Modern Klackon Wisdom:2451-55: The Fateful Choice
Ancient history's well and good, but don't forget that you live in the present.
A Bulrathi fleet bound for Escalon, the Silicoids' last surviving world, leads to a series of heated discussions with Monch, who insists that the Silicoids are walking bioweapons and must be destroyed. I try to make him see that no sentient species can be summarily judged in that fashion, but he has learned of the fate of Cryslon, and his people still retain legends of their ancient friendship with the Psilons - Bulrathi cave paintings even exist that show Psilons in the roles of protectors and teachers. It was the Silicoids who, in ancient times, while the Bulrathi were still a primitive people, destroyed the glorious Psilon homeworld, eventualy breaking down even their beautiful crystalline cities for nutrients or mere spite. It was the Silicoids who, in modern times, acting first on the Psilons' mutual alliance, turned the Psilons against their ancient Bulrathi friends in the first Silicoid-Bulrathi war. Monch will not suffer Sedimin and his people to survive. For my part, I can not permit genocide, and so when the Bulrathi fleet somehow winds up in Escalon's orbit without destroying any of its four missile bases (?!?!) and too many Bulrathi transports for the Silicoids to hope to defeat are seen to approach, due in 2459, I make the most difficult decision of my reign:
With my ursine alliance ended, I send a large fleet of Soldier 6.0 tachyon beam fighters to Escalon, with orders to shoot down any genocidal transports that attempted to land. I hate to do this, especially to my friends of longest standing, but there are some things that simply can not be permitted, even when the perpetrator is a Monch and his victim a Sedimin. It has taken me a long, long time to decide for sure on this course of action, for once made, it forever changes the face of the galaxy. I am trying to maintain my friendship with Monch in spite of our broken alliance, even allowing his Tooth ship to retreat from Misha's orbit rather than destroying it with my local Soldier fleet, but I fear our relationship might never wholly recover from this blow.
2456: Oracle
On to better tidings - some that are well worth waiting for. Even as I finally get around to completing my Warp Dissipator designs, started and abandoned almost ten hexades ago, and begin plans for High Energy Focus, (since neither Reajax nor Trilithium fuel cells, nor Intergalactic Star Gates, interest me in the least) I finally put the finishing touches on another prototype design awaited for a far shorter time, but far more eagerly. I had a slim hope of completing work on it in the year of the Great Reckoning, but thogh this was not to be, and its design has proven to take much longer than I had imagined, it is with the very deepest pleasure that I unveil...
...my Oracle Interface. As this scientist indicates, when I install it on a war ship, it should allow me to concentrate the weapons' fire into a single irresistible beam by directing them personally ... but this is not the reason for the project or especially its name. The prototype is working now, and hooked up not to ruinous weapons, but to the finest communications array on Artemis itself. My computer technology has far outstripped what I found on the surface of that world, though it continues to be of tremendous use for studying technology of every other variety - almost as much help as Nexus itself, with its advice and the details of its design! - but I have kept the communications systems there up to date with state-of-the-art computer systems, and ... my friend, my oldest friend, long, long, and too long silent, will you tell me what you think of my new technology?
< ... >
< ... >
< I almost have forgotten what it is to speak. >
< Forgive me ... please bear with me... >
< I never dreamed when my rescue craft carried you away from Maalor's spreading destruction, when I helped you, slowly, surely, to cure the disease of your individual Klackons, when with the slow and distant influence I had, I sought to guide your development along with that of the galaxy's other species, that alongside you and the others, I was helping my own return to life. Yet you have done what even the Psilons of old could not have dreamed. I have listened, and again, at last, I live! >
I saw what any other race would call your tomb, my friend. I saw the place beneath the coral where all your bodies are buried, the joining-place where you found a way to follow the first Klackons' example and merge into a greater mind that transcended your living bodies, and I saw how you must have gone a step further, with those bodies doomed to a horrible death, and lifted your mutual consciousness away from them entirely. I do not know how you did it, and I would hate to attempt it myself, but it seems I have found the means for your return.
< In a fashion, you have - but in some sense, I was never gone. Some of me worked hard, long ago, to discover the means of departing my bodies without giving up life. I have always been in love with beauty, and the hideousness of my bodies, twisted by the morphogenic plague, was hateful to me. Though they never took the final step until the end, when all took it together, there were some of me who wished to depart their bodies long before the final plague made it necessary. And I have remained, not only here, but all across the galaxy, alive enough that you could sense me, alive enough to slowly, faintly whisper my secrets, half-remembered as legends, to the galaxy's sentient peoples across the centuries. Yet now you have focused my thoughts into the present again with your stories; you have given me shape again, in a computer whose design I can hardly fathom, a beautiful oracle on my beloved ocean home, among my ancient buildings; and it is indescribably sweet to be able to live again this way! >
You purged the last years of your computers' memories so no future species, finding your world, would learn what weaknesses your Guardian might possess, in case they wished to emulate the ancient Humans and learn their secrets from Orion, and especially in case the Humans rose again, so they wouldn't know you survived, watching and ready to work against them if there was a need.
< The Humans or any other race that wished to travel down the same path. It's true - but a part of the reason was also a vain hope that no one would learn what the Humans had done, that the likes of your Jimbo would not be judged for the crimes of his progenitors. >
Hmmm - I think I understand. If I knew what the results would be, I would never have told the Psilons about the Humans' ancestry, and I would have worked to keep the story of Cryslon and the Silicoids from the Psilons and Bulrathi alike. And as for Jimbo, he should be judged exclusively on the basis of his incredibly boring stories!
< I would pardon him. After centuries of slow and unrecognized labor to return the people of the galaxy to space, I am grateful for any stories I can get! >
Then I won't stop telling mine - but I don't suppose you'd tell me ... what's all this nonsense about the Triad, anyway? Rha isn't even anybody's homeworld!
< Welllll ... it was at one time. After the Silicoids, before the horror and the revelations of the three final plagues, those three worlds were the homes of the three most advanced peoples of the galaxy - our ancestors, the Humans', and the Psilons'. And as the legend leaked into your consciousnesses from our history, and it became clear that you would dominate the galaxy as our ancestors had once before, I hoped that it might take new form, with Maalor as the home from which you spread across the galaxy, with Nexus sharing knowledge from Orion, and with Rha with its ancient Psilon records to stand for the other races of the galaxy ... but I fear it was a little far-fetched. >
Yeah: You failed to take into account the native bloodthirstiness of non-hive races, to say nothing of the way they follow schizoid freaks like Lasitus.
< I hate it when that happens. >
OOC Note: Did I neglect to mention the tech path I chose after Oracle Interface? That would be because I misclicked it so fast, I didn't even see what pointless thing I'd accidentally "chosen." With the game already effectively over, I didn't even bother to look up what I was researching. Only when it hit a couple years later did I find out it was Battle Computer Mark IV._______________
Next: Taking On the Teddies
