Cosmic Vintages: The Wine Wars Of The Outer Rim

From the Sensory Archives of Dr. Kepler Voss, Chief Enologist, Terran Wine Dominion

TIMESTAMP: 2387.156.22:41 SOL STANDARD

Listen, you corporate wine-swilling parasites. I’m only going to say this once. My neural implant is going to short out from the Rigel bourbon I’ve been mainlining to forget what I’ve seen.

The conquest is complete. Thirty-seven worlds bend the knee to our viticultural empire. Their grapes weep alien tears into bottles. These bottles will grace the tables of Earth’s plutocrats. But you want to know the real obscenity? The wine is magnificent.

Take Kepler-442b, that crystalline hellscape where the indigenous Vrex used to cultivate their nightmare vines in caves of living quartz. Did we care about their species perfecting their craft for twelve millennia? Meanwhile, we were still painting on cave walls. Hell no. We just needed those grapes that grow in zero-g conditions. Their cellular structure is twisted by cosmic radiation. This produces a wine so potent it can literally bend spacetime around your tongue.

The Vrex are extinct now, of course. “Accidental” atmospheric poisoning during the terraforming process. Funny how these accidents always happen after we’ve extracted their agricultural secrets and uploaded their brainwaves into our databanks.

But you should taste the ’79 Kepler Crystal Noir I’ve got aging in the ship’s hold. Each bottle contains approximately 14.7 nanoseconds of temporal displacement. One sip and you’re experiencing flavors from three different timelines simultaneously. The Terran Wine Dominion is selling it for fifty thousand credits a bottle. Collectors don’t even know they’re drinking genocide.

Then there’s the Proxima Centauri scandal that the corporate media won’t touch with a ten-foot plasma torch. Those floating jellyfish-things—the Medusae—they didn’t even have a concept of private property before we arrived. Their entire society was built around sharing their bioluminescent fruit-pods that ferment naturally in their stomach-chambers. The resulting wine could cure radiation sickness and induce religious ecstasy simultaneously.

So naturally, we enslaved them and turned them into living fermentation tanks.

I’ve been to the processing stations on Proxima C. Rows upon rows of Medusae suspended in nutrient baths, their translucent bodies pulsing with the rhythm of artificial wine production. They’ve been lobotomized, of course—can’t have them remembering their ancestral songs that could shatter our containment fields. But sometimes, late at night, the station’s AI thinks I’m asleep. I hear them humming in frequencies. These sounds make my bones ache with something that might be sorrow.

The Proxima Transcendence Vintage is our best seller. Each bottle contains the refined essence of a being that once composed symphonies with its own biochemistry. Wine critics on Earth describe it as “spiritually transformative” and “a religious experience in liquid form.”

They have no idea how literally correct they are.

But here’s where it gets really sick: the wines are mutating us. Every sommelier in the fleet is developing precognitive abilities after prolonged exposure to the Kepler temporals. The Proxima stuff is giving people empathic overload. I know three wine tasters who had complete psychotic breaks after tasting the ’81 batch. They kept screaming about “feeling their pain” until we had to sedate them permanently.

And the Vegan wines from Alpha Lyrae? They’re not even made from organic compounds as we understand them. The native flora exists partially in hyperspace, and their fermentation process involves dimensional folding that our xenobiologists barely comprehend. I’ve seen a single drop of Vegan Crimson cause spontaneous quantum tunneling in laboratory rats. One moment the rat’s there, the next it’s simultaneously existing in seventeen different probability states.

I tried a full glass once. Spent three days experiencing every possible version of my life where I’d made different choices. In one timeline, I was a peacekeeper. I tried to establish diplomatic relations with alien species. I worked to avoid strip-mining their cultures for luxury products. In another, I was the one being harvested, my dreams fermented into someone else’s intoxication.

The worst part? I can’t stop. None of us can. The wines from the conquered worlds don’t just get you drunk—they make you aware. Every sip is a communion with the ghosts of civilizations we’ve erased, and somehow that makes the wine taste better. We’re developing tolerance, but not to the alcohol. We’re building resistance to our own humanity.

Yesterday I received word. The fleet has made contact with a species on Ross 128b. This species ferments their emotional memories into liquid form. The advance scouts report that a single vintage contains the concentrated love, grief, and joy of an entire generation.

The Corporate Council is already drawing up invasion plans.

I’m supposed to submit a flavor profile and market analysis by next week. Instead, I’m broadcasting this on an open neural channel. I hope someone, somewhere, is still capable of feeling horror at what we’ve become.

Because here in the outer rim, surrounded by bottles that contain the liquidated souls of extinct species, I’ve realized something that the wine critics and corporate boards back on Earth will never understand:

We’re not conquering the galaxy. We’re consuming it, one vintage at a time. And with every glass we raise in celebration of our expanded palates and refined tastes, we’re toasting our own damnation.

The wine is extraordinary. The wine is transcendent. The wine is everything we dreamed it could be.

And that, more than anything else, is why we’re all going to hell.

Dr. Kepler Voss was found deceased in his quarters shortly after this transmission. Official cause of death: acute alcohol poisoning from an unidentified xenobiological vintage. His personal wine collection was distributed among senior corporate executives as per standard protocol.

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[NEURAL FEED TERMINATED] [CORPORATE CENSORSHIP PROTOCOL ACTIVATED] [MEMORY WIPE SEQUENCE INITIATED]