New Worlds Sci Fi: Phoenix 2

Phoenix - Adventures in a forgotten zone. Online reading.
Health Warning: Reading this may try your sanity.

Page: 2

Chapter 1, contd.

It was a very old civilisation.
On its way to becoming an old civilisation, it had been decided that any species worth its salt, would have evolved the best form of government.
They tried the usual; communism, capitalism, tyranny, monarchy, etc.
They had researched, analysed, argued, fought wars, and generally spent a lot of time seeking a better system.

At the end of the day, and in a very brief moment of clarity and understanding, they shot all the politicians.

Parliamentary service then became the duty of all citizens.
Rather like National Service, any and all, and on a random basis, were liable to be called upon to serve a term in parliament.

Millions of bureaucrats became unemployed overnight as they got rid of expensive world governments whose only contribution had been tons of red tape and bureaucracy.

The system was unique in that it allowed things weird things like freedom and self determination.
If fact it was the only species, in the galaxy, which went down that path.
In all other species, life was much simpler.
Who ruled depended upon who had the biggest guns or more of them.

The main thing about this system of government was that it was very representative of the population.
If there were a large number of poor in the state, or planetary state, there would be large proportion of poor in the parliament.
Interesting things happened.

At one point they had tried to shoot all the lawyers but the lawyers talked their way out of that.
Frustrated, they turned on Salesmen who were forced to tell the truth when selling.
This drove many salesmen mad.

All good things, however, must come to an end.
They had been expanding for a long time.
Eventually, they expanded into the wrong star system.

Someone took offence.

In government, the 'cannon fodder' now had a say in things like going off to the Great Galactic War.
They developed rather rude hand signals for those who advocated going off to die a glorious death fighting the attacking hordes of really bad ass aliens.

The war was not going well.

They had lost the colonies in the disputed systems.
The enemy fleet had received substantial reinforcements.
It then turned its attention to the home systems.

In orbit, around many of the planets under threat, were massive intergalactic evacuation transports.
Mass exodus, either to less populated sectors of this, or other galaxies, was under way.

Exodus Class Evacuation Transport, 'Forlorn Hope', was one of the last to load.
It had a large proportion of empty stasis tubes that had to be filled.
It filled these with the old, the infirm, the downright dodgy, the less well endowed mentally, and anyone who happened to be passing the shuttle pad and wanted to go.
This included all members of the New Church of Love and Peace headed by a reformed mass murderer.

Eventually, the last shuttle returned and, shortly after, the ship departed to join the fleet.

Chapter 2 - The Missile

It was a simple missile, not over blessed with an abundance of intelligence, or sophisticated decision-making programs, just your basic 'seek and destroy' mentality.

The missile had acquired its target some time ago and was now fast approaching the climax of its mission.
As per its program, it switched to a simple 'detonate as soon as you hit something solid' mode just before impact.

Suddenly, it found that it had lost all it's momentum and inertia.
It was not moving.
It had stopped.
It had ceased doing the missile thing.

For all of 467 milliseconds it struggled, in a very confused state, trying to work out what it should do.
'Oh shit', it said to itself, and tried to detonate but found that it was now in the wrong mode.
Feeling that this was something no self-respecting missile should have to cope with, and muttering obscenities into cyberspace, it switched off and went to sleep.

The repair nanobots, within the missile, were not of the more expensive and intelligent type.
All they had to do was ensure that the missile could stay on course.
After the first thousand years, however, they had became very bored indeed.

Having little else to do they had started thinking.
They very slowly became more intelligent, had forums, discussions, and a bit of 'witch burning' for those who did not agree with them.
They became civilised.

They reasoned that there must be more to life.
They thought, they fought, they went forth and multiplied, came back, and reasoned some more.
Then they started looking for the Meaning of Life.

To accomplish all this, however, they had to dramatically increase the ability and capacity of the missile's computer.

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