Earth Unbalanced

Today is April 31. It is the third April 31 in our history. The fourth year since the calendar, and so much more, changed.

They let us keep the months, you see. They ripped down our cities, destroyed our history, killed billions in a matter of days. But some things, they decided, did not need as much recalibration as the rest of our world.

We call them Syms. We could not resist them. Amid conflict over technology outrunning human capability, wars on multiple continents, and too many domestic conflicts to count, we forgot to look up. Our cultural tapestry was fraying long before they arrived, and when they did, their order quickly became absolute.

Order. The only word that matters now. Perfection through balance, no matter the cost of aligning the scales.

Order is oxygen to these creatures. Their names are all palindromes, from what we’ve seen of their language. Their features are perfectly mirrored, their speech rhythmic, their demand for equilibrium made real through their own words and thought and shape.

Some of them do look different, and that’s disturbing in its own way. A younger one with identical gouges on each cheek. A warrior with a missing finger on both hands, each pared down to the knuckle with unsettlingly uniform scarring. For Syms, if physical balance is upended, it means death. That’s one rule they didn’t foist on us, but not out of benevolence.

More likely, it’s because if they did, there’d be no one left.

The calendar is one of the more meaningless examples, but to the Syms, it was another asymmetry in a world that was already too off-balance. And any incongruity had to be corrected. They first decided on 30-day months – just remove the rounding error. What we didn’t realize then, and we’re still discovering now, is just how fanatical they are about calibration.

Twelve months – six on one side, six on the other. That works. But 365 days – that needed correcting. And when they figured out some months had 30 days, some had 31, and one had 28 or 29, depending on the year? It demanded a reckoning. The solution, a 30-day month, came with a mandate.

Everyone born on the 31st was to be executed.

So many were already dead, and we were subjugated, but we were not cattle. The leaders among us appealed to their reason, begged for a different solution, and then the Syms landed on a new solution: 12 months, 31 days each, with the last day of the month reserved for capital punishment. Any child born on the last day of the month would be executed, too. A monthly reminder of how imperfect we are, how impossible it is to uplift us, and how gracious the Syms are to try anyway.

We are not cattle, but we have been branded, and we’ve been forced to set about making this world more compatible with their doctrine. Our bodies are still imperfect, but they’re breeding us toward a more palatable homogeny. We live in new cities on symmetrical grids, with pallid buildings that yield only where absolutely necessary to suit humanity’s rancid unevenness.

I’m sure they’d say it was a noble concession on their part, the well-meaning benefactors tossing a hunk of meat to some rabid dogs. And in some ways, they’d be right. In the past few years humanity has debased itself in the hope that some fraction of a fraction of our people would earn the right to exist in the Syms’ new right-sized world.

Years later, it’s still unclear if they mean to correct us and be on their way or plan to make a show of us to a broader galaxy that holds even more dreadful things. They haven’t built any infrastructure for themselves other than what’s necessary to observe and enforce sameness, and whether this is a specific, surgical intervention or a permanent occupation is unclear. They have not shared any deeper motivations than draining what they see as a cyst on the universe.

But the future does not matter. Today does. Today is April 31. It is the third April 31 in our history and the fourth year since the Syms arrived and now, more profoundly than ever, I feel the change of this world, and the shame and the pain and the horror and the hopelessness of being forced to live a life I no longer control.

Today, my son was born. So tonight, they will die, or we will. My name is Erik Shaw. I have a plan. If you are out there, if you are ready, send help to New Seattle.

***

“ … and that’s it. It’s been on repeat for a few days now. He must have had a low-tech radio transmitter, something antique-looking that the Syms wouldn’t look at twice. But something’s happening out there, and if we’re going to move, the time is now.”

Claire rolled her eyes. Ian was telling the story to anyone who would listen, and at this point, the list was running low. But Ian had an earnestness about him that could turn the room toward this proposed suicide mission if left unchecked. So for the fourth – fifth? – time, she butted in.

“This could very easily be a trap,” Claire said. “The Syms have tech to imitate voices and physical features. Hell, we had that before everything went to shit. You really think that they made such a simple mistake, when every other contingency’s been covered twice over?”

“But that’s the point!” Ian said. “I told you before, there is a very real possibility that the Syms are too advanced to even consider radio transmission. Their protocols might not account for tech like this because it’s so far removed from what they use now. We’ve been using radios to get the word out on our resistance since January, and they haven’t responded in any way we can see.”

“So what? Even if they’re caught off-guard, making one of these things bleed is more luck than skill. You think one desperate guy with nothing to lose really changed anything? At best we’d be walking into a city on high alert and pissed-off Syms looking for any reason to –”

“You haven’t been paying attention, Claire,” a rail-thin, dark-haired woman called out as she walked into the run-down barn.

Simone. Of course she would come back now. And of course she would be ready to fight.

“The Syms,” Simone lingered on that word, letting herself chew on it and taste the foulness of it. “Have you noticed anything off about their patrol routes lately?”

“I’ve heard some reports, but things are busy here,” Claire responded. “We had an influx of refugees just two days ago, and we’re out of room. We need to build more sheds to even keep –”

“I appreciate the difficulty of your situation,” Simone said with a dismissive sigh. Always cutting in. Talking to her was like talking to a wall, or a buzzsaw, or both. Simone had brought this community together and still rode on the clout she built in the early days of the occupation. She had helped get people away from cities and set up the woodland farmstead that had become home to around 280 people over the past few years.

But now, she was dangerously close to recommending they put out a call to arms.

Any military action would expose not just themselves, but the other communities tucked into the folds of the Pacific Northwest. There were around 3,000 people between 20 hubs, and around a quarter of them would be of use in a fight.

Not enough. Not nearly enough.

“Something has changed,” Simone continued. “The Syms don’t break routine. They’ve run the same patrols, same supply routes, same transport systems since they first got planetside. But for the past four days, they’re nowhere to be found. All of our co-ops for hundreds of miles have noticed, and those closest to New Seattle found out why just a few hours ago: A massive perimeter’s been set around the city. The Syms are outside, not in. Something happened. Something that set them off-balance.”

The room took a beat to process that. Claire, Ian, and the half-dozen other leaders of the Douglas community were used to setbacks. This was new, exciting, terrifying.

“Why haven’t they just bombed the city?” one asked. “That’s what they did when Boise tried to rebel.”

“No idea,” Simone said. “That transmission wasn’t just some dispossessed father. He managed to shake up what amounts to the Syms’ capital on Earth. It’s where they’re most concentrated, their hub for interplanetary activity, and now they’re hesitating to even try to retake it.

“We need to decide what comes next. New Seattle asked for help. Whatever the plan was, it has worked, briefly. And that’s more than we can say of anything that we’ve tried in the past four years.”

Ian took a deep breath.

“You know where I stand,” he said. “If we aren’t going to fight back when there’s finally a chance to, then what are we even doing out here?”

That damn earnestness. Claire knew she had lost the room. She just hoped she wouldn’t lose everything else, too.

“If we’re going to do this,” she said, “then we need to know what actually happened. What has them so spooked? Why aren’t they retaliating?”

“We … might be getting an answer to that, actually,” Simone replied.

The repetition of New Seattle’s message had become white noise amid their argument. Now, there was a change in the transmission. It was that man’s voice again. Erik. And he was not alone.

“Today is May 3,” he said, “and humans hold New Seattle.”

***

Our transmission was received, not just by others here, but by others out among the stars. I have learned too much over the past few days to relay it all, but here’s what I can share:

The Syms were once the preeminent race throughout the known universe. Now, they are a shell. They’ve been hunted down across the thousands of planets they inhabited by a coalition with a simple directive: Disrupt control. Destroy the fanatics. Free the subjugated.

Ours was the first planet breached by the Syms in nearly 300 years. They have been in our solar system for about that long, rebuilding their ranks, but they are still nothing more than a blip on a broader galactic radar. The ambassadors who we’ve interacted with expect that these are some of the few holdouts left, and a full military response in the coming days will rout the rest of them.

That is the good news. The bad news is what we can infer from all of this. If the Syms were nothing, then we’re at the mercy of whatever else is out there, too. This coalition of species, The Unbalanced, has offered aid that we can’t afford to decline. They can help not just get us back on our feet but provide technology to rebuild at a scale we thought impossible. And they have offered an opportunity for us to build our own presence starside, when we’re ready.

My son is alive. He’s 6 pounds 11 ounces, with a tuft of blonde hair and bright blue eyes. He is alive, and I am too, and as far as I can tell no humans were killed in the fight for the city. The Syms that tried to hold on around the outskirts of New Seattle have since scattered. The Unbalanced tell me it’s a similar story across the continent and overseas, though they came here first. Because of my story. Our story.

I’d like to think that a group moved to intervene by a plea for help is on the right side of things in this universe. We’ll find out soon enough, I’m sure. To those of you still out there, keep close to your communities for the next few days. There are still Syms out there, and even on the run, they’re too much for any group of us.

I will be frank: Being in debt to a group that can crush these monsters, and knowing that our oppressors were low on the galactic food chain, is just as disruptive as the past few years have been. We’ll get our world back, and soon. But there’s no way to be ready for what comes next. And I can’t guarantee that we’ll look back on today as a good one.

I hope that you’ll forgive me if things go even more wrong from here. But my son is alive. So many are gone, but he is alive, and we are alive. That has to mean something.

It has to.

***

The feed went quiet for a few seconds, then picked up from the beginning.

Today is May 3, and humans hold New Seattle.

Claire couldn’t believe it the second time, either. All the misery of the last four years, and in a matter of days, they’d be free. Why did it take this “coalition” so long? Why now? She wasn’t a trusting person before all of this, and even less so now.

There had to be a catch.

“Oh my god!” Ian shouted. He hopped up and down a few times, arms splaying outward, mouth ajar. So innocent. It was unseemly. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god!”

“That’s … something,” Simone chuckled. “Some real deus ex machina shit.”

“Let our scouts know to be on the lookout for Syms and to radio in if any get within two miles of Douglas,” Claire told the operators. “If they’re fanning out to hide, this spot is as likely as any.”

“And get the rest of our people back here ASAP,” Simone said. “No use risking supply runs if we only have to hunker down for a few days. Everyone goes dark unless we pick up Sym activity.”

There had to be a catch. There had to be.

A low rumble drew everyone’s eyes skyward. Massive spacecraft jumped into view, forming dozens of unfamiliar constellations in the daylight. That would be the military response. But why would The Unbalanced send so many for an enemy that was supposedly so weak?

Claire didn’t know. She might not learn in this lifetime. But she was convinced what was to come would be an even tougher trial.

We are alive. That has to mean something.

It has to.

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “But I hope so.”