Degradation of Pride
Human anthropologists invited to explore a distant android society uncover shocking secrets in the depths of the city of ageless machines.
It's a photo story that wants someone who is a visualizer rather than a conceptualizer, like my brain is, to write its screenplay.
The human visitors were invited by a military ruling class who have been in power for millennia; a sign of peace after making first contact. The Sapiens travel a glimmering city made of crystal and take portraits of all who they encounter. Only barely pushing for interviews when they dared. Most of the inner city residents ignored the visitors, at times quite literally seeming to exist on a different plane of reality.
Class structure wasn't intended to be their focus before embarking on the venture. The leaders, their voices impossible to detect lie, manipulation, joy, had made it seem as though the residents needed for nothing other than the energy they harnessed from their social system's and the system nearby's stars.
But they found class structure and it was in clearly in place for as many years as the aliens were old. The discovery was stark and somehow both terrifying and strangely human. At first moving down the hierarchy ranks as they left the city center and passed to the city outskirts, only to find themselves under the city itself. A strange development of emotion seemed present in the beings: shame. A desire to not be seen that was as strong as the urbanite's desire to push the poor out of the light of day.
These androids, while true they didn't require food, and energy supply was indeed quite unlimited relative to the humans' Type 0 civilization means, they didn't paint the full picture. Energy itself couldn't spawn repair from thin air, not that the autocrats who founded their urban enclave give much thought to the needs of others. They maintained the doctors...engineers... at an unknown cost.
While that lingering question of emotion in these beings was left unanswered, they certainly saw enough to know what little empathy existed in the proud beings only seemed to have materialized in those who ended up needing others to learn to care. But the humans left still unclear if anyone ever did learn to. A thought that certainly didn't help any with their residual nightmares.
Also, if you're a Rick & Morty fan and remember the episode where the squids are killing off the decoys and they eventually get captured by a Smith family who wants their skin because "have you ever made a copy of a copy" — "...there be monsters" keeps playing in my head when you get ... eh you'll see.
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