A screen came alive and we saw a man. A human, but not someone we knew.”
“Hello, people of N21,” he said.” I am President Freeman of Earth. I know when you were sent away, Willem Wallace, or ‘Caesar’ as you referred to him, was the ‘Chancellor’.
“Approximately three hundred years after you left, Wallace had shown enough of his character to make those of us still on Earth recognize what you had long ago seen. There was an uprising, and we were able to remove him from power. He was in prison until we received a signal from you.
“Every computer around the world came on at the same time, and showed Wallace seated at his desk. He told us that we were all going to join him in a celebration of your exile. We saw what your camera’s recorded, Wallace telling you he wanted to ‘play’; the death of your maintenance worker. Then we saw a bay of the station open, and the people dying on the floor.”
For a moment, Freeman stopped. He looked somber, then rubbed his face with his hands.
“Wallace was questioned at length. That was an experience I never want to have again. He was, quite simply, insane. He wanted to toy with you as a cat toys with it’s prey. Revelling in your suffering was what he wanted most of all.
“He tried to bargain with us with his knowledge. He wanted freedom, but we refused. It took several months to obtain what we wanted. He spent that entire time in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t pretty. What we got from him, we want to pass on to you.
“There are several… surprises, in the computers of the station. They have been left there. There seems to be no way to remove them from the memory. Even a complete shutdown will reload the same information when you start them again.
“Much of what is programmed will be worse that what has already happened. Some not as bad. We will append a file to this message that will tell you what we have found. I hope you can find something on board that we didn’t think of here.”
