Speaker For The Damned
The Speaking of Andrew Wiggen
"I'm not playing Russian
Roulette the way Graff was."
"Yes you are sir. The only difference is that he knew he had
only one empty chamber, and you don't know how many chambers are empty because
he loaded the gun."
~Orson
Scott Card; excerpt from ENDERS SHADOW~
Ender, the great xenocide, the
man who destroyed a sentient, ramen species.
Who would have know he got his name from his two year old sister, who
couldn't pronounce Andrew? Born in a
time when the Earth's population was overwhelming, and there was a limit of two
children per family. Ender was a Third,
and though he was legally born, with the government, he was still a mockery to
his family.
Ender was born in a time where
the threat of the Buggers was very real.
After the First and Second Invasions, the International Fleet (IF)
created a series of schools in which to train young, genius children to become
commanders of the fleet they were sending against the Bugger home worlds. The fleet they called the Third
Invasion. The first of these school was
the Battle school, found in the Belt.
This school was used to train and test potential candidates for future
commanders. The school screened
millions of potential students and only took the smartest and most charismatic,
but they also needed a killer instinct.
Ender's older brother, Peter,
the Hegemon who united Earth, was tested for the program but found too
violent. Ender's sister, Valentine, was
also tested, but was found too mild. Ender
was born in hope that her would be a mixture of the two.
Ender was taken up to the Battle
school at age five, and between that year, and the time he was ten, more
burdens were placed on him, by purposefully isolating him from his peers, and
by rigging the war games, around which the students' lives revolve, in the
favour of his opponents armies. In his
final battle at the School, he resorted to ending the game before it was
supposed to be through, by heading towards the enemy gate, not caring how many
of his men were disabled.
After that, he was transferred
to Command School, used to train students of at least sixteen years of
age. The ten-year-old Ender was put
through tests by the famous Mazer Rackham, hero of the Second Invasion, though
the tests were, in reality, attacks against Bugger Fleets.
In what Ender thought was his
final examination, he was so tired and resentful of the stress his teachers,
and Rackham were placing on him, he decided to fail the test by destroying the
planet he was supposed to by attacking in the simulation.
Against impossible odds, Ender
had beaten the Bugger at their home world, and had committed genocide, though
at the time, he had thought it only a stupid game the adults were forcing him
to play. It wasn't until after he had
committed the unspeakable crime, that he was told what he had done. An eleven-year-old boy had commanded the
army in the destruction of a sentient species.
Ender was crushed and never stopped despising himself for it.
After the annihilation of the
Buggers, there was the League War that lasted five days; the cause, who should
get control of Ender. Finally, a treaty
was signed agreeing that Ender could never come home to the planet he had
saved. The person who proposed this was
believed to be Locke, also known as Peter, Ender's brother, though in reality
it was Valentine who convinced her brother to not let Ender come home for fear
that Peter would use him.
With now where to go, Ender
decided to become the governor of the first colony, on a Bugger world. His
sister accompanied him.
After several years, The Speaker
for the Dead wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon, the lives of the
Buggers and Peter Wiggen, Hegemon of Earth.
The Speaker for the Dead had a deep understanding on the misunderstanding
that passed between Buggers and Human, causing Ender to look like a monster to
have killed a ramen race, though he had not intentionally done it. Shortly after that Ender disappeared.