Among the troubled waters of domination and rebellion, the vast Umerium empire was born. As frightening as innovative, both ambitious and hard-working, they have established a far-reaching network of production and political relations that would make them a space power par excellence. However, all great powers come with great resistance within them. Just as humidity attacks walls and stains, this type of stain is difficult to remove and it tends to corrode everything on its way.
In one of the many space adventures of the empire, the empire came across a planet with many resources to exploit. Years later, the invasion took place as planned. The whole race was either relegated to exile or pseudo-enslaved. Nowadays, on a planet dominated and productively exploited by the empire, two old acquaintances meet again, one on each side of the floating walls, but both on the sea and under the three moons. Even if they both belong to different realities, they have common thoughts and different goals that are conflicts of interest. Will reason win over force, or will only the future impose over the past? Only the wise know when to stop, but the wise don’t make cracks in walls. These are made by the brave.
When General Cao tries to lead an expedition to the pagan lands, in search of some lost parchments, he realizes that not everything that existed on the planet has died off. The general’s ambiguous and grey past opens the door to discord within the Umerian settlement on the planet and gives the battered society a slight hope that the rebellion and the dreams of vengeance will come true. This is how the plot of this story is woven in the most remote corners of the galaxy.

Part I

I still remember those clear skies, full of the greenish sky that embraced us soothingly, moving the masses of water under its divine purpose. For so many generations, Mother of Tides gave us the opportunity of taking her water and survive in her own womb. That is why, even today, her values live on as pillars against the severity of the very unfair time. These were times of peace, love, and cordiality, with plenty of food and when the only problems were to plan the future of our civilisation. Perhaps a bit delayed compared to the stories brought by the space travellers who came down to our planet, but we existed in a humble spirit, without the greed that characterizes great, advanced civilizations.
Different families respected each other, even the most senior. There were no religious differences, although the opposition of the Mother of the Tides – the Cult of Three Moons – started to emerge. It was a cult aggravated by the gravitational power of the moons on the tide of our planet and other factors that make those three moons an important element for the movement of water masses. The followers of the cult intruded on the “Water Walls”, which, however extreme they may have been, were the source of knowledge on how they work and the reason for their existence.
The territory that is a part of our civilization consisted of numerous archipelagos that were about 10% of the planet’s surface; at least the explored parts of it. As expected, the diet of our population was always 85% fish and the rest was completed with the little that could have been planted on the islands which were not very fertile. Due to mostly sandy soil, crops were limited and considered sumptuous. The greed for fishing that the family heads
and the council of the archipelagos had, is what made it possible for us to fish large amounts of food and thus not have hunger problems. It was never a real issue, not even something we feared. But the peace of a town is made for others to interrupt it. That is how a flash from the south appeared. Entering through the “Sage Moon”, it plunged into the southern masses of low water. Initially, they were just regular travellers, passing through, how it usually is on this planet. My village has given them shelter and food until they repaired their ship. The crew was four people. They wore large suits and helmets to breathe until they realised that our atmosphere was more favourable than expected.
Now without their suits and special armour, but still totally alien to us, they explored the natural wonders of our planet and especially of the water. One of them was a young apprentice to the other crew members. His name was Cao. He had a skinny body, but a great hunger to learn. We shared many nights of conversations, somewhat limited because of language, but we understood each other. The day they left for their planet – as their machine was already repaired with a lot of diligence – Cao gave me a gift. It was the insignia of his people carved in iron that unwillingly would be the originator of a sentence that seems eternal to our people.
Twenty years have passed. As I think back, it seems that it was yesterday when the sky started to turn black and the noise of the propellers started to deafen everyone in the Archipelagos. The tip of an unknown ship made its way through the clouds. The more it was seen, the more familiar it became to me. The symbol Cao gave me, was emerging in the sky with omens of death and destruction. I will never forget that day. I felt humiliated and disappointed.
Suddenly, the symbol in the front part of the ship began to open. Millions of missiles went out of it, crashing into our houses, our canteens, into everything that we created with such effort, where we spent our days. We didn’t know what war is, so we couldn’t be prepared for this. When the imperial soldiers got down to the Archipelagos, some of us fought. Fishing knives and harpoons were our weapons, but it was not enough. At the end of the invasion, only 50% of the population survived. Many of them were enslaved and tortured by the empire in order to find out everything they knew about the planet. Others, like me, ran away to the pagan lands that were smaller and more difficult to spot because of the high waves. While I was escaping in one of the fishing boats I used to drive, a ship with two crew members followed me and almost sank me, but my harpoon skills helped me hurt one of them badly. With his face severely injured, he gave up the pursuit.
After a few years during which the empire dedicated itself to examining the planet in and out, another ship with a particular shape approached through the “Sunny Moon”. On its top, there was a big circle, with a circular structure around a needle, just like the ones we used to make fishing nets. It floated on the sea for a short while and then collapsed rapidly as if the planet was about to explode. But no, the planet was far from exploding. The ship was only transforming. Later, when we collected information from the people who entered and exited the floating city and had contact with the stragglers that we left on the pagan lands, we learned that the empire called this process “The Earthformation”. Slowly, the planet increased the amount of water it had and flooded the entire Archipelago. Only around 3% of the planet was left with a terrestrial surface. Suddenly, looking at the celestial horizon – already only a little green because of the changes the invaders had started – we couldn’t recognise what was the location of the place where our village was born, where we worked the land and where the fishing nets used to fall to bring a plate of food to our table.
Those times were not easy. Material things make your quality of life worse or better. Having a good hook or a reinforced fishing net made fishing easier and more abundant. The same happens the other way around – but when the spirit breaks there are few consolations within us that can lighten that burden. The feeling of having lost everything in an instant, almost without realising it, is such a bitter blow that it takes away the eagerness to fight or take back what was yours. Those years were wasted years – years of head down and sad looks among the few who stayed in some part of the abandoned land on the planet. Malnutrition and plagues hit us constantly, reducing the number of our people. Many of those who could not raise their heads approached the floating city offering an olive branch, searching for some sort of help from the empire. The authorities of that city opened the gates to the locals and invited them in. They fed them, gave a roof over their heads and dressed them with imperial insignia. All this care was in exchange for working for the empire performing a simple task: pushing the turbine.
One of the side effects the Earthformation caused was losing the ultraviolet rays the sun generated towards our planet. The sun was still shining, maybe not as bright as before, but it was shining. Its different layers of ozone thickened, limiting this type of rays that the empire cleverly used as an energy source, a cheap and abundant fuel for the turbines of the city and some important processes that were generated there.
Since the empire has flooded the entire planet out of greed to take our water, obviously it had the right technology to create artificial cities. I suppose it is what held them back from invading and settling on the planet – building a self-sufficient self-floating city, a perfect business. In the “Imperial City” it seemed like the empire had moved part of their home planet to ours. Huge walls that can be seen in the sea, near Sage Moon, are the walls of what they consider civilisation. The boundaries of manners, well-being, mass production and all the artificial things; on the other side, we, the indigenous people represent the history and the vestiges of the primitive lives that have been crushed and forced to “live better”.
The process was tough and very unfair, but we managed to go forward, even though the presence of the empire means a constant threat. Using a type of reed that grows on the shores of the sea, we managed to expand our houses and our own corridors above the murky waters of pagan lands. After endless attempts and failures, we managed to create a certain structure that goes from the anchor point on the land to the sea with no danger of landslides and keeps away the predators that inhabit those seas. Our own floating city, with no walls, made organically only from reeds.
The empire was already mostly made up of the original population and their descendants. They were earmarked with a symbol of wave and lived outside, on the margins of the floating city. They could only leave the margins to push the turbine across a special bridge that the empire built. It spans all over the city. The only price to pay was the stay in the “civilised world” and the plain and monotonous food that the empire mass-produced. There were no chains or shackles, no whips or great abuse of physical violence. Symbolic violence is and will always be much more effective than physical one. The whip provokes suspicion and encourages rebellion. Iron chains can always be broken by the weakest link. But how do you break a chain that is invisible? A mental chain is much more difficult to shake off than merely forced enslavement. The empire mastered this form of domination flawlessly. A space traveller told us that in many of the most numerous towns on other planets, rebellions and attempts to reclaim power were frequent – armed riots, unknown terrorist groups, massive protests, etc. For this reason, our planet was their “pilot test” to try to dominate without physically enslaving.
To conclude, from the perspective of the inhabitants of the archipelago, the consequences will be similar. The difference between these modes (dissimilar, but identical) that the empire learned was that the people will be lethargic and have little understanding of the real situation. As if the revolution presented by other forms was postponed for later in history, in our history.
Since the arrival of the Umerium clan – they made themselves known throughout the universe – we believed that the main goal was to have an infinite source of drinking water for different races of the universe. However, not a long time ago we were able to find more information than we had ever considered. The plan that was found explained a process that the floating city was carrying out, in order to extract particles from a mineral found in the water, in our water. The piece of paper was wet and difficult to understand the writing that was inside. It became useless after a couple of days.
The legends of the Mother of the Tides talk about water as the great saviour of our people. The Mother of the Tides herself favoured it from her womb, keeping us together, alive. However, the original tribes strongly disbelieved this myth, as well as disbelieved a better future. If the miracle that the legend talks about actually exists, it is time to reveal it to us. Tomorrow can be too late.