Supremacy

In the one hundred and fifty-first year of humankind's existence under Protean rule on the planet Minerva, Boudica Becquerel spent her days performing her duties as one of the many hunters, gatherers, and trappers for her isolated community. This function was one accorded very great respect by the community, not simply by reason of its obvious necessity, but also because of the very great amount of risk that performing it necessarily entailed. Every single time anyone went out and about to collect sustenance for everyone, there existed the very significant possibility that they would never return; even worse, there existed some chance that the entire community might risk exposure as well. Boudica Becquerel and all others who accepted this role were fully aware of its potential dangers, and yet they took them on regardless.

Boudica's particular enclave of civilization had survived for generations within an extensive network of caves located deep within a vast expanse of forest. Another, separate community existed several miles away, and Boudica and her people had infrequent contact with them on the rare occasions when people from one site would make very very high-risk outings and venture over into the area of the others. Between these two groups sat an enormous scrapyard, the site of many decades of accumulated refuse and debris from numerous nearby facilities of various kinds.

On one day just like any other, Boudica was out among the trees, checking the traps that she had left a few days previously. Out of about ten traps that she had set, eight of them had caught wildlife.

“Yes!” she thought to herself, celebrating a relatively abundant hunt after recent weeks of slim returns.

Before returning to the home base with her bounty, Boudica performed her usual ritual of checking to make sure that one of her most valued possessions remained on her person and had not fallen to the ground at any point during her hunt. She searched her pockets, and sure enough, there it had stayed: a chain and locket in the shape of a heart. As always, Boudica felt a flood of relief upon finding the object to be safe with her. She would be utterly devastated if this one family heirloom of hers were in any way misplaced or destroyed.

Many generations in the past, one of Boudica’s ancestors had been granted the heart locket by a mysterious stranger wearing an odd and somewhat intimidating suit. This stranger had apparently emphasized that the locket was something of very great importance and that it needed to be guarded closely and passed down through successive generations. Although unsurprisingly taken aback by this person and the seemingly urgent requests they made, Boudica's ancestor nevertheless adhered to them and acted accordingly. This event occurred back in the days of human liberty; only a few decades later came the arrival and takeover of the Proteans.

The Proteans were terrifying beings from a foreign dimension. Hyper-rational and hyper-intelligent, they also totally lacked the ability to feel any sense of emotion. On many occasions for millennia they have managed to penetrate into this dimension, and long ago they were variously referred to as “ghosts” or “demons”, owing to humankind's ignorance of their true nature. One hundred and fifty-one years ago, they arrived and took over human civilization on Minerva, in addition to attacking other planets at proximate times. The Proteans were shapeshifters, but they often presented as humans in order to infiltrate groups and communities of humans that might seek to undermine their rule. A Protean in human form could only be distinguished by the totally black irises of its eyes; one could see the whites of its eyes, but besides this nothing but gaping black holes, blacker than the night.

The Proteans absorbed and adopted those elements of human society which were in any way useful to them, but other technologies and facilities that they had no use for were abandoned and fell into total obsolescence. Protean rule over any cosmic body where humans had formerly been the masters was defined by their treatment of humans being almost identical to humans' historical treatment of other animals: humans became nothing more than inferior creatures to be exploited for use as food and slave labor, and for nothing else. The Proteans' utter lack of emotion and sentimentality meant that they had no interest whatsoever in keeping any humans as pets, and thus the positive aspects of humans' treatment of other creatures was completely absent when it came to how Proteans dealt with humans.

While most humans found themselves in a state of absolute subjugation, slavery, and abject misery, waiting to be killed and eaten or spending their days performing grueling manual labor, some isolated rebel communities did still exist on some parts of numerous planets. Some of these communities even managed to preserve humanity's knowledge base in print books and as digital information on devices that were powered by renewable resources. This was the case with Boudica Becquerel's particular patch of secret civilization on Minerva, and she and many others she lived with were actually quite learned despite their difficult circumstances.

Boudica and all of the others made do with these circumstances. When finishing her hunting trips, Boudica always dutifully checked for her heart-shaped locket, then upon being satisfied that it was right where it should be, she returned to her cave. This evening, Boudica decided to pull out her locket and start playing around with it out of boredom, repeatedly clicking it open and shut. On one of the inner surfaces of the locket was a clock that had stopped working long before her time, and on the other inner surface was a rather curious poem:

"Within this heart of bronze you'll find

Instruction most vital.

When days are dark the time will come

To cease to be idle!

"Rays named after the third letter

Used in the Graecian tongue,

Once used against the enemy

Their death knell will have rung.

"Once the challenge has been all done,

Just one thing left to do:

This item you must then gift to

One who came before you."

Boudica had personally never put too much thought into this little poem. She had always figured that it was just some abstract riddle and had never attempted to decipher its cryptic lines. Tonight, however, Boudica actually spent some time mulling over these words, pondering what they seemed to imply.

"The third letter used in the Graecian tongue… Well that would obviously be gamma. Rays named after them… So gamma rays, then. But what is this about 'When days are dark the time will come' and 'used against the enemy'? What about the 'challenge' and gifting this item 'to one who came before you'?"

She spent just a little bit more time thinking about these pronouncements, and then suddenly, it hit her all at once like a train.

"GAMMA RAYS!! IT'S GAMMA RAYS!!!"

Boudica immediately went and excitedly announced her realizations to everyone who would listen. Many were skeptical at first, but after being told about the poem and what she had deduced from it, they figured that they had no reason not to take action accordingly. There was one main lesson of supreme value that Boudica had learned from the poem in her locket: despite being seemingly immortal and indestructible, Proteans could in fact be eliminated by gamma radiation.

The community immediately set to work on their plans. They took frequent trips, mostly at night, to the scrapyard a couple of miles away. They acquired and assembled anything and everything that they thought might be put to good use from the vast expanses of mostly metal garbage. One of the first things that they did was construct a working Geiger counter, which they could then use to identify sources of isotopes for them to mine. Once they had their Geiger counter, they carefully searched around for locations where sufficient quantities of isotopes could be extracted, which they did eventually find in a couple of places.

Simultaneously with their work on the Geiger counter, the people went about getting for themselves suits of lead for physical protection from the radiation. Some individuals managed to find existing lead suits in the scrapyard, but most suits had to be assembled from scratch. Then, once almost everyone was suited up and prepared, they each went out and collected as much radioactive material as they could possibly obtain.

Finally, once again relying entirely upon items from the enormous scrapyard, Boudica and her community members innovated and fashioned ray guns that would be the central keys to the destruction of the Proteans. The construction of the Geiger counter, the collection of the isotopes, the construction of the lead suits, and the construction of the ray guns altogether took almost a decade to complete. Once all was said and done, however, Boudica and her people were more than ready to set out upon their daring mission.

One bright and clear day, Boudica and all of the other members of her beloved community set out to risk everything for the sake of regaining their liberty and mastery over the planet. They closed in upon the nearest city, at which point an army of Proteans descended upon them. They blasted their ray guns endlessly every which way, and while some humans were killed in the struggle, the guns proved to be very effective in vaporizing any and all Proteans against which they were employed. By the end of the days, the humans had retaken most buildings and facilities in the city.

That evening, Boudica went to retrieve her precious heart locket, as it had fallen off of her at some point during battle. She found it, picked it up, and opened it, finding that the glass covering the poem had broken and the paper on which the poem had been written was ripped. As she looked at this damage, she recalled the poem's message, in particular that of the final stanza:

"Once the challenge has been all done,

Just one thing left to do:

This item you must then gift to

One who came before you."

She knew exactly what she had to do next.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Boudica scoured the scrapyard until she had recovered a shard of clear glass, which she then cleaned and carved down so that it would fit into the inside surface of the locket. She then wrote down the poem on a small piece of paper, slipped the paper into the locket, and then covered it with the glass. Once all of this was done, she went and made her way into the bowels of an old, disused government building, where she found exactly what she sought: a time machine.

Time machines had long been in use by humanity by the time the Proteans came, although they were always guarded by governments and used only to undo great catastrophes. Boudica knew that she couldn't tell the people of the past about the Protean takeover, because then they would prepare for it and the Proteans would see them doing so from their own dimension, prompting them to swoop in early and then know what to expect from the human resistance. Boudica only did what she could, using the time machine to give the locket to her own ancestor and emphasize the need to keep it close and pass it down. Her ancestor was confused, stunned, and concerned, but ultimately compliant with these requests.

Once Boudica returned to her own time, she continued to work as a great asset to the resistance, helping to fight off Protean armies and build even larger gamma ray machines that could envelope entire cities with their emissions. Eventually the entire continent was liberated, and decades after that, all of Minerva. Thenceforth, Boudica and her pocket of humankind sought to rebuild civilization, while also spreading the resistance throughout the entire galaxy.