[h1]Somewhere outside of Ressurectionist Space[/h1]

	[i]”[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9L4q-0Pi4E]What has happened to our future?[/url] What has become of tomorrow as it became today? Why is it that humanity has not just betrayed its own history, but its self as an entity. We exist today at a time where man can do what only our ancestors have dreamed of! We have not just taken to the air but we have bounded clear from the orbit of the star that was our home! We have voyaged across the great interstellar expanse and come to new stars. We have found new planets, settled them, researched them, mined them, and turned them all into earths beyond Earth. We met new life – communicated with new life – and expanded the length and breadth of humanity far beyond the natural boundaries that restrained it. Easily, we have overcome nature.

	But yet, we have allowed ourselves to loose significantly something more fundamental. The lose does not ensure humanity's gain to be a sum of zero. Hardly that, it is not even a gain. We have lost. We have lost fundamentally everything that the human experience had been building for thousands of years and walked back on it! We are not an enlightened race of beings traveling the galaxy and someday the entire universe, probing the natural boundaries. But we have regressed into barbarians in star fighters and space ships. We are the Huns armed with nuclear rail guns, and high powered lasers. We are no more civilized than the Goths now, and we have walked back on the glorious promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity. We have consigned the once modern vision into the dustbin of history and withdrawn from it the imperial dictatorships of Alexanders, Ivans, Napoleons, Hitlers, and Mussolinis.

	And even if not so, we have kept the capitalist baron on life support for far longer than his fat face had any reason to be on. We have sold our future to these men. And for what? For the death of Earth, our home? For the sewing of Discord across the galaxy?

	The problems we fight today are of humanity's own creation! But not all of ours. It is the creation of Humanity's Power! Its leadership, command, bureaucracy, its superstructure. What did we have to fear from the computer and the robot? Nothing, we could design it so! What did we have to fear from the opening of new planets for our use? Nothing, all for all! But what class of man, what rung on that ladder had the most to fear, should the elevator to collective enlightened existence be finished ever?

	Power.

	So terrified power was in the discovery of new resources that threatened the solidity of its base, by the computer and machine to destabilize its primordial force on other men that they had to double down. And they sold our future, for validity in our history. No more was a congress, no more was democracy. Now it was the army. Then onto the Emperor. Both raised not as organized conceived of the present for the future, but the present for the past! Praetorians, Emperors in Togas. Latin spoken on Mars and across the stars. Imperial cults, and reactionary reaction against new reactionaries.

	Kinetiscm is as much a mystification of the sciences as it is an anointment of a single figure as Emperor above all. In a time where man can be self governing and liberated from the slavish material conditions that so daunted our development, gave rise to wars and treason and failed revolutions it was all made Imperial property. All men no longer free! All men to the Emperor!

	And so, what does this mean for our future? It means it has been sold out. It has been long sold out. Property of power and power has no interest in the future. Control of the future and its image is the new ideology that binds mankind. It holds behind this ideology the force of world destroying weapons, mind altering surgery and cybernetics. It tells us there is no future to have. We are there. Or if we are not there, to trust the future in power itself. And what does power say is the future? The past. Back to imperial dictatorship. Back to slavery. Back to private capital and back to class division. Back to castles to courtiers and plate armor. Back to living and dying by the sword and the death to imagination!

	And people, my brothers. I offer in my own imagination the future itself. I offer no conceptualization of it, because that is yours to decide as it is my own. The dogma of power that drives man to fear themselves and the universe is a weak one. It is a glass cannon, swift to act and incinerate millions before the sword but a swift punch to it wavers with. It dreams itself to be immovable, perfect. It relies on the supports of centuries and millenia old ideas and ways, far removed from the times in which we live, corrupting the present as it steals the future away from our mind, our imagination.

	The specter that haunts all mankind, dictating our actions from a millenia of graves will need to be excised. All churches be burned, all iconography be smashed, all state apparatus dismantled. From the detritus to be left behind and the smattering of its images into its individual parts we will leave it behind, or more accurately reconstruct it as a present idea of our time, from whence we will move ahead into a more unique future. The light that shall burn will illuminate the dark cavern ahead of us, and we can find our lost future.”[/i]

	The man stopped speaking. He clicked a button on the screen and the computer stopped recording audio. He hit another button and it began compiling the information into a formalized file. Soon enough this audio file would be sent out into space towards their intent. They would not be physically going. Behind him on a blue tooth speaker a ghostly song, that spoke laconically of the very historic specters that haunted today. A stylistic figment, plucked from the past itself in one part irony, in one part statement. A sort of artistic touch, to make that statement. It should have been picked up.

	Now done with it though he did not turn it up but raised from the comfort of his seat and moved about his cabin. It was small, bare bones. This ship had once been an industrial one and smaller than most in the Free Association. The walls were bare metal, showing pipes and wires that were straddled tightly to the walls. He could hear the low rumbling, barely imperceptible beneath the sound of the music he was playing.

	Parked next to the chair was the bed, large and soft with a collection of red sheets and blankets thrown over it. In the niche it was set in were collections of books, scraps of paper, and a television screen. Elsewhere along the walls were old photos, collected posters. It all piled up as the years had gone by. The man couldn't remember how long it had been. Had to be going on to a few decades now. He tossed the tablet computer he had used on it, and let it do its work as he rose and went to the open bathroom in the corner, only a curtain separated the toilet and shower from the rest of the industrial world around it.

	He went to the sink and washed his face. He could feel the sweat on his face. He was anxious, that much he could feel. He felt his heart beat in the veins of his neck, his head pulsed. He was clouded with doubts over whether he had said the right words this time. If he had left anything out. He half considered going back and making the speech all over again. It would have been the fifteenth time. That much he was sure. There were fourteen older files on the computer of his fourteen tried attempts. No, he would have to resign himself. This was it. Maybe later, if there was a later. This was his first time. Or rather his first time at this particular thing. He had been involved in and organized other things like this but usually after someone who posed a direct threat to the Association. No, this time he was acting on his own power. And the men called him captain for that.

	He looked up into the mirror. He was a rough and unshaven man, somewhere in his middle years. His eyes were framed with lines, thin and wire like they formed a pair of reefs around his eyes, of which they were some dull steel-blue bauble. His brows were thinning, gray, barely there like his receding hairline. His nose had been broken, two or three times; it was bent all to hell now, it was a miracle he could breath.

	The door to his cabin opened and he looked over. There standing in the door was a short narrow framed black woman. He face was dour and stoic, eyes cold and bracing. “Are we ready, Mr. Spectre?” she asked, almost buisiness like.

	Aswan Spectre nodded, standing up straight and putting his shoulders back. “As ready as we're going to be. Is that ship linked up?” he asked, stepping away from the sink. He held himself composed like a commander. Though he did not look the role in his dirty jeans and torn shirt. He looked more like a post apocalyptic punk than anything. As he headed for the door he detoured to swipe up his tablet computer.

	“We have control of the engine and navigation computers. We're almost ready stripping the star ship of any valuable assets. Its crew is in the hold. They're asking what we're going to do.”

	“I suppose you have my permission to tell them.” Aswan told her. That they were going to be delivered to the closest Associate Stockpile, and from there it was up to them to figure out how to get back if they couldn't figure that out.

	The other ship in question was a private merchant vessel they had commandeered in interstellar space. The EMP from a nuclear missile had shut off their unguarded systems long enough that they could physically access it and take it over. It was a clean strike, Aswan's cloaked ship - the Derrida – had managed to avoid tripping any of its sensors so they had no opportunity to throw up shields.

	Now in the hall they could see the other ship being stripped out. This wasn't a piracy thing, Aswan told himself. This was just being pragmatic. While the emptied vehicle would be put to good use that may call for putting potentially valuable information technology and assets – soft and hard – at risk. They could always use those to collect information on future missions, and there might be more troves of potentially important details best not destroyed. To the Derrida and its crew, at least.

	That other ship, marked only by a serial number was a large white beast. Arrow shaped and broad. It could be seen in the rotation of the Derrida through the floor windows on this deck. In the intermingling lights of either vessel the long cable connecting the two could be seen, though that five mile long span came the salvageable components and the people moving back and forth. Through it too on long fiber-optic cable would be the upload of the systems needed to remotely pilot the ship, and set its coordinates and parameters for warp and exiting it.

	“Are you nervous?” asked the woman. She was earnest in her concern. Aswan could see she too was anxious. They all were. But so far they were all going about their roles.

	“I'm fine.” he lied.

	Moments later they stepped onto an elevator and headed into the central spine of the Derrida. Here the rumble of the ship's gravitational generation were loudest. They pulled themselves along through the gravitational void up into the brain center of the ship and out into the vast round cupola heading the starship, like the bulb at the end of the lamp, it was a space of bright lights and glowing monitors. Through the thick glass of the leading cabin they could see the entire vista of space, the billions of stars of the Milky Way, the shimmering of the navigation lights on the merchant ship and the Derrida, and the rotation of the Derrida's ten cabins. The cable between them like a long black umbilical chord adrift in the medium of dark space.

	A crew waited adrift nearby at computer consoles. Human, alien. They turned to see who had entered as they heard the hatch open and close and hailed their anointed commander. He came up behind them, holding the computer. “Set the fifteenth recording up.” he told a hawkish creature, “That's the one to send. But send it only after we give the commands for the puppet to move.”

	“Yes, sir.” the alien said, taking the computer and connecting it into his terminal.

	As he worked Aswan turned his attention to other matters. “What's the status?” he asked in a low voice.

	“We're clearing out now. All the important work was finished, and it's time to get the crew back in.”

	“Great, wait for the all clear.”

	“Roger.”

	As time passed a message flashed on the crewman's terminal. Looking over the alien's shoulders Aswan read the message. The cable was detached and the ship was empty. “Begin activating it.” he gave the order.

	“Destination?” the crewman asked.

	“This.” Aswan said, taking out his tablet. Swiping and tapping through a few things he produced an orbital image and a planet. Around it was a station. “Can we hit that.” Aswan said, pointing to the orbital station. At the size it was at, it looked to be orbiting a distance from the planet below it, a way station between it and the moon, or itself acting as the sole satellite.

	The crew member looked at it. “I can see what I can do.” he said. He took the tablet and began tapping away at his terminal. He began swiping through the tablet, looking for what data he could before finally becoming confident. The situation sized up, he entered the command and sent it.

	Outside the command deck, the other space vessel began to move. Its thrusters boiling up to a start and it was on its way through cold space. As the thrusters burned, the ship slowly picked up speed.

	“There's a recording on that.” Aswan said, leaning over the shoulder of the crewman, “I would like you to broad cast the latest audio file in the direction that ship is going. Loop it two or three times. By the time we leave it'll arrive, and that'll hit.”

	“As you say.”