It is a fundamental mistake to take any part of the Roman myth, history or news in good faith. The empire is built on lies; it cultivates and asserts them in every facet of society. Even its pantheon of Gods are simply a complex fabrication designed to weed out deviant behavior.
There is no better example of this dynamic than the Goddess of Desire. In old mythology, Venus is a multifaceted deity; according to Krick (y. CLXXVIII) she once had “no less than one hundred and seventeen epithets”. She was Venus Urania, the Divine Love; Venus Nymphia, the Divine Marriage; Venus Nicephorus, the Bringer of Victory; Venus Xenia, the Foreigner. In contrast, the Venus who is sparingly worshipped today is shallow and vain; she is Venus Morpho, She Who Is Shapely. She is subversive and flighty, the opposite of what a Roman Woman is supposed to be like. The goddess of lust and desire is mostly worshipped by sex workers as well as Luci and Aemili (Roman euphemisms for trans and queer women), minorities that are actively and sometimes brutally suppressed by the imperial censors.
-Excerpt from “A Convenient Fabrication: the History of Cultural Conquest in the Novo Roma” by Octavia Vibianus
***
Tal
One moment I am nothing, the next I am me again.
I was not prepared during training for the experience of longsleep. The scientists and engineers and quickjump pilots who travel in-system told us that it would be like waking up a second after falling asleep, years having passed. They were wrong. There’s an awareness in the void of nothing. The rest of the universe passes by at lightspeed, but I experience the sensation of it moving through me. A constant, slow, beat. As the centuries pass, it does not get less unsettling.
And then I awaken, a little over four years after our 792nd jump, and I exist again.
“Good morning, Tal.” If I ignore her, maybe she’ll go away. The case that holds me hisses open as I unstrap my hind legs, chest and waist. I feel like my body is made of lead, my tentacles barely managing to hold themselves up. Which means Sara Jan will be spiking my meal with supplements and it will taste like shit.
“I want it to be fvored like crisp fruits. And I will eat it hot.” I flex my pedipalps and walk to the locker that holds my jumpsuits. As much as I love the idea of terrorizing her with my naked body all day, I need to actually do something with this time, so I grab the simple bck. I cover up anything that would give her any ideas.
As I leave the room, I am betrayed by my own body and I gnce at her pod. My skin fres a bright yellow, tinges of orange and green swaying upon the brightness. It is only for a moment. I will myself back to my neutral purple, but It does not matter. The damage is done; she knows how alone I feel.
I step into the wide living space. What I ck for companionship, I fully make up for in luxury. Walls are lined with screens showing all manner of information that I could want. Lavish cushions litter the floor, as if I were about to entertain a dozen guests. A little area for food prep, to fvor the nightmare slop that helps me maintain perfect homeostasis. On the far end are a cluster of fitness machines, designed to optimally reverse any atrophy from my slumber. There were many things those who sent us here could not have prepared for, but they did predict how much more pleasant my eternity might feel if I lived in a tiny pace. At least they gave me that.
As I reach the food dispensary, it dings and a panel slides open to reveal the steaming porridge. It smells like the shellfish that ancient people hunted, before the first tentacle reached into the sky, wondering what was out there. I suppress a gag and reach for a spice mix to sprinkle on it, hoping to cover some of the taste, certain I will not be entirely successful. I pick up my bowl just as the retro engines ignite; I imagine the blue light leaking from our ion drive. It will be at least a cycle before we slow down enough to deploy.
I sit on a purple cushion, my legs rexing, curled beneath me. I flick the controls with one of my tentacles, cycling through sheets of data about the next star on our mission. The hard work is done by Sara Jan; deploying the scanner nets and the transmitter and plotting the next leap. She’s the pilot– and the ship– and requires very little input from me at most of these jumps. Odir and I were put on the mission for pnning and study, in case we come across something more interesting than the pnners anticipated.
Sara Jan breaks the silence. “Can we talk?” I pray to the goddess below the waves to deliver me from this purgatory I find myself in. I continue to methodically scoop every single bit of my meal into my mouth, making sure not to waste anything and risk my body degrading. Like Odir’s did.
“That depends entirely on what you want to talk about.” As I finish my meal I find myself wishing, absurdly, there were more to eat so I could distract myself from her.
“It’s been six thousand, five hundred and twenty-seven cycles since we broke up and neither of us has been happy a day since.” I sigh heavily as I toss the little bowl into its receptacle to be cleaned by Sara Jan. We’ve had this conversation countless times.
“I was never happy with you, Sara.” Just go for the heart, Tal. “I wasn’t happy with Odir, either, even if I was able to actually rete to her.” My skin fshes with red and green splotches, but I don’t care about my emotions right now. Years of suppressing how I feel has taken its toll and I am beyond caring.
When she speaks again, her voice projecting from every wall of the room, it is practically a whisper. “You’re just depressed, Tal. The protocols…”
“Shut the fuck up!” I sm a tentacle against the counter and let out a low growl, my skin a harsh and deep red. “I do not give a fuck what a bunch of theorists thought would be good for us ten thousand years ago! You and I are just a failed experiment and we deserve to die in the void. You know it, I know it, there’s no fucking point to rehashing this!” Silence falls on the room like a thick snow, as suffocating as it is comforting. I breathe, my eyes tightly shut, and try to will my skin back to neutral. “Just focus on the mission. We… We don’t need to do this.”
I pass the rest of the shift without speaking. I run countless redundant diagnostics, checking that her sensors are functioning at capacity, as they always are. She chimes in occasionally to point my attention at a piece of data, or to inform me what stage of the deployment we are in, but her voice is robotic and cold. Perhaps it is just a matter of perspective, but arguing was preferable to this. As I eat my awful pre-sleep extra rge meal, I try to find some middle ground. “This next system is Css A, you know?”
A long moment passes before she speaks. “Yes. Main css star, stage three. Third pnet appears habitable. Evidence from our st couple survey probes suggests a spacefarer with limited range. Unlikely to have left the system.”
My skin is pink, rippling with green and blue rivers, all curiosity and excitement. We would get to spend an extra shift monitoring the locals. I try to imagine what sort of creatures they are. “This is our first. We’ve never gotten to see a css 4 civilization, let alone around an A star.” I hum excitedly for a few minutes. It is no first contact, but it is the next best thing.
With the meal done, I step into the cryo chamber. The slick tube I will sleep in for the years ahead yawns open at me ominously. After I have stripped my jumpsuit off and tossed it into its cleaner, I step towards her pod instead. I can see her red skin through the pstiform, two of her eyes, a glimpse of a tentacle. I try to imagine what it's like, to be integrated into the ship instead of sleeping “Sara?”
“Yes, Tal?” Her voice is surprisingly warm.
“Do you ever think of stopping? Do you ever wonder if we can just ditch the ship on that third pnet and live in a jungle together?” Do you ever think we could speak to another person ever again?
The silence before her response feels like it sts for hours. “We have a mission.” I sigh heavily and walk towards my awaiting pod. “Tal?”
I climb into my pod and begin to fasten my leg-straps. I try very hard to mask my annoyance with her in my voice. “What?”
“Next time, we should fuck.”
I groan and press the lever, drifting back into the void as my body fills with ice.
***
Intercepted communiques between Etrus Zone XII chief Maximus Tarquinius and Prefect Primus Sejanus Augustulus. Two files attached.
His Most Revered Hand,
I pray to Jupiter that this report finds you basking in the glory of our young emperor. I have attached a detailed report of our raid on the most recent underground medical network in Tarchna, codenamed VENUS. I will summarize the report for you: XVI individuals detained in the twelfth ghetto over three days with connections to the Veneralia Fertility Clinic in Section XXV:
II doctors (a geneticist and a regeneration specialist)
III clinic staff (two nurses and one machine tech)
XI patients, all of whom received multiple genetic modifications
In addition, the team that raided the clinic recovered VII regenerator rigs and the remains of the fourth member of the clinic staff. The individual, a secretary who was appallingly himself a former patient, destroyed nearly all of the clinic’s encrypted records by self-immoting within the server room. Nothing of use could be recovered.The doctors are both being sent directly to the Castra Praetoria for interrogation as I write this message. I will personally assure the Imperator that, given proper attention, the geneticist in particur will break and help reveal more of those former patients who have escaped our notice. The proximity of the clinic to the main recruitment office of the foreign legion is of particur concern, as several of the detained patients had already contacted recruitment officers once their genetic profiles had stabilized. I have attached the relevant files on the therapies used to modify their genes.
Department policy is generally to send offenders to a work camp. Given these particur crimes, however, I ask for your wisdom with regards to what we should do with those in our custody.
May Jupiter Ever Smile on Him,
Chief Tarquinius
===
Maximus,
Liquidate every modified patient and any families they were still in contact with. There can be no mercy with perversion like this.
-Sejanus
P.S. Forward me visual scans of the modifications.
