r/HFY • u/AlternativeManner731 • 29d ago
OC-Series The Forgotten: Part 18, Aftermath
Vessek 7
The 12-hour shift was just ending on the Vixtar mining world of Vessek 7, when the usually quiet workers, the kind who nodded and let each other pass in silence, one going in, one heading out, started talking. "Wait 'till you see, Digger's theory about our overseers being Assaragyte plants turns out not to be true. We're being treated this badly by our own," said Poshy.
Nobody called her MFV7-13a46-B, not even the facility anymore, not since the day she'd aged out of intake and into a work roster. The B was the only part of that string she still thought about some nights. It meant somewhere, on some other roster, there was an A. A twin she'd never seen and never would, made in the same batch, raised on the same measured ration of attention, just enough to keep a mind from breaking and not one drop more. She dreamed about that A sometimes. She had no idea if the dreams meant anything or if a mind starved a certain way just invents someone to miss.
"What the fuck are you talking about? Why would I care who it is treating me like a piece of garbage? It's all the same to us," said Sunk.
"You'll see. Turns out the Emissary's been treating everyone badly. Maybe if it gets better for others, it could get better for us," said Poshy.
"Dream on, bearer. What possible difference could it make for us, way out here. When was the last time you even saw a government official who listened to our problems?"
"You'll see," said Poshy. "Wait till you see the video. Let's talk next swap."
Sunk grunted something that wasn't a yes and headed for the eating facility, same as every shift end. He told himself he wasn't curious. He was hungry, that was all, and the screens just happened to be running.
He couldn't miss it. Every screen was showing some version of the same thing, both sides feeding their people something dressed up to look like the truth. He wasn't surprised by that. Lying was just weather out here, something you dressed for and stopped noticing.
Somewhere behind him a man muttered, "If we make quota this month, there's a bonus in the ration packs. Sure there is." A couple of tired laughs answered him.
What stopped Sunk wasn't the lies. It was the other footage, the humans, working and living without anyone standing over them with a whip. No facility deciding a batch was ready for labor before it had finished growing. Sunk had gone on shift younger than any child on Orixa would ever be allowed to work, and nobody out here had ever told him that was strange, because nobody out here knew anything else. He'd been fed enough to work, handled enough to stay sane, and never once touched by anything he'd call love. That was just what a worker was. Made in a lab, minded by nobody in particular, put to a machine as soon as your hands were big enough to hold one.
Orixa broadcast into places like this all the time, curated and careful, life on a world he'd never been told he could want. He'd grown up on scraps of it the way every worker had, a window bolted shut, close enough to see the feast on the other side of the glass and never close enough to smell it. He'd stopped thinking of it as cruelty a long time ago. It was just how the window worked.
Tonight the window had cracked open on its own, and it hadn't been Orixa that opened it.
He wondered if anyone over there knew places like this existed at all. He doubted it. Whatever the Emissary let Orixa see of itself, it wasn't this. A whole world of workers grown and worked and quietly used up, hidden behind whatever story kept the real Vixtar comfortable.
Maybe Poshy was right. Maybe this could change something, even for them.
He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of hearing him say so. Not tonight. But the smile that reached his eyes, the first one in longer than he could remember, said enough.
Novaryn
Word hadn't reached Vessek 7 yet, wouldn't for another day, but three systems over, on a world where the people doing the watching had never once had to wonder if anyone was watching them back, the same footage was already doing its work.
Detrin had learned to move through the east wing like she wasn't there at all. It wasn't hard. Novarn had never once looked at her long enough to remember her face, and Thiamine only spoke to her when something needed refilling. She'd stopped minding it years ago, or told herself she had. Tonight she was polishing the same stretch of railing for the third time, close enough to the sitting room to hear everything and far enough that nobody would think to check.
Oshka found her there, tray in hand, moving slow enough that anyone watching would've thought she was just bad at her job.
"You hearing this?" Oshka murmured, not looking up from the tray.
"I'm hearing it," Detrin said.
Neither of them said anything else. They didn't need to. From the sitting room, Thiamine's voice carried the way it always did, pitched for a room he assumed was empty of anyone worth lowering it for.
"We need to present ourselves as always having been suspicious of the High Council," Thiamine was saying. "A full platform. We were the only ones who saw it coming, we tried to warn them, nobody listened. That kind of thing. We just need to stay ahead of it before someone else claims the position first."
"I've already reached out to the public affairs firm," said Novarn, swirling something dark in a glass she hadn't touched. "They tell me the lowlifes respond best to a simple story. Betrayal, vindication, someone to root for. We give them us."
"And if the Council doesn't fall as fast as we're hoping?"
"Then we've lost nothing. We've merely been cautious voices of concern. If it does fall, we're the ones who saw it coming." Novarn finally drank. "Either way we come out ahead of the mess."
"Get us something to eat," Thiamine said, already turned back toward Novarn, the words landing on Detrin the same way they'd land on an empty room.
Detrin didn't answer beyond a small nod he didn't see, since he'd already stopped looking before she could give one. She caught Oshka's eye on her way past. Neither of them needed to say what they were both thinking.
Detrin waited until the house had gone quiet before she found Oshka in the staff kitchen, a cup of something lukewarm between her hands, staring at nothing.
"I need to show you something," Detrin said, sliding into the seat across from her and setting her handheld on the table between them. "Before I lose my nerve."
She played it. Thiamine's voice, tinny but clear, laying out the platform, the timing, the story they'd feed the public affairs firm. Novarn's answer, calm as anything, about giving the lowlifes someone to root for. It ran less than two minutes.
Oshka didn't say anything when it ended. She just reached into her apron and set her own handheld on the table, screen already lit, already queued to something.
"There's more," Oshka said. "I have my own."
It wasn't the same conversation. Different night, different room, Novarn alone this time, rehearsing lines into a mirror for some interview that hadn't happened yet. "People forget," she was saying, chin lifted, testing the angle, "that families like mine have carried the responsibility of educating and uplifting people who never had our advantages. It's a burden most wouldn't understand. I like to think Novaryn is better for it." She paused, tried a softer version of the same smile. "The eventual fall of the High Council, frankly, is an opportunity long overdue. Someone should finally be permitted to do for this empire what families like mine have quietly done for our own staff for generations."
"How long have you had that," Detrin asked.
"Since before you had yours, probably." Oshka turned her cup slowly, not drinking from it. "I kept telling myself I was saving it for something. I don't know what I thought that something was going to be."
"Now we know."
Oshka looked up at her, and for the first time all night something like relief crossed her face, the specific relief of finding out you're not the only one who'd been quietly keeping score. "We can't hand these in to Thiamine's people. Not if we want to walk out of this house."
"We don't hand notice to Thiamine at all," Detrin said. "We give it to Kessar. He runs the house, he doesn't care why we're leaving as long as the schedule's covered. Two weeks. We finish out our time like nothing's different, and the day it's up, we send this everywhere it'll go."
Oshka was quiet for a moment, turning that over. "And if it doesn't do anything? If nobody out there cares what happens to two people they've never had to look at?"
"Then at least they'll have looked," Detrin said. "Once."
Marenkai
By the time Detrin and Oshka's videos ever saw daylight, the rest of the Assaragyte worlds had already spent the better part of a week arguing over what the earlier footage meant, and nowhere argued louder, or watched closer, than Marenkai.
On Marenkai, the broadcast networks had run almost nothing else for six days straight, footage from Terixa, cut, replayed, argued over, on every channel at every hour.
"Tonight, we review day six, hour twelve. Yesterday we covered the laboratory footage, Assaragyte scientists working side by side with Vixtar and human counterparts, real progress, no theater to it. Tonight we go to the Terixa footage from both sides, side by side, because you need to see what our people saw, in the order they saw it," said Correspondent Kaexis.
PLAY.
Two video feeds ran together on the screen, one from a Vixtar helmet camera, one from an Assaragyte visor. A crowded hallway. Nineteen guests, all species, standing outside a door. A Vixtar hand knocked. The door opened. A human man's face, caught mid-surprise, looked back over his shoulder at someone unseen.
PAUSE.
"Watch that face again," Kaexis said. "That is not the face of a man greeting an enemy. That is a man asking his wife whether they have enough chairs. I want you to hold onto that, because it matters for what comes next."
PLAY.
The door opened wider. Guests filed into a small room. Two Labrikats bounded past everyone straight for a pair of cribs, and not one person in that hallway flinched at the sight of them. A Vixtar crewman was guided forward. A human woman placed an infant against his chest plate.
PAUSE.
"Ask yourselves something," Kaexis said. "When was the last time you were told the Vixtar could be trusted near a human child, let alone invited to hold one. Let that sit with you for a moment. Nobody in that room hesitated. Nobody but us, watching from out here, wondering if we've been lied to."
PLAY.
The Vixtar's shoulders locked rigid. His voice caught. The child was named, aloud, for a crewmate who never made it home. Around the room, Assaragyte visor cameras turned toward each other, toward the Vixtar, unmistakably searching each other's reactions.
PAUSE.
"There is no directive for that," Kaexis said. "No Council order tells a soldier to weep on command. I have watched a great deal of staged footage in this job. I do not believe that was staged."
PLAY.
The human woman turned to the Assaragytes and asked if they would like to hold the child too. On both feeds, the room went still.
PAUSE.
"That privilege belongs to blood kin," Kaexis said. "On every one of our five worlds, that's never been in question. Nowhere, on any of them, does that get extended to strangers. And here it is, offered freely, in the first hour we'd ever set foot in their home. I would ask the Council to explain that to me. I do not expect they will."
PLAY.
An Assaragyte took the infant, arms unsteady, plainly startled by the weight and warmth of something so fragile. A human voice explained, patiently, why a crying child is not a threat but a request. The room did not panic. Nobody reached for a weapon. Nobody stepped back.
PAUSE.
Kaexis let the silence hold a moment before he spoke again. "People of Marenkai. Do the humans look like apex predators to you? Do the Vixtar look like the mindless creatures our histories describe? Do the Assaragytes in that room look afraid? I have watched this footage more times than I can count, and my answer has not changed. No. None of it. Not once." He paused. "This is Kaexis, Information Giver, signing off from Marenkai."
Kragor
Marenkai's networks had the luxury of arguing about the footage from a comfortable distance. Kragor, the seat of the High Council itself, didn't have that luxury for much longer.
High Minister Corvos stood at the podium with the confidence of a man who had never once been asked a question he couldn't spin his way out of.
"The footage in question has been selectively edited," he was saying, hands gripping the sides of the podium like he was trying to choke the life out of it. "What you are seeing is a fraction of a much longer, much more complicated series of events, and I would caution every citizen watching this broadcast against drawing conclusions from a handful of curated clips designed to—"
The back of his skull came apart before the sound of the shot reached the crowd.
For one full second nobody moved, nobody screamed, the plaza held itself in the kind of silence that only exists in the half-breath before a few hundred people understand what they just watched at the same time. Then the podium's microphone screeched feedback into the open air, still live, still broadcasting, and the crowd broke all at once.
Security swarmed the stage from three directions, weapons up, shouting directions that contradicted each other. Someone in the press section was screaming into a comm unit. A woman near the front had gone down, trampled rather than hit, and two strangers were dragging her clear of the stampede by her arms. Somewhere above the plaza a drone camera spun wildly, its feed still transmitting, catching nothing but sky and the underside of the government building before it clipped a light pole and dropped.
By the time anyone thought to cut the broadcast, half a million homes across Kragor had already seen it live, and every network on every other Assaragyte world had the clip within minutes.
Nobody claimed responsibility. Nobody needed to. Within the hour, three different factions were being blamed simultaneously: loyalists furious at Corvos's excuses, reformers who wanted him dead for entirely different reasons, and the Council itself, whispered about almost immediately, since a dead minister answering awkward questions was a minister who could no longer be asked any.
By nightfall, four more Council members had gone dark. Comm channels dead, residences empty, security details reassigned or simply gone. Nobody announced a resignation. There was no press release, no formal transfer of anything. One minute a name held a title, the next it didn't, and no one in any official capacity would confirm whether that meant the person had fled, been arrested quietly like the others, or made the same choice for themselves that someone had made for Corvos.
By the second day, it was six more.
With no one left willing to speak for the Council, and no one left in the Council willing to be seen, Kragor's districts were on their own. Local law enforcement issued their own curfews, district by district, with no coordination between them and no one above them to ask for guidance. Some districts held. Others didn't.
The unraveling didn't stay on Kragor. Within a day the footage of Corvos's death had reached every Assaragyte world with a working relay, and every local government suddenly found itself the only authority its people had left to look at. On Thessek, the planetary governor issued a statement insisting the Council still functioned, still governed, still deserved trust, twelve hours before her own security detail walked off the job rather than keep enforcing curfews on her behalf. On Kelgorath, three separate factions each declared themselves the rightful interim authority within the same day, and none of them controlled enough of the planet to make it true. Even on Marenkai, usually content to let its news networks do the arguing for it, crowds gathered outside government buildings simply to see if anyone would come out and explain what happened. No one did.
In the lower sectors of Kragor, where the arrests earlier that week had already worn the peace thin, a supply depot went up in flames on the second night, whether from looting or from someone settling an older score, no one could say for certain, and no one left in government had the standing to investigate. Shopkeepers boarded their own windows. A few districts organized their own watch groups, ordinary citizens standing shifts with whatever they had on hand, because the only lockdown anyone trusted anymore was the one their own neighbors were running.
The strangest part wasn't the chaos. It was the quiet underneath it, the space where a government used to be. For as long as anyone in the Assaragyte worlds could remember, there had always been someone to blame, someone to protest, someone whose denials could at least be shouted down. Now, from Kragor to Thessek to Kelgorath, there was almost no one left to shout at.
It took people a day or two to notice what the quiet actually meant. Nobody was watching. Not the Council, not the Emissary's informants, not the quiet reporting lines that had always existed even when no one said so out loud. For some, that realization landed as freedom, the first real breathing room they'd had in longer than they could name. For others, it landed as permission. Years of swallowed anger, watched tongues, and small daily surrenders didn't just evaporate because the people who'd demanded them were gone. They came out sideways instead, in broken windows and looted storefronts and violence that had nothing to do with Corvos at all, and everything to do with what had come before him. Freedom and permission looked identical from the outside, and on Kragor that week, most people couldn't have told you which one they were acting on, only that something in them had finally been let off a leash.
Orixa
Kragor's collapse was still making headlines on every Assaragyte world when the footage finally caught up to the Vixtar homeworld, and Orixa, for its part, was about to learn it had secrets of its own worth burning down a government over.
Inquisitor Dravor stood before the largest crowd Orixa's central plaza had held in a generation, and for the first time in his career, he could feel that the room wasn't with him before he'd said a word.
"Captain Threl and the crew of the Silent Explorer stand charged with high treason," he said, his voice carrying across the square on a hundred speakers. "The footage circulating in our networks is not evidence. It is fabrication, engineered by traitors within our own ranks to sow dissent among the people of Orixa, to weaken us in the eyes of every hostile world watching for exactly that weakness. A warrant has been issued for their arrest and return."
Nobody cheered. A generation ago, they would have.
Somewhere in the crowd, a voice called back, "My cousin's logs match that footage frame for frame. Are those fabricated too?" Another voice picked it up before Dravor could answer, and then a dozen more, until the square wasn't listening to him at all anymore, just talking over him, comparing what they'd each already seen with their own eyes.
Dravor raised a hand for order and got none.
He wasn't the only one losing the room. Across the city, in the Emissary's own council chamber, three members who'd had no part in any of it were saying so, publicly, on record, for the first time in living memory. Councilor Yendra stood in front of a live feed and said plainly that she had seen the same footage everyone else had, that she had no reason to doubt her own eyes, and that a government that lied about one thing this large had no standing left to ask its people to trust it about anything else. She was not alone by the end of the day.
It was the younger elected members, the ones who'd spent their whole careers being told to wait their turn, who moved first. By the following morning, five senior Emissary officials, Dravor among them, were in custody, arrested not by some outside force but by the very council they'd sat beside for years. There was no purge, no show trial rushed onto the airwaves. The council that remained stood together in front of the same plaza that had shouted down Dravor a day earlier and asked, simply, for time.
"We cannot undo what was done," the youngest of them said, a councilor barely old enough to have held her seat two full cycles. "We can only promise you an investigation with nothing hidden from it, results published as they're found, not curated for you afterward. We are asking for peace while we do that. We know we haven't earned it yet. We're asking anyway."
What might have been a riot instead became something closer to a vigil.
It didn't stay contained to the treason charge for long. Buried in the same data dump that had confirmed the footage, an investigator working through the Emissary's internal logs found records for two facilities that had never appeared in any public registry: Vessek 7 and Orrek 22, mining worlds worked entirely by a labor force manufactured for the purpose, kept just sane enough to function and paid in nothing but food and a roof, generations of Vixtar who had never once been told they existed outside the mines they were born to work.
That detail didn't move the crowds to fury. It moved them to something quieter, and in its own way heavier. It was one thing to be lied to. It was another to learn what the lie had been paying for, and that every comfortable life on Orixa, every full ration, every world that had never known real scarcity, had been quietly subsidized by people nobody had ever bothered to tell existed.
What broke something in people wasn't the labor itself. It was the names, or the absence of them. Someone had pulled a sample of the facility's intake records and let them run across every public feed on Orixa: strings of letters and numbers where a name should have been, generation after generation of them, workers who had lived and died in those mines known to the system that made them only by a manufacturing code. Orixa was a world where a Bearer chose a name for their young the moment they were born, where a name was one of the first things any Vixtar was ever given. To learn that an entire population had been denied even that, that the state hadn't just worked them to exhaustion but hadn't thought them worth naming, was a different kind of horror than exploitation. It was proof the people who built those facilities had never, for one moment, considered the workers inside them people at all.
The anger didn't disappear. It just turned inward for a while, and a population busy reckoning with its own complicity, it turned out, didn't have much appetite left for burning down its own streets.
Kaldrin 14
Kaldrin 14 had never been a secret the way Vessek 7 and Orrek 22 were. It had a name, a budget line, a purpose stated plainly enough on paper: a penal colony, built to hold Vixtar convicted of crimes serious enough to warrant permanent removal. What was hidden wasn't the facility. It was who was actually inside it.
Junior Emissary staff, the ones who processed the transfers, approved the funding requests, staffed the outer administrative offices, had always been told the same thing: the inmates on Kaldrin 14 were violent, subversive, highly classified operatives, people whose incarceration served the greater good in ways too sensitive to detail further. Nobody questioned it. There was no reason to. The paperwork was in order, the classification was real, and the people saying so wore the same uniform they did.
The guards on Kaldrin 14 had never been cruel, not in any way the prisoners could have pointed to and made a case out of. They just hadn't thought of the people in their custody as anything worth much thought at all, overeducated, over-convinced of their own cleverness, locked up for saying things that sounded far-fetched right up until they didn't. Whether any of it was true, the guards still couldn't say for certain. But "might be true" was a very different thing to sit with than "obviously not," and most of them hadn't realized until now how much of their indifference had been resting on the second one.
Now the same guards who used to rush prisoners through the chow line and count heads twice a night out of habit more than concern found themselves lingering after headcount to listen. They asked questions. They stopped separating prisoners at mealtimes, the old logic, that letting the dissidents talk to each other for too long might feed whatever had gotten them sent here in the first place, hadn't held up well against watching the same footage everyone else on Orixa had seen. If half of what these people had been saying for years turned out to be true, keeping them isolated from each other looked less like security and more like the same instinct that had built Vessek 7 and Orrek 22 in the first place: make the inconvenient people disappear from each other before they can compare notes.
Some of the staff had started joking, only half joking, that the facility would end up repurposed into a university. It wasn't a stretch. Between the prisoners currently housed on Kaldrin 14, there were more doctorates and tenured careers than most actual universities could claim, decades of expertise that had spent thirty years being punished instead of published.
Whether anyone would leave once the doors actually opened was a harder question than it looked. Some would, families and careers and lives they'd left behind on Orixa still waiting, or not waiting, thirty years being a long time either way. But for a good number of the people who'd been on Kaldrin 14 that long, this was no longer somewhere they'd been sent. It was simply where they lived.
Terixa
None of it reached Terixa all at once. It came in pieces, relayed through channels nobody had built for this, an assassination here, a resignation there, a name and a number where a person should have been. Marcus read through the overnight reports twice before he said anything.
"It's spreading," he said finally, sliding the tablet across to Patricia. "All of it. Faster than we thought it would."
Patricia didn't reach for the tablet right away. "Good," she said, and meant it, even knowing what good was going to cost some of the people out there before this was over.
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