This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Extension_Switch_823 on 2025-06-30 05:11:15+00:00.
Shoji looked on at the world his forefathers had groomed to be a colony, he knew it would live.
The war, the weapons, the sacrifices had all been too much to bear for his parents. Now all he had to hold onto was a rock.
He turned to the stars and felt wrath flicker in his chest like aching cinders. Those smug, honorless cretins, they would have their karma. One day.
On a cane and in low gravity he trekked away from the bridge of the ship. Its sterile metal, its rejuvenation chambers, its flickering glass and failing computers.
One day someone would put it back together. Someone who knew how it worked, or how to make it work.
He was no such master of industry.
He was a warrior, raised by warriors, to commit war. As was every man of his generation, nearly.
He walked the halls, smiling as the planters grew over with vegetation. Clippings taken from that pale blue dot, back when it was blue.
They had already out competed every single thing his people had made to sustain him out in space. And there were two more mass extinction events on the way to further harden their cousins.
Out on the surface of the ship, the vast irreplaceable hulk he’d called home for so long, he limped and glided to a little hollow where his peers rest. Just a hole in the old armor, the other side was a bulkhead so vast and overgrown it was practically a climate separate from anything else on the ship.
He drifted down, walked into the full strength gravity and grunted. He felt his whole age bearing down on him as he lumbered his millennia old bones to take a seat right next to his best friend. He gave the mighty tree a pat on the trunk as he passed by with teary eyes.
Slowly, he set his clothes and trinkets as side, then lowered himself down into the rich loamy soil. The maintenance bot would reactivate and cover him over at the end of the day, then plant another tree on top of him.
The ship would drift until someone found it.
That someone would be from that planet, every working factory ship for several parsecs was going to take shifts making the simplest, meanest things anyone could come up with. It was the highlight of their youth testing their designs.
He smiled at the memories.
The cheering, the jeering, their fathers and mothers instructing on faults and flaws. Those ships would kill anything from anywhere but that system.
Or pester them enough to turn around.
Shoji Kalsinki looked up through the hole in the bulkhead and smiled.
" ‘The Galaxy doesn’t need warriors’ eh? We’ll show you some warriors, just you wait. 10, 20 million years you’ll wish you could keep us instead" he spat and rested back in the most comfortable bed in his life.
Smug, satisfied.
Vengeance would be his…eventually.
Everything itched. That’s weird, he just turned in to die among the trees of his friends, how could be itch?
Maybe someone fixed up an old clone vat? But that had to have taken…just way too long.
He moved to scratch the itchs as he thought back, the memory of his life defijeing itself as he thought back through it. Fog turning to lines, echoes to voices.
Then with a clunk and hiss the pod case opened and he pushed himself out into the air, gasping. Then his face didn’t itch so much.
It was some kind of dance he was doing to get off all the clone goop that someone snickered at.
“Don’t laugh, it itches like the dickens!” He stopped.
That was not his language, this wasn’t his species. 4 limbs and upright yes, but everything was off.
“White corner is a shower, clothes on the stool, your friends are outside when you’re ready.” It was a deep voice with a hint of a growl to it.
Unfamiliar words and weird concepts too, but that wasn’t an intercom making noises.
Shoji turned, a similar body to his, clad in shiney black chiten and grey fabric waved to him. An unfamiliar gesture he returned like it was second nature. In the creature’s other hand was an implement like the ones his father called prototypes.
The man noticed his stare and nodded. “Labcoats don’t know what makes a successful clone with mismatched souls, imported functions and informal storage like you. We take ‘not screeching and bloodthirsty’ as a success here.”
The man turned and left. Leaving Shoji to contemplate. How much of him was improvised? How much was real?
The shower certainly helped his contemplation but he didn’t have any answers for his plenty of questions, and someone did.
Once the clothes were on as correct as he could he walked up to the door and pushed on the big red handle. Then he gaped.
It was the shape of the ship he knew, but it practically gleamed in bronze and obsidian, under every edge were gleaming lights and glowing windows, along every panel were modules bigger than the palaces of his old home world. He could feel the rumble of the engines from where he stood.
“Shoji!” He turned to see who called his name but was stopped by someone wrapping him up in a hug, I weird but comforting gesture.
“Everyone else is up, and uh, the blue shorts go inside the leggings.” It almost sounded like.
“Yanta? What do you mean everyone? And what do you mean they go inside, they’re wider!”
“That’s just how these guys organized their garments, the scientists will interrogate you on why you think it goes that way for hours if they see you wearing them like that, here let me-”
“No, Yanta, I can do it myself let go of my-” and that is how the guard, and a team of white clad, clipboard armed scientists found Shoji tangled up in a ball with the one person he’d trust his life to.
“I told you we should have provided them briefs” and like that, chaos from every corner of the room.