The Damocles Directive
Listen up, people! And non-people. That means you, Dinah.
Now, most of us here have come from doomed planets. Our worlds have been destroyed one way or another, from trails small and large. We've lost one home already. We don't want to lose another. So that's why we're setting up this team.
What this organization does is good work. None of us here would have a life without it. I'd be lost forever. Dina'd be treated like a freak at best. We've had it all - culture shock from different people, different species, different physics, different societies, different languages. We've worked hard, and everybody around us has worked hard in order to get us the lives we have now. Some of these are good lives. Some of them could be better. But they're our lives, damnit, and we're not losing them like we lost them before.
Each one of us knows how slender the thread that holds the sword is. We've come from places that died due to the uncaring nature of chance. We've left friends, family, everything behind in some cases. We don't want to see this world suffer the fate of our previous ones.
Therefore, this organization launches, officially launches, this team. We plan to know when, how and why the sword will fall. We plan to examine, redeem, neutralize or in worst cases destroy the threat. Each of these other worlds, many of them ours, burned out due to some accident, some disaster, some misfortune, some tragedy. We can't always do much about them. Most of the time we don't learn about them until the refugees arrive here. But we can stop them happening to our new home.
Our job, ladies and gentlemen and things, is to investigate the threats that have destroyed other worlds. Working with the other parts of our organization, we will interview refugees about what happened on their worlds, where the tragedy started, and see that we stop it here. We look through the looking glass to these places and see what is happening there and see it does not happen here. Maybe even stop it there. We know, each of us, some of the wonders each of these worlds have that this one doesn't. We will build or save or construct them here. Make a new home. Protect a new home.
We shall know when that sword will fall. We shall know how that sword will fall. We will know why. And we will stop it.
This is our pledge. This is The Damocles Directive.
