Fall of the Rhiau Empire
Know that Harro knelt before the throne and saw the sky above the Empire. Humble yourself before the might of your King. Thus the ten thousand gods shall instill in you innocence and obedience, the highest virtues.
The Zeal Books, Letters of Fareso Verse 7
Chapter 1
The farmers harvested their rice. They stacked it up in silo boxes and sent it away to be processed and distributed. Silan never bothered to think much about it. His father and his grandfather before him had harvested rice from the flats. Only a couple of people in his family managed to scrounge up enough money to move away across the sea and live in the industrial sectors in Caroo. And so it shocked him when Silan was told he was being promoted by the Teon Rice Corporation to Overseer of Local Distribution. He had been a field manager, here and there as needed, but it was a jump he had never seen coming.
The money called to him, and he answered in kind. There were countless reasons why he wanted this position, power, freedom, security, but ultimately it was just the money he could send back to his sister, Isla, in Fenex Village that made Silan want it.
When he began Overseer training, he met Jodana. She guided him in the ways of the TRC and what was expected. The yield rates needed to be increased as demand rose across the world. And she reminded him that approximately seven percent of their crop would be lost in transportation, he must always be mindful of loss. “Lost?” he asked, sitting beside the computer as she showed him the charts of gross and profits. “What do you mean lost?”
“Well,” she rolled her chair back and steepled her fingers. “There are thieves, accidents, spoilage, that sort of thing. Not to mention, Teon’s a global corporation coordinating across continents. It’s hard to keep track of every grain of rice so we expect that some of it will be misplaced or miscounted.” “There’s gotta be a better way, we’re dealing with food. Shouldn’t the company keep better track of it?” he asked incredulously. “I mean, people depend on this.”
“Look, it happens. We can’t deal with everything this way. Some of it is going to be misplaced. It just happens.”
This did not sit right with Silan but he sat back quietly at this comment. As she showed him the numbers, he tried to keep count but the words just swam in his head. He just swallowed and let the information wash over him.
The weeks wore on and his training came to completion. Understanding the distribution of the rice and the shipments still had difficulty with Silan. He never quite got over losing seven percent of his crop, people were starving after all. Millions died every year and though Teon donated to countless charities and food banks, they still talked about accounting and “acceptable losses.” It annoyed him that Jodana seemed to brush aside his questions and seemed to be dancing around certain numbers.
He saw planes flying over the rice fields one day, nearly a year after his promotion, while observing the morning packer trucks heading out. He had been warned of a supervisor from corporate coming to evaluate their farming but Silan had not expected a dramatic entrance like this.
The planes landed on a strip behind the local cleaning plant. The tarmac was slick with recent rain and smelled of cut grass. The airstair lowered down from the plane and three men emerged.
Silan and his assistant walked to greet the corporate representatives with his manager. The three men coming off the plane onto the landing strip, each wearing regal and excessive suits of bright colors well out of place to Silan’s eyes, seemed oddly light on their feet and kept glancing to the sky.
Silan greeted them with a salute and said hello. The officials nodded in response before walking past him. The first man, in a purple coat and named Regional Director Nerulus, said as the group walked towards the office building, “You seem to have spent a lot of your time cracking down on losses.”
Struggling to keep up with their long and far strides, Silan replied, “Yes, I know Teon accounts for losses within an acceptable percentage, but I figured that food is food, you understand? Better to save all of it and put that money to keeping track of all our supplies.”
Officer of Financials Regio smirked. “I admire your bright-eyed enthusiasm. But wouldn’t that effort be better suited to simply improving crop yield?”
The reasoning, to Silan, made no sense. “I mean, that would also leave us with more lost profits though? As one goes up the other goes up, and people depend on this food.”
Nerulus patted Silan on the shoulder. “The company has made peace with that. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘acceptable losses’.”
With that comment, they made their way into the building, leaving Silan to chase after them. He struggled to keep up with their flying movements as they made their way towards the conference room on the third floor. All corporate buildings of Teon were standardized, so they did not really need Silan to guide them, his presence was a formality and one they seemed wholly uninterested in.
At the conference room, Silan sat bored listening to corporate men who cared little for his more rustic background. He often felt this way, as a pet of the real managers of the company, a project to make themselves feel more egalitarian. But as frustrated as he was with being ignored and looked down upon, Silan was further confused by TRC’s willingness to ignore such heavy losses of food in the face of global food shortage.
Then a phrase caught his ear, “Upward export.” He had seen this phrase on a few reports, but it never was defined and mentioned only in passing. Nerulus used the term, he said the upward export rate was lower than last quarter, a mere six point eight percent of total gross.
Silan began to sift through corporate documents, pulling anything he could from the records room on the topic. But no documents ever defined the term or where “upward” may mean. Instead, he found only a consistent number, it was always approximately seven percent.
And so he began to ask his coworkers and superiors in TRC. Whenever he mentioned upward export, they clammed up and brushed off his concern. Instead, they directed him to focus on what he actually did for his job, or else they gently reminded Silan he may lose it.
And so he focused on sorting his papers, filing his reports and keeping track of expenses. But Silan kept an eye out for any loss, for any grain of rice that may be destroyed or spirited away to areas unknown. He found thieves on numerous occasions, swiping crates of rice and trying to sneak them over to the shipping docks.
But even as he worked to stop them, he also would let the occasional crew slip through. They would flee and Silan would track where they fled to. A team of thieves would sneak around their safe houses and their clandestine routes, all Silan’s corporate spies could keep track of, before inevitably disappearing at the port.
Silan sat at his desk in the office running his hand through his hair as he watched planes come and go from the port across the bay. The planes soared through the air, up past the clouds.
Chuckling to himself, Silan considered for a moment a truly absurd idea. What if they’re going to space? he asked himself. Even as he thought, he dismissed the idea as laughable. But it lingered.
And one day, as he flipped through the papers in the archive, locked away in the depths of the lower basement, he heard footsteps rapidly approaching his table. Quickly, Silan shuffled the papers back into the folder he had been looking through.
A man in a long robe fastened tight against his slim frame stood before Silan. His long hair was tied back in a greasy braid.
“Hello, am I speaking with Silan?” asked the man, standing over the table.
Silan stood and said, “Yes, and may I ask who you are, my sir?”
“I am a representative of an institution that has a great deal of interest in the well-being of the Teon Rice Corporation and the stability of this world at large.” The man spoke in a lilting accent that Silan did not recognize.
“Yes,” Silan said, nodding.
“Yes. And you have been asking many things that show us you have a great deal of interest in things of our concern. I would like to have a more thorough conversation with you, if you would care to join me.”
Silan stood and said, “Are you saying that you’re investigating this missing rice too?”
The man said, “I cannot get into specifics here. This is far too important. But you and I have interests in common.”
Silan agreed to meet the man later that evening at a park. As he walked back home after work, Silan found himself feeling deeply unsettled. Every person he saw walking by seemed to be looking in Silan’s direction, and looking away when Silan noticed.
Then, as he reached his apartment building, Silan noticed that there was in fact someone keeping fixed on him. A man in a green hat had continually appeared at the edges of Silan’s vision. It was as though he wanted Silan to notice.
Silan slipped into the building, quickly shutting the gate behind him. He clambered up the stairs and slammed the door to his apartment open. He locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief.
But he looked at the small clock, the hands telling him it was almost time for his meeting with the strange man who claimed he wished to help Silan. He sighed and went to the ice box. He opened it to find the box empty save a small wooden cup of water.
He took a sip from it before returning it to the ice box. Sitting at the kitchen table, Silan ran his hands through his hair. He looked up at his wall where a rusted old sword hung on the wall, where his grandfather had placed it all those years ago. It was his grandfather who told Silan to always fight on the right side.
And so Silan rose and made his way back out of the apartment building. This was his chance to do something that would truly help people. As he walked to the park, Silan passed by the Beggar’s Row, the section of the city allotted for the poor to try and beg for spare coins.
It had been packed for years, charity wagons handing out soup and clothes to the beggars and the few generous opting to drop off whatever money they had left over. But it was especially busy today. Silan saw a lone soup wagon pulled by a tired looking ox. This must be a good day for the beggars, he thought to himself, there hasn’t been any charities in there for a few weeks now.
He tossed a handful of coins into a bowl and hastened his pace. The grass gave way to trees and winding sidewalks with benches scattered for good measure. The Citadel Park was meant to be walked through with occasional stops to take a break, not to be enjoyed as a destination. The benches were hard and unforgiving stone slabs and the sidewalks did not move toward anything particularly worth looking at for too long.
The man sat at one of the stone benches and smiled contentedly as he watched the waste collectors walk by with their hauls. He stood as Silan approached and said, “Welcome, my friend. I trust you had a good journey.”
“I’m doing well.”
“Excellent. Now, let us get straight into this,” he said. He and Silan began to walk along the trail. “I know you have been looking into export rates and loss percentages.”
“Upward export rates and loss rates seem to have an overlapping percentage. And no one seems to know what upward export actually means,” Silan explained. “It seems grossly irresponsible in the face of a famine.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he agreed. “But you must understand that there are more lives at stake than you are already aware of.”
“What do you mean?”
“This may be difficult for you to understand but there is a system in place to ensure that everything goes where it must. A vast and powerful system, ancient and resilient, that is currently undergoing many changes.” The man strained, he was clearly thinking very hard and choosing his words very carefully. “You have shown yourself to be capable at sifting through the data and as such we are willing to offer you a place in that system to give voice to this community of yours.”
“I don’t think I fully follow what you’re saying,” Silan said. He ran a hand through his hair and grimaced.
“What I am saying is that this is not the only world, and it is not the only world that is suffering.”
“Wait, what?”
The man continued, “There is a vast Empire that is trying to protect countless lives on countless worlds.”
“An empire? Are you talking about aliens?” Silan stopped and stood, holding his head in his hands. He was sitting with a crazy man.
“No, people like you and I. But your company is tasked with helping to feed far more people than you know. I am offering you something-”
“Wait, you’re telling me a lot right now that I don’t think I can process.” Silan staggered and leaned against a rough oak tree.
“I am offering you a position within this Empire so that you may represent your world.” He rested a hand on Silan’s shoulder. “You can leave this world and join us in the Empty Sea.”
