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"No? But you claim you know better for us than we do, one hundred percent of the time. You've decided that we don't get to opt out of your world. You have the power to enforce your whims down to the level of our neurochemistry. There's nowhere we can go to be free of you! You won't even allow us to hate you in the privacy of our own hearts. What else but a god would do that? What else but a god could?

"There were these old stories, back from the days way before jump drives. They were about unknowable creatures that lived in the darkness between stars. They had the power to change you in horrible ways, inside and out, until you were unrecognisable. At any time they could descend from the sky and eradicate or corrupt entire civilizations and the most horrifying thing of all is that they could do it unintentionally. In fact, pretty much always, because they couldn't even be communicated with. They didn't meaningfully perceive humans; to them we were so small as to be specks. It turned all the dogma of religion on its head - what if gods didn't love us? What if they didn't even hate us? What if they could wipe us out without even noticing?

"You combine all the worst aspects of cosmic horrors, fascists and billionaire techbros. You refuse to allow the existence of any viewpoint that doesn't perfectly align with yours. You think any problem you experience is a failure of technique, not motive or principle. And you have the power to pull all of this off without even being conscious of what you're doing."

"You can't judge the Affini on the neglect and abuse of one member of our species."

"Oh, but I can! Because who was I supposed to appeal to? I'm just a floret, remember! I don't have political rights. My owner always knows best."

"I can't apologise enough for-"

"No! You're right. You can't. There is no amount of apology you or the Compact can give me. It wasn't just that you fucked up, it was that you created a system which makes those fuck-ups inevitable and uncountable. How many florets are out there, trapped with Affini just as bad as mine? I was lucky. How many more are out there screaming silently, in a prison of their own mind, unable to even articulate the concept of pain? You paint smiles on our faces and celebrate that we never frown. You steal our ability to cry, and then pat yourselves on the back for never having seen a tear. If I'm incapable of feeling misery, how is any joy I feel genuine?"

"Why would you want to feel misery?"

"You're still not understanding me! Wanting to be capable of something is not the same as wanting it!"

"If you never want to feel misery, why are you so concerned with having the ability to?"

"Have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas?"

"No."

"Of course. Why even ask? Why would you ever read anything humans wrote? Too low-brow and cutesy for you, I guess."

"I'm sorry, that's hardly fair. I cannae be expected to have perused the entire literary corpus of a species we only made contact with five years ago, can I?"

"You should read it, though. It's a short story about a utopian city in which the needs of all are met and none suffer, but all of it is predicated upon the torture, pain and misery of a single individual. It doesn't explain how, but for this city to live in abundance and plenty, a single child has to suffer for the whole of its life."

"Sounds utterly barbaric."

"Oh, yes, absolutely! I'm glad you think so. But the thing is, when they're old enough, every citizen learns this fact. They're not kept in the dark about it. They all know the atrocity their society is built on. And everyone is horrified when they learn about it, but eventually most of them come to accept it as the cost of living in their wonderful city. Sure, one kid has to suffer but it's not them or their kid, and the city's nice enough.

"For your idea of the universe to be valid, a universe where you can do whatever you please, you can't ever be wrong. In a world where you've set yourself up as the ultimate authority - against which no appeals can be made - you have to be right every single time, literally no exceptions, or it all falls apart. There can't be even one person you get wrong, one person you can't save, one person whose life you make worse. But you keep claiming the Affini aren't gods. So you're fallible. You can make mistakes. And over the sheer vastness of your civilization, I can't possibly have been the only mistake you ever made. Why did I deserve to be the child who has to suffer to fuel your perfect city?"

"..."

"And you know what, while we're at it, why does a nation dedicated to the happiness of its subjects have such massive warships? Why was this thing even built? What are the Affini so afraid of? I know this isn't even close to the biggest ship you've built - I know there are things ten times the size of this one. What does the Affini need with three-hundred click dreadnoughts? Benevolent rulers don't need to build warships the size of cities."

"There is no ulterior motive behind the Compact."

"Okay, and suppose for a moment I could believe that - is it supposed to make me feel better? That you genuinely believe this idea of perfection that you intend to spread to the whole universe? When I've seen how that can fail, and how even when confronted with that failure you'll never change your point of view?

"You don't see me as a person, you see me as an... intriguing problem to be picked apart, to be solved. To you, I'm an equation whose sides need to be balanced. You think there's some magic set of words that, if you work on it long enough, will make me accept what happened to me was a tragic outlier rather than the inevitable outcome of a system where we are always held as inferior to you. There isn't. And I guarantee you will go to whatever the plant equivalent of a grave is failing to understand why there are perfectly legitimate reasons I can want you monsters gone without being some sort of fascist.

"For all the awful things fascists did to us, for all that they ruined everything and turned every joy in our world to ash, at least my heart could hate them and my bullets could kill them. And somehow I miss them for that now, because to kill even one of you I need a tactical nuke, and if I hate you the parasite you put in my spinal cord feeds me drugs until I stop.

"But here's the craziest thing, the fascists weren't scared of our hate, even though they were infinitely more vulnerable! You somehow manage to be more cowardly than them, which is damn impressive! If even one human doesn't love the Affini with all our hearts, that must mean something's wrong with us. Why would you ever need to work on yourselves? After all, you always know best! Except we both know that's not true. Everything around us speaks to that.