A Story from the Helion Peace Corps

Sentient life, wherever it is found, forms a number of similar structures. There are the obvious ones which force physical marks on their worlds. These are webs of infrastructure or clusters of industry. There are also more subtle social structures which imprint empathy on their species' such as comforting clans, or the swarms of civilization. 

The most persistent of these, despite all odds and across all planets, are peace corps. Wherever a creature's consciousness develops into what we recognize as sentience it becomes bound by some primordial natural force to protect those incapable of protecting themselves. With this in mind, it is no surprise that the Intergalactic Helion League's most widespread force is its own peace corps. By far this legion outnumbers the League’s Armed Forces, and even its police forces. Here thousands of volunteers work in harmony to preserve the life of species that they otherwise would never owe any obligation to. Their job is thankless, and when done well their wards never even know how close to cataclysm they had come.

 So that you may know how harsh their labor is, how haunted their lives are, and how horrible a price they pay for peace, I am going to relay to you just ten-minutes from one of their lives. They will be pulled from the last hour of a mission wherein the right man was in the right place and did everything as he should have. For his privacy I will refer to him by a pseudonym but beyond that I will preserve his story as accurately as it is known to me. It took place on a planet farther from yours than you could ever imagine but closer to it than you could ever dream. 

The clacking of keys echoed across the halls of the League's ship. A lone vessel left to save a whole world. Red-eyed and weary, Moshi worked to save a planet that was not his own. Week by week he watched other Helion ships warp away from him. They skipped across the stars like scared does. His colleagues had written off this world; they warned him that lost causes only break hearts. While they ran he worked. He had written, he had called, he had pushed numbers and tilted scales both social and economic. He was a lone shepherd warding off with a wild crook that dreadful pack of wolves; Famine, Plague, Death, and their chief, War. 

Such was the scale of our friend's focus, his lone crusade curbing chaos at every venture. He was a veteran of the cause, raised by the Helion corps since his childhood. He was the prodigal son of a dead world and planetary salvation was his lifelong funerary rite. He was raised in the Helion Peace Corps. Those ideologians made this victim into a victor. Though his souls’ scars never healed to completion. They scabbed into a moral labor which bordered on madness. He did not stop. He did not rest. He was an unending force against every evil a world could produce. 

His charge was a desperate one. A planet newly nuclear, one that was grappling with the ails and alms of an atomic age. It was no small feat, these worlds rarely lasted long. It was civilization’s great bottle-neck. Super-states rabidly rattle their sabers at each other until one fool slips and draws first blood. Such a story dictated whether a species could chase life across the stars or whether it would, weighed down by its own warring hosts, descend into a lifeless age of ash. 

The souls who had made history on this world were ignorant both of their peril and their protector. Money appeared in empty accounts and logistic lag cleared across the board. States trapped in war found treaties offered to them the fairness of which none on either side could have sought from conflict alone . All these were the acts of a guardian angel hidden behind the heavy leaden veil of bureaucracy. That was his camouflage. The Helion ships specialized in covert computer operations. With this blazing digital blade, one man among any other was holding back hell’s host.  

This was his drive. Not thanks, not pay, not honor but the salvation of souls. For this reason he was sleepless; for this reason he stayed behind while others fled. This reason in his eyes was life's great purpose: preservation, protection, and most of all prosperity for those who in their truest heart utter a love for peace.

STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED

The blaring alarm nearly burst his eardrums. His Ship's monotone voice uttered those three words of damnation. A crimson hue ebbed and flowed across his eyes as the emergency lights turned on. 

There was a mistake. There had to have been. Everything was going perfectly. 

His reason and composure were drowned by a flood of panicked conclusions. The job was almost done, everything had been going perfectly. 

Maybe a glitch? The software misfired?

None of the nuclear nations had been in conflict, in fact tensions were low thanks to his work. And a single launch? These super-states send fleets of missiles, never just one. They always bet on armageddon’s accuracy over personal precision. He was confident his computer had failed him.

The hair on his neck stood like pin needles as he scanned the bay window for nothing. Desperately he clung to that poor hope of an error, that some kind of glitch had set off a false alarm. Then he saw it. There was a single red glare cutting across the sky. There had been an error, but not with his ship. Somewhere, in some secret silo, a fool had mistakenly murdered his world with one misfire.

This is solvable. He thought …this can be fixed, it'll just be harder. I can contact the other nations… warn them make sure they don-

STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED

Again the alarm went off, and another red glare slashed the sky bloody. The alarm went off again, and again. The response to that miscall. One hemisphere began a full salvo on its rival. Response upon response compounding against one man’s mistake. To the sounding billowing orchestra of the alarms Moshi shot from his chair. He lifted it over his head and began smashing the speakers. He needed to think. All he could do was think. That was his tool, his power, that was how he saved people. And then the first strike impacted.  

Somewhere, a boy confessed his love to a girl. To his terror she blushed, and laughed, before leaning in for a kiss. And then they were gone. A student stayed up late, diligently studying for her exam. She was the first in her family to make it this far, she was the first with these kinds of opportunities. She looked from her notebooks out the window. There, hungrily on the horizon, a glowing orb grew, its fusion fires slowly swallowing everything around it. In one palace a father drove back late from work and would find no home to return to, in another children found no parents returning to them. Sirens ring out as first responders attempt to fight fires their world had never known and that no world had ever won over. 

From the stars Moshi watched on, red-eyed and weeping. He did everything right, anything he could, but found none of it worked. He did not leave. As that world burned he sat and mourned. That was all that was left to do. 

I did not tell you this story so that I might aggrandize on some moral failing that planet held, or some great technical failure on behalf of Moshi. Everyone on that planet did the best that they could and then some for those who could not. And Moshi had saved planets a plenty before this one. I would wager he has saved plenty more than you since that hour. If there was some lesson to be gleaned from this episode I did not plant it there for you. I told you this story because someone ought to know it other than him. And I hope that it haunts you. Not because I have any animosity toward you, but quite the opposite. We are always haunted by history, persevering despite all odds. Carry it with you, and all others like it.