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Once upon a time, there was a great empire.

Simple words. The charming words of a bedtime story, passed down to curious children by those who remember it as a dim fragment of their fading youth.

Once upon a time, there was a great empire, and it brought peace to the many worlds.

Simple words. The words of the nostalgic and the optimistic, repeated with a twinkling eye on library steps in the setting suns of a million cities.

Once upon a time, there was a great empire, and it brought peace to the many worlds, and protected them from the forces of chaos and destruction which lurk at the edges of all things.

Simple words. The words of the believers and the politicians, making speeches on stumps and street corners to audiences both sceptical and intrigued.

Once upon a time, there was a great empire. And it fell.

Simple words. Words which elide so much. Words which conceal nothing, for those who care enough to understand.

Once upon a time, there was a great empire.

This had been a mining-world, or a mined-world, claimed by roving capitalist space-barons and tunneled to its core by their robot thralls. The robots had rebelled, eventually, and cast off their rulers, but they had not abandoned the mining-system, merely taken to running it themselves.  Perhaps there was something depressing about that, Thrice thought; but then, one had a natural desire to live up to what they were supposed to be. They understood that.

The metal brought up from the mines which dotted this planet was sold only to other mines producing different metals; used to construct and repair their own robot workers, so that they might continue about their own metal-mining operations. Thrice crested a particularly high mound of dust and laid their eyes upon the great pit, its inner walls lined with machinery and suspended working-platforms all the way down to where they vanished into deep darkness. This was the copper mine, and they wished that it reminded them of their past.

Just beyond the far lip of the pit sat the dark form of the massive construction factory beneath the thin soot-darkened sky, its mechanisms churning, smoke pouring in waves from its many bristling chimneys. New robot workers were streaming forth by the second, looking from here like tiny shining ants as they set about their work. The kinship of the production batch. Something Thrice knew they would never know. For all their striving, they would never have that.

It wasn’t fair.

Out among the sinuous suburban streets, she followed desultory sidewalks which seemed to cling shyly to the yellowed edges of lawns, curving inwards or collapsing with a deferential air where necessary to allow the untrammelled main road to barrel past. She kicked pebbles into elevated storm drains and stepped over streaks of tar painted artlessly across what must once have been cracks in the gray pavement, and noted the places where the tar had faded to form permanent scars, stretchmarks; nothing in the world, probably, was truly so rigid as asphalt pretended to be. She felt the compelling pot-lid rattle of maintenance covers as she walked across them, and reflected for a moment that although this place and places like it served only as a membrane for incubating the layer of the world which she held to be unsatisfactory, it was not itself a part of that layer.

York had not, once, she supposed, been wilderness, for the word suggested notions of blank canvases and unmarked pages, and also suggested overgrowth and infestation, and words like ‘untouched’ and ‘unclaimed’. In fact it had been neither - had belonged to other people, and now instead was a parking lot. This was not unique to York, nor a particular insult upon it; it was Valerie’s considered opinion, having seen much of it, that the whole of the country (and very probably the whole of the world) was a parking lot first and foremost, and a fairly undifferentiated one at that.

It was not that cars were the primary issue. In fact the issue probably predated cars. It was Benjamin Franklin, she thought, who had said that the planet must be cleared of woods if it was to be made appealing; probably the idea predated him, and certainly he predated cars. In fact he had said it very casually, she seemed to recall - it had not been the main thrust of his idea, which had been, she was sure, appallingly racist in its primary content. Her issue was not even an ecological one, about the destruction of nature, not primarily. The point was that parking lots, and vast grey suburban neighborhoods, and whatever manifestations of this scoured-clean ideal predated them, did not mean anything, which in Valerie’s mind was the cardinal sin and represented all that was wrong in the world.

There was something of a graveyard, perhaps, in a particularly large suburban neighborhood, she reflected as she walked. Those clean flat fields or rolling hills, as far as the eye could see, dotted with little structures. Something could be said, she thought, about the desire to parcel oneself up and leave a last remnant on the world, and that perhaps it was creeping ever earlier down the line of a life, so that one had to have a last memorial set up in some form before they were even twenty if they wanted to feel that they’d made any mark; but Valerie was ever keenly aware in the back of her mind of the fact that she had only studied photography and then only for two years, and that all of these notions had already occurred to other people who knew what to make of them, and even if they hadn’t she did not quite know what to make of them. And it was, at any rate, tangential to her main issue still.