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Most galactic empires are known by certain factors: Their army, their expansion rate, their strength. Labs for developing cutting-edge technology, hundreds of worlds under their power. Whole planetary ecumenopolis in which culture and civilization flourished, while in the rebel worlds, war laid siege to their populations, under the threat of erasing them from existence, be it military war, or economic one. TITAN inc was an empire favoring the second type. TITAN products flooded the galaxies, from snacks to movies, to the screens they needed to be seen by. Its army was one of followers, because there is nothing that gets people to do the wrong thing more than thinking they are doing the right one.
But there’s a very important thing people who study galactic empires usually forget. Empires are collective organisms, ones with weapons, armies, tech development… But the most important part of an empire is its army of producers. Thousands of worlds exclusively dedicated to the feeding of the imperial organism, planets divided between the huge and optimized farms, which continuously produced sustenance, and factories which processed it and gave it TITAN’s brand, which usually involved light blue coloring. Arcadia-0912 was one of these worlds. Its original ecosphere long lost and not even remembered, it was now terraformed an made into a bubbling mix of industrial complexes several kilometers round and seas upon seas of bio-domes which contained thousands of farms, the size of countries.
Life inside those bio-domes was pretty simple. Since TITAN inc. had found that workers were more worthwhile than robots, each bio-dome also contained some buildings that housed the few families that worked there. In theory, they actually rented their plots of the domes from TITAN, bought the seeds from TITAN, grew them and then sold them to TITAN, which unsurprisingly made TITAN a huge profit margin. But they were somewhat happy, even in their simple lives. Not happy like the commercials that encouraged people unfit to be proper followers to live “free” lives in their farming systems, but they knew that, as part of the bio-domes, they were to be protected by TITAN from outside threats.
Their days, divided by light and darkness cycles according to the harvest requirements weren’t easy nor long. They were spent by imagining what life could be beyond those blue and almost invisible walls that covered their entire lives. The adults may have wanted for their kids to adapt to that small life, to dream only of the harvest, of the wellbeing of their crops and the sustenance they could get from them. But they didn’t. They looked at sponsored media and their imagination grew beyond it. They imagined space, snow, volcano worlds where armies clashed. Huge and terrifying demon tyrants overthrown by TITAN’s glorious warriors. Why couldn’t they dream of being that warriors? They were free, right? They owned the land they worked in, so they could, potentially, grow up to be followers of TITAN. They could, at least in their wildest dreams, be able to reach PARADISE. Axa was one of those kids. One of the dreamy type. Of the one that told stories to his friends, who imagined what life could be beyond those artificial skies who only rained when the system told them to rain. Whose crops were numbered, making it troublesome to even take one single fruit from the shipment without the TITAN envoys who were sent to take it noticing.
Axa Monev and his friends dreamt of all those things TITAN media promised them. They could be anything. They could earn anything. They had hope. But not their parents. They already knew what was it. Seed. Grow. Harvest. Repeat. It was all they had. And they knew, even if they were told they were free, they were only pieces of the farm, only a single failure away from being replaced.
That’s why Lorana Monev, Axa’s mother, knew from the beginning she had to hide her son. For not even controlled environments could avoid illnesses.
It started, as a lot of illnesses do, with just a cough, back when Axa came back from one of his trips from the edge of the wall of the Bio-dome, looking for freedom. This was not considered strange itself, as colds were not infrequent when the algorithm felt the crops needed some ventilation, but there was something, something only a mother can see, that made her suspicious it could go for worse. She was right. From that moment, it should have been strange, for TITAN overseers, not to come look what was happening. They knew they were being watched. But the cough evolved into a difficulty in breathing, lack of appetite, of movement, and some days after that, the kid slept thought almost all day. Nevertheless, Mrs. Monev didn’t call TITAN medical specialists. She knew what was going to happen if she did. They would take him out of the planet, to one of their hospitals, and she old never see him again. She wanted to keep her son by her side as long as possible. But it soon proved counterproductive. For not too weeks passed by, when her son was as good as dead.
Life as shot in their bio-domes. The harvest had a one-yea life, and, as some kind of harvest themselves, they were aware that their own days were numbered. But it was not easy to think about poor Axa. He as just starting his own life, his on work. He as brimming with life, and then, he laid on that bed, pallid and lifeless, hanging from a thread. And Lorana Monev prayed. She prayed to her own gods, to the other gods, to whoever could hear her. Be him be healed, she wished. Even if that meant he would comply with TITAN life, even if it meant taking away his freedom or hers. It didn’t matter. Like every mother who has seen her kid at the brink of death, she as desperate. She made a wish. And, apparently, she was heard. Suddenly, the remedies started to have effect. Axa recovered his color once again. He started to live, once again. The whole family celebrated, the whole village was happy, but it was a short-lived celebration, as it hadn’t passed a single day when a bright blue ship carrying the brand of TITAN arrived. A full scientific delegation, not without their armed escort, gathered all villagers in the TITAN Media center, and went on to explain them about that deadly illness that was wrecking chaos across the universe. And their routine health check, unfortunately, had found presence of the pathogen. They did specific tests, and, as it couldn’t go another way, Axa was positive. They could cure him, yes, but not here, not here. He just needed to be bought to one of their medical centers across the galaxy, where he would get the best attention, they promised, yes. It didn’t fool anybody. The kid was already healing himself. They did that to him. They even probably got him ill in the fist place, some of the farmers thought. But the point as that he wasn’t being taken to a hospital. He was being harvested. An unusual immune system. A medical discovering that would get the scientist working in his case step up a couple ranks. Axa Monev got his wish to leave the Bio-dome farmlands for not going back. But, since his close encounter with Lady Death, he wasn’t alone anymore. From inside his scared soul, King LeGaup Locust’s ghost waited foe his own Plague to be released again.