Heartbeat

Somewhere, a little girl has died.

Her parents watch in tearful uselessness as the doctors bow their heads and drift away from her broken form. The car had been too fast, too sure and fancy free. A swerve too late, and the driver finds solace at the bottom of a bottle as the memory of collision crashes through his mind.

It is of little consequence to the two individuals who watched helplessly as life dribbled from their little girl. There will be no friends coming knocking any more, and they'll watch as her one time peers slowly grow and change, watch as they live lives that mirror the one they've lost. The ballet dress will lie hanging in the wardrobe, dusty but unforgotten, long after the funeral goers are gone.

There will be no pink presents under the tree this year. No dolls or Disney films to watch into the dead of night, no reason not to drink as soon as the sun has risen. There will be no first kiss, no tearful cries of teenage angst and screams of hormonal rage to tire the eyes and test a love that would have held. There will be no wedding to pay for. There will be no honeymoon and grandchildren, no heirs worth estating, no point any more.

So they fill the forms those two, they watch a life transform from the little girl they love, to words on printed paper. Such a little thing, those signatures, such a tiny mark. But as they scratch their names into it they dare to hope despite their grief. Perhaps the mark of their daughter, will be more than just another name to file.

***

Somewhere, a little girl is dying.

Her heart beats weakly, it always has. Her skin is washed out and blotchy, cool to the touch in the heat of summer, in winter she hugs her hot water bottle tightly. She has been waiting for 6 years now. Six years of dodging death and hospital visits, of watching others her age grow and strengthen, watching them do what she cannot.

She is six years old and knows that she will die soon, if she cannot get the help she needs. She is six years old now, and has lived with the knowledge that her life is less than that of others, from the very moment she could comprehend it. She cries at night time when her parents think her sleeping, so they do not know just how afraid she is. All her dolls lie in beds made by a careful hand, and wait for time to pass.

And then there is the phone call.

In a flash of light and noise her parents snatch her from her bed, and she finds herself in familiar territory for an unfamiliar reason. They have a donor. As her eyes drift closed she cannot speak so shouts inside her mind that she loves her parents, she knows that they wont hear but decides to try it anyway, she assumes that she wont get another chance. After all, she's been dying since the day that she was born. Perhaps this is it.

The next few days are long and painful, but her parents by her side smile more than she has ever seen.

On the day she is to leave the hospital she runs on the grass that lies outside. Her legs don't know what to do, but the veins sluice with oxygen as they never have before, and she shuffles forward as her mother laughs beside her. Her face is rosy and flush, and her eyes shine as the breath runs longer than she can ever remember. The legs don't know what they are doing, but they will learn. Perhaps it's time her dollies left their beds, and ran around outside in the sun.

Inside the surgeon watches, and a ghost of a smile pirouettes across his face. This is his payment, right here and now, in this moment. Years of training, hardship and pain, of missed exuberance and cancelled plans, a lifetime of training and work for moments just like these. He allows himself this tiny moment of light, before he closes the blinds, and walks back to the desk. He has papers to look through; a little boy is dying.

This is humanity, when we fight to live despite the odds. When we pluck life from death not with a roar, but with the steady silence of determination. We live in a world of heroes and strength, of sacrifice and honour, and of hope that will not be snuffed against the darkness of a midnight hour.

Somewhere, a little girl lives.

Humanity's Debt

Always has humanity been on the front lines of war. Not with their soldiers, nor armadas. Humanity had long ago decided that they would only wage defensive wars, they would only commit troops to conflicts that were righteous in nature. They never conquered, they refused to join in expansionist wars. But on every front line, in every army, humans were always there.

It began when the human organization known as the Red Cross met the intergalactic agency called Hands for Hearts. They were found most often in the slums of megalopolises, the derelict space stations, serving the poor. When Mt. Rainier on the continent of North America finally erupted, the devastation wrecked on Sol-3 was incredible. Three billion humans died in a matter of days. Even counting every colony and every human traveling outside of the United Human Confederacy, humanity lost a tenth of their population. The Red Cross, and its sister organizations the Red Crescent, Red Crystal, and Red Lotus, could not together handle a fraction of the catastrophe.

When Hands for Hearts dropped out of FTL above the skies of Earth, they appeared in numbers so vast the humans’ scanners glowed to the point that one tech nearly went blind. The UHC military went to Defense Condition Omega, nearly firing on the organization. Luckily, a human that had been volunteering for the organization was able to get to a communications center to ease the situation.

Then they landed.

They brought atmospheric scrubbers to prevent an ash winter, firefighting vessels that could drop millions of gallons of water at a time to extinguish forest fires, housing units that could be emplaced in minutes with the capacity to hold hundreds of families, agricultural equipment that tilled acres upon acres of land a day to reestablish sustenance production, cloning systems to reestablish both domestic livestock and wild fauna. They carried the capacity to essentially re-terraform an entire continent.

It all came without cost, without expectation of recompense, without any strings attached. Millions of scientists, engineers, technicians, and workers volunteered four Earth months of their lives for a species that was not their own, to rebuild an ecosystem and a peoples on a planet that was not within their realms, all funded by donations, the wages of the labors of a hundred different species and a trillion different souls who could have used those credits for their own luxury.

Humanity was grateful. The entire species, which had not conducted a single major operation of any sort on an interstellar scale, came together with a singular focus: repaying a debt that none ever asked to be repaid.

It took three years for humanity to recover, far less time than any human had expected when the news broke of the Rainier eruption. By the end of the fourth year, the Io shipyard had launched the new Avia-class carrier-support ship, the UHS Hippocrates. It came armed not with rail guns or missile pods or energy weapons but with a fleet of Vrach-class landing ships equipped with a full medical staff and enough rooms to hold a hundred patients as they recuperate. Within seven months, a half dozen more were patrolling the human sector, landing in distant colonies to provide medical assistance, improve the health of the residents, and overall healing the colonists before taking off and flying to the next colony.

Then the war started. Two members of the Imperium, the coalition of nearly forty percent of the many species of the Milky Way, began a territorial dispute that quickly turned violent. Worlds were attacked, cities razed, continents burned. As soon as the military that conducted left, a human fleet dropped out of FTL.

At first the residents of Choktar thought the military fleet had returned to finish the devastation. Then, they saw the markings. The first ship, Borzuya, landed near the rubble that was one the largest city in the planet’s western hemisphere. It was gargantuan, fully four miles long, larger than most species’ capital ships and carriers. On her hull showed a massive white field, centered in which was a red crescent moon. From within came hundreds of vessels of various types: half a dozen hospital-sized recovery wards with their own flight capabilities, dozens of air ambulances, scores of emergency medical landing teams. The sheer scope of the one craft put most militaries to shame, and the humans landed nearly thirty in a single day. In fourteen hours, a quarter of the surviving population had at least spoken to a medic or nurse or doctor. They spent days upon end reattaching lost limbs, sewing plasma wounds shut, reconnecting torn ligaments, performing more medical treatments than can be counted. Their doctors were more fluent in xenobiology than most other species were in their own native bodies. When all was complete three weeks later, the population was twice as large as would have been expected thanks to the Interstellar Red Cross Society.

The most revealing thing about humanity happened when the UHS Memorial landed, carrying digging teams, priests of every human religion, and coffins. So many coffins. They immediately found religious representatives from the planet and arranged funerary rights for every lost soul. The humans moved mountains upon mountains of rubble, finding every body, limb, hair, every bit of the people who had died during the attack. They had to dig mass graves the size of canyons just to bury the dead, they numbered so many. And they watched. They watched as High Priest To’urn sang the Song of Mourning in front of the memorial grave marker, and they wept. They wept in a way that no other could. They wept not from sympathy, nor empathy. They wept from memory. They had felt the loss that the Choktari were feeling now, of the knowledge that loved ones were gone forever, of the lonely beds and the empty cradles. Of schools abandoned because there were no teachers to teach and no students to learn. Of the derelict cities because there were no residents to inhabit them.

By the time Hands for Hearts had dropped in, all that was left was the economic rebuilding. The bodies were healed, but more importantly, the souls were healed. Humanity left the Choktari to let Hands for Hearts do their work. Humanity had more work to do.

The war continued for months. The humans pushed closer and closer to the front lines, evacuating civilians, treating wounds, anything they could do to alleviate the pains. Eventually they began receiving the wounded soldiers from the armies, and humanity did what they do best. They healed them. They sent teams directly to the combat units, medics and priests with scant more than band-aids and bibles to face the horrors of war. They healed, and sometimes, they died, caught in the crossfire of armies. Humans appeared on every front line, healing both armies’ soldiers without question, without complaint. They were sentients, and all sentients had a right to live. They patched up those they could, evacuated the rest. They became a staple of every army. To have a human medic near you was to know in your heart that you would see your family again.

That is how humanity repaid the debt no one asked them to. That is how the humans stopped needing any military force outside of to police their own people and stop piracy. The humans never needed any military, because they had everyone else’s. The sole time humanity was attacked, a thousand ships from nearly a hundred species appeared and obliterated the offenders. It was not out of any need to remain in the humans favor, nor fear that the humans may recall their medical support. It was because the humans had earned their place among the stars.

Now, there in one title that is held above all others in the UHC. When a human walks in bearing a "Sestra" tab on their sleeves, generals stand and salute. They are welcome in any space, given authorization to land on any planet. They are our healers, our nurses and doctors and combat medics and hospice caretakers. They devote their lives to serving others.

They bleed so others don't have to.

Making An Omelet

It has been five standard years since our first contact with the humans.

I was sent as part of the evaluative delegation to Earth. One of our stealthier agents had picked up a warning that humans had some rather frightening ideas, chief among them being “You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” The meaning of this saying was not entirely clear, so we investigated. As the member of the team with the most human-like biochemistry, I was assigned to investigate actual omelets. I objected that this was a waste of my time, but we were told to be thorough. I've submitted my report on omelets under separate cover. No one should bother to read it. In the process of observing, though, I noticed two things that are of interest.

The first was the cook's spatula, which was flexible enough to follow the curvature of the pan. Now, spatulas are pretty common among industrialized omnivorous species, and flexible spatulas are hardly unknown. But they're usually made out of organic polymers that don't take heat well, and the pan was directly over an open methane flame.

“Aren't you worried the heat will damage your spatula?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said, “this spatula is silicone. It's designed for this.”

“Silicone?”

“Yeah. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it's a silicate polymer with really good heat resistance. Great for cooking implements.”

Silicate. Polymer.

Now, I learned in school that silicates form crystals, and occasionally amorphous solids that are as rigid as crystals. Silicates just don't form flexible structures. That's why the galaxy is full of carbon-based life and not silicon-based. Silicon would be too rigid. You probably know that too.

Apparently nobody told the humans. Despite the fact that their planet is 70% silicate crystals with no naturally occurring silicate polymers. They wanted a silicate polymer for their spatula and went out and made one.

This got me looking a little more closely at the rest of his tools. I noticed that the half-made omelet wasn't sticking to the pan at all, despite having some pretty sticky things in it. I asked about this, and he said the pan was coated with teflon, an extremely non-sticky material.

“Why does it stick to the pan then?” I asked.

He laughed. Apparently this was a running joke of some sort among the humans. Then he explained “It's a pretty involved process, actually. I'm a little vague on the details, but there's some sort of high-temperature ion-bombardment to strip the fluorines from the pan side of the molecules.”

“Fluorines,” I repeated. That was the last thing I had expected to hear in the context of cooking. I was too shocked to be shocked.

“Yeah,” he said, as if there were nothing shocking about this, “that's what makes it so non-sticky. The outer layer is all fluorine, bonded to a carbon backbone. Stickiness is mostly about covalent bonds, but no oxidizer in food that can pry the carbon away from those fluorines.”

“But... fluorine... how many scientists died putting this together?”

“Teflon itself, I don't think any. The early history of fluorine chemistry had a lot of casualties.”

So that's humanity. Forget breaking eggs. Apparently, the saying should be: "You can't make an omelet without completely rewriting the structure of matter and performing high-energy transformations on the single deadliest corrosive gas in the universe. With a lot of casualties."

So I do endorse opening trade relations. There's a lot to be gained.

But we also need to employ extreme caution in dealing with them. Because they won't be employing any caution at all.