First Contact

The day was warm and pleasant to Nakteti, who wore a set of oversized polarized eye shields called 'sun-glasses' to protect her sensitive eyes from Terra's energetic yellow sun. Terra was outside the Green Zone for her race, well into the Amber/Red area where life was supposed to be harsh and difficult due to IR and UV rays streaming from the sun. The gamma rays were largely offset by the planet's strong magnetic field.

It was a boon for the plants, which grew everywhere that Nakteti could see. Small trees in between the paths for ground effect vehicles and foot traffic, plants in pots on balconies and in front of shops, gardens on top of roofs.

Which was all the stranger to Nakteti, since she'd watched a special about how Terra had, at one time, suffered a genetic engineering disaster that turned the entire planet's ecology against the humans. Lethal plants that actively sought out humans and mammals that had eventually pushed humans into only a handful of giant megaplexes. Before the Terrans had managed to fix the ecology, the Mantids had attacked. They had also spent eons with plants out to kill everything in sight with poisonous leaves, fruit, berries. Acids were the primary weapon of Terran plants, yet Terrans would eat them anyway, commenting on how the acids made the food taste better.

To Nakteti that spoke of a gastro-intestinal tract that could probably dissolve battleship armor.

She was sitting with Major Carnight and two big warborg escorts, staring at an odd statue. It was of a half-dozen different types of canines and a quartet of felines, done in bronze, on top of a giant rectangle of gray marble. On each side of the upright rectangle were large braziers where a flame burned brightly. There were wreaths around the base, and as she watched people came up to lay more wreaths, a few flowers, and small little items.

"What is that?" Nakteti asked.

"A memorial," Major Carnight said, setting down his glass of juice.

"Part of the Sleeping Ones?" Nakteti nodded, sure that was the answer.

"Actually, it predates the Sleeping Ones by about a thousand years," Major Carnight said. "It's a Pre-Diaspora monument."

That made Nakteti frown. "Wasn't your Diaspora over eight thousand of your years ago?" Nakteti watched a robot move up and set a wreath down, surrounded by four smaller robots. She had learned that AI's often 'grew' and that the AI's had them change bodies as they 'grew' to teach them about the world around them.

It seemed odd to Nakteti, but not more odd than the fact that somehow the Terrans had kept the AI's from attempting to murder them.

If you ignore the First and Second Digital/Biological War, she snorted to herself.

"Yes, it was. This was our first lesson that the galaxy would be a hard place and would take everything from us if it could," Carnight said. He sipped at the glass and set it down. "Want me to tell the story or do you want to read about it or watch it on the Tri-Vid?"

She squeezed the leg she was holding in her one grasping hand. "You, please."

Carnight nodded. "All right. It was early in our exploration. We hadn't even fully explored out own system yet when we sent an FTL craft to our nearby neighbor, Alpha Centauri. It was a ripple-drive, called the Ah-Queue-Berry Drive, and we were powering it with thorium anti-matter," he said. He looked at the statue. "We hadn't learned the risks of those two things yet, and used cold sleep, a form of cryogenic hibernation, before we learned the risks of that, so that the crew wouldn't age during the travel part of an almost 10 light year round trip part of their twelve year voyage."

Carnight signaled for his glass to be refilled and set his hand on top of Nakteti's grasping hand.

"We learned a lot, gathered a lot of data, learned about xenoplanets, learned a lot about how the drive operates in deep space, even landed on the four planets that we could. Then the craft returned," Carnight said. He took another drink and Nakteti noticed tears welled up in his eyes. "When it came back, everything looked fine. Nothing looked out of place.

"What we didn't know is that the ship had brought back a virulent pandemic. One that ripped through the global population and then mutated to be part of the ecosystem in a violent joke against us. The disease had a hundred percent lethality over twenty years. It even managed to attach itself to cells of the hosts, becoming part of the cell. If you removed the disease, the cell died," Carnight said. Nakteti could feel his distress and reached out with her catching hand and rubbed his back.

"Records talk about it, how horrible it was. How so many people killed themselves or fell into depression as one of the good things in the universe vanished. They were our friends, they were the first thing we uplifted, and we loved them as much as our own children," Carnight said. He took another drink off his glass and wiped his eyes.

"We have some of them. In a way. We can clone the neural tissue of both species. If we try to clone the entire being, they die before they can even be born. So we have them, in a way, as full conversion cyborgs, but we lost so much," Major Carnight said. "Even Digital Sapients self-terminated, it was such a dark day for our people."

It suddenly dawned on Nakteti what she was looking at. "Those were the Goodbois and the Purrbois?"

Major Carnight nodded. "Yup. Wiped out by a plague from Alpha Centauri. Afterwards we uplifted primates and that didn't go so well for either of us for a while, because we needed to learn a lesson about doing things for ourselves. We overcame that, eventually, the Primacy became the Biological Artificial Sentience Systems, and with a single exception, we've been friends ever since."

"Except when you went to war with them," Nakteti said, trying to be helpful.

He laughed then. "Seems like we spent half our existence smashing each other in the face."

Nakteti nodded, thinking about it. The Major got emotional over creatures that he had never met, that had all died before he was born, and didn't even try to conceal it. She remembered that Major Carnight had talked about how he'd been saved twice by purrbois and had worked with a gooboi quite often.

"Have your people tried to solve the problem again?" She asked. She couldn't imagine that the Terran scientists, who seemed to have developed such wonders, could not have defeated the virus.

"It is the longest running research project that my species has ever known. Even the Clone Worlds have tried to solve the problem. The problem is, in all the samples we have, in all the samples we've been able to find, the mitochondria of the canine and feline cells were replaced by the virus and as soon as the body develops complex organs, the whole system fails and the clone dies. I think it was mitochondria, I'm a little fuzzy on it," Carnight said, shaking his head. "Someday, some day we'll crack the problem, but till then, we will hold tight to their memory."

Nakteti shook her head. In the Civilized Races the purrbois and the goodbois would have been written off as a loss. A failed species. Their DNA would have been logged into the great databases and been forgotten by everyone but the odd researcher or two.

"Your people confuse me, sometimes, Major Carnight," she said, still rubbing his back as she stared at the monument.

"Our three species banded together. The purrbois caught, killed, and sometimes ate vermin that could carry sickness, the goodbois helped us hunt and guarded the caves, we made sure they had plenty to eat and a safe place to give birth to their young," Major Carnight said.

"Wait, the caves? How long ago did your two species bond?" Nakteti asked.

"About, oh, forty-thousand years ago for the goodbois, who self-domesticated for the most part, and about thirty-thousand years ago for the purrbois," Carnight said.

Nakteti inhaled sharply several times at the reminder that less than fifty-thousand years ago humans were living in caves. Fifty-thousand years ago her people had invented fusion power and anti-gravity.

"Easy, Nakteti, easy," Carnight said, patting her hands with his own.

"Your people sometimes frighten me, Carnight," Nakteti said. "How fast you advanced, it should have been a Great Filter, but you overcame it."

"Usually by breaking everything in sight till we were the only ones left standing," Carnight chuckled.

Again, the offhand and almost amused reference to violence surprised her. Where most species abhorred violence, were physically repulsed by it, to humans it was part of their bonding. She had seen male humans physically strike each other's shoulders with a clenched fist as part of a greeting, had seen female humans embrace one another tightly, had seen small children slap and touch one another as part of play.

Was it their ability to instantly become violent without a second's hesitation that enabled them to survive long enough to adapt and overcome? Nakteti wondered. It made sense. She had watched Major Carnight exercise with another human using the 'hard-light' eVR system. Watched the Major exchange punches and kicks that made both combatants grunt with the impacts.

He had been stripped to the waist, only wearing his pants, moving in a slow circle around his hard-light holographic opponent, who was apparently facing off against a hologram of Major Carnight.

She had watched, fascinated, as they had fought one another. The speed, power, and certainty in the strikes, blocks, and dodges had been captivating.

Even when she realized something with a shock.

Humans did not have to think about their next action, that they could adapt their reflexes over time so that they could allow their body to perform actions automatically. That when engaged in combat a human could focus not only on their opponent, but their opponent's possible moves, strategies, as well as the landscape, their surroundings, and even consider other things.

The realization had shocked her to the core. Her own race was neo-sapient, barely above an animal according to the Unified Species Council, but she had to think for a split second about what she was going to do unless it was such a thing as grasping a branch as she fell.

Adaptive reflex neuro-plasticity, she had thought.

Now she stared at the monument to a pair of beloved lost species.

Our first lesson, she thought to herself as a pair of small children laid a wreath at the base of the monument. The universe would take everything from us if it could.

One of them held a partially animatronic kitty in its arms.

The children have never even met one, yet weep for their loss, Nakteti thought to herself. She tried to decide if she would do the same and had to admit she would not. None of the races she knew of would. A dead species was dead, there was no reason to waste further resources on it. To do so was wasteful and foolish and undermined the common good.

The thought surprised her for how uncharitable it was. She considered where that thought had come from and realized it was how she was educated, what she was taught.

If she was asked, at that moment when she was watching the immature human cry her heart out for the loss of another being that she had never met, if the human's instinct, passion, and propensity for violence was unwarranted, she would have stated that it was perfectly reasonable when facing a hostile universe. It was not only understandable, it was logical, a perfectly understandable evolutionary trait that had prepared them for facing an actively hostile reality.

"Are you distressed?" Major Carnight asked. "You are weeping."

Nakteti shook her head. "No. I am feeling empathy for the child's distress."

Major Carnight nodded. "Purrbois and goodbois are still beloved by children. She probably wanted a real one, like she has seen on the educational programs, and had to be told that they are all gone. It is her first taste of mortality, that all things must perish."

That made Nakteti look up at him. "Humans don't."

Major Carnight shook his head. "We do. Our SUDS templates drift, our bodies wear out. The number one killer of humans is 'death by misadventure' or 'killed in action' if a war is going on. We're perfectly aware of our own mortality, we just fight against it."

"Yet the being who saved us is called 'an immortal' in the news casts," Nakteti countered.

"The being who saved you, Daxin, is one of the few immortals left, a product of a bygone age. Eventually someone or something will kill him. Like the rest of us, death is the great equalizer," Carnight shrugged. "Most of them died from complications. Daxin himself is the last one left. He's over eight thousand years old. One of the original triple-helix humans, one of the first full conversion cyborgs, one of the first clinical immortals."

Nakteti nodded. At one time the humans had experimented with adding an extra 'strand' to the 'ladder' of the DNA helix in order to provide two more copies of the code. The first version had prevented aging, but had resulted in complications regarding pregnancy, maturity, and had ultimately been stopped due to overpopulation.

Humans were so strange. They compacted tens of thousands of years of scientific progressed into years or decades or months.

Already humans had decoded her own DNA, performing something called "genome cracking" that she had been assured was impossible. When they had asked her permission to examine her genome, her genetics, she had agreed because fully examining it beyond just verifying her identity and species as impossible. Everyone knew that, everyone had been taught that, every researcher repeated it. That the DNA helix was too complicated for computers to decode.

The humans had also informed her that her race had undergone genetic alteration. The human researchers had asked for permission and less than two days later she was being informed that her, and all her surviving crew members, had been genetically tampered with.

She had been asked why and although she had told the humans that she did not know, she suspected.

Only one group benefited from her people being genetically altered.

The Civilized Species.

If they had reached inside her, reached inside her parents, and changed them, what else had they done? They looked silly, fussy, and seemed incompetent.

But were they really?

She hadn't realized she was shaking or making sounds of distress until she felt herself lifted up, set on Major Carnight's leg, and hugged firmly. The pressure eased her stress until she could finally breath normally.

"Let's get you back to the hotel. I think you've had about enough sight-seeing for the day," Major Carnight stated.

Nakteti just nodded.

She held Major Carnight's hand with both of hers as they walked across the street and into the hotel. She was proud of herself. She had gone all the way across the street and halfway down the block on her first excursion.

Twice little immature humans tried to hug her. Both times their parents stopped them and the children cried in emotional distress. She had felt the joy her appearance had caused in their little spirits, and felt that their emotional pain at not being able to hug her was genuine.

A human will push you face first through a crysteel window and then turn around and want to give your litter mates unconditional love, she thought to herself as the elevator moved up to the luxury suite. All based on perceived threat.

She was quiet when they entered the suite, letting thoughts run through her mind.

While Major Carnight was speaking to his superiors on his datalink, she used her's differently in the privacy of her own room.

She moved in front of the mirrors, removed her pants and shirt, sash, belt, shoes, and gloves, and took pictures of herself naked, careful to get herself from every angle. She then took pictures of her clothing, making sure to get the front, back, and sides, then dressed carefully and took pictures again after combing her fur.

She moved over to the eVR terminal and loaded up a few programs that she found for free. She converted the nude pictures of herself to eVR, then airbrushed away her nipples and genitals, removed her vestigial climbing claws, and then converted it to a weighted wire-frame model as well as a texture overlay.

Then she scanned in her clothing, making the attachment points quickly and easily. The software was eager to the help, the limited VI in the program almost anticipating what she wanted to do. She made some color changes to the shirts and pants, a few pattern changes to her sash and belt, shoes and gloves. Added different color eyes and different fur patterns and colors.

Some of them she made bright and silly.

She then used another program to convert the wireframe to a construction template and then uploaded the dressed one to her room's replicator.

It took only a few minutes for the replicator to ping and the shield to raise. The fur was too sticky and unpleasant, almost greasy feeling, so she tried again.

She had to look up a tutorial of a smiling human explaining how to make realistic feeling kittykitty hair for a purrboi or a goodboi, and she followed along, weighting her own hair in the model.

It only took three more attempts before it felt perfect.

She programmed it to say a few things, the most important was 'I love you' when hugged. She enabled it to toddle along with a small child, holding hands, and downloaded the freeware response pack for caretaker and companion animatronics, tweaked it according to the tutorial video performed by a human sized blue and white fox, and then ran off one of the replicator.

It was perfect.

She ensured the creators of the freeware programs she had downloaded would get a 'tip' from each sale and uploaded it to SolNet, offering it for the same price as most animatronic child nurturing companions. She offered it in over two dozen styles, all based on crew members who had died in the PreCursor attack, including a custom 'assign your own colors' and put it for sale along with additional clothing packs.

Then she took images of her poor Sweet, both how it had originally looked and then how it had arrived, made models of them, then, on the advice of the VI, had made the replicator versions a kind of 'do it yourself' model as well as model ones.

She uploaded that too.

Done, she wandered into the main suite and saw that it was almost dark.

She had spent the afternoon working and had enjoyed it.

Which was weird. Her genetic test had shown she was a leader at heart, genetically programmed to command others.

Yet she had felt contentment while she had worked. Imagining the expressions on children's faces when the replicator printed it out for them to hold. She had made sure that her animatronic self was firm to hold and warm with a beating heart for children to hear.

She had even used allergen neutral and immunocompromised safe materials.

She had even gone through her database of where she had been, had found the two children who had wanted to hug her, and the one on the shuttle, and sent their parents free copies with her Captain's compliments.

Feeling slightly confused that she would feel such contentment just crafting copies of herself she sat on the big couch and slowly ate her dinner, a wonderful concoction called a 'nacho bowl' that contained ground beef and vegetables and wonderful crunchy bread.

There was a pinging and Major Carnight turned to her and raised an eyebrow.

"Did you make a stuffy of yourself and upload it to the SolNet market?" he asked.

"Yes. I thought your children may enjoy it," she said.

He shook his head. "Well, congratulations on being the number one downloaded template for the last two hours," he laughed. "You have people as far away as the Clone Worlds downloading copies of you to make stuffies of. At least you followed the VI's advice and trademarked yourself."

Nakteti shrugged. "If it brings people enjoyment, I am content."

Major Carnight shook his head. "Do you remember how you were worried about paying for the repairs to your ship?" he asked.

"Yes. I still worry, but perhaps I will be able to mitigate the price somewhat for my people," Nakteti said.

"Um, you might want to come over here where I can embrace you," Major Carnight said.

Curious, she moved over and sat on her human's lap, leaning back as he put his arms around her. Once again she was struck at how reassuringly solid and warm he was. "All right, while this is very pleasant and I enjoy it very much, why?"

"Check your bank account balance," he said.

Sighing, knowing she'd only see the small amount that Terra had transferred compared to the amount she knew she'd need to fix The Sweet, she opened her bank account.

She immediately began to shudder, hyperventilating in panic. Major Carnight hugged her firmly as she stared at the number.

She had sold over 2.8 billion versions of the 'stuffy' and nearly 11 million models of The Sweet.

------------------------

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Wow. That's a long download queue

-----NOTHING FOLLOWS-------

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLD

Same here. Wow. Everyone wants it.

------NOTHING FOLLOWS------

CLONE WORLDS

Oh, this is bullshit. The servers are overloaded.

----NOTHING FOLLOWS------

RIGELLIAN COMPACT

OH MY GOD IT'S SO SOFT AND FLUFFY AND SAYS IT LOVES YOU WHEN YOU HUG IT!

-----NOTHING FOLLOWS-----