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tonarrate/Do_You_Hold_Our_Debt_Fulfilled | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all of its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what we enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now; something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold our debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal's clan now satisfied?"
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race had largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
The Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts – acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets – was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man. |
tonarrate/The_Laughingstock_Of_The_Universe | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | Humanity was the laughing stock of the Universe.
They were short, ugly, unimpressive creatures. Gestation periods too long to be a swarming menace of sheer numbers. No razor claws, armoured shells, or horrible poisons, even their intellects (the things they themselves prized over all else) were merely average in the grand scheme of races. Nothing they made could come close to the technological brilliance of the Qurt-Uthla, the efficency of a TurTrrthr or the beauty of Abfyuri.
So we, the collective galactic community, simply laughed at them. We gave them the basic communication devices all races receive when they become post-FTL, and left them to their own devices. We gave them the standard warnings, not to fuck with other post-FTL races, or we will annihilate them. They shrugged, mumbled something about "MAD", whatever that is, and continued on their merry little way.
So they grew, and thrived. Their little galactic empire expanded outward more than any other race. We didn't care. An unlimited universe means more than enough room for every race. Soon they would be bored, like every other race, and begin their great project. They would find one niche, and carve it beyond any other race. Just like every other race before them. If we had bothered to read the history of this sophomoric and frankly, substandard race, we would have wiped them out before they could get out of the Sol System.
No other race had the concept of "tenacity". While other races were so efficient, they had never encountered resistance, even on their own planets, humans did not. While every other race saw their native environment as a plaything from the word "go", humans had struggled since coming down from the trees they used to call home. The one thing humans had over anything else, was they never, ever gave up. They would run after their prey, never catching it. Until that is, their prey laid down and died from exhaustion.
While every other race saw virtue in nothing else but ease of life, human mythologies universally condemn hedonism. Excess pleasure was a sign of weakness, paradoxically. Their heroes, the archetypes that thrived from the first intelligible sound from their throats until now has been those who seek challenge far beyond their abilities.
The lone human standing against entire armies, against fantastical creatures, against another human who has been corrupted by that dreaded efficiency and now holds powers meant for Gods. Their religions all masturbating over how powerless and helpless they are against a being beyond their comprehension. Their horror-stories not focused around losing their power (like every other, sensible race) but set up against an enemy that is even more tenacious than themselves.
Their "Jay-Suns" and "Van Pyres" are simply humans without limits. While other races' media showed how much better they would be than the yet to be discovered alien life forms, humans continue to portray themselves and weak, snivelling creatures who only won by the last bullet in their gun, or else by the fact they lasted a few seconds longer.
After studying their works of art for years, I asked a human why this was. He looked at me, gave me a look my sensor told me was condescension and simply said "If we win right away, there isn't any tension". I asked if he would not prefer my lightning-reflexes, or perhaps massive claws. He laughed. "Power corrupts", is what he told me.
So foolish were we, content to sit upon our mountains, that when we first encountered THEM, we were shocked. It was like an opposing universe alliance. One built on conquest and rage. The complete counterpart to our guarded but peaceful community. Their fangs were just a little bit sharper, their brains a little bit better. Their muscles a little bit stronger. We were now the weaker side, outmatched in every way. We had no idea what to do. It was called the 20 second war, because that's how long it took for our generals to decide that fighting was useless, and that we would be destroyed either way. We might as well enjoy our last few minutes.
This baffled the humans. While we gorged ourselves on the finest foods, they prepared. While the races in our council went extinct one after another. Humanity scavenged the enemy ships who were accidentally hit by friendly fire. While we fled our planets, retreating further and further so we could live in excess a little longer, they entrenched themselves into a line.
Humans took the weapons we had devised when we needed to keep up with our neighbours. Only one really had any impact on THEM. The humans called it "An EMP on steroids". All technology was rendered useless except for the most primitive of kinetic weapons. The only problem no one could really fix about it, was that it hit friendlies as well. It wiped us all back to the primitive, pre-FTL ages, in such a state we stood even less of a chance.
The humans didn't care. The massive beasts of Yurrsothoh XI shredded their front lines, while they pelted their armour hides with metal slugs. While their generals were always at a disadvantage due to worse military engagements, the humans made sure every acre of land was fought for tooth and nail. Every single last human fought past any reasonable member of another race would. The last cry of every human commander was "hold the goddamned line". Humans in the number of untold trillions sacrificed themselves in what they would later describe as "routine acts of war heroism". Eventually though, the enemy slowly crept forward over their home worlds.
Eventually, the pushed all the way back to the human capital world. The last planet belonging to the humans that could put up any fight. Earth. We had all long retreated back, but watched the transmission with fascination. The cold metallic voice of the translator rang out in the capital of Earth. Addressing the last bastion of hope for humanity.
"HUMANS. YOU HAVE PROVEN YOUR WORTH TO US. LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS AND ACCEPT YOUR PLACE AS OUR SERVANTS. YOUR COURAGE IS ADEQUATE."
There was a long silence in the human capital. We all awaited their response. The losses on both sides had been massive. The humans, for all their faults, had managed to wipe out over half the races that had made up the enemy. They had earned their place. I would be lying if I said we all weren't jealous, furious that this race of bald monkey people had been deemed worthy, but not us.
The radio transmission crackled back to life, broadcasting their reply:
"NO. WE FIND YOUR COURAGE LACKING"
Then, the lines went dark. Instead of the dying hum of the "EMP on steroids", there was a sudden burst. The humans had blown up Earth. Their crown world. Their paradise. They would not bend knee. An explosion so massive and unexpected that only the humans who survived were those that occupied small colonies far beyond our own retreat line.
Even we, as far back as we were, felt the scorch of this explosion. This massive release of energy wiped out the last of the enemy, but humans had paid a sacrifice far greater than any we could have fathomed. Their entire galactic history, now reduced to a few scant colonies.
Yet, on their communication lines, they were cheering.
"It worked! It worked"
"We killed them all!
We were dumbfounded. Billions, trillions of colonies beyond the reaches of space we had bothered to look. They all lit up like a shower of sparks. All previously dark, under strict orders never to use detectable technology until they were sure of the enemies defeat. They carved their niche. They were a phoenix. Something with endurance beyond what we anticipated.
A comm request came through to the high-king. We opened the line. He spoke in our universal tongue.
"I am the leader of the United Space Colonies of Humanity. In the 23 minutes it took for you to realise what happened to our home, we have evaluted you."
The high king simply had no words.
"These are the niches of man. Whereas you are content to live your short, insipid lives. We will become greater"
The broadcast inspired fear in our people. Was the enemy of the enemy really our friend?
"Yes, we have evaluted you. Those who are smarter, those who are stronger. We find you lacking."
We braced for the decleration of war.
"We would wipe out your cowardly asses with them, but frankly, you don't present enough of a challenge for us."
Humans were the laughing stock of the Universe. Once.
|
tonarrate/Adrenaline_Amazing_Stuff | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | “It was probably about 13 Galactic Years ago that I first fought alongside the Humans. My unit of Vargruung Walkers were acting as heavy support for a unit of about 14 human infantry, doing hunter-kill missions against the Kell-wreth in some dark swamp world.
Reminded me of home if I’m honest.
Sure we’d all heard the stories of how humans breathed oxygen neat, could rip a reef lizard apart with their bare hands, felt no pain, breathed fire etc etc. The usual fznar you always get from military stories. The truth is that, yes, humans have a well honed capacity for violence, but that’s still nowhere near the sort of thing you get from a Drill Kamikaze Bezerker. No the thing that makes them dangerous is that…
Well it’s hard to put in the words. You know that feeling you get when you meet a doctor? That sort of feeling of trust you have that he knows how to do his job, that’s the feeling I get from humans with regards to fighting. They’ve got the air of knowing what they’re doing when it comes to fighting.
They have this completely detached way of thinking about warfare that no other race can match. That and adrenalin, that stuff’s just incredible. It’s considered an illegal and potentially lethal substance in 90% of galaxy. Drll Juveniles use it as a Narcotic, the Octovar consider it an Aphrodisiac and the Kell-Wreth use it as a combat-enhancer. But only humans produce it naturally, and only humans have bodies DESIGNED for it. Afterall, it was the Kell-Wreth deciding it’d be fun to abduct humans and surgically harvest their adrenalin glands that caused the whole Terran / Kell Wreth war in the first place, and it was why we were doing HK missions on Ghoulad III.
So there we were, me and two fellow Barghast in our Vargruung Scout Walkers, acting as heavy support for a unit of human “Rayn’garrs” when a trinity of Kell-Wreth in full Mechanized Battle Dress get the drop on us. You could clearly see their veins monstrously blue and throbbing, and they’re squealing in that horrible way that they sound when they try to use their underdeveloped vocal cords. It was obvious that they were doped up on adrenalin so far that they couldn’t even act rationally any more.
Their whirring gauss weapons manage to incinerate two of the humans in brief sprays of soot. The sight is so horrific that my two spawnmates freeze in their tracks, and even I was unable to move my tentacles fast enough to get a clean shot. The humans however reacted instantly. They immediately dashed behind the armored shell of our Vargruung which affords them needed cover, and began to return fire.
The Kell-Wreth saw this and attempted to advance towards us. I fire a couple of shots from my Plasma Casters to try and scare them off, but in their state they totally ignore my wild shots. That’s when one brave human charges into one, and jammed the combat blade on the end of his slug-thrower right into the Kell-Wreths face, it made a horrible gurgle and sunk beneath the swamp waters.
He then leapt on top of another and with his bare hands he managed to gouge the Kell-Wreth’s eyes out with his bare hands, its screaming somehow managed to get even worse before the human broke the things neck. The other one stops for an instant as it notices its compatriots flailing and I was finally able to concentrate long enough to incinerate it with my plasma casters.
It later turned out that the human had been shot five times in non-lethal areas. He simply did not feel it at the time.
Adrenalin. Amazing stuff. |
tonarrate/Its_Because_Of_Their_Tongues | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | "It's because of their tongues, you know..."
"I guess I should explain, huh? They're not really all that different; pretty much any advanced sophont is going to have a highly-evolved organ for language. But they've got that shared-orifice bauplan... let me tell you about how they reproduce sometime! Anyway, their speech organ is also used for consuming food. Damn thing is covered in neurons, more than their manipulators. And the things are always eating! Two, three times a cycle, there's just no room to properly glut themselves."
"So here they are, tiny little mouth, having to spend something like a tenth of their lives ramming food into it, just to not die. Is it any wonder they thought eating was really important?"
"Oh, they do, though! It's a communal time and even a form of worship. They eat a wafer and believe it transubstantiates into the flesh of their god-thing. No, he wasn't just pulling my flipper, I looked it up on the InfoThing! Crazy but true."
"So for some of these guys, eating isn't just worship, but art! It's not enough to spend all that time actually eating, they spend even more time to change the sensory expression they receive when they do it. Not just processing it to remove parasites, either... they apply heat and flame to it, soak it in liquids, add lipids, vegetable matter and animal meat, even fungus! I know, right?"
"It's so important that they have humans whose occupation is to prepare their food. And not just one! He uses different words for it, even, it has to be something they had across cultures even in their pre-industrial age.
"He didn't believe me when I told him we had no such 'chef' anywhere on our planet. I asked him why, our processed krill-flesh was safe to eat, easy to store, and provided adequate nutrition. He asked to see my portion... no, you shell-head, of course he didn't eat it! But he did put it to his muzzle and inhale... and he asked me if I would let him prepare a portion for me."
"Of course I assented! My pride as an ethnographer demanded no less. To participate in an art event of another culture! Of course, I had no idea what he proposed to do, but krill-patty is krill-patty. I mean, that's the point, is it not?
"He showed me differently. I don't know all of the things he did to it. He sampled it with a spectrometer, and he snuffled at it with his muzzle, and he spent an hour going over the Standard Tox Report, for which I was grateful... at least he was being careful not to kill me! And he also spent a little while looking at a technical article about the neurological function of the Cetian consumption organ.
"Then he took the patty-stuff, and soaked it in boiling brine, and added... stuff? Some stuff to it, I don't even know what it was, just some flakes from a jar from his rack. And then he pulled it out, and slapped it on a plate and subjected it to direct heating! And then... I don't even know, I asked him to explain, but the translator didn't work, he lapsed into technical jargon.
"He put it into a portion-bowl, poured a thick fluid onto it, and handed it to me. I looked at it with doubt, not particularly hungry as I had eaten only four cycles prior, but somehow looking at it, I felt my appetite increase. And then I placed it in my consumption organ...
"There are no words to describe the feeling. No, there are, but not in Cetian! We will need to learn the human words for it. It was like making love, or the warm embrace of a pod-mate, or the blood thundering in your head after you have dived deeply and surfaced all at once.
"No! I'm not crazy! It was all of these things and more. And I can prove it to you! Because, gentlemen, he is here. I have brought him here and he will show you his art! He will teach us his art. And when we return to the Home Ocean, as 'chefs' in our own right, we will gain fame undying. Yes! Over such a small thing as food, even!" |
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_Pest_Control | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | Colonel Chambers stood at the helm of the spaceship, arms behind his back and facing the vast array of screens. The power armor that encased him completely annulled any form of fidgeting or stray movements. It contrasted heavily with the Progor diplomat Drohmen standing beside him who altered between looking at the screens and looking at him from the corner of his many eyes. The size difference between the two was evident, but while the human stood rigid and dignified, the larger Progor seemed to subconsciously try and put as much distance between them as possible without moving away. Chambers was aware of this behavior, but ignored it in favor of looking at the carnage that was being transmitted from the surface of the planet.
Glorified Pest Control is what they were right now, and Chambers couldn’t decide if he found that insulting or hilarious. After years of careful and controlled diplomatic missions humanity went from being seen as “terrifying and dangerous” to “terrifying and dangerous, but cooperative”. It took longer for other races to actually respond to their negotiation attempts, and even more for anyone to be the ones to kickstart them, but eventually they managed to get something going resembling a trading coalition. Of course Humanity still had the advantage technology wise, and their expansive empire meant that they had plenty of natural resources, but it was still worth it if only for fleets to stop jumping away when they saw a Human spaceship arrive.
It didn’t take long for requests of armed conflicts to appear though, and it was the same story for most of them. Big bad aliens had wronged them so they wanted the bigger, badder aliens to go and plant some fear in them, and if they could invade a planet while they were at it that would be great. Thankfully for everyone involved Humans weren’t that crazy and every offer was shot down, with the appropriate amount of anger so that after each race finished collectively changing their soiled pants they wouldn’t ask again. There was one offer that was taken, though, which was one marked as an ‘extermination”. They had been prepared to decline that as well but the Nuem that had requested it managed to explain quickly enough that they weren’t planning an offensive campaign against an intergalactic enemy, but were rather looking for a way to cull the population of a very violent and very big predator that had gotten out of hand.
Life outside the Veil of Madness was in no way peaceful, but the amount of infighting that happened between members of the same race was astonishingly less than that in Human history. Other races rarely had global wars to the scale that Humanity had seen, so things like nuclear weaponry or kinetic bombardments didn’t exist on many planets. Most did have a lot more experience in space warfaring though, even if it was just because they had actually participated in some sort of interstellar conflict at one point or another. However, in terms of ground warfare it seemed that Humans were at the very top of the pyramid and their superior technology did nothing but help with that. One round of orbital bombardment and several million dead predators later Humans were certified bug exterminators, and there was high demand for it.
There had been a lot of discussion about what protocols should be followed, with the main decree being that the primary objective was the regulation of non-sapient creatures with high population, not genocide. The second being that the exterminations were to be as humane as possible; they were pretending to be the bad guys, not actually being them. There was, however, the odd case in which the pest in question didn’t actually feel pain, one such case being the current one. The Latrogus were what could only be described as a combination of crab, scorpion, and nightmare. Ranging from two and a half meters tall up to four, the hulking creatures had no natural predators and even the Progor avoided them like the plague, which is what they were becoming with their rapid growth cycles. Extremely violent by nature and hard to kill, the best course of action would have been to blast the things away from space, which was why Drohmen was terrified by their current method.
Colonel Chambers was in charge of the latest ‘Decontamination Protocol’ and had brought the UTA Troopship “Conqueror” for the mission. It was a medium sized ship by Human standards, which meant it was still massive compared to anything the Progor had. The ship was designed for such missions, carrying almost no warheads and focusing mostly on specialized troop transportation. Said specialized troops were on the surface of the planet, wearing heavy power armor and tearing into the Latrogus.
One problem with having to constantly wear power armor in the presence of other races, aside from it being much less comfortable than normal clothing, was the fact that military troops looked less impressive by comparison. The solution? Make their armor bigger.
The Titan class power armor was an ostentatious creation of both power and endurance. Standing three meters tall and weighing approximately ten tonnes, the hulking suit would break the very ground it stood on if it weren’t for the Inertial Dampeners built into them, which had been designed specifically to allow this monster of a machine fluid movement. Its arsenal was equally impressive. Automatic weapons fired rounds that resembled missiles more than bullets, its explosives were strong enough that they could shake bunkers, and finally the suit itself was a weapon. The suit wasn’t just durable, but its metal fists were strong enough to crush armored vehicles and it wasn’t uncommon to see pilots ignore their ranged weapons in favor of bludgeoning their way to victory. Engineers were working on blunt and edged weapons designed specifically for Titan pilots, with the word ‘chainsaw’ thrown around here and there. Chambers wasn’t sure if that was a joke or an actual consideration.
Deployment was equally as flashy. Due to their weight and size, deploying Titan pilots onto the ground in the normal fashion in a timely manner was nearly impossible, so special measures were created. Troopships were specifically designed to carry the load of the suits as well as the mechanisms of release. Dropping normal soldiers from the atmosphere in little more than a metal wrapper was insane, but dropping metal behemoths into the battlefield? Now that was the type of insanity Humans were infamous for. Not only did this cut down on deployment times, but it also worked as a weak form of orbital bombardment and terrified whoever was near when the Titans broke out.
Drohmen watched as the pods stopped raining and the last pilot stepped out, fighting as soon as the capsule opened. He finally tore his eyes from the screens and looked at Chambers. “Is this course of action really necessary? Wouldn’t your normal method be more effective?” Latrogus were a source of fear for his people and couldn’t stand the idea of soldiers throwing themselves at the monsters when there were safer options.
Chambers produced a long sigh, which his synthesizers changed into a garbled hellish sound. “I can assure you, my soldiers are more than capable. We set the landing zones in such a way to maximize efficiency.” He didn’t want to go into any more details, not when he had explained them to the previous envoy, who had been replaced by Drohmen not long ago.
“I don’t doubt that, but wouldn’t it be better for your soldiers to not go through the ordeal?”
Now it was Chambers who turned away from the screens. “What do you mean?”
“Fighting the Latrogus. It’s a taxing task mentally, not to mention your methods of arrival. As well as your soldiers are trained it must be an unpleasant undertaking.”
Chambers processed the words before cracking a grin, which went unseen due to his black visor. “Oh, it’s not unpleasant at all.” He turned back to the monitors, which showed several soldiers in close quarter combat with the Latrogus, ripping and tearing them apart in a bloody mess. “In fact, they love it.” |
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_4 | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | The chambers of learning were abuzz that day. Only those greatest in position amongst the science caste were there, not even a single of the overseer class, nor a warrior to keep the usually easily frightened science class controlled. Manes bristled as those there sought to contain their excitement, but failed. In any other place or time, such base display of emotion would shame the members of the science class, their entire family taking the short penance at once. But this day, none sought overseers, nor informed on one another. It was the most special day. They would this day converse with a human.
Since the day that the humans had emerged from the Veil, those of the science caste given the unenviable duty of studying the Veil had gone from barely being above the labour caste to being considered for rebirth in the warrior, or even overseer caste! All they would need do is find the secret of the human ability to withstand the Veil, and their newest births would be blessed. But no revelations had come, much as they studied and prayed and experimented. Many lost themselves to the Veil's madness, for nothing. But mere twopassages ago, the warrior caste had found a smaller, weaker human ship wandering at the borders of the Veil. The battle had been long, and many of the warrior caste would not know their rebirths, but the greatest of all the prizes that those in the science caste had ever dreamed of was captured. A living human. One who could be studied, discussed with, and if the science caste had their way, dissected for their purposes.
As finally the door opened, all eyes turned to it, the slight ruffling of manes now carefully controlled the only sound any heard. And then entered the human. A size and a half of even the mightiest warrior caste, but somehow... disappointing. This was the creature that had emerged from the Veil? What secrets could such a strange creature hold? Though large and wide, it had no fangs to defend its rebirths as they formed, only two manipulators, and its mane did not even cover its entire self! Devices carefully designed for such purpose quickly scanned and measured the body, but manes settled. This thing was obviously no threat to a room full of even the science caste, much less with the warrior escorting it now in the room. It was led to the central dias, and swiftly the science caste surrounded it, settling back against their holdlegs to peer curiously. And then the human bared its teeth, and manes fluttered in fear.
IJKek stepped forth, one manipulator nervously settling the last errant parts of her mane. She had won the right to address the creature in a simply trial, by formulating the position they would take with this particular human, and accepting the outcome on her and her own solely. Should she succeed in finding answers to these creature's immunity to the Veil, her rebirths would be overseers at the least. If she failed, her last rebirths would likely not leave the vats. A fore-manipulator lifted the translation device so painstakingly researched and filled with words, and she spoke. "Humanman, we give you hellos. Hello. Excuse, this translator is experimental. We seek understandings of your Veil-madness, the lack."
Part of IJKek's mane ruffled slightly as the human turned its eyes (and only two!) to her, and it displayed its teeth again before speaking. "Made by the lowest bidder, huh? I'm Overcaptain Howard L. Craft, since we're being polite and all." Hearing a human speak through the translators was.. an event. Perhaps the young science caste who had constructed it had performed better than expected. Not only were the human's words understandable, but it almost seemed to catch the emotion it had in them. Amused, perhaps? So unlike the broadcasts they had heard from human ships! The room itself seemed to relax, as the human's feelings suffused the room. They were like us! Not simply some monsters in human form!
"Apologies," IJKek replied, playing with her device until it seemed the feed stabilized, already adapting to the conversation. Truly magnificant engineering after all. "I am IJKek, of the science class. Your people have an immunity to the madness of the Veil, and we would benefit greatly from an understanding of such matters. If such an understanding was found, you could return home to your caste with the honors of our people, and our overseer's apologies for the manner which brought you here."
The human, Howard, leaned back against the dias. In the only onehalfpassages since the science caste were told this meeting would occur, there was no time to adapt the room to the human's needs, so its comfort was not accounted for. Unknown to the human, as the conversation had begun, infusions had been put into the air to aid openness, and trust. The science caste members in the room had, of course, been inoculated against these, but they seemed to be functioning on the human well. And indeed, with eyes just faintly starting to list. "It's an old story... I mean before we even left our home planet. You know, you don't really think about things till they hit you right in the face y'know? We always thought it was just old stories."
Tiny rustles of anticipation were seen in the manes of the scientists across the room. The human was obviously under the effects of the infusions as it spoke. "Long, long, long time ago, like I said, before we left our homes, we knew there was something else out there. Not, y'know, you folk." And here an arm waved at the crowd who despite themselves, inched back. A brief reminder that this thing was significantly more powerful than them.
"So they were watching us all along, y'know, these... whatchya call them. Gods? Maybe. That's what we thought of them as. Anyways, they stayed out of reach, just watching us, letting the madness overtake us and laughing about it. Till one day, they came down to see what the madness was doing to us close up, and some lucky human caught them off guard, and found they weren't gods after all. And then that lucky human ate his god."
Manes bristled at that, and a few of the science caste even flared fully. None would report that, of course, in light of this. There were beings who maintained the Veil? And humans had killed one? And.. still under the madness... devoured it? What manner of abomination was this? The human, still in the grips of the infusions, apparently unknowing of the effect its words had, continued. "And then something strange happened. He wasn't mad any more. So he waited till another one was there, and did it again, but shared it with others. And then again, and again. And when they had kids, whatever was in them baked into their skin, and no humans were mad any more. The old things drew back from humanity, thought to leave us on our planet while they kept their madness going. But we changed, and every time we unlocked more of the world, we found them. Again and again and again." The burst of amusement from the human was anything but reasuring this time.
"Now there's none left. That we can find. But we will find them... hope I get to be the one to do it. I've always wanted to know how they taste.."
Recordings of counter-intelligence operative "Howard L. Craft", on mission to the IJ-Ani. Scenario Eldritch used. |
tonarrate/The_Part_With_Balls | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | Now don't get me wrong... the illathrod have some of the finest covert-operations units in the known galaxy. But the humans? The humans have something else entirely. It was only [ten minutes] into that first skirmish, that first contact battle between the humans and the illathrod, that the illathrod lost contact with two of their heavy cruisers. The Endeavour and the... Justice, I think it was.
Up until then the humans had been unsurprising. Some novel formations, some weapons with more punch than was anticipated, but nothing the Empire couldn't handle. So as I was saying, they lost contact with the heavy cruisers. This is always annoying in a battle but it does happen. Barriers were still up, engines were still on... so nobody panicked. They had capable crews and everybody knew the game plan: greet these apes with guns blazing and negotiate from a position of strength.
Outnumbered and with smaller ships to boot, the humans seemed stunned by the illathrod aggression... they held their line but wouldn't charge into range of the illathrod guns.
Then the Endeavour starts to drift. Communications still down, engines slow, but the manoeuvre thrusters are going crazy. It moves into position behind the illathrod capital ship, the Monument. And then the Justice, it does the same thing! But this one takes position on the starboard side of the Monument, far closer than regulations allow.
At this point the bridge starts to panic, something could be seriously wrong. The human commander attempts to establish communications with the Monument but gets declined: the illathrod are more worried about this technical issue.
So they send a light cruiser to investigate the Justice, but when they get there it's too late. It starts to roll, and as it brings its port battery up against the Monument, it's own capital ship, the illathrod see these huge black scars on the belly of the Justice. Same on the Endeavour.
And then they open fire. On the Monument.
The Endeavour's spinal cannon puts a slug the size of a frigate right into the Monument's primary thruster. Now at that range, aimed at that part of the ship, you don't need me to tell you that some serious damage was done. That slug tore through the full length of that dreadnought as the Justice opened fire: illathrod later claimed that the humans aimed for the escape pods on purpose but either way... nothing got off that ship alive.
At this point Command is going crazy. And that's when the human fleet attacks. With the Monument blown to dust and the Endeavour and Justice shooting on other illathrod ships it was a total rout, everybody got to safe FTL distance as fast as they could. Some didn't even risk that... there were some collisions in the retreat.
It took the Empire months to piece together what had happened, it was a complete scandal. Before the first shots were even fired, low-speed human stealth-pods had already passed through the shields of those two ships. They cut through the hull right at the base of the communications tower and then this... what's the human phrase... this is the part with "balls". About a dozen human soldiers board each of the ships from those pods.
We're talking heavy cruisers here, crews of two to three hundred. And they never stood a chance. Humans take the bridge and hold it - for the duration of the battle - against the compliment of illathrod troops on board. They somehow take control of the ship... we think they used an AI but they've never admitted it... and then use the two illathrod ships to decapitate the fleet.
So I guess what I'm trying to say... is that when you leave the hive, never take a human at face value. They won't normally screw you over, mind, but there's always a long term plan. Always a backup, a way for them to be the last man standing. Just look at the illathrod today... the sorry bastards. Don't you make their mistake.
|
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_2 | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | I admit I was bored. The negotiations were the usual: Humans can do this and that so long as they don’t blow up this or that place. They may not kill so and so in return they are allowed all the x amount of y they want. Blah blah blah. The air conditioning in my suit malfunctioned and the damn thing was getting stuffy which did not improve my mood at all. So when recess was called I decided to step out and see Konasi for myself. For those of you that don't know or don't care, the Kondar are still very sore about our First Contact. They fear us yes but below that layer of fear is a simmering hatred. Kinda like a child has against his parents when they ground him.
Anyway I'm strolling along the city streets, the locals giving me and my bodyguard a wide, WIDE breadth, when I stumble upon a cineplex. Normally I wouldn't be interested but the title of one caught my eye, '19: First Contact'. I ask the fellow at the ticket booth and he tells me that it's about when the humans first made contact with his race and the ensuing war. Which is weird because the history books don't mention much about a war. So after he's done urinating himself I decide to purchase a pass to watch this bit of comedy... and that was when I saw how exaggerated the stories of our race have gone.
The average human movie is at most 3 and a half hours long. Kondar flicks last longer, and this little number was a whopping 6.7 hours. Thankfully it was already starting so I did not have to see the previews. The room was darkened and was relatively conditioned so I opted to remove my helmet, something I know I should not have done, but hey, it was dark, everyone was focused on the opening parental advisory and reminder to shut off all extrasource communication devices. To take more caution I sat in the back where no one was positioned, so I believe no harm was done. It felt nice to cool down.
It started as your typical film... 'We zannen (that's what they call themselves, like us calling ourselves human) have always looked up for our answers. We sought life out there in the galaxy, and the very souls we reached out to reached back to us. In time we thrived. In time we established ourselves as a major power everywhere in the known verse. Except the Veil." Then it cuts to our section of the galaxy, which of course looks nothing like it really was. It's basically Hell in space the way they portrayed it, full of derelict ships, planets that look all funky, and suns imploding on themselves, etc. Not true at all but real good special effects.
"All ventures into the Veil had met with failure. All who entered it were never heard from again. It was a wasteland. Someplace we KNEW no life could exist. It seems what WE know and what the GALAXY knows are two different things." Cheesy. Ass. Line.
So as we all know the Kondar were fighting the Gox Union that was aggresively expanding its borders into allied space, and a Kondar security fleet had just defeated a Gox Scouting fleet. It was a nice looking battle, plenty of special effects and explosions. Then they expand beyond the battle. It was taking place at Station 19, the Veil checkpoint. One that trafficked all ships going into the Veil, though mostly it was too keep aliens with more balls than brains from going straight into the deathtrap of our home.
So the Kondar are repairing themselves yeah? And that's when they come to the main character of this story, the captian of the KonVass. That's right, the very KonVass the Supremacy shot down. So captain KoSag is talking with his crew about the Gox getting more aggressive and the problems that would cause, and was debating whether or not to requisition more ships for patrol, when his ensign (I think that was an ensign, I can't remember Kondar-Human rank equivalence) pointed out they were getting a strong energy reading. I'm sure you and I both know this is bull crap, we were running in slowly so our energy output was minimal, they wouldn't have been able to detect the ship until it got to...well the station. And we both know both of us were caught with our pants down when we saw each other. But the Kondar still see it in a different way...
Few Kondar aside from diplomats every see a human AS a human. And for reasons I still don't know, they have not disclosed our appearance to the public, and so many are still in the dark as to what we are, only having blurry, bigfoot-esque photos to go on. Whoever directed this had an interesting imagination.
We are bipedal, that much they got down. But they believe we got mandibles where our cheeks should be. And that we have three eyes, holes underneath our arms that sprout tentacle like appendages, for eherm invasive procedures as I was to learn later, and that our ships look more like a set off a horror flick than a ship.
So our ships drops into their system. And the first thing they do is pan to the 'humans', showing what's going on inside. Apparently on the 'Soopremetchy', the captain...hang on...it still makes me laugh when I think of it.
Those idiots got our whole language wrong. It's like they took whatever words of our language they thought sounded coolest and mashed em together to form our language. The grammatical errors and accent are so atrocious for a second I thought 'What the fuck is he saying?' So the captain...wait...the captain says, in the subtitles "Interesting. Fresh Meat. This will make a nice change to the usual prey." Though in our language they way he says it is "Mash-up! Tasty food. Nice kill hunting spree!"
And the other 'human' in subtitles replies 'Yes Overcaptain.' Though he says 'Affirmative Caption.'(No I did not spell that wrong, that's what he/she/it said). I didn't even know we had an Overcaptain in the Navy. They seem to know our ranking system better than us...that was sarcasm in case whoever's reading this could not pick it up. Anyway, the Overcaptain then says 'Inform the lesser beings that the Hunt begins.'(Tell bugs fight start now!) "Yes Overcaptain" (Affirmative Caption)
So the good guy KoSag takes action and aligns the fleet in a pincer formation preparing to fire, when the Caption of the Fleet, some fat guy tells him not to fire. The two get into an argument, the Captain of the Fleet is obviously being made out to look like some pompous buffoon that wanted peace with a bunch of murdering babyeaters. You know, a cliché.
Then the infamous transmission comes. It's static-y but what I could make out was it sounded like 'How are you gentleman...all your base are belong to us.'
Wow. Deja vu
The Captain of the Fleet says "Hold your fire they are trying to make contact!" And then the 'Soopremetchy', blows his ass into a half cup of atomic matter, the ever famous 'warning shot' was a kill shot. KoSag takes control of the fleet and orders everyone to open fire, doing a lot of cosmetic damage to the ship's front end. And the...ugh... 'Soopremetchy' goes all out, blasting nearly the entire fleet to scrap in a matter of minutes. And there's a lot of scenes of Kondar dying horrifically, like getting burned, exploded, torn if half from shrapnel, getting sucked out into space, getting vaporized by a plasma shot.
And then the 'Soopremetchy' captain says "Pitiful things. We leave, hopefully they will provide better sport when we give them time to prepare." (Stupid. Go now frown bad. Ball our game better with practice swing.).
"Yes Overcaptain" (Affirmative Caption), and the 'Soopremetchy' starts to turn back towards the Veil. KoSag, battered and bloody, pushes a corpse off the command console, starts manual override, and drives the KonVass into the 'Soopremetchy's' way, letting loose with everything he has. The 'Overcaptain' gives the order to cripple the ship but not destroy it, as the crews' 'fighting spirit' interests him (Beat crap out of but no shit beat. I you him like of play time fight).
And so the 'Soopremetchy' Blasts the KonVass with its Main Cannon, which we know was not placed on the front, and blasts the ship aside, but doesn't outright destroy it. KoSag then is informed Life Support, and damn near everything but the engines is shot to hell, and he decides to abandon ship, but not before he rigs the KonVass to do a suicide charge right into the 'Soopremetchy''s side.
The KonVass Explodes, causing the shields to drop, and causing a sizeable dent in the 'Soopremetchy'. Afterwards, KoSag falls unconcious and the screen goes black. The crowd is silent for a moment, the only thing you could he was me trying to hold back my giggling. Damn that was funny. Thank JeBudAllaHind no one heard me.
I stopped for a moment to look down at my watch to look at the time, and only a single standard hour had passed. I had to sit through 5 more hours of this? I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I didn't get a choice as the film resumed. KoSag coming to in a medbay of a Kondar Cruiser, the KonKin I think it was called. So KoSag goes through the usual bullshit in these kinds of flicks, dealing with a top brass that thinks he hit his head to hard with the usual, "Nothing can live in the Veil!" stuff that they've been spouting since the beginning of the film. So it goes on to KoSag temporarily relieved of duty while he fully recovers from his head trauma. Enter love interest the surprisingly attractive doctor (and I mean attractive by human standards), who at first does not believe KoSag, treating him as another mental patient. But as the scene keeps shifting to the Supremacy glassing made up planets, people obviously are starting to get suspicious, including the doctor, who starts asking about this 'phantom ship'.
Of course we never glassed any world. Admittedly we blew one up but that was when we thought it was uninhabited, but humanity had made only 2 other major incursions into Kondar space, both done by pirates. The rest were minor skirmishes that didn't happen until WAY after First Contact. Eventually through a 2 hour long reel of drama which I slept through (except for the love scene, that was actually pretty interesting. Didn't know a Kondar woman was that flexible), KoSag is delivering a message to the Gathering (basically every branch of their government meshed together into a sausage fest of epic proportions), warning of this race of planet killing maniacs. Even with the overwhelming evidence, the Gathering is hesitant about making war, especially while Gox are still fighting them. Suddenly Gox transmission! They shall ally with Kondar after our atrocious crimes committed against them (In reality all we did was drop out of warp kinda close to a flag ship. Close enough to where we tore through the whole thing as we decelerated, and then obliterated the entire1st, 2nd, and 3rd fleet when they retaliated. We still apologized but them Gox know how to hold a grudge).
Course with the overwhelming evidence, and the support of their one time enemies, the Kondar go to war! Except the cliché corrupt politician, and by some political bullshit the Kondar have, he stalls the whole vote. I would explain why that worked but it would take longer than watching this damn movie. So KoSag is still grounded for massive drama before the Gox interrupt, pledging their aid against us on some kind of blood oat that apparently overrides the other guy's override. Finally some real action.
So the Allied Systems alongside the Gox Union form this huge fleet to combat the human fleet, which by the way looks like someone copypasted the Supremacy several hundred times over. KoSag is given command of the KonSen, and placed under the command of another commander, one that was obviously red shirt material. And I was right. After the not so motivating speech about how they were the galaxy's last hope, they started fighting our fleet which was just twiddling its thumbs waiting for them in a random tract of space, and it wasn't 3 minutes into it that the Captain of the Fleet gets torn in half by teleporting boarding parties. The ensign tried to make a brave show of it, but she only killed one 'human' before she was restrained. Remember those tentacle things I was talking about earlier? Yeah. Tentacle rape...humans aren't the only one with that fetish. Interesting to watch though.
So then it turns away from the massive galactic battle to KoSag, whose ship lost power. And since the people by the reactor are not longer responding (cut to reactor room filled with that goop they call blood while humans are eating/raping half dead Kondar), he leads a team to go down there. An action flick quickly becomes a horror flick as the human hunting band hunts the team down one by one, eventually only KoSag is left, who manages to kill the entire hunting party but one, who teleports him back to the ...Soopremetchy. The Overcaptain, who despite never meeting him, knows KoSag instantly and gloats over his triumph. Then faster than you can say 'plot hole' he breaks free, and sacrifices himself to kill the Overcaptain, pushing him into a reactor core, which by the way you should NEVER leave open. For some reason that ended the battle. Apparently our chain of command is destroyed when you kill our captain, so afterwards we retreated back into the Veil.
KoSag is hailed as a hero, hooray and all that. Then some stirring speech from KoSag, a subtitle that says '20 <Unit of time: closest translation years> later' Humans are back, but we find a massive fleet waiting for us, that blow us to bits. With KoSag as Captain of the Fleet of course. And it ends with the same Kondar from the beginning saying "'We zannen have always looked up for our answers. We sought life out there in the galaxy, and the very souls we reached out to reached back to us. But the galaxy is a fickle place. Some of the very beings we called out to were not interested in peace. Some were more interested in slaughter." Cut to human hunter guy. "Some in sport." Cut to Overcaptain. "But we zannen shall prevail. We have before, we have now. And we always shall." And then the rolling credits play as the lights slowly come back on.
I fumble to get my helmet back on before anyone turns, and it clicked into place thankfully quick. The Kondar seem oblivious to me, talking among each other what they thought of the movie.
"I thought it was alright. Never thought of humans as looking like that but <no direct translation available. Divine being> damn they look ugly."
"KoSag never did any of that though. I thought he retired a drunk."
"Well you know these movie producers, big on action little on history."
"I liked the movie, for once it shows US fighting back."
I couldn't resist. "I thought it was a load of crap. I mean is the guy dead or not?!"
When everyone looked at me, I couldn't help but crack a smile. Course they couldn't see it under my helmet. That's probably what got them all screaming and running out of the Cineplex. I certainly had fun for one evening.
Later on it became a cult classic, because of some rumor spread that all who watch the movie and talk bad about it will then die from angry human spirits bound to the essence of the film or something. Wonder how that got started. I think I'll ask for a copy of that film during the next meeting.
-Taken from the Journal of T. Rollfaec, currently promoted to Chief diplomat. |
tonarrate/Theyre_Made_Out_Of_Meat | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | "They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can mark this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
|
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_3 | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | 2 worlds. Yes that's right, I not only negotiated the release of the Gox occupation, but I also got 2 whole uninhabited worlds out of the deal. How? Well it wasn't easy. Seeing as how I had to present myself before the entire Cohesion. That was a task in itself as dozens of representatives from each of the Unionite races we're all staring at me.
First of all it was a nasty situation. Some screw up didn't realize the same patch of territory we had our eyes on had already been claimed by the Gox Union. So when 2000 colonists come down in full body suit, the Gox see it as a damn invasion force. After half of em are killed and the rest held hostage, I am called to the damn negotiating table. It was bad. I knew the Gox still didn't like humans after our erm...first encounter. And the embassy reflected that. They clearly didn't even want us on the planet as it was crappy let me tell you. The food sucked, the services were terrible, and the rooms cramped, and basically a poorhouse with gold lined plates. Not the best position for me as I was still deciding exactly how I was going to negotiate the release of 1323 or our folks to a union of five different races, all of whom despise us. A shame really, the Kwixa women are kinda hot…
Anyway I'm getting carried away. So the embassy is crap, I established that much. But since I figured no speech I give could stir the hearts and minds, or whatever they use, to our position, so I started studying their political system more in depth. That was when I stumbled upon something very interesting. With it in mind I started making additions to my speech. A lot of additions. When the Union wants to negotiate something with a race outside the Union, they do it in something called the Cohesion. It makes them seem more intimidating when I'm speaking to their leaders and their delegates. The leaders don't say anything, but instead relay what they want to say through their delegates, which I find stupid because my translator picks up what they're saying anyway. By day I step into the room where all Cohesions are held. The Kwixa delegate is looking really, REALLY hot. Thank the holy spirit of Buddhallah my suit was covering my erection. They are all staring down at me as I arrange my papers and begin my negotiatin'.
Naturally they refuse like they always do, but I knew of a little thing called "Outer's plea" where a an alien to the Union may do what we humans like to call a filibuster, and talk endlessly about anything. the Unionites pride themselves of being master bullshitters, even so far as training themselves to withstand hours of useless jargon, but they have yet to meet me. The helmet works to my advantage as it relays everything I say in a monotone drawl. This annoys the crap out of them as they realize what I'm doing and that it means they have to sit down, shut up and listen to me for however long I'm going to talk. I first explained the rules of human poker, a favorite pastime of mine. And then I linked that to the appalling conditions of the embassy. Suddenly there was my filibuster as I started going down the list of problems. Starting with living conditions I talked for 3 hours straight about how hard it was for me to stretch my limbs in my room. The delegates were getting uncomfortable in their small seats. Next I went on and on about the com services and how expensive it was. I would pause briefly for a drink, the delegates would look hopefully thinking I was finished, then resume much to their disappointment. 14 hours in, I am thanking the additions to my suit injecting endorphins in me so I don't feel my legs cramping up. The delegates have requisitioned blankets as even they realize that I am probably gonna go all night.
As the night rolled into dawn I stopped listing my complaints about food, and moved on to complaining about the restrooms. For Unionites who have been consuming water all yesterday, it was torture. I started off complaining about the size of the toilet size. How there was not enough LIQUID inside. How I could not find RELIEF from the narrow PIPES. Imagine then developing half inch pipes for a full inch bum hole. It was a brutal experience that I relayed in grisly detail. I can tell that one or two were crossing their leg appendages, while I was grateful for the waste collection pouches in my suit. I was nearing the 24 hour mark when I started talking about the massive dump I took when the Gera delegate called for a break. Phew that gives me time to write new material, while they went to the bathroom. When they came back I could see them slightly refreshed, but their hopes died as I dramatically took a long roll of paper and unrolled it, letting the bottom comically slide on the floor.
Day 2. They had enough. Just as I was about to go into detail how the mini bar in my room had more poison than alcohol, they stopped me mid-sentence, not the delegates, but their leaders, they seemed much more willing to reopen negotiations, just as long as I stopped talking. In less than an hour our people we're homebound and with two new worlds in our pocket I thankfully slipped out of my suit for the scrubbers, the poor bastards. I took a long, gratifying shower when I had company. Kwixa delegate.
Yes you know where I'm going. She liked how I handled the cohesion. And how she always had a thing about humans and that mysterious armor we wear. I offered to show her that there was nothing to be afraid of, and she accepted a little too eagerly. Yeah. We went on space dates. And guess what, you know those headlines about us establishing an effective diplomatic relation? I released a thousand human hostages, got us two more planets, and made peace with an alien race, all in one week!
But enough about me, how are you doing?
Transmission from Chief Diplomat T.Rollfaec, to Chief Diplomat Gutter Barba . Rollfaec is pending promotion |
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_1 | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | When mankind ventured out into space, we never suspected what was to come. Our first inhabited planet was less than thirty light-years away, far closer than we would have thought. The issue?
Everyone was dead.
The entire planet was like that, a perfectly stable world with no issues that we could determine, and yet it seems the suicide rates were the greatest cause of death among the people. We don't know why, but they apparently had been doing this for some time. Years of study later showed that the reptile-like race had taken nearly ten times as long as we did to reach the industrial age, and had not gotten very far beyond that.
Time went on, and we soon discovered that this was not an isolated occurrence. Species after species had killed each other and themselves off for one reason or another. Some had died off so early only a few stone monuments marked that they had ever been there, some had established empires spanning nearly a dozen systems. But always they were all dead, down to the last child.
And so we travelled the stars, colonising the lost homeworlds we found, along with others. We studied the creatures on many worlds, although none bore intelligent life. In time we studied the technology of the more advanced dead races, gleaming a scientific secret or two we had missed. It was rather amusing to see the scientific community collectively slap their heads when they see the simple ideas and concepts they had missed.
Once, and just once, we found a sentient race still alive. On a planet with 3/4th the gravity of earth, a planet primarily dominated by jungles bore a race of insect-like scavengers. They were barely beyond the Stone Age, farming and agriculture still in its early days.
We considered making contact, but in the end decided against it. They were a very violent race, and many would kill one another for the smallest detail. Suicide also seemed to be something they would resort to with little or no good reason. In fact the entire race seemed insane. Long-term observation showed that after hatching the individual would slowly but surely go insane, to the point where none reached old age. In fact the only reason this race had not yet gone extinct is a combination of high birth rates, short life spans, and a child being able to defend itself hours after birth. In any other race this bizarre affliction can and did drive them to extinction.
For nearly seven hundred years, mankind grew and expanded. We did not find another living race during that time, or find out how we were immune. Many came up with theories, but none fit better than any others. Ethnic, religious, and cultural differences became less important when you were away from Earth, and in the end those who could not agree simply lived on different worlds. The UTA, United Terran Alliance, controlled over 87% of mankind's colonies from its seat of power on Earth. A few rogue factions cropped up, piracy and smuggling saw a rebirth in this new space age, and mankind went on as it always had.
Then a moment that would change our history came. The UTA Dreadnought "Supremacy" was in essence a city in space. Constructed with our most advanced technology, to the point where systems were updated during construction, and having a length of nearly seven miles, it was the mightiest ship we had ever created. The Supremacy was sent to investigate a new world our long-range sensors show had space-age technology upon it. It was farther out than we had ever travelled before, but not by much. It was assumed that this would be just another dead world, that we might find some usable raw materials pre-harvested in the form of abandoned constructions in orbit.
What we found was an outpost of a space-faring race, its people still alive and well. Dozens of ships were in orbit around a rocky empty world, along with a space dock to repair and refuel them. They were remarkably primitive compared to our own, and much smaller. The largest was perhaps the length of a football field, if that. From the scarring and damage, along with the derelict ship floating nearby of a different make, they had been fighting not too long ago.
Our first contact did not go so well, however. We would later piece together what happened, and it went something like this. As soon as what might have at the time been the largest spaceship in the galaxy appeared on top of them, the race known as the Kondar were sent to the edge of panic. The commander tried to keep a disaster from occurring and ordered his ships not to open fire. Communications on both sides failed, we ourselves had long ago stopped carrying any equipment or training our crew for first-encounters, and apparently the Kondar had not had any first contacts of their own in hundreds of years. It also didn't help that our subspace communications were just advanced enough that the garbled words the poor Kondar picked up on their outdated systems sounded horribly sinister and alien even by the wide standards of the galaxy as it now was.
One of the Kondar gunmen on the closest ship had a panic attack after hearing our garbled transmission. He fired upon the Supremacy, which in a placating gesture had lowered its shields. The shot was able to breach the hull at a single point, and cost the lives of three crewmen. The captain of Supremacy ordered the shields raised and a warning shot fired. Unlucky for the Kondar, the concept of warning shots was alien to them, and they did not stop to ask why the single shot had missed.
It was a short fight. The Supremacy blew away a single craft to secure its escape victor; a sad but necessary tactic. This only hurt our reputation further, with what happened later.
As we soon discovered, nearly 3% of the galaxy was part of what was known as the "Veil of Madness". Any race within this sector of space would slowly but surely go insane. Short jaunts were safe enough, but more than that and permanent damage to the mind would result. We had apparently been sitting in the galactic equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, and had finally breached its edge. When the Kondar realized that both our entrance and escape vectors lead directly into the veil, a panic started. With surprising speed, news spread among their people, and among others, of what had happened.
The story grew worse with each retelling, especially once it left official military reports. Tales of the titanic black ship that came from beyond the veil, sent out signals in a horrid dark language, obliterated dozens of the Kondar's finest warships in seconds for no reason, and then vanished like a ghost soon spread everywhere. Humanity had become the bogeymen of the universe.
Raids from pirate groups further cemented our dark reputation, and in time we came to work with the role. Every attempt to convince people that we wanted fair negations was seen as a deception. Rather than fight a losing battle, we played to the role given to us. Soon we were seen as 'wicked but not unreasonable' and gained both fear and respect throughout the galaxy. Few humans appeared in view of aliens outside of deliberately frightening power armour, and human ambassadors used voice synthesizers to sound like that first garbled communication had.
Looking back, it's actually worked out in our favour. After years of contact, most alien races know almost nothing about humans other than exaggerated horror stories; they rarely bother us, and the ones that do never return home.
The only bit of info we were more than happy to share with them was the reason we can live in the veil. Turns out we were all a little crazy to start with. I think the fact that we're pulling the largest practical joke in the galaxy was already proof enough of that. |
tonarrate/The_Egg | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way. |
tonarrate/Servitude | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | I didn’t understand why they did it at first, I probably still don’t. I used to live on a farm on Xangzie. Me and my mate, Gen, were bought to work there, it was a Sliv couple. I thought they treated us right, they gave us food and shelter. They even gave us one of their old vidboxes for our room occasionally. We were treated better than most Garths. It was a good life. Then I saw on the news, the Council made contact with a new species. I thought they looked like fur-less Yamagh when I first saw them, only a lot bigger. Humans, they called themselves.
First contact is fairly rare but most have seen at least one in their lifespan. I was there when the Platorax joined, so I knew what was coming. They needed to build working translators, establish currency exchanges and connect them to the extranet before the humans could properly interact with the rest of the galaxy. The whole process took at least 3 cycles, but it still wouldn’t be perfect until a about 30 or 40 cycles.
Anyway, the strange things didn’t start happening until 4 cycles later, when the first human world was connected to the extranet. I was lying down on my bed, with Gen tending to my body. I accidentally left the gates open and one of the Trang ran onto a road. You can guess what happened next. My Masters punished me, which I probably deserved. Trang are expensive to grow. Anyway, that’s when I saw it on the news. The humans had read about servitude on the extranet, and they were mad. Very mad. Madder than my masters. Maybe they never had servitude on their homeworld, but wanted their own Garth? Well it’s a bit self-entitled to expect people to give them Garths. They started shouting at the Council meetings, hundreds of humans travelled to the capital, and angry about something. At the time I thought they were being ungrateful, the Council had opened up to them, and they spit in the Councils face. It was strange.
Things started escalating after that. The humans began threatening violence, I still didn’t understand why they didn’t just buy Garths. The Council shrugged of course, I mean these humans couldn’t beat the masters. The Council has always been there. Soon my mate was carrying my child. We began worrying. If the masters found out, they would kill her. I didn’t know what to do. We decided to hide it, but in about a cycle it’s going to become obvious. That’s when the humans began their war.
They started fighting against the Council, targeting servitude centres and stealing the Garths. Did they want us for themselves? They were showing footage of a taken servitude centre, the press were allowed in. The translators were still buggy but I could understand most of it. Most of it were talking about things like rights and equals. Garths weren’t allowed go to school so I couldn’t understand but I knew that equals was a maths thing. And then he said something, he directed it at Garths everywhere. It translated perfectly, but I didn’t understand the meaning at the time, “We are all born free and equal.”. I figured it didn’t matter anyway, the humans would likely be destroyed by the Council. I was wrong.
I didn’t know this at the time, but the humans grew up on war. There was always war on their world, and it didn’t end until hundreds of cycles after they left their solar system. War was all they knew until the ‘Peace era’ as they called it. I guess that’s why they decided to fight. Doing nothing was alien to them, I suppose going to war must have felt like coming home.
Of course I didn’t know this at the time, so when it was shown that the humans were managing to survive. Not only that, in the footage it looked like some Garth were fighting with them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This wasn’t good news, and it only added to the stress of my mate. We still didn’t know what we would do. It didn’t matter, because they found out anyway.
I thank the humans for what happened next. I didn’t really understand it, but them freeing servitude centres meant that my mate was more valuable, so they spared her life. Instead they would keep her and sell the child. We were happy that we were spared. Then the Humans began winning. The pushed their way all the into the central planets, and even made it to Xangzie. I saw their drop pods, it was like the stars were falling. Me, my mate and our masters all hid underground when we saw them coming. The masters had built a makeshift shelter. Eventually the Humans were in the house. We tried to keep as quiet as we can in case they found us. It didn’t help, they found us anyway.
When they marched down the stairs with their projectile weapons, they looked like the beasts in the stories my mother told back at the servitude centres. They were black all over their body, you couldn’t see their faces, you didn’t know where the weapon ends and the body begins. They were not the same humans I saw on the vidbox. One of my master grabbed me, forced me in front of him. He started shouting, “Stay back. Stay back or I swear I’ll cut him.”
The humans stared at me, probably waiting for their translators. Then they looked at each other then nodded.
A bright flash came from the end of their weapon-hand and the noise almost deafened me. My master dropped to the floor, while my other master shrieked which I thought would definitely deafen me. One of the humans grabbed my master and took her away. One of the humans walked towards me, I stepped backwards, not know what he would do. That was when my mate started screaming, all this stress had caught up to our child. My translator kicked in. “OH GOD, JENKINS! GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE, SHE’S GOING INTO LABOR!”
It’s been 10 cycles since that day. The humans won their war. Evicted the head of the council, put themselves on top and rewrote a whole bunch of laws, banning servitude. They added clinics which helped Garths ‘re-enter society’ Taught me how how to do maths, which was very useful, among other things. I get paid for my work now, and I can use it to buy nice things for my mate. I still don’t understand why they went out of their way to help us, why they sacrificed so many of their kind to end something that has been going on so long that no one minded it.
But after watching my daughter go for her first day of school, I think I’m coming close to understanding. |
tonarrate/Our_First_And_Last_Mistake | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | I remember the war with humanity. It was our first and last mistake, the last war of the Gwin, the war that destroyed us.
I was barely a hatchling at the time the war started, barely old enough to understand what the politicians were saying never, mind understand the intricacies of galactic politics or jingoistic fevers. Some dispute about colonisation rights. Something trivial and unimportant. But something we foolishly thought destroying a human vessel was worth it.
I remember the first few days of the war. The propaganda on the vid screens. The pictures from the front lines of our glorious armies, winning victory after victory. They compared the primitive human weapons to our advanced technology. The showed us the bedraggled human prisoners after they surrendered. Made them read out statements of aggression and war guilt for the galactic news feeds.
Of course the vids never told us for every human we killed they killed ten of us.
We took the worlds we wanted, then got greedy and took some more. The humans were professional, but we had numbers. City after city feel beneath our guns, enslaved human populations churned out guns to use on their own people. But even as we broke their fleet at K’nassi, sent it tumbling into that dying star, leaking fire and atmosphere, we realised we were losing.
Every world we took, they made us pay for tenfold. They sent soldiers behind our lines to sabotage our factories, assassinate our leaders. Women and children blew themselves up to kill just a few reservists in logistic convoys. Every weapon we made the humans copied, every stratagem they countered. We had stretched ourselves too thin against an enemy who was too determined not to lose.
As the humans began to take back the worlds we’d taken from them, we grew desperate. We stopped taking prisoners, executing humans by the hundred. As we left a world we glassed the major population centres to deny the humans a propaganda victory. We fought tooth and claw and mandible as slowly they pushed us from their space. World by world we inflicted horror upon horror on them, as world by world the Grey Ships of Earth reclaimed their homes.
We fell back until there was nowhere left to go. And the only worlds left were ours. I watched as the humans scattered our fleets in the upper atmosphere, the burning husks of our ships filling the skies. I smelt the ozone of an orbital lance as it burned away a military base ten kilometres away out of existence. The look of pure shame as the Arch-Committee transmitted our full and utter surrender.
And I remember too, the first sight of a human, tall and upright, a giant of muscle and bone, the searching eyes of a predator born. I remember him gesturing me over to him and the certainty of my death filling my mind. I was a child but I was prepared to die for the Gwin. A sacrifice to allow the humans to take their fully justified revenge upon us.
And I remember my first taste of the chocolate bar he gave me.
The humans revenge was total. From the ruins they built schools and roads. Hospitals and sanitation plants. The human engineer brought running water free of parasites to my hivestack for the first time. The inoculations against worker diseases the committees had never bother to cure. They wrought revenge with words we’d never heard. Democracy, Freedom, Brotherhood. They wrought it in the form of Human rights, and most powerfully of all...forgiveness.
And their revenge was total. In just 10 years human children and Gwin were playing together on the fields outside the school. In 30 years they were fighting beside another against the Sheliathi. 100 years from the days the humans landed on our worlds and the Gwin no longer exist. Admitted to humanity, nominated by Terrans and approved by a unanimous decision of the Human parliament, the 6th species to gain such an honour. The Gwin no longer exist, but humanity just grew stronger.
Yes I remember the war with humanity. Our last and best mistake.
President David X’Lisjdl of the Gwin, as part of the official ceremonies celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Gwin’s admittance to Humanity.
|
tonarrate/The_Artisans | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | The moment the signal was returned to us, calling out from the depths of space, I swore my heart stopped.
We were a simple mining ship. We had a simple life style. Find space rocks, mine them, sell the ore. Not a glamorous lifestyle, but it paid the bills.
It was one day years ago that changed our world forever.
It was a simple job for simple men. We were busy hauling a massive payload of helium and uranium back to the station, enough to last us a good month without more work. Then it came from nowhere. A basic hail, one from almost a lightyear away. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. But the transmission wasn’t human.
Against our regulations, we got curious and I ordered our nav officer to send a reply, one filled with goodwill. A second later, we got a reply, along with an alien, dreadnought sized ship warping in from nowhere.
That massive ship was blocky, utilitarian, and wholly ugly. Like a child had pieced leftover Legos together for form something vaguely looking like a ship.
And it was right on top of us. As luck would have it, none of us were trained for first contact.
With haste, we send more friendly hails, hoping we didn’t anger this force of nature. I blasted an order over the paging system, telling the cook to get something started and to clean up the mess hall for guests. Mom always did say it was hard to stay mad at someone offering free food. Looking back, I say it was the most truthful thing I’d ever heard.
The translators the spooks from the Central Colony Bureau made came in handy. For whatever reason, the little headmounted devices made a cypher for the gravelly alien dialect with insane speed. Within a few sentences, we could talk easily to the hulking, shark-like beings. Never again would I badmouth a CCB spook.
When they came aboard, the huge aliens looked around at human ship with looks akin to wonder, not at all minding the fearful looks of the crew. It was like they had seen a real ship for the first time. The metal, drab mining vessel was nothing impressive though. Only the high-traffic areas were furnished. These areas seemed to capture their interest more than anything, as they would gape openly. The differences between the crew member’s appearances seem to startle them as well. Seeing Yeoman Fuji and Private Jamal walking down the hall together was enough to give them pause.
They would chat as they walked, always using the same words with no deviation. It was as if they had no words with many meanings, or meanings that could be expressed with a single word. Their own translators would constantly make errors. Often times they would have their word tense wrong, or their pronunciation. Slang simply didn’t go though.
When we came to the now cleaned mess hall, the hulking aliens stopped dead when they saw the table piled high with food, albet, the low-grade things miners eat. They seemed almost eager at the sight and turned to me, tiny eyes flashing with the silent question.
You think I was going to tell them no? I decided we could talk about not killing us AFTER they had a bite to eat.
When everyone was sat down, the lead alien took what looked like a greasy cheeseburger in it’s beefy, four fingered hand. The instant its teeth sunk into the sandwich, tears sprang to it’s eyes. It was in that moment I saw my life flash before my eyes.
You could understand why I was confused when it slowly chewed the bite, then looked to me, beady eyes still misty.
“W-what sort of divine be you? Will you follow us back? Bearing more gifts like the one’s we’ve seen?”
That was the line. The line that told the human race its soon-to-be role in the galactic community.
We aren’t warriors, as the mighty Gunbar, the ones aboard our ship, grew from thousands of years of war. We aren’t scholars, as the old Yan’saltho had traveled the stars and seen it all before we even climbed out of the oceans. We aren’t workers, as the insectoid Folexas could build empires in a single nightcycle with lightning haste and no mistakes.
No. In a universe void of nourishment of the soul, we were to become the artisans. The ones who made simple surviving into thriving. Thriving with both joy and inward intrigue.
Never did we forget the reactions we got to TRUE art.
Mom. Thanks again for the advice. |
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_2_5 | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | From the audio logs of Hurann Grethunk:
Our group was handpicked from the best of the best of each race in our alliance. The smartest Kragag, the fastest Urloc, the most nearly invisible Slyarn. We had a cutting edge ship and the best funding we could get while still remaining a secret project. We had enough engine power to bug out to near FTL in under 50 seconds, and to FTL in 2 minutes. We had state of the art stealth technology. Despite all this effort, every last one of us was a poke away from voiding their bowels. Our mission was utter madness. We were going to enter the Veil, and spy on what we believed to be a Human space installation.
The Veil itself is immaterial. Whatever it is, no sensors can detect it. We've only learned its boundaries by trial and costly error. However, when we passed the border, we all shuddered as the realization hit us. We were in Human territory. If we got caught, we were beyond aid.
We had to be quick to avoid the effects of the Veil, so we had been inserted not too far from the target, which appeared at this range to be an observation station. A single hangar, one of those damnable Human shield emitters (which our people were furiously trying to counter) and a number of vicious looking spikes that could send all manner of death our way. A chill ran through us all as we neared scanning distance. Hopefully, the stealth tech would work and we could get done without incident.
"Hey Bob, get a load of this."
"What is that? Not like any ship we've seen before."
"Yeah, it's new I guess. From the lowered emissions I think it's supposed to be stealthed, but we picked it up about 7 minutes ago. We traced the vector and it entered the veil about half an hour ago."
"Half an hour? A stealth vessel? Those bastards are trying to spy on us."
"What should we do?"
Everything was going smoothly. Our sensors were having trouble locking on to the station, but that was expected. A few more minutes and we could begin the scans. Then, our ship's lights flashed red and the captain's display flashed warning signs. We had just been pinged.
A ping is a detection method, much like a sonar ping. It's a definite "we know you're there" and when we realized what it was, half the crew really did void their bowels. The captain ordered an immediate turn around and the mission was scrapped. We escaped to FTL in record time, but even that success was dampened by the failure of our mission.
Our superiors will not be pleased. |
tonarrate/The_Veil_Of_Madness_Torn | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | The atmosphere in the lecture hall was normal. Some students buzzed and whispered. Some texted or chatted on cell-u-voxes. A few even had notebooks out, and they were the minority. The Professor stepped up to the lectern, and the room grew quieter.
“All right, guys, I have an announcement to make first and foremost,” the aging Grestonian said, and the room got a bit quieter at that. Professor Snar'drik was a stickler for procedure. “Today's lecture on human contact is cancelled. Before the whole classroom unites in celebration,” he added, glaring pointedly at two students who had already grabbed their bags, "I have arranged for an expert in the field, Doctor Ulor Tilol of the Union Diplomatic Exchange, to teach the lesson for me. Doctor?” he asked, nodding respectfully and stepping off the stage.
The classroom buzz got a bit louder as a tall, slender being in a white vacuum suit got up and clumsily walked up onto the stage. It stood before the podium and raised its golden visor to face the assembled students.
“Good afternoon,” the person said, sliding a small storage stick into the lectern's data slot. “My name is Doctor Ulor Tilol, and I'm a Contact Specialist at the Union Diplomatic Exchange. I think the professor may have already told you, in fact,” making an exaggerated gesture at the teacher. A few students snickered.
“Today, I'll be covering a few points on the first contact between the humans and, well, more or less everybody else. The story's been retold in popular fiction dozens of times, each tale more exaggerated and inaccurate than the last. I don't know if you've covered this or not, class, but there's this miraculous, magical time period, within which all portrayals of a historic event are completely wrong. I dare to hope that that time has passed for what Humans call the First Contact Incident, and what at least a few of the more media-conscious of you probably call the Soopremetchy War.”
Several Media Relations students laughed out loud, while the rest of the audience looked confused.
The room darkened and the projector flicked on, a hologram floating into the center of the viewing dome. It was the region of space known as the Veil of Madness, a block of the galaxy that nobody but the Humans could inhabit safely. The map slowly zoomed in until all the class could see was one side of the roughly cubical region. Several red dots appeared where human ships had engaged in piracy, several dozen more turned bright blue to indicate where native civilizations had succumbed to the Madness and killed themselves off, and one orange, blinking light appeared where the first contact between Humans and the rest of the galaxy had occurred.
The visiting Doctor pointed each significant dot out in turn. When he arrived at the last one, the site of the Supremacy's accidental combat action, he took care to point it out. "Class, does anyone know which of the...maybe fifty stars visible in this one single view are the Human Alpha worlds, the ones where the Humans have the core of their mining and colonization efforts?”
A few raised voices mumbled out answers, while one or two people raised appendages. The visiting lecturer pointed to one of these more respectful students, and she raised her voice to be heard. "None of them."
“Precisely, ma'am, well done," the Doctor said, gesturing at the controls. The view zoomed back out, until the entire Veil was visible. The Doctor pointed a finger at the heart of the Veil and a red spotting laser emerged. A few star systems turned yellow when the beam touched them. "Its these ones, here at the center of the Veil. Probably the most heavily defended stars in the universe. Each has the equivalent of five Union patrol fleets in its outer defense circuit, and a full Union Battlegroup in planetary defense."
The room came to life with unsettled buzzes. A full Battlegroup would be enough to seize complete and uncontested control of any star system in the universe thus far, no question. The Doctor didn't seem to mind the noise, talking right through it. "This is not to say the Humans use the fleets in actual warfare, quite the opposite. Before the first contact, Humans used these weapons mostly on each other. Some fought pirates, some fought insurrections...the same as literally every single sentient race in the universe, really. The difference is that the Humans never had a moderating force, something to slow them down. And, of course, their brains were stewing in the raw stuff of Madness the whole time."
Another student raised a hand, and the doctor pointed to him. "Yes?”
"Doctor, are the Humans building these fleets to attack someone?" he asked.
"Oh, certainly not," the Doctor said, waving his hand at the starmap. Several hundred stars turned an aqua green, and several were overlaid with the homes of dead civilizations. “The humans have so many more star lanes to protect than anyone else that most of their fleet assets are spent keeping pirates and raiders at bay."
“Who would rob Humans?” the student asked in surprise.
"Why, each other," the Doctor said. He tapped the 'forward' key on the tablet a few times, and a picture of a human raider frigate, with hideous, empty eye sockets leaking blood painted on the prow. Several students recoiled. “The vast majority of human raiders hit one another or Human Aerospace Merchant Marine freighters. The vessel that made first contact with the Union, the Supremacy, was a powerful ship, for its time, but the Humans have since created dedicated diplomatic vessels that don't even have anything heavier than anti-asteroid beams.”
“In fact, I rode one of those ships here," the Doctor continued, eliciting an excited murmuring from the students. None of them seemed to be willing to ask aloud, so the Doctor supplied the answer to the obvious question. "They're cramped. Really cramped. Very nice to ride in, smooth-moving and quiet, but no room for frills and decoration; Humans prioritize efficiency over aesthetics, given the cost of an Envoy Cruiser."
The Doctor clicked back to the starmap. “One thing that coloured Human impressions of First Contact,” he said, was that Humans had actually encountered non-Humans before. “Here," he gestured at the star map, and the hologram zoomed it rapidly to a single star system. "This world had living inhabitants."
"Did the Humans destroy them?" one student asked eagerly. The Doctor seemed to draw his head back in surprise.
"Goodness, no, no, of course not," he said, shaking his head under the helmet. "Humans had dreamed of First Contact for over a thousand years. They were delighted to meet other races. The problem was with the non-Humans, not the Humans." A few students nodded knowingly.
“They had the Madness, didn't they?" one student asked. The Doctor nodded.
“They did indeed. They were utterly insane, their peoples collapsing into anarchy and cannibalism."
“The Humans,” the Doctor said, clicking back to the view of the entire explored universe, rather than just the Veil, "had absolutely no desire to harm these alien beings. Why would they? They were rapidly destroying themselves. The Humans pressed on, finding hundreds of worlds like their own Terra, worlds that could have easily supported sentient life, but didn't. Remember, these were a people steeped in the Veil. They had no idea that the area in which they evolved was verboten. They thought it was totally normal. If the Veil has a physical presence, the Humans, to this day, can't detect it. That's why cartographic missions are so dangerous: the only way to find the edge of the Veil is to get close to it and try not to go crazy before you have a chance to fly home again. Unpleasant, but there you go.”
“Moving on, we come to the First Contact event the Humans of today refer to the Incident,” the Doctor said, clicking to the slide between the Veil/Universe map and the raider ship. A gigantic, oblong chunk of metal appeared, with the words Supremacy highlighted at the bottom of the slide, next to a tiny Kondar patrol vessel for scale. "The Kondar Navy had just fried a few Silvun pirate vessels when a Human Dreadnought, the Supremacy, emerged from FTL nearly on top of the smaller vessel. The Kondar gunners panicked - not without reason - and fired on the Human ship. The Human ship had lowered its shields, to create a more passive stance, hoping to avoid conflict. The Kondar ship killed the Human crewers before the Supremacy managed to get its shield back up."
The image turned to a video of the two vessels moving. The Kondar ship fired. The Supremacy took a single broadside hit, and a tiny flare of red appeared on its side. Several seconds later, a massive beam of purple, the size of an entire Silvun Fleet Command Ship, appeared between the Supremacy and another Kondar ship that was fleeing the battle.
Suddenly, the room was filled with a horrible, garbled mess of primitive phonetic sounds. Several students clapped their appendages over their aural glands before the Doctor fidgeted with the controls and the sounds died down. "All that time," the Doctor said, "the Human Captain was broadcasting over and over that he didn't want any trouble. The Kondar didn't understand, of course...and who blames them? The Humans had a language that no non-Human had ever heard. This recording was taken from the sensor logs of the Kondar ships that survived, by the by. Congratulations. The Humans had to make a few diplomatic concessions to get this declassified." Several students looked suitably impressed. Everybody knew that Humans were unnervingly patient negotiators.
The Doctor skipped past the end of the video, and the raider ship on the next slide, to a picture of a Human battlesuit. It had been marred with several huge blast wounds; black crusts of blood were visible around two of the holes. Several Xenomedical Sciences students glanced at each other. Human blood had iron in it, didn't it? And got hard when it dried?
“The Humans seized on the opportunity, sending a ship to the Kondar home world, with all of its weapons replaced with shield generators and projectors, so that there was no way the Kondar could harm them before they had a chance to talk." The battlesuit was replaced with a several-second, looping video of another identical suit sprinting across a battlefield, shrapnel bouncing off its plates like feathers. The suit's wearer vaulted a two-meter barrier as its joints turned red, before landing next to the camera. The camera-holder dropped the camera and ran, as the Human raised a palm, fingers curled, and pointed it next to the camera. A burst of blue fluid appeared, streaming from the Human's palm. After a moment, the Human cut the stream, and accidentally kicked the camera as it walked by, turning it to point at a Vench-a, its body encased in the blue fluid from the waist down. It fumbled over, trying to pull its sidearm from the muck. It succeeded, and pointed it at its head. Several students gasped.
Before the Vench-a could pull the trigger, a familiar stream of blue goo appeared, freezing the hand in place. The Human walked up and, seemingly very carefully, disentangled the gun from the hapless soldiers gooey hand. It tossed the gun over its shoulder with casual contempt, and then slapped a blinking red object, the size of a coin, into the blue mess. A beam of red light appeared from off-camera, in the sky, and hit the Vench-a. It started to levitate into the air, and hung in place for a second. After a moment, it shot into the air like a geyser, and even though the video was silent, the audience could nearly hear it screaming.
The Human looked around, as if searching for something, then spotted the camera. It leaned over, tilting its head this way and that, before apparently realizing what it was seeing. It took a few deliberate steps towards the view point, before a hail of black objects slammed into the suit from somewhere else. The Human flew backward and slammed into the wall it had just vaulted, several molten holes appearing in its matte black surface. The Human rebounded fast, but it was too late: the wall collapsed on it, crushing it instantly. A few moments later, a terrified Vench- a soldier appeared, shakily keeping the prostrate Human covered. Some more troops walked up, looking baffled, as the first soldier gingerly pried off the helmet. The Human soldiers skin was decorated oddly, with an unnatural purple zig-zag haircut, and several pieces of metal lodged in its nose in a decorative pattern. It looked female, but who could tell with Humans?
Several audience members looked like they were going to be sick. The slide mercifully finished, and started looping. The Doctor went back to the slide of the damaged Human suit, highlighting several dark colours in a pattern on its shell. "The Kondar weren't convinced by the Human diplomats. Why should they have been? The Human pirates and raiders immediately started capturing aliens for study, completely without United Terran Alliance approval. Though the UTA immediately returned the captured people and slaughtered the pirates, the damage had been done: between the disaster of First Contact, the Kondar spreading rumors about how the Human ship had come and gone from the Veil, and the activity of the Human criminals, Humanity was seen as evil incarnate."
"Human diplomats, however, were determined to be seen as no such thing. The Humans immediately descended on Union representatives, offering all sorts of gifts and diplomatic concessions. At first,” the Doctor continued, shocking the assembled students. "The Humans even offered to take some Kondar observers to the Courts-Martial Tribune, to see the Captain of the Supremacy stand trial. They were baffled by the horrified refusal of the Kondar representatives. Remember, class...the Humans didn't understand that there was a Veil at all." The Doctor changed the slide again, and this time, it was the Picoelectric Engineering students' turn to look interested. A blueprint of a ludicrously complex machine the size of a chair appeared in the dome.
“I'm glad to see some of you know what this is,” the Doctor said. “This is a Human Biocrystal. The Humans use these devices to shield living things from radiation. This is one of VERY few Human technological achievements that aren't Human Achievements alone."
“Didn't they steal those from the Aeron?” one student asked quizzically.
"No,” the Doctor said, a definite note of smugness entering his synthesized voice. “The Aeron never got it to work. When the Humans heard about it...somehow...they asked the Aeron if they could have the prototypes and if they got them to work, would the Aeron like to have the technology needed to reproduce them? Obviously, the Aerons said no, at first, but a few casual mentions of the dozens of irradiated nebular systems near the Aeron homeworld that were known to be brimming with precious metals...well...let's just say the Aerons quickly forgot their recalcitrance.”
“This was to be the pattern. People were scared of the Humans. So, when the Humans came knocking, the opposite species was quick to bargain,” the Doctor said, changing the slide to a picture of over fifty diplomats standing together on a stage. Several of them were in the same white suits that he himself was wearing, as they were the universal uniform of the diplomat: they allowed for unfiltered communication without the distraction of personal appearance. Most of the diplomats were not in the uniforms, either because they didn't need them, or didn't seem to want them. Alone at one end of the line was a Human ambassador in a chilling black-armored suit, with swept spikes protruding from the back of the helmet, and a blank black plastic visor. Only the Aeron and Lenn diplomats were standing anywhere near the Human, and they didn't look particularly happy.
"After all, Humans did have all those shiny toys," the Doctor said, a note of levity slipping through his synthesized voice. "And somehow, people are quick to forget their fears when there's money to be made. After a few years, popular fiction - I refuse to call them documentaries - of First Contact became more and more popular, and more and more outlandish,” The Doctor projected a clip from the infamous cult classic 19: First Contact, showing a Kondar tackling a Human into a reactor core; a clip from End of Days showing a Kondar tossing a Human in a white jumpsuit over a railing; and a clip from Maximum Resistance showing a Human gleefully rounding up weeping Kondar slaves.
"Obviously, the Humans found these inaccurate portrayals of their species more than a little irritating, though some thought they were just hilarious. Personally, I find them profoundly distracting. How's a diplomat supposed to get anything done when everybody's looking at you like you're about to grow horns?" the Doctor said, which caused several of the more attentive students to whip their heads around, staring wide-eyed.
"Anyway," the Doctor said, seemingly ignorant of the consternation slowly filling the room, "things came to a dramatic head a few years ago when a Human freighter was destroyed by a Lenn warship that was testing ordinance illegally. The Lenn ship - the Filigrath's Eye, if I recall - immediately retreated to its home space, informing the Lenn leadership of the tragedy. The Humans came in force, demanding that the Lenn pay for what they had done, and, I must say, it was not unfair of them to do so, even from a purely legal standpoint. So, the Lenn nearly dissolved into civil war, between those who said that the government should immediately forfeit something of value to prevent the Humans simply coming in and taking it; those who said that the 'filthy Humans had it coming,'” the Doctor said, curling his fingers in midair, “and those who said that the Humans wouldn't listen to reason if the government tried to negotiate for reparations and would just conquer the whole species,”
“The Humans, however, had other plans. This, students, is why you're here, instead of undergrads. All of you are graduate students," he said pointing at the class. The students, some of whom had been whispering frantically to one another, snapped their gaze down to the podium, as the teacher moved to the next slide. A picture of a gargantuan warship, easily twelve miles long, appeared in the centre of the dome. Its flanks were marked with alternating white blocks and black lines, and a few students recoiled as they realized that it was supposed to look like a set of teeth from a Human pet species, the canine.
“The Humans sent one ship to the Lenn homeworld. They arrived to begin legal dialogue, and they found pure chaos. The planet was literally hours from a self-destructive civil war. All over one ship being destroyed. So, the Humans stationed their vessel over the planet, and announced that any party that launched attacks against either the Human vessel itself or other Lenn parties would be reduced to a fine powder. Naturally, the Lenn were quite willing to do as told.” The slide changed again, to a pair of Human diplomats in their terrible armoured suits, marching down a boarding ramp flanked by a full platoon of battlesuits. Several Lenn were waiting at the base of the ramp, their backs to the camera. “The Humans sent two diplomats down to the planet below, and they were immediately bombarded with all sorts of wearying stereotypes, from the Lenn government prostrating themselves in terror to Lenn civilians fleeing in terror to Lenn military ruining their dress uniforms in terror. Very simply, terror," the Doctor said with a completely flat voice. Several students tittered nervously, but said nothing.
“The Humans were caught off-guard. They didn't want to be seen as devils. Well, not to that degree, anyway," the Doctor said, shrugging. "See, the Humans had made a mistake. They had deliberately perpetuated the stereotype of Humanity being an unstoppable, unknowable force of terror, because," he said, ticking points off on his digits, "1) the Humans were up against their own first impressions, which were terrible; 2) the negotiations with the Union were delightfully one-sided; 3) the Humans were unable to control their own piracy problem for a time and this helped them cover up this embarrassment...can anyone think of the final reason why the Humans perpetuated the stereotype.”
Dead silence echoed throughout the room. Finally, after very nearly two minutes, one girl gingerly raised a paw. "Um...because...you thought it was funny?"
"Well, yeah, more or less," the Doctor said. The graduate students' faces all paled, or something like it, at the fact that the Doctor hadn't protested the use of the word 'you.' The Professor, in the front row, nodded glumly, but didn't raise an objection. "See, the Humans had a facet of their culture that somehow, managed to become COMPLETELY unique. Remember when I said that Humans' brains evolved in the raw stuff of Madness? Well, it manifested oddly. Most species killed themselves. Humans decided to kill themselves off, too. In fiction. Pre-Contact Human fiction is chock-full of examples of Humans getting their asses kicked, by Nature-” he cut in a clip of a Human being swept away by a tidal wave - “to their own hubris-” a picture of a Human city on fire as an army of automata swept it clean of life - “to aliens.” He finished with a clip of several Humans in uniform screaming as they were melted alive by aliens that did, indeed, look very menacing. "Humans didn't have compulsions to commit autocide, the destruction of their own race, but they imagined it happening, over and over. To finally meet actual aliens," he said, gesturing to the crowd, several of which looked like they were seriously considering making a break for it, "and to find them TERRIFIED of Humans...well. Let's just say that it erased several long-standing inferiority complexes.”
“The Humans were afraid of us?" one student asked, carefully avoiding the word 'you.' The Doctor nodded sagely, behind his golden mask.
"Yes! Well, at first, and not specifically. Humans, you see, have a fear of the unknown. Their evolutionary niche is a very, very tenuous one: top omnivore, after all, has to watch its ass for top predator. Their technology evolved faster than they did, you see, and their quite natural fear of the unknown never really went away, even after they more or less proved that there was nothing to fear outside the Veil.”
The Doctor turned off the projector, turning the lights back up, and sat down in the ornate chair at the front of the stage, where the Professor sat when he wasn't doing a holographic presentation. “The Humans decided that there had to be something they could do. After all, the Lenn had done something very, very illegal, and Humans had died for it...but the Lenn were already punishing themselves far out of proportion to their wrongdoing. So, the Human United Terran Alliance government passed a decree, ordering the Diplomatic Corps to stop with the intentionally scary visage and just deal reasonably with the Lenn. The diplomats agreed immediately, of course...they were the ones who would be first to die if the Lenn did something stupid.”
“The Lenn were confused, of course. Who wouldn't be? The Humans had held them in the grip that the entire civilized universe feared, and released them. After demanding that the crew of the Lenn ship that had caused the whole mess be sentenced to life in prison, and demanding that the Admiral who had ordered the ship to test its ordinance in the way it did be immediately and permanently blacklisted and dishonourably discharged, the Humans up and left,”
"That's why you're all here, graduate candidates," the Doctor said, casually casting his invisible gaze over the mass of nervous students. “The UTA is tired of a part of their history that, frankly, everyone involved would rather move on from. Humanity is the dominant force in the galaxy by virtue of their mental capacity, their ability to overcome the Madness, and their massive territory. Not scare tactics. So, as I'm sure at least a few of you Mechanical Engineering and Diplomatic Studies students know, the Humans have decided to start gradually releasing their advanced technology in bits and pieces to members of the Union who agree to start speaking to their citizens, and telling them to stop being afraid of Humans,” The Doctor reached onto the small table next to the chair, grabbing a glass of water. He lifted it in front of his mask, and - clearly enjoying himself - took a drink, clean through the solid plastic helmet. The room erupted in confused mutters. The Doctor set the glass down on the table and stood up, putting his hands in his pockets under the clearly holographic suit. He started pacing the stage.
"So, first and foremost among the inventions the Humans shared with the universe was the device that lets them move through clouds of nebular heavy metal molecules - uranium and so on - that space is littered with. It lets the Humans go clean through the parts of supernovae remnants that the rest of the Union have to avoid. The second bit was these cool holographic projectors,” He tapped the side of the 'helmet' as he turned to face the audience, and the white and gold shell vanished...revealing Professor Snar'drik, with a massive grin on his face.
The room exploded with angry and relieved conversation. The Professor stood at the front of the room, smirking from aural gland to aural gland, as the rows of students yelled themselves hoarse.
“I had you going, didn't I?” he asked, flashing his teeth. “I really had you all. Hook, line, and sinker,” Several students nodded ruefully, as the noise died down. "Anyway. I hope you all enjoyed the show. Take it to heart. Whoa, hey, hey, where are you going?” he asked as several students made to leave, several already fumbling with voxes or bags. "Our guest hasn't made his speech yet,” He pointed at the Professor sitting in the first row, who had been watching the entire display with a smirk.
The original 'Professor,' the one who had first introduced the 'guest speaker,' stood and walked briskly to the front of the room, as several students poked one another and asked each other what was going on. The fake Professor walked up to the real one and shook his hand, before turning to face the audience. “Well, class, I hope I got my point across. I will say, the pilot class for the next Graduate Studies series seems to have gone rather well so far, don't you think?”
“Oh, quite,” the real Professor said mildly. "I'd say it went quite well indeed,” The false professor tapped the side of his head, and his holographic shroud fell away too, revealing...a Human, in an armoured black bodysuit, with a blank black mask.
Several students screamed, and at least one swooned back into their seat, looking dizzy. The Human pulled the helmet off and put it under their arm, waving his free hand at the group. “Please, class, sit. I won't take long. I promise," he said, smiling broadly.
The students scrambled back into their seats, apprehensively staring at the Human. “My name is Ulor Tilol, and I'm an educational specialist from UTA University on Skedra Prime. Forgive me a bit of theater," he said, airily gesturing at the holographic devices the two men were carrying, but I needed to make a point. UTA has come to see that a self-sustaining myth of devilry can only really go so far before imploding. And, frankly, it wasn't funny when an entire world was at stake. Remember when the Professor said that Humans coped with the Madness by being just a little crazy ourselves? Were not crazy enough to perpetuate a lie to the point that an entire species falls apart. This Graduate Human Studies class is the first step in getting things back to a more even footing.”
“Then why did you let it go on for so long?!" one student yelled angrily, before seemingly realizing what he had done. Several other students stared at him with pale faces. Doctor Tilol seemed to consider the question, pursing his lips and stroking his chin with his free hand. "Well," he said after a moment, “some traditions must be maintained.” |
tonarrate/Straining_To_Find_That_Pale_Blue_Dot | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | We encountered the first of them in a warm, wet world orbiting a small yellow star, in a previously unexplored sector of space.. They didn't seem to have the population for the tech base they possessed, yet there they were, launching orbital craft almost daily and even sending crewed missions to some of the neighbouring bodies. But as we spoke to them for the first time, we learned that this was not their home. They told us of a planet long lost, of a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam. A planet many groups had fled in the wake of a final, fiery war. A planet they no longer knew the location of. Losing a homeworld was not unusual in the galaxy (the minor races affected by the Wars of the kla-keen spring to mind), but for a homeworld to not only be rendered uninhabitable but truly lost was remarkable. Still, we uplifted them and they took their place amongst the galactic community.
But even after uplift, their thoughts and actions were continually focused on their lost world. For such a small race, they had the highest spending per capita on exploration than any other race, even more so than the nomadic barshan. It was in these expeditions that they found more of their kind than we had thought possible. Most were like the first group we had found, a group of a few million on a relatively habitable world just starting to reach space. These, also like the first, knew of the homeworld lost, and also put everything they had into finding it. Some other groups hadn't even rediscovered technology, telling stories of the legendary world from whence they came while huddled around fires. These groups, unlike many who are encountered in their primitive cycle, showed no shock or surprise, merely nodding when told of the galaxy at large, as if they already knew of their shared heritage with the other humans they spoke to. Even they, without the benefits of technology, had strained to find the pale blue dot in their skies.
Curious about this part of humans, I spoke to the human ambassador at length. I asked why finding their homeworld was so important to them, and why every disparate group they found, no matter how different, knew and spoke of this homeworld even after the centuries they must have been away from it. The ambassador looked at me for a moment and said "Because, Ambassador Kosh, every one of them knows that no matter what other forms of life there are and might be, the only human beings in all the universe come from Earth." Years turned to decades and the humans still searched. But no progress was made. Though they found dozens of lost human worlds, none, the humans said, was Earth. I'm uncertain as to how they could know this, yet somehow they did.
A human survey ship searching for colonizeable worlds came across a garden world in an uncharted system. This was good for their investors, naturally, and so they began to survey nearby rocky bodies, as a garden planet with nearby sources of fusion fuels is valuable indeed. This planet in particular had a unusually large rocky moon, almost a quarter of its size. It, indeed, had large deposits of helium-3, as well as trace amounts of water ice. But that was not the real treasure they found on that moon. The remains of a small, primitive craft lay next to a smattering of equipment and a piece of coloured cloth attached to a pole. The craft seemed to be the remains of a landing vehicle of some sort. As the surveyors approached the alien vessel, they saw an inscription on one of the legs.
"HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND" |
tonarrate/Level_With_Me | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | “Level with me.”
The orb clicked in response. “I maintain my present orientation, Commander.”
“No-” the Commander started, then stopped. His expression softened with something approaching sympathy. He spoke again, saying, “I mean tell me the situation as it is. Don't sugarcoat-” He caught himself this time, “Don't leave anything out.”
The orb blinked and nodded, shaking its eyecase up and down. “Our position at Vene is unstable. The aggressors have taken the outer system and demand that the inner system be surrendered. They are gathering fleet assets. We cannot withstand them even now, but they do not attack.”
It was the Commander's turn to nod. “What about us?”
“The combined task force,” the orb said, “If it moves to support Vene at best speed, will reach the system within fifteen hours. There is no closer force. It is our prediction that the aggressors will proceed to invade the inner system before we reach Vene.”
The Commander mulled this over for a moment, and sat back against his desk. “But we'll be able to save the system if we move now?”
The orb shook its eyecase the other way. “No. The combined task force will be insufficient. The aggressors will take the inner system regardless of resistance.”
For a time, the room was silent. The Commander closed his eyes and let his head hang down, thinking about what it would mean to commit the task force to action, and about what would happen if he chose to stand off.
“We have a pact with you,” he said, still leaning against the desk, head still down. “We make for Vene. Tell your people to expect us.”
The orb nodded once more, and departed.
The Commander began to see faces. These he would never see again, for Vene would claim them.
He opened his eyes, and opened a fleetwide channel, to announce a course change.
Twelve hours later, the command staff stood in a circle around the holoset aboard the bridge of the flagship, watching the sensor data pour in. The task force had pushed all engines beyond safety limits, damaging them irreparably, but cutting travel time by more than an hour. The lead vessels were now close enough to Vene to access the system's sensor network, and the information they were collecting was now being shared throughout the fleet.
The situation was entirely hopeless. The aggressors had begun their attack seven hours ago and were now encroaching upon the second planet, the final fortress of Vene. Friendly forces had been decimated and were now making their last stand around that world, fighting to their last breath against a dozen fleets, each more than twenty times their own tonnage.
The orb, now hovering over the holoset, reported that its people were ready for the arrival of the combined task force. A clock within the holoset had begun counting down, and reversion to realspace was expected in six minutes.
It took two minutes for the command staff to finalise their defence plans. The Commander made his final address before reversion three minutes later.
“The enemy is present in overwhelming numbers, which will just make the losses we are about to inflict all the more embarrassing. We will bleed them so badly they will execute their officers for incompetence. We're all the cavalry there is, so make the charge count. Don't hold anything back. All craft, prepare for combat.”
All 68 ships of the combined task force reverted at the same time, punching a hole in space so wide that, for a brief moment, it blotted out the sun. In that moment, every ship fired everything. The light of their main guns burned through a squadron of capital ships, caught with their shields facing the wrong way. Before the nearest aggressor fleet could reorient itself, the combined task force had brought down twice its mass in enemy metal.
The element of surprise was quickly spent. The aggressors turned their ships to face this new threat, shifting a full three fleets out of position to match a force lesser than theirs by far. The defenders of Vene took this opportunity to renew their attack, and the sky above the second world brightened once again with the lights of battle.
The flagship shuddered as it lost its portside missile pod. All around it the warships of the combined task force were breaking apart, their well-built hulls no match for the immense volume of fire raining down upon them. The Commander stood and saluted them, closing his eyes one last time as his own ship was smashed to ruin. Behind him, the orb-shaped Emissary backed itself into an alcove and anchored itself there, just as the shields failed completely.
Vene's defenders were extinguished thirty-seven minutes later. All that remained of the combined task force were expanding clouds of gas and wreckage, reduced to small pieces by the aggressors, to ensure no survivors. But the Emissary, anchored to the alcove, was still there, though the structure it was attached to had long since ceased to be a part of the bridge.
When Vene was retaken over one hundred days later, the Emissary was recovered, its beacon still broadcasting weakly. Its memory was made part of public record. Parts of it were played at the signing of the treaty with humanity, formally bringing the two empires together in unity. The ambassador told those gathered the full story of the Battle of Vene.
In two hundred seconds, a meagre 68 ships destroyed or crippled four times their number of enemy vessels, including three battle-cruisers and a command carrier, each of those far out-massing the human flagship. The combined task force perished in its entirety, but it left three fleets in disarray and, by drawing these away from the defenders, magnified their effectiveness against the remaining ships.
As was their custom, the aggressors left the corpses of their dishonored dead floating around one of their gutted ships. Among them were hundreds of high-ranking officers, including an admiral, executed for incompetence.
Vene maintains its own special fleet unit, numbering 68 ships. The flagship, at the request of the Emissary, was christened “Level With Me.” |
tonarrate/They_Had_Variety | hf://datasets/jerryjalapeno/scripts@a2e66311e3feb8191550e45fd1859e8f7c0852d5/tonarrate.tar.gz | I can’t sleep at night.
It began after the Earthlings appeared on the Galactic stage. I was one of the many individuals who began to research them, some as a job others out of curiosity.
While the human beings were certainly unique in physiology, ability, and culture, so was every other species. Nothing about them at first glance made them stand out from the galactic crowd. In fact, in a general sense the species of the galaxy were all very similar. After all, we all had to conquer our home planets and develop the ability for space travel on our own.
I suppose if anything did, it wasn’t any one attribute but the combinations. They not only had a wide variety of coloration, they also had a wide variety of size and body type. In fact, if anything that was what made Earthlings stand out. They had variety.
Not only physically, but culturally. It wasn’t completely unheard of for a species to have more than one language, but these were almost always glorified dialects and/or remnants of pre-artificial language (if that species used one). The humans had 24 “families” of spoken language. Granted they did have a single lingua franca’s but still!
All these differences and I have listed only two of many, lead straight into what may be the most interesting thing about humans. Their propensity for violent conflict. …Let me rephrase that. It’s not that there weren’t other violent species out there. In fact, many if not most of the space-faring races were apex predators on their home planets. Its humans had a habit of infighting. Nobody could believe how often and how ruthlessly humans would fight with themselves.
When one of my contemporaries asked them directly, they responded with some human philosopher. Most of it basically boiled down to the concept of “the other”. It was almost insulting. As if we had no idea what war was! As if one species had never set out to destroy another of incompatibility! Maybe I misspoke earlier. It isn’t even as if no other species has gone to war with its own race. It was the major reason why maintaining close relationships with colonies was so important to many species. If colonies became to separate and independent for a couple of generations conflicts could arise and had. Our problem wasn’t that they went to war with other members of their own species. It was how quickly they were able to view their own species as “the other”.
Maybe that was the defining trait of humans? Their ability to quickly label anyone as “the other”? As a non-person? Some of their philosophers certainly thought so. Many of my contemporaries stopped their search here. I began to dive back into the history of Earth. I wanted to know how such an ability had come about. My search revealed many disturbing things. Atrocities of such a varied and incomprehensible nature. Attempted genocide, torture, slavery. No one did these things to their own species. Soon I was the only one left. All of my fellow researchers, public and private, had since gone public with their findings. Humanity was painted in an ill light. Their defining trait to be the ability to treat another being as equals one day and as an inanimate obstacle the next.
I realized that my fellow scholars had forgotten something. The first thing that had shocked us. The diversity of humankind. As I delved back into their history, I saw more evidence of how those differences were even more pronounced then we thought. It was no wonder they were able to consider members of their own species as non-persons!
But how did such an arrangement come to exist? Why hadn’t any one culture or civilization already stamped out their rivals? …And why did no other species have this diversity? I eventually came upon pre-history. I read about how early man had driven his rival and sister species to extinction. My first thoughts were that the others were right.
Then it occurred to me. No other species had closely related species either. No other species was as diverse in form and culture. As the realization set in I grew terrified. I began this research commenting on how similar the species of the galaxy were. …Humans were similar to us as well. No other species had the diversity in value systems and beliefs the humans did.
What sets the humans apart IS NOT their capacity to turn friends and loved ones into “the Other”. It is their capacity to turn “the Other” into friends and loved ones.
What is truly surprising is not that the humans fight over their differences. It’s that they have differences to fight over. The species of the galaxy are all very similar. With one exception, they have all brutally stamped out any differences, any variations. These deviations from the norm were destroyed so perfectly our racial memories have forgotten them.
Every species, save Homo sapiens, had long ago perfected the art of genocide.
I wonder if I shall ever sleep again. |
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