The Dark Forest Hypothesis (Short Gothic Sci-Fi Story)
By Paul Victor Tims
Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover art made using AI. This story takes place in the universe of Knightshift, a short sci-fi film that I’m currently working on and which will be released (touch wood) in a month or two. It can, however, be read as a standalone piece.
My name is Kalazar Von Schtier, and it was I who killed the world.
It was the Dark Forest Hypothesis that did it. You’re familiar with the idea, of course: the universe is close kin to a dark forest filled with armed hunters. Each might, individually, be perfectly friendly; perfectly amiable and well-meaning. But he can’t know that the same is true of the others. Ergo, the only path to survival is the path of atrocity. The moment one hunter sees another, he must kill his unsuspecting fellow, or risk being killed himself. So it is with interstellar civilisations. We might want to attribute the best of intentions to our alien neighbours, but if they do not offer us the same benefit of the doubt, we will be destroyed. So we must strike first. Always.
Following this logic, I have ordered the deaths of hundreds of nascent spacefaring societies. The moment our scientists detected the radio transmissions or electromagnetic leakage of a technologically advancing species, I’d order it exterminated before it could grow to harm us. A brutal but, I was certain, necessary measure. Our military would capture a meteor, accelerate it to 99% light-speed and hurl it at the target-world. It might take a thousand years to reach to achieve impact, given the vast, galactic distances involved, but a thousand years is nothing to a truly long-lived race. And, after that millennium had elapsed, there would be no more threat.
It had worked well for us, this policy of pre-emptive genocide. Our beautiful, lilac world of Gillishar had survived – thrived even – unmolested by invaders from beyond blackness of the void.
Then, one day, we picked up transmissions from a new world and these transmissions seemed different. More… aggressive. We made the annihilation of this putative galactic threat a priority. That is to say, I did.
Ordinarily, after the dispatch of an interstellar projectile, I wouldn’t think about the target again. Nobody born of Gillishar would, for we have never been barbarians and to glory in death is a barbarian thing. Indeed, for the thousand years it took our meteor-missile to cross the intervening space, I put the whole thing from my mind and focused on the business of living.
The, the day after Impact Day, they came.
I will never know, I suppose, if they experienced a rush of technological development in the ten centuries it took our attack to reach them or if the transmissions we picked up had had simply been from a backwater outpost of a greater morass. In either case, we thought we were obliterating a culture limited to a single, obscure planet. Instead, a multi-galactic culture showed up on our doorstep, aggrieved that we had destroyed a world of some historic significance to their people.
They came in starships like gothic mausoleums: faster than light, heavier than darkness and boasting nose-cones shaped into grinning, red-eyed skulls. They came in clanking suits of golden armour with memento mori pauldrons, velvet cloaks and plumes of rank. They came steeped in blood and conquest and vengeance.
We had adhered to the Dark Forest play-book for as long as we had understood the risks of alien worlds. But these men were different – these Imperators, as they called themselves. When we became a threat, their response wasn’t swift, merciful cleansing. It was subjugation. They didn’t want us dead: they wanted us grovelling; broken; humiliated.
They took our men for slaves and our women for concubines. They even took our children to be brainwashed and turned into soldiers for their cause. They left our elderly and weak and uncontrollably criminal in place as witnesses; left us just enough genetic diversity that we wouldn’t go extinct. We would endure, solely, to remember what they had done to us.
Oh, we fought back. Don’t think us cowards. I was actively involved in the resistance until my inevitable injuries rendered me useless. But it was always hopeless. They had countless worlds and, having mastered FTL travel, they could tap any one of them for reinforcements at any moment. Their weapons were superior to ours. Their warriors – their Centurions – were like living tanks and they just wouldn’t fucking die.
So yes, I killed our world. It still hangs in space. It is still populated. But everything we were is gone. Our spirit is broken. Our pride is burned to ash.
And I finally understand the foul underside of the Dark Forest Hypothesis; why it must always fail as a survival strategy. If you can’t know if a new civilisation is friendly, you also can’t know with whom you’re picking a fight.
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