This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/themegauser on 2024-04-10 06:56:11.

I met a human once a long time ago. Back when earth still sang.

They were a Hardy people. Survivors through and through. They even managed to prosper in places most thought impossible. But they always held a special place for their home. Staunch Protectors of the cradle that birthed them. But the most notable aspect of them was the art, the music. They were a melting pot of cultures and ideas. This making for cultural innovation on scales few races have the capacity for, and fewer still would actively pursue with such zeal.

Anyone within scanner range could tap into the media of earth. They never tried to encrypt it. Claiming it as spiritual enrichment owed to all life. It was only in the final days that we saw a new side to them, a fierceness we thought them incapable of. And the sorrow with which they could lay waste to others.

When the great machines came from beyond, the rest of us fled, and who could blame us?

When star sized behemoths are eating their way through your systems, only the mad and the stupid stay behind in defence of a heap of rock. But it’s a funny thing, madness, as well as stupidity. They are so awfully close to bravery and bravery the humans had in abundance.

Whilst the coalition of the time pulled back its borders and evacuated homeworlds towards colonies, the humans did the reverse. Pulling all resources from their colony efforts and making Sol into a fortress the likes of which we hadn’t thought possible, and to this day, we scarcely have the capacity to replicate. The great imperial palace is modelled after the remnants of Sol, after all.

They striped themselves of their precious culture, silenced the ever-present hum of life that raduated from their world and shifted into a war economy we still use as an emergency model.

They held on longer than all expected, longer than many dared to dream. So long, in fact, that some began to think they could hold forever.

Hope. They gave us hope. That we might still return victorious to our own homes. And then, try as they might. They could hold no longer. After 10 cycles under a siege that broke other systems in days, the mighty Sol defence buckled. And the machines swarmed in.

And as we watched the great Sol bastion be breached, they sang.

They sang a melody to the stars themselves. Billions of souls sang as one, in defiance to the machine god that ate the sun.

They ended the war that day. Detonated a dark matter bomb we had only theorised possible. And cleaved the known galaxy in two.

The last words from earth, a line from a 39th century poet.

“Let this aspect of babylonia cleanse away the darkness”