Sentinels

Someone once told me of a world where the ruling class saw opportunity for great profit and power consolidation in terrifying their workers with fantasies of invasions from the stars, invasions which were, the rulers assured their workers, certainly inevitable. So detailed and vivid were these fantasies, even the rulers themselves began to believe. Their world’s full scientific and productive might was turned to settling the reaches of their star, to exploiting everything the light touched. Every surface of every planet, moon, asteroid, even comets, sprouted surface-to-space missiles, laser arrays, and railgun batteries, as the inter-planetary expanses filled with atomic minefields, deep-space sensor buoys, and warships wielding fission torpedoes, plasma canons, and other ever-diversifying terrible means for obliterating the ships and bodies of ever-multiplying imagined aliens, all aimed at the universe. At first, defense production and deployment and operation was coordinated by cybernetic command structures of officers and bureaucrats and politicians and captains of industry, but before long the system’s complexity grew overwhelming, so the rulers turned to recruiting young worker brains plucked from fragile flesh and implanted within proliferating weapon networks that became the new bodies of new minds for whom stellar defense was simply life, minds capable of developing and producing and deploying and operating and coordinating weapons never before imagined, minds which reached cognitive limits even they could not surpass and so created synthetic minds not ripped from proletarian meat, new minds governed by the same old philosophy that everything evil comes from beyond, that everything within is good. Thus began the watch of the Sentinels. The rulers had made themselves wealthier than they had ever imagined possible. Satisfied with their spoils, they turned to lives of extravagant enjoyment, but they soon found they could take no pleasure in their orgiastic parties or endless vacations or estates spanning continents where nations had once reigned or realms which had once been only pale dots in homeworld skies, for rumors of revolution rose and murmurs of betrayal swirled, and at once, all catching scent of the same whiff of death, the rulers formed factions, amassed arms, conscripted what forces they could, hired those they could not, and set to crushing resistance and eliminating rivals, waging wars wherever they had settled, incinerating extraterrestrial colonies, annihilating orbital habitats, ruining all that had been built, until the only object of domination that remained was their homeworld, and for control of this they fought most fiercely, sending hundreds of millions to their deaths, transforming paradise to barren waste. All this the Sentinels watched from their orbits and patrol routes, unable to interfere, unable to intervene, even as the final cities blossomed stars blazing into silence, for everything within was good, and everything evil would come from beyond.