Challenge #02012-E188: Human Inhumanity
Spies are sent to earth, disguised as historians, to find earth’s weaknesses and strengths.
Know thy enemy and all that, but they who know the past control the future.To see what these people have done to each other...
They are horrified at what they find. -- Anon Guest
So far, Terran colonies were the only civilisations interested in any kind of negotiations with Earth. And even then, those negotiations were lawsuits. Some of the bolder civilisations were starting to wonder why this was so. Therefore, they worked on special teams.
First - they had to be able to survive in the toughest of Terran environments. Which meant training with N'Ozzies, Inuit, and Mishmi sections of the greater Human Collective. They even got some additional wilderness training with some Crow descendants.
Second - they had to blend in. Humans could instinctively tell when something was wrong on such subtle levels that it was alarming. The more perfect the disguise, the more unnerving it was to humans who knew how humans looked and behaved. The Uncanny Valley met with Thin Slicing and synergised with any lingering xenophobia to create hostile reactions. Even in the Humans who were helping them.
Third, they had to pass unnoticed on Earth, where assorted selfish butts of people had been rigging things for their benefit for well over four hundred years. Expelling the "unwanted" down wormholes and periodically trying idiotic ideas that had been attempted and failed miserably in the past. Earth had been ruined, more or less, by the greedy and the avaricious who had dreams of despotism and kept conflicting with the fires of revolution. And wondering why.
Intense study could only take someone so far. After that, it was finding a plausible way to enter the world and find a plausible way to blend in. After that, came researching histories written by the despots that didn't want pesky people asking awkward questions. And delving into dusty and fragile tomes that told assorted versions of the truth, depending on who was in charge. And who was rebelling by disseminating these versions.
Humanity was stubborn. They had the motto, Try, try, and try again. Sometimes, success came by brute force. Other times, success came via solutions that had others frothing at the mouth with frustration at not thinking of that earlier. Humanity had another saying that they frequently ignored - Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
There had been a lot of repeating lessons in the four hundred years since the Shattering.
Including the depths to which Humanity could sink before it realised something was very, very wrong with their local state of affairs.
The histories were full of them. Genocide. Germ warfare. Ethnic cleansing. Ethnic erasure. Ethnic criminalisation. Slavery. Torture. War after war after war...
Purity culture. Nature culture. Chemical culture. Genetic manipulation. Forced scarcity. Planned obsolescence. Oligarchies and Tyrannies and Despots, oh my.
And the tortures that Humanity visited on their fellow Humans...
It was no surprise at all that Galactic Society decided to give Terra and Terrans a wide berth for another handful of decades.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / focalpoint]
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