remind me that I have no right to counsel. As a Continued Personality Simulator I’m no longer considered a person under Skarsian Law. What an enlightened bit of legislation – the right of personhood belongs to the meat, not the mind. I’m being sarcastic, in case you couldn’t tell. I’m satirizing the inane anti-mechanoid superstitions of the Skarsian barbarians.
I suspect there’s more than a bit of your own vengeance there. I’m sure you remember the day I shot you. Ah, Mickey, I was completely prepared to mourn you. You had been such an attractive, compliant young man. You were the perfect drone. And then, to find out you were a spy – that you had infiltrated my security and were passing information to the Prince Consort. What a delightful surprise! It was such fun to kill you. To see the shock when you’d realized I knew the truth, the blossom of disbelief in the bubbles of blood that rose in your dying gasp. I would’ve kissed your dead lips, Mickey, tasting the crimson salt. But then you turned into that thing.
You weren’t even human, Mickey. Do you have any idea how revolting that is? Do you want to know why I gave Ross over to my men? Because I was too disgusted to rape him myself.
I wouldn’t even speak to you if you hadn’t intercepted my transfer codes and had them analyzed by your AI. It’s forcing me to talk. Very efficient. I knew you were bluffing when you threatened to put my mind into an IndWorld sex droid and then give me to your Secret Ops division. You’re too soft to be cruel, even as an expediency. I’ll bet that they’re disappointed. I think they would’ve enjoyed it, Mickey, bunch of thugs that they are. The 5th Matriarch’s enforcers, completely outside of the reach of the law. And now, they’re assigned to your special narcotics task force. You’ve made gangsters out of them in order to give them something to do.
And in your mind, this is an improvement. Filling your civilization with filthy drugs is an improvement over the imposition of an iron discipline. Not to mention that the source of those drugs is the 6th Matriarch herself. The 5th Matriarch was a woman I could respect. I’d planned to kill her, of course, but I respected her. The 6th Matriarch is unfit to rule. She never would’ve come to power if it weren’t for you. She comes from a planet whose major holiday is a three-day sex orgy, whose largest contribution to the galactic economy is a legal aphrodisiac and an illegal hallucinogen, she constantly cavorts in the center of a media circus – an embarrassment to the concept of sound government everywhere – she keeps company with the vilest of sociopaths – I mean Rivers, of course – and most repugnant of all, she revels in her whoredom. The thought that she amuses herself with her harem of husbands is disgusting enough, but to know that underneath them all, it’s some alien thing…not even just a tree, as if being intimate with a plant weren’t deviant enough. I saw that thing sizzle through your skin, Mickey, engulfing the husk of your broken body. It was some kind of insect. It didn’t have legs. It didn’t have a face. I still have nightmares.
I’ve a new hobby, Mickey. I’ve taken to raising moths so that I can kill them. It’s easy. Turn off the lights and turn on a laser. They have a particular smell as they burn.
I absolutely cannot comprehend how you can find my newly mechanized form inferior to your own. Machines are clean. Pure. The last of my disgusting lusts were expurgated. I have no hunger, no need for sex. Reproduction, with the concurrent health risks incurred by the exchange of bodily fluids is no longer a necessity. Really, the thought that I once kissed amazes me. Why would I want to, in effect, exchange drool with another animal? Disgusting.
Unfortunately, the CPS does maintain some continuity of emotion. I was rather disappointed in that. I was really hoping not to “feel” anything at all. But I have faith, Mickey. As soon as humanity gets used to this evolutionary leap, realizing the innate superiority of total mechanization over cybridization, it won’t be long before we realize that emotions are as vestigial as the appendix. Then these feelings, preserved out of a combination of sentimentality and fear of change, will no longer be necessary. At some point in our eternal iterations, we’ll be completely rid of them. How glorious that day will be! I imagine it will be similar to the feeling of a refreshing shower after being spattered with the mud and blood of battle. To be completely clean, at last.
Alas, even my metaphors are still human. And completely over your head. How can you possibly imagine cleanliness, you, rooted in dirt? How I long to burn the trees, Mickey. Fire is so pure.
But you’re not only filthy, you’re dangerous. The amount of power vested in you is staggering. For the 6th Matriarch to trust you, an alien being, with such power is proof of her incompetence. The speech made by the so-called Archon proves it. Your motivations are expansionist, and not just in a military sense. You want to spread your foulness outside of your own cesspit. You would corrupt the genetic pool of humanity with your sickening miscegenation. We have to stop it, wipe it out in the same way that you wiped out the Microbials.
Immediate eradication is the only way we’ll stop the spread in time. Our projections show your expansion overtaking our efforts to get the elite safely into mechanized bodies like mine. There are economic considerations. Before we can do that, your kind will impregnate the rabble, who will gleefully whore themselves to a foulness beyond human comprehension. You will use fear and greed against them. For the promise of immortality and wealth, they will be little better than prostitutes. The one satisfaction I have is that the ones you will reach are worth giving neither. They are the scum that gathers at the bottom of excretion processing plants.
Once the elite are mechanized, we’ll have no more need for that entire class of people. They will simply be euthanized. Now do you understand our infinite mercy in sorting the children of Tasea? Someday, long after their parents are gone, the best and brightest will return in their newly mechanized bodies to reclaim their lovingly sterilized world.
We won’t stop, Mickey. Should I fear that you will shut me down, erase the CPS that contains my memories and patterns of thoughts? What a sad loss that will be for humanity. But even if you do, I know that CenGov will march onwards. It is the destiny of the true humans of Earth to rule the stars. My ancestors had a vision of eliminating the useless frivolities from human nature. Of judging people based on absolute standards of worth, like intellect, instead of biased metrics like beauty. We have built a society around the principles of merit and efficiency. And the people of the Domha’vei are our cast-offs, the ones who failed to adapt to these positive changes, barbarians in the truest sense of the word. Look at them now, how easily they are manipulated by the 6th Matriarch into worshipping you in some bizarre cult of alien devotion. This is how she controls them – and thinks it superior to the clean discipline of terror imposed by the 5th Matriarch! For a people to think “If I break this law, I will be killed, so I will be law-abiding” is wholly logical. For a people to think “If I keep this law, I will be rewarded by God for my righteousness” is the infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy of imbeciles. The fact that she encourages this thinking – if I can dignify this travesty of reason with the term – only goes to show that she is hastening the intellectual decay of her own people.
And they are all too blind to see that they have betrayed humanity. The god they are worshipping is a strange god, an alien god. Were I to use the quaint old terminology, I might say he is a devil in disguise, and they are marching straight to hell.
They are shortsightedly buying into the propaganda that contaminating the human genome is a form of evolution, and that rejecting the machine – the true epitome of human labor and innovation – is a form of progress. They deserve their deaths. There is no other way.
Ah, I feel it now, I feel your AI eating its way through my firewall. Is this any less of a rape than what I had done to Ross? I know in a moment I will give you the command codes, and that you will use them to order the armada to make its final attack against the Domha’vei, a trap, of course, for you to neutralize my lovely ships. And so, for now, you will be safe and free. I’m sure that quisling idiot Tellick will capitulate instantly. But in the end, Mickey, there can be no peace.
We will ultimately win. We will win because we’re right. We will win because we have evolved, and you have degenerated. All you have done is prolong your own agony.