ONE MONTHS AFTER CASE OMAHA

The planet looked perfectly innocuous. A single Pangaea continent with islands scattered around, nearly 70% of the planet oceans, two ice caps, active atmosphere. Vast cities were scattered around the primary continent, connected by lines of light with smaller cities scattered about. It looked like any other planet, the uniformity and the precision would have been perfectly in place in Unified Species Council territory.

But Nakteti couldn't help but just stare at it.

The It Tastes Sweet had docked at one of the massive space stations orbiting nearly two million miles above it. They were having some of the problems that had popped up during the Sweet's 'maiden' voyage and it's flight from where TerraSol had vanished. The engineers were aboard, working on her ship, and she was pleased with the progress.

Curious, she had checked the planetary index.

Now she stood at one of the observation ports aboard the Sweet and stared at the planet below.

"But... why?" she asked, staring at it.

"What do you mean?" Major Carnight asked from where he was leaning against the wall.

"You've beaten so much. Death, major injury, poverty. There's very little you can't create with the nano-forge creation engines, so the Confederacy is essentially post-scarcity," Nakteti said. "So... why?"

"Why do they choose to live there?" Major Carnight asked.

"Yes. Why would they choose to live in a dictatorship? Working in dangerous factories? Why subject themselves to it?" Nakteti asked. "Mandatory sterilization, no clone tech, no technology beyond what you'd find in Lanaktallan space. Why? Why don't they leave?"

Major Carnight shrugged. "Because they can," he said. When he saw Nakteti's confused look he shrugged. "They can leave any time. It's one of the major tenets of the Confederacy, Freedom of Movement. It's part of living someplace like this, you can just renounce your citizenship and leave."

"But why live there?" Nakteti asked. "Why live under oppressive, draconian laws with socio-police, abusive law-sec, even corp-sec and violence in the streets?"

Major Carnight sighed. "There's an old myth. Real old, prior to the Great Glassing. Apparently humans were put in a simulation. The first couple were utopias. Do you know what happened?"

Nakteti shook her head, reaching out and taking Major Carnight's hand even as she held tight to her command stick. She had a feeling she wasn't going to like the answer.

"It crashed. It lasted less than six hours. The second one lasted two hours," Major Carnight said.

"Why? Why did it crash?" Nakteti asked.

"Because we're humans," he said. He gave a bitter laugh. "There are utopia worlds out there. Every luxury you can imagine, hell, luxuries and pleasures that even Matron Sangbre couldn't imagine. As much as you want, when you want, how you want."

"Why not live there?" Nakteti asked.

Major Carnight laughed. "The major population of the utopia worlds are transient, rarely staying for longer than a few months or years. Do you know why?"

Nakteti shook her head.

"We humans have another saying," Major Carnight started.

"You seem to have a lot of them," she laughed.

"Yes, yes we do," Carnight laughed. He squeezed Nakteti's hand affectionately. "As I was saying, we have another saying: One man's Heaven is another man's Hell. It goes hand in hand with another saying: It is better to Rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven."

"You humans are strange. Your people would rather live on a world like that, with all of the restrictions and oppression, than somewhere else seems crazy," she said.

"Yup," Major Carnight said. He gave a strange sigh. "There's a high amount of diversity of thought, morals, ethics, and beliefs in the Terran species, in people. Some people, well, they actually prefer the rigid structure, in some way enjoy the suffering and oppression. Some feel as if every day is a triumph of their willpower and endurance, others feel it necessary to atone for perceived sins."

He gave another sigh. "I realize that it seems strange to you, Nakteti," he said. "Humans, well, we're different. Different from one another, even siblings can be so wildly divergent you would never believe that they were family members much less twins."

Nakteti shook her head. "It just startles me."

Major Carnight tapped his fingers against the wall. "I have a sister," he said. "Actually, my mother and father have been married for nearly four hundred years. Completely monogamous. They're, shall we say, prolific. I have eighty-three brothers and sisters, and every one of us are different. We even look different," he laughed and held up his hand.

"Eighty three? Just the two of them?" Nakteti put her hand on her own stomach. "Her poor birthing organs."

Major Carnight laughed. "My sister has as many children and she's only two hundred. Of course, she's what's known as a 'magical primitivist' and lives on a nanite infused world. She's their version of royalty, spent a hundred years clawing her way up to it."

Nakteti shook her head again. "You humans are weird."

Major Carnight laughed again, tilting his left hand palm up and displaying a hologram. A plump female Terran sat surrounded by nearly a hundred other Terrans. From the two small infants breast feeding to the adults down on one knee. Nakteti looked hard and noticed that they all had the same appearing eyes. Not the color, just something about the eyes.

"My sister, Her Grace the Arch-Duchess of Relflagen, Lady of Magic and Beauty, the Arcane Will of King Nganto, She Who has Birthed a Hundred," Major Carnight said. He shook his head. "She's a weird one, but I love her dearly."

"So why a dystopia?" Nakteti asked, touching the plas-steel screen again with her free hand, holding onto Major Carnight's hand when he lowered it.

Major Carnight shrugged. "Who knows. I imagine if we looked into the history we'd see who purchased it, who settled it, and why they set it up the way they did. It probably makes perfect sense to everyone involved," He shrugged again. "I noticed it's a single life with SUDS. Basically, if you get killed then you're reskinned and your time there is over. You get paid your actual wages and free transport to another world of your choice."

Nakteti shook her head. "To willingly subject oneself to such things."

"Exactly. Willingly. That's the key point," Major Carnight said. "There's probably revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars, the whole experience down there," he laughed suddenly. "I'll admit, in a way, it's tempting, alluring. I wonder how long I'd last, where I'd find myself. You have to start reskinned as a child in a creche. The challenge is there and it's tempting."

Nakteti shook her head again. "I wish to take the Sweet and get as far away as possible," she looked down. "What do they produce?"

Major Carnight checked his implant. "That we're interested in? Hyperdrives, jump cores and jumpdrives. Huh, they produce C+ weapons, plasma wave phased motion cannons, and classified military equipment for Space Force and the Confederate Military."

"Is that why the Confederacy ignores what goes on?" Nakteti asked, suddenly convinced she had the answer.

Major Carnight shook his head. "No, there's Confederate inspectors to make sure they abide by the basic tenets."

"Then why do they allow it?" Nakteti asked.

"Because they choose to live there, choose this world. This is their choice," Major Carnight said. He gave an ugly chuckle. "History's full of bad things where people's choice was taken away for no reason that the people themselves would accept or were willing to understand."

He tapped the glass. "One of the biggest things that has led to the worst wars, the worst atrocities, was when choice was taken away by force. We don't do well."

Nakteti held still, hearing the slight edge to Major Carnight's voice. She watched the planet beneath her.

Major Carnight put one hand on the arma-glass. "Those people down there, they chose to live like that. Chose the harsh rules, chose to have every moment dictated to them. Would you believe, if you tried to 'free' them, they'd fight you to the death? Tell you that they like it this way, go at you tooth and nail if you tried to invade and 'liberate' them."

He touched the arma-glass with one finger, making a slow circle.

"It isn't like the old days, the bad old days, before, when you were born into it, you didn't know anything else, you couldn't escape. You have to immigrate here, volunteer to live here," his voice was cold, hard, and carried an echo of something that tasted like old rusted metal and burnt molycirc to Nakteti. "Even back then, we'd fight, we'd kill, we'd do whatever it took to keep what we had."

He made another small circle. "Humans are strange. It took decades, centuries to realize that the mathematics, the attempts to use computer modeling to predict human behavior, was, to be honest, impossible."

"Really?" Nakteti blurted out. She didn't mean to.

"There's an odd piece of wiring in the human brain, one that can't be removed, and suppressing it makes the brain rewire other sections. It causes us to fight against things that most people would feel were impossible to fight against if it is causing distress. Computer modeling can't account for when that piece of wiring will go off, it's different for every person, its threshhold is different for every person," he sighed, then tapped his finger, hard, against the arma-glass.

A spark jumped off his finger as an arc of red and purple electricity, hair thin, crawled up his finger.

"You remove that piece, with surgery or drugs, and we go omnicidal or worse. It prevents us from ever feeling permanent satisfaction," he said.

"There is no utopia," Nakteti guessed.

"No," Major Carnight said. He held up his finger, watching the hair thin crackle fade away.

"I don't understand, but perhaps, in time, I will," she said.

-----------------------------

The It Tastes Sweet dropped out of hyperspace outside the resonance zone, streaking into existence. Artificial gravity shadows kept ships from moving further into the system. The Sweet made a least time heading for the fourth planet from the stellar mass, following the instructions of the automated beacons.

The Sweet pulled into a parking orbit around the planet, and after a few hours, a shuttle undocked from the Sweet and dropped into atmospere, following the instructions of the automated systems. It settled down on the pad and the door opened as the ramp extended.

Major Carnight came out first, his body covered in a matte black shell, a mag-ac rifle in his hands. He scanned the landing pad, cocking his head to listen, then moved around to the edges, walking around them and looking down at the city below.

Traffic lights changed, automated vehicles moved down the streets, advertisements flashed and danced.

He moved up to the elevator and tapped the datapad, waiting for a long moment. After a moment his credentials were accepted and the elevator slowly moved up to the landing pad. Carnight checked it, clearing it for Nakteti and three of her crew members.

They rode down silently, the Tnvaru in their armored vacuum suits, Carnight in the matte black armor.

The elevator opened up into a hallway, which they moved down slowly, Carnight in the lead.

They encountered no-one.

He stopped at one wall, running his hand along the wall, one hand held out to stop the Tnvaru from following. He checked the holes in the wall, the slagging marks, the pitting from shrapnel. He knelt down and touched several rusted brown marks.

The Tnvaru followed him as he followed the automatically uploaded map to the facility.

Finally they reached their destination.

Nakteti stared from the observation balcony.

There were craters on the floor, the seats smashed aside, the podium was shattered and wrecked. The fabric on the walls was torn in strips and hanging down.

It was empty.

"But, where is everyone?" Nakteti asked, staring at the huge chamber.

Major Carnight's armor suddenly dissolved into powder that fell around him, leaving him in his adaptive camouflage, holding the rifle.

"Where is the Confederate Senate?" Nakteti asked, her words echoing around the empty chamber.

Major Carnight's laughter was her only answer.