Xenophobia - Chapter 9

    The next couple dozen or so cycles passed quickly. The council met a few times regarding the human’s excursion to Mars during that time. There was always a little fervor and disagreement, particularly from the “Trifecta” as some of the counselors had started to call Cagool, Juag-e, and Jin’thun, but nothing ever got out of hand. The old judge always managed to rope them back in.

    Instead, the majority of time was spent reviewing data from the analytics team and arranging deep-space signals to keep unwary travelers out of the quarantine zone. It was monotonous sometimes but needed to be done.

    Falling right in line with Harris’s message, the human interplanetary vehicle launched at the tail end of the sixth cycle.  Six passengers were on a course for the nearest planet with the trip expecting to take something in the range of six to ten cycles.

    Reviewing the specs that the analytics team sent back proved entertaining in a way. The craft was dirty in comparison to most space craft, being little more than a series of controlled explosives that helped escape the atmosphere; but Darrian couldn’t help but admire it. The humans demonstrated a nearly suicidal determination for exploration when only twenty cycles before they seemed to have no interest in even leaving their own orbit.

    Additionally, while the council waited for the spacecraft to complete its journey, there was a scattering of other reports that trickled in. These reports were not directly related to space travel, but rather the state of the planet.

    Darrian could never decide if they made him hopeful or fearful for the future of the human species.

    The reports tended to be on both sides of the spectrum. On the one end, there were a number of wars and conflicts taking place across the planet at any given time. Violent actions were so constant amongst the inhabitants that there were a number of special categories; the two primary of which were “assault” and “murder”. Life was damaged or extinguished at a terrifyingly constant rate.

   Yet, on the other end of the spectrum, there were a large number of humans that displayed a much more civilized manner. For every war that broke out, there were humans that resisted the call of violence. Some protested while others fought to defend the innocents caught in the crossfire. Others attempted to garner legislation to their favor while still more actively rescued and healed rather than harmed.

    Most simply did not act on the baser need for violent action. Instead, they went about their time trying to better themselves and their communities using the infrastructure of support that civilization could grant.

    Darrian couldn’t help but feel respect these people.

    The more meetings he attended and the more data he reviewed, the more he started to notice a number of interesting trends.

    The first was that the number of overly violent humans was actually lower than previously thought. Only something in the range of ten to fifteen percent seemed to have a predisposal towards overt violence. These numbers were drastically lower than the initial meetings might have suggested.

    Instead, one of the major problems seemed to be that those individuals predisposed towards violence always seemed to find their way into positions of power and leadership. An otherwise placid population was forced towards violence through the will of a select few.

    Perhaps it was a side effect of the combative tendencies that these violent individuals ended up in positions of power. Or perhaps the humans’ current governmental systems simply favored an archaic need for bloodshed. No one in the council could really agree.

    “Maybe if more humans worked to correct their problems versus just standing by as atrocities happen, they could move forward as a species.” Jin’thun growled during the discussion.

    Darrian couldn’t help but agree. The more he studied the population, the more he realized that most problems were fed more by global indifference than anything else.

    Another pattern that he noticed was that a lot of the global issues seemed to have geographic correlation. Similar to how violence was perpetrated by a select percentage of humans, certain localized populations seemed more inclined than others towards violent and self-destructive tendencies. These populations were often the same ones that contributed to war conflicts and global crisis around the planet in comparison to other locations.

    There had been some arguments over it, but no one could understand how it worked. For whatever reason, specific ‘countries’ as they called themselves seemed to believe they were better than the rest of the global population. It was like they believed that they were the only ones that mattered despite the only difference being their geographic location on the planet.

    These moralistic dilemmas preoccupied most of the council meetings for more than a few cycles. It was taxing because the council had no real power to act upon a quarantined species and so most time was spent just debating with no real endpoint.  They were just arguing over atrocities.

    It made Darrian a little thankful when he found a new priority message flashing on his datapad.

    “Humans are attempting to colonize Mars.”

===

Next Chapter
Previous Chapter
Start at the Beginning

===