The Poster

 Two parents. One image. Two different worlds.

 

The poster hangs on thousands of walls—real ones and virtual—across the world and within the Verse, where reality has a second skin.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t threaten.
It simply... reminds.

---

Ana Quen | Galatean | Mother of three

She paused her Verse scroll the moment she saw it.

The child on the left was barefoot—running, laughing, no suit, no mask. A butterfly followed, silly and brave.

Terran children chase butterflies.

Her daughter had asked last night:
“Can we go outside barefoot one day?”

Ana smiled. Said maybe.
It was a lie she wanted to believe.

The boy on the right wore crisp lines, hands busy calibrating a fusion cell with surgical grace.
Ours calibrate fusion packs.

Her son could already repair emergency seals.
Her eldest rerouted dome oxygen at nine.

She was proud. She was tired.

But when she looked at the poster, all she wanted was tall grass and enough breathable air to let her kids chase anything.

Even butterflies.

---

Jalen Ross | Terran | Father of two

He caught the poster while standing in line at the med-distribution kiosk.

It was one of the newer ones—designed to remind people what Galateans were: focused, obedient, machine-blooded.
That was the message, anyway.

Ours calibrate fusion packs.

Someone had underlined “efficiency is inherited” in marker.
Someone else had scrawled: “So is bankruptcy.”

His son had failed another math module that week. Spent hours recording holovid stunts for likes.
The most recent? Riding a rooftop drone into a dumpster.

Jalen just wanted him to finish a physics lesson.
To stop mocking education like it was a joke for has-beens.

He looked at the Galatean boy on the poster.
Sharp-eyed. Focused. Future-oriented.

It felt like looking into a world his son had been told wasn’t worth aspiring to.

He read it again while his son giggled at a holovid of some half-dressed influencer doing the “Drone Dive Challenge.” Two million views. No helmet.

Jalen exhaled slowly, the kind of breath that only left when your spine got tired of holding the rest in.

---

This isn’t a scene from the battlefield.
It’s one from the space between.

Where quiet ache lives.

And where every war leaves its mark—not just on soldiers, but on the stories we tell our children.

 

Want more?
This scene is part of the Galatean Saga Lore Drops — story fragments, visuals, and voices from both sides of the war.
No spoilers. Just atmosphere, emotion, and the quiet tensions between two futures.

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