The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Prologue
In these future times, humanity had built its paradise: not content with exploring the stars and encountering other civilizations, it promised every member of its society food and shelter, free healthcare, and, at the end of life, a place in the After—a digital server where one could continue living indefinitely in a disembodied state.
Refining a society that cultivated empathy—or at least tried to appear so—it had abolished the death penalty and prison. Authorities employed telepathic agents, ensuring that no innocent person was wrongly convicted and precisely measuring the sincerity of expressed remorse. The harshest sanction a criminal could face was the suspension of citizenship, resulting in the loss of free access to basic rights. Even so, those convicted were assigned paying jobs: a form of forced labor in these future times that would have been considered ordinary life in the 21st century.
And yet, there were exceptions. Among them was the case of Garen Antor. A senior official working on experimental projects for the Starfleet, Garen had been deeply involved at every level in a sordid project. Its details were never fully disclosed to the public, both out of decency and to avoid spreading violent ideas. What was certain was that this project resulted in the suffering, torture, and death of hundreds of children and adolescents, as confirmed with pain by their families. The scale of this criminal endeavor shifted the trial, originally intended to be military, to a civilian criminal court.
The temptation to return to pre-stellar era punishments was strong. On Calchas-3, home to “administrative detention centers”—prisons in all but name—crowds gathered: media representatives, societal tourists, embarrassed legal experts, and death penalty advocates among the protesters.
Philosophers, peace activists, historians, reasonable people, and compassionate individuals appealed to the Transients—extraterrestrial life forms so advanced that they were indistinguishable from gods. They begged these beings to intervene and prevent a regression in civilization. The Transients, who had traded knowledge and wealth with humanity for years, were known for their undeniable benevolence and wisdom.
When the trial began, one of the judges was a Transient who had incarnated in a humanoid machine to communicate with the court.
To everyone’s surprise, Garen Antor was not the cold, austere bureaucrat in a gray uniform they had imagined. He was a force of nature: tall, broad, charismatic, with piercing intelligence—an intelligence he demonstrated through silence amid debates that concerned not only his fate but the future of human civilization. The death penalty was off the table, and life imprisonment without hope of release was seen as unworthy of humanity’s progressive ideals. Temporary imprisonment posed a real risk that Antor might be killed by one of the vengeful parents who had openly expressed such intentions on camera. In the absence of other options, the Transient proposed exile to an unknown, impossibly distant location from which Garen Antor would have no chance of returning. In these times, crossing a galaxy arm took mere seconds, so the Transient suggested an exile of one year—a distance unfathomable to the human mind.