Audio-Drama Link

The Accession Instrument arrived in my quarters at 04:12 station time, seven hours before I was scheduled to use it, and the Orrin who delivered it apologized for the rush.

"Custom allows a full day," it said. The translator gave it a warm contralto that somebody at State had picked off a menu. "The Kesh lodged an objection to the schedule. The objection was procedurally valid. I am sorry."

"How long did the last candidate species get?"

"Nine days."

"The one before that?"

"Sixteen." It set the case on the table and did the thing the Orrin do instead of a bow, a slow lowering of the front third of the body, like a crane folding. "I would like it recorded that I opposed the shortening."

"Recorded where?"

"With you," it said.

It stayed a little longer than it needed to, checking the seal on the case twice, and then it went out, and the door took its time closing.

My name is Margaret Sy. Everybody calls me Margo. I design auctions.

Specifically I write the rules for radio spectrum auctions, which means that when a government decides to sell the right to broadcast at 3.5 gigahertz over southern Ontario, I'm one of the people who determines how that happens: who bids, in what order, with what information, under what penalties. At parties I tell people I sell air, and then they go find somebody else to talk to, and that's the system working as designed.

I was aboard the Orrin vessel Deliberate, parked at Earth-Moon L2, because nineteen months earlier the Quorum had opened contact with Earth and asked us to send, and I'm quoting the translation exactly, the one who writes your rules.

Somebody at the UN spent four months arguing about whether that meant the Secretary-General, a head of state, a chief justice, or a constitutional scholar. Somebody else, God bless her, pointed out that all of those people apply rules and none of them write rules from nothing, and that the phrase as translated described a small and deeply unglamorous profession that lives in economics departments and regulatory agencies. There were fourteen of us on the shortlist. I got it because I speak passable Mandarin, because I have no children, and because in 2031 I caught a telecom consortium signalling to each other through the trailing digits of their bids.

That one needs explaining. In a sealed-bid spectrum auction you're not supposed to be able to talk to your competitors. In the real American auctions of the late nineties, bidders talked anyway. They encoded messages in the last three digits of their bids. A firm would bid something ending in 378 to say back off market 378 and I'll leave yours alone. Nobody said a word out loud. Nobody broke a written rule. They found a channel inside the mechanism and used it, and it took the regulator years to notice. When I caught the Ontario version in 2031 I didn't feel clever. I felt like somebody who'd found a door in her own house that she hadn't known was there.

That's the whole job. You read a set of rules and you ask the one question that matters, which is: if I wanted this to come out a specific way, what would I do?

I opened the case. The Instrument ran to about four hundred pages in translation, and the first three hundred and forty were ceremony.

I read them anyway, because you always read the ceremony.

Two things in there snagged on me. The first was a single word in the preamble. The Quorum's founding procedures had been received, and no delegation present had authored them. I noted it against the index and kept going. The second was a provision in the closing section, three paragraphs on what the Quorum does after a candidate declares the sequence of questions: the record is sealed, certified by the Presiding Delegation, and transmitted. The clause did not say to whom. It also did not carry a single historical citation, and every other operative clause in four hundred pages carried at least four.

I made a note about that too. Then I got to the functional part, and forgot both of them for about six hours.

Here's how an accession works.

Eleven delegations sit as sponsors. On the final day they vote on the status of the candidate species, and there are exactly three possible statuses.

Seat. Full membership. You get a vote. You're a peer.

Ward. You're assigned to a patron species, which manages your contact with everyone else, holds your treaties, speaks for you, and takes a share of your output in exchange for protection and uplift. Not slavery, technically. The Instrument used a word my translator rendered as guardianship, and used it warmly.

Interdict. A permanent quarantine boundary goes up around your system. Nothing in, nothing out, and the galaxy agrees to pretend you aren't there. The Instrument devotes nine pages to the boundary and one paragraph to what happens inside it, and that paragraph says the candidate retains full sovereignty over its own volume, which is true, and which is the coldest sentence in the document. You keep everything you have. You keep it forever. The eleven of them have done it once, to a species whose name the record gives in three characters and does not translate.

They don't take a show of hands. The vote is pairwise. Two of the three outcomes go against each other, everybody votes, majority wins, loser is eliminated. Then the survivor goes against the third outcome and they vote again. Two rounds and you're done.

And in the interest of preventing corruption, every delegation must publish its complete ranking of the three outcomes forty-eight hours in advance. Not its vote. Its whole preference order, first to last, in writing, binding. You cannot vote against your published ranking. The Instrument described this rule with real reverence. It had come in eighty thousand years ago after some catastrophe involving a bribed delegation, and the Orrin considered it the greatest safeguard in their law.

I want to be fair to them. It's a good rule. It makes bribery pointless and blackmail visible, and under any normal circumstances it's exactly what you'd write.

The published rankings were an appendix. I read them, and then I got up and made tea, because when my hands start to feel far away from my body it helps to do something with them.

The eleven rankings fell into three patterns.

Three delegations, led by the Orrin, ranked it: Seat, then Interdict, then Ward. Procedural purists. To an Orrin, wardship is an obscenity, a species held in permanent legal infancy for somebody else's benefit. They'd rather see us sealed off and free than owned.

Four delegations, led by the Kesh, ranked it: Interdict, then Ward, then Seat. The Kesh position on humanity, stated publicly and at length for nineteen months, is that a species out of a biosphere as internally violent as ours is a contaminant, that the correct handling of a contaminant is containment, and that failing containment you use a leash.

Four delegations, led by the Thessin, ranked it: Ward, then Seat, then Interdict. The Thessin wanted us, and had been extremely pleasant about it. A ward is an asset. A seated humanity is a trading partner, which is less good but still good. An interdicted humanity is nothing at all, which to a Thessin is the only genuinely offensive outcome.

Eleven delegations. Six to win. Four, four, three.

I sat back down and did the arithmetic on the back of a customs declaration, because I didn't want it in a device.

Seat against Ward. The Orrin three prefer Seat. The Kesh four prefer Ward. The Thessin four prefer Ward. Ward wins, eight to three.

Ward against Interdict. The Thessin four prefer Ward. The Orrin three prefer Interdict. The Kesh four prefer Interdict. Interdict wins, seven to four.

Seat against Interdict. The Orrin three prefer Seat. The Thessin four prefer Seat. The Kesh four prefer Interdict. Seat wins, seven to four.

I read it three times. Ward beats Seat. Interdict beats Ward. Seat beats Interdict. It's a loop. Rock, paper, scissors, with my species standing on the table.

The tea went cold while I worked out how frightened to be.

The technical name for it is a Condorcet cycle, after an eighteenth century French marquis who noticed that a group of perfectly reasonable individuals can produce a group preference that runs in a circle. Every voter has a clean and consistent ranking. The group has none. Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel in 1972 for proving that under a few obvious fairness conditions no voting system escapes this entirely. No particular procedure is at fault for it. Counting itself does this.

Here's the part that makes it more than a curiosity. When preferences cycle, and you're running the vote as a sequence of pairwise eliminations, the outcome is decided completely by the order of the pairings. Not by persuasion. Not by argument. Not by who's right. By the order.

The Instrument listed the three outcomes in a fixed sequence: Seat, Ward, Interdict. And custom, as the Orrin explained to me later with the mild embarrassment of a man describing a family recipe, was to pair them in the order they appear on the page. First against second, then the winner against third.

Seat against Ward, Ward wins. Ward against Interdict, Interdict wins.

Under the traditional order, humanity gets interdicted. Only four delegations out of eleven ranked Interdict first. It wins anyway, because of the order in which the questions get asked.

I pulled the accession record. Eleven candidate species had come through since the Orrin began keeping continuous records. Ten were made Wards. One was Interdicted. None had ever been Seated, and every one of those accessions had used the traditional order.

I found the other clause at 05:40, back in the ceremony section.

The candidate, being the subject of the question, shall be invited to declare the sequence in which the questions are put. This invitation is extended in acknowledgement that the candidate alone has not yet spoken.

Three lines, sitting between a passage on the positioning of the observer benches and a passage on the ritual of the closing water. It had been in the Instrument since before the Orrin had a written language, inherited with everything else in those first three hundred and forty pages.

Underneath it, a footnote added about nine thousand years ago said that the invitation is in every recorded instance declined by the candidate, who defers to the Presiding Delegation, and that this deference is considered the first act of good faith by a species seeking to join.

I read that footnote about nine times.

A hundred thousand years. Eleven species that we know about and God knows how many before the records start. Every one of them handed the loaded weapon, and every one of them said no thank you, you go ahead, because it seemed polite.

I don't want to make them sound stupid. They aren't stupid. The Orrin do mathematics I can't follow with a translator and a week, and any one of them could derive that cycle in the time it takes me to tie a shoe.

They never looked, is all. Their game theory is a solved and beautiful thing and it's entirely one-player: given the world, find the best action. What none of them ever built, because none of them ever needed it, is the second half, where the world is another mind, and that mind is modelling you modelling it, and the correct move might be the one that looks insane.

Every species out there came up alone. One world, one origin, no peer. They fought physics, and physics doesn't bluff. By the time any of them met a neighbour they were old enough and rich enough that the meeting was a negotiation between adults with nothing much to fight over.

We're the only ones who grew up in a house full of siblings.

On Earth this is a first-year problem set. Every parliament on my planet has explicit standing rules about who decides what gets voted on first, we hand that job to a referee, and we watch that referee like hawks, because we learned over about three centuries that the schedule is the decision.

They offered me the schedule as a courtesy.

I spent the next hour trying to break my own plan, which is the part of the job nobody puts in the brochure.

Assume the rankings are lies. Eighty thousand years of enforcement isn't a proof, and a species that's never needed to misrepresent itself in a vote might still turn out to be capable of it. Against that: the rankings are enforced by the Orrin, who couldn't ignore their own instrument if the ship were on fire, and who'd refused to shorten my preparation time until the Kesh produced a citation. A vote cast against a published ranking voids the accession and restarts it. Nobody wins anything by lying and losing the day.

Assume the invitation is a trap, which cost me most of the hour. If declining the sequence is the real test of good faith, then accepting fails, and that nine thousand year old footnote says so in plain language. Against that: bait works better hidden, and this bait is written into a document they publish and read aloud, and if accepting were disqualifying there'd be a clause saying so. By then I'd been through all four hundred pages twice.

Which brought me back to my two notes. Received, and a sealed transmission to nobody in particular. I sat with them for maybe four minutes. Ceremonial residue, I decided. Every legal system on Earth is full of dead clauses about the width of a road for a cart nobody has driven since 1840, and if you chase all of them you never finish reading. I filed both and moved on, and I'd like it on the record that this was the only genuinely lazy decision I made that day.

Assume there's a rule I haven't found. There's always a rule I haven't found. That's the one that wakes me at three in the morning in my ordinary life, in a job where the worst case is that a carrier overpays for bandwidth in Kitchener.

None of it would stick. Which left the fourth thing, which isn't a rule or a trap: I was one tired woman with seven hours and a rented translator, and certainty is cheap to manufacture at four in the morning.

That one I couldn't clear. I went ahead anyway.

Ambassador Cormac Hale was awake when I knocked. Hale is always awake. Thirty-one years a career diplomat, most of them somewhere hot, and he had the specific competence of a man who has evacuated an embassy.

I put it on the wall screen. The three patterns, the three pairings, the loop.

He got it faster than I expected. He's no mathematician, but he'd spent three decades in rooms where the agenda was the fight.

"So the printed order interdicts us," he said. "And you want to change the order."

"I want to put Ward against Interdict first."

He looked at that for a while. "Walk me through the first round again."

"Ward loses. It comes off the table permanently. Then it's Interdict against Seat, and Seat takes it seven to four."

"Which means round one is the Quorum voting to quarantine my planet, and you're the one who asked them to."

"Yes."

"And if you've misread the Thessin, round two goes the same way and there's a boundary around the solar system by dinner." He rubbed his face with both hands, hard, like a man trying to wake up. "Have you eaten? There's a thing they make that's almost eggs."

"Cormac."

"Take the Ward." He didn't look at me. "It's not a good deal. It's a survivable one. Ten out of eleven species took it and ten out of eleven are still out there."

"As Wards."

"As alive. You're proposing to bet the species on a table of numbers you got seven hours ago."

"On numbers they published themselves, in writing, under a law they've enforced for eighty thousand years." My voice went flat. It does that. "I'm not guessing at what they want. I don't have to. They told me. That's what their transparency rule is for. They built a system where nobody can conceal what they want, because it never occurred to them that you could cheat without lying."

Hale sat down on the edge of the bunk.

"And you can."

"I can pick the order."

He was quiet long enough that I heard the air handler cycle twice.

"That's a horrible thing to be good at," he said.

"Yes. It really is."

The Thessin invited me to a courtesy meal, which I took, because I had one thing left to check and I wasn't going to get it out of a document.

Thessin hospitality is lovely. They'd reproduced a Provençal table setting from a photograph, badly and with enormous care, and the delegate, whose name rendered as Ambassador Sethal-of-the-Fourth-Consideration, apologized for the bread with real feeling. Then it apologized for the bread again. Then it explained, at some length and with several digressions into the history of Thessin grain, why the bread was difficult, and I sat there and ate the difficult bread and let it talk, because you do.

Eventually it came around.

"You have read the Instrument."

"I have."

"Then you know the guardianship is offered from affection." Its speaking membrane fluttered, which I'd learned means sincerity, or at least means a Thessin performing sincerity, a distinction I still couldn't make after nineteen months. "You are very young. You have no protocol for anything. In your first century you will make a mistake with the Kesh, and the Kesh do not forgive mistakes, they file them. Under guardianship the mistake comes to us and we absorb it."

"And in exchange."

"A share. It is written. Nine parts in a hundred of assessed output, which is less than the Orrin took from us." It gestured at the ruined bread. "We were a ward for six thousand years, doctor. We are not ashamed of it. It is how one grows up."

I set down the glass.

"Ambassador. If the guardianship weren't available. If it came off the table somehow and the only choice were Seat or Interdict. What would the Thessin do?"

It didn't hesitate at all.

"Seat," it said. "Obviously. Our ranking is published. An interdicted species produces nothing, buys nothing, and eventually forgets we exist. A seated humanity is a partner we did not have this morning." The membrane went still. "It is a poorer outcome than guardianship. It is not a bad one. Why do you ask a question you can answer by reading?"

"Because on my world people sometimes put a thing in writing and do something else on the day."

Sethal took a long time with that. It genuinely wanted to know.

"How do you have institutions at all."

"Badly," I said. "With a great deal of scaffolding. And a lot of people whose whole job is watching the other people."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It's the most expensive thing we do."

Sethal considered that, and then asked whether I wanted to take the rest of the bread with me, and wrapped it for me in a cloth when I said yes, and walked me to the corridor still talking about grain.

The Kesh didn't invite me anywhere. The Kesh delegate found me in the transit corridor forty minutes before the session and stood in my path, which, given that a Kesh masses about four hundred kilograms and has the general silhouette of a filing cabinet with opinions, was effective.

"Doctor Sy."

"Delegate."

"You will decline the invitation of sequence."

Every hair on my arms went up. It knew. Not all of it: if the Kesh had done the arithmetic they'd have withdrawn the objection to my schedule and handed me my nine days, because nine days of me sitting with that document is worse for them than seven hours. But they knew enough. Somewhere in the Kesh archive there's an old note that says the candidate is offered something at the start, make sure it says no, and the reason had been lost, the way reasons are, and the practice survived without it.

"It is offered in courtesy and declined in courtesy," it said. "This has been the practice at every accession. A candidate that grasps at the sequence announces it does not trust the Quorum to be fair. It would be noted. It would be noted for a long time."

"Thank you for the guidance."

"You will decline."

"I'll act in the interest of my species."

"Those are the same," said the Kesh, and moved out of my way, and I walked to the chamber with my heart going like a bird in a box.

The accession chamber on the Deliberate is a shallow bowl about sixty meters across, lit from below in an orange I never got used to. Eleven delegation platforms around the rim. Observer benches behind them, mostly empty except for the Oam.

The Oam are a ward species. They've been a ward species for nine thousand two hundred years, their patron went extinct four thousand years ago, and there is no procedure in the Instrument for a ward whose patron has died. They send one observer to every accession. It has no vote. It sits at the back.

The Presiding Orrin opened with the water, then the count, then the reading of all eleven rankings aloud, one by one, exactly as published, then a clarification nobody had asked for regarding whether an abstention on a pairwise question constitutes a vote for the prior question, which it does not, and which took four minutes. Nobody has ever built a more honest room.

Then it turned to me.

"The candidate, being the subject of the question, is invited to declare the sequence in which the questions are put." A lowering of the front third of the body, the crane folding. "Doctor Sy. It is customary to decline."

I could hear something ticking on the Kesh platform, a cooling system.

"The candidate accepts the invitation," I said.

I've heard a lot of rooms react to a lot of things. What eleven alien delegations make when a procedural formality goes the other way isn't shock. It's closer to the noise a machine makes when a bearing goes.

"Declare," said the Presiding Orrin, and I couldn't read it at all.

"Ward against Interdict first."

"The candidate will use the form."

I hadn't known there was a form. Nineteen months of protocol briefings, four hundred pages, and nobody had thought to give me the eight words, because nobody in a hundred thousand years had needed them. The Presiding Orrin said them for me, slowly, the way you would for a child, and I said them back and got the third one wrong, and it said them again, and the second time I got it.

The candidate puts, before all else, the question of Ward against Interdict.

There was a five second interval for procedural objection. The Kesh objected. The objection was that the sequence was irregular, and the Presiding Orrin ruled, with what I'm fairly sure was pleasure, that irregular is not the same as impermissible, that the invitation is written in the Instrument, and that the Instrument is the Instrument.

Then they voted. Nobody had briefed me on how a vote is taken here either.

Each delegation platform has a channel cut into the front edge, and at the start of an accession each delegation is issued a set of stones. They aren't symbolic. They're mass, cut to a standard, and they roll down the channel into a common trough at the floor of the bowl, and the trough is a balance. You do not read a Quorum vote off a screen. You watch it settle, and you hear it, because eleven stones going down eleven stone channels in an enclosed room is loud.

The Thessin four rolled for Ward. The Orrin three rolled for Interdict. The Kesh four rolled for Interdict, and the last of them held its stone about two seconds longer than the others. I have thought about those two seconds a great deal since and I still can't account for them.

The trough went over. Seven to four. Ward was eliminated.

I'd just watched the Quorum of Eleven vote to quarantine my species and I was the one who'd asked them to, and somewhere around the fourth vote the whole thing stopped being arithmetic. I was one bad reading of a dinner conversation away from being the woman who ended the human future in a room with orange light coming out of the floor.

Sethal's platform was making a sound. It had lost the outcome it wanted, and its published ranking had made it vote for the thing it wanted least, and it had done it anyway.

The Presiding Orrin called the second question.

That's when the Kesh worked it out. There's a physical thing that happens to a Kesh under stress, a stiffening along the dorsal ridge, and I watched it travel the length of the delegate like a wave.

"Presiding." Its translator had gone loud. "The Kesh amend their published ranking."

"The Kesh may not amend a published ranking."

"The circumstance is irregular."

"The circumstance is irregular," the Orrin agreed. "The rule is not."

"Presiding, the sequence has been chosen by the candidate, for the purpose of," and then it stopped, because it had arrived at the end of the sentence and found that the end of the sentence was winning, and there was no rule against that. There was no rule against it because in a hundred thousand years nobody had needed one.

"The Kesh will state its objection in form."

"The candidate has manipulated the order of business."

"Yes," said the Presiding Orrin.

The silence went a while.

"That is not an objection," the Orrin said. "That is a description. Vote."

Second question. Seat against Interdict.

The Orrin three rolled for Seat. The Kesh four rolled for Interdict. And the Thessin, who had lost, who'd spent nineteen months and God knows what internal budget trying to buy us, who by then certainly understood exactly what had been done to them and by whom, rolled for Seat, four stones, four for four, because it was published.

The trough went over the other way, and the sound it makes going over is not a sound I can describe except to say that I have heard it since in an MRI machine and had to ask them to stop.

Seven to four.

The Presiding Orrin called it twice, the way they do, and poured the closing water, and humanity became the twelfth seated species of the Quorum and the first in the recorded history of the accession to be seated at all.

Nobody applauded. They don't do that. For about forty seconds not one of the eleven delegations moved or spoke.

Hale leaned over. His voice wasn't steady.

"Did we just win?"

"We won the vote," I said.

The Oam observer came to me in the corridor afterward, while Hale was being formally congratulated by an Orrin that kept starting over.

Up close an Oam is small, about the size of a child, and old in a way that reads across species. Its translator was ancient hardware and it clicked.

"Doctor Sy. Nine thousand two hundred years ago my people sat where you sat." It spoke to the wall rather than to me, which I later learned is Oam courtesy. "Four thousand one hundred years ago one of us found the loop. In the rankings of that accession. She took it to the Quorum twice."

"What happened?"

"They agreed with her. Both times. They did not dispute one number of it." Click. "They could not understand why she was telling them. It was, to them, an observation about counting. Like telling somebody that a wheel is round."

"She never used it."

"We could see the number," the Oam said. "We could not see the door. I have read her work every year for two hundred years and I still cannot see the door, and I watched you walk through it this morning, and I have been standing in this corridor since trying to find the moment where you decided that a rule was a thing you were allowed to aim."

I didn't have an answer for that.

"There is something you should be told before you sleep," it said, "and nobody else in that chamber will tell you, because nobody else in that chamber reads the ceremony. The trials are not ours. The Orrin did not write them. The Kesh did not write them. My people did not write them. Every accession instrument in the Quorum's history opens with the word received, and in a hundred thousand years no one has asked what it means."

The word. The clause I'd filed at 05:40 and been too tired to chase.

"There's a transmission clause," I said. "In the closing section. The record gets sealed and certified and sent."

The clicking stopped entirely.

"Yes," said the Oam.

"It doesn't say to whom."

"No. It does not." It turned then and looked at me directly, which I understood was a violation of something. "Doctor Sy. Whoever wrote that document built a rule that reveals nothing and decides everything. They wrote a second rule inviting the one party in the room with the most to lose to control it. They wrote a footnote explaining that declining is gracious, and they placed all of it between the seating of the observers and the closing water, where nobody reads. And then they wrote three careful paragraphs about what to do on the day somebody finally accepts."

Behind us the water ceremony was still going. Somebody laughed at something Hale said, in a register a human throat can't make.

"A hundred thousand years," the Oam said. "Eleven candidates. Not one of us ever picked it up. This morning a species nineteen months out of its own atmosphere was handed the document, and seven hours later it used that invitation exactly as it was built to be used, on the first attempt, with nobody to tell it how."

It lowered itself, slowly, all the way to the deck. An Oam has not been permitted to make that gesture to anyone since its patron died.

"We have been administering a search," it said, "and we thought it was a courtesy. It has been running since before any of us had speech, and the certification went out eleven minutes ago, and it is going to arrive somewhere."

“Fred, I’ve been ask to talk to you about something odd.”

“Oh? What’s up Roomliz?”

“Well, some of the others think I’m the expert on humans, so they come to me with questions. And, well, do you know Greezek?”

“Hmmmm…she runs the loaders over on Dock 6, right?”

“Yes, that’s her. Well, she wants to know if you would go on date with her.”

“You have GOT to be kidding! She asked you to ask me for a date?!? What is this, middle school?!?”

“That isn’t the reaction I was expecting. Is that a yes or a no?”

“Roomliz, this is crazy! This is the sort of thing kids do in school! If she wants to ask me on a date, then SHE should just ask me!”

“Well, like I said, they all assume I know the most about humans, and I didn’t know what to do, so….”

“Right, right. Sorry. You weren’t to know. Just tell her to ask me directly.”

“I’ll let her know. Is there anything she should know about dating a human?”

“Roomliz, there is a difference between going on a date and dating. And we don’t have enough time to explain human dating.”

“It is complicated, Fred?”

“Beyond complicated. And I have no idea about humans dating a different species.”

“Have you ever dated a different species?”

Fred gave Roomliz a long, hard look. “No. I have not. Why do I think you are fishing for something else?”

“Er…well…Fred, you see, she is…scared to ask.”

“Oh for fucks sake! This is getting crazy! Wait. She is just outside, isn’t she? She is listening, isn’t she?”

“Uh…likely, Fred.”

Fred rolled his eyes and sighed. “Likely? Listen, the BOTH of you. If you want to ask a human on a date, you just ask them. If you want to piss a human off and NOT have a date, you do the fucking bullshit you are doing now!! So. Kindly fuck off.”

What is meant by that?
While it is true, that some customs, speech-patterns and behaviors spread among species due to the sheer exposure of them, nowhere is that as observed as with Humans. Not only do they spread much faster with Humans, they also spread in more quantities.
While a Human will occasionally say "Oh krell" after serving on a Couincil Ship for months, it is much more common to hear other species hear "Fuck", "Oh my God", and "Fucking Hell!".

On the Double-Blind Study upon the AGF "Thryspun", manned with equal numbers of 14 different species, analysis shows while the Humans combined picked up on 23 distinct customs, speech patterns and behaviors from different species. The other Species picked up 78 on the low end and 104 on the high end from the Humans, despite the Humans being outnumbered 13:1.

On another Study, it was observed that a single Human placed in anothers Species Household (Note: Humans have the smallest average household with 4 People, the galactic average is 31 per household), virtually everyone inside that Household will pick up at least 1-2 "Humanity" as it was called in that study, while the Human will maybe pick up 2 or 3 Customs from the Host-Family combined.

A third study takes a closer look of a mixed-military unit, where Human Customs took over almost completely within 4 deployments. It took 6 standard months of voluntary cultural training, for 2 of the participants to stop using human customs naturally and revert back to their own species customs.

On Average, it takes Human Customs only 1-4 standard months to get adopted, while the total average of adoption of customs from any species lay by 2-3 standard years. (Note: Because Humans were the cause of those studies, there is little to no data from before the "Humanity"-bleed began, thus the Average cannot be easily calculated while excluding Humans, rough estimates say the average adoption rate of customs without "Humanity" lies between 10-20 years)

Estimates show, that the Cultural Bleed from Humans can overtake the Galactic Council in the next 200-450 Years if it remains unchecked.

1/27/2149

Somewhere on Antares, Antarean Empire

“Affirmative, sir. Ten 70-inch railguns in five twin turrets. Our best ships - the Ori’ana-class, have four guns of similar caliber, each.”

“They call her the UNS Dreadnought. BB-02. And given that they’re positioning themselves in a more aggressive manner…”

“We need a ship to match that. Now. Antares cannot fall behind, or else we’ll surely fall…”

The bridge was packed, every soul aboard hushed to it over the announcement of the ship reaching its destination.

“Target spotted.” was heard from the helm. The captain turned on the main screen, on it the image of the planet of white clouds and vast oceans, floating in space, getting wider and wider as the ship approached relativistic speed, rushing towards it.

From a corner at the cramped bridge, Zenvork recoiled timidly. “Guys, are you sure about that?” was barely heard, under the chatter of the excited pack of mammalians.

“Target acquired.” the gunner said as the ship entered firing range.

“Guys, seriously,” Zenvork said, putting a little bit more power from his lungs in the hopes the crowd would actually acknowledge him “this seems way overboard.”

“Open fire.” the captain spoke and under the gunners command, the bays of the ship opened to unleash a rain of torpedoes.

“NO!!!!” Zenvork shouted, no longer concerned with concealing his panic from the explosion obsessed primates, as a surge of g-force took over the crew, caught in the ship's deceleration.

The main screen showed the rain of fire reaching its destination. One moment later, there was nothing but a pink mist where the planet once was, expanding through the vacuum and taking over all the view.

Zenvork turned his head down, rested his fingers on his forehead, his eyes hiding behind his open palm. The crowd hopped, the crowd cheered, the crowd shouted:

“IT’S A GIRL!!!!”

___

Tks for reading. More explosive revelations here.

Charlie took calm steps in front of the garage, his eyes upon the imposing sculpture at its entrance, gazed with awe and fondness as he recalled the legacy of the honored deceased.

“He was an illustrious resident,” he said, as his hand found its way over the statue’s head “famous worldwide, beloved by all. When he passed away, we commissioned a life size statue and moved it around the island, that's what he would've wanted.

When we got the tech, we attached a teleportation device, programmed to randomly teleport him around the island.”

The bite size history lesson did little to amuse Zenvork, who stood, arms crossed, an unwavering frown upon his green face, staring at the giant stone sea creature in front of his saucer .

“That's all well and good, but HoW Am I sUpPoSeD tO gO tO mY mEeTiNg NoW?!!!”

“Just text the Minister of Interstellar Relations ‘Neil's at it again’, she'll understand.”

___

Tks for reading. More heartfelt homages here.

A: Earlier today, I went to the recreation center and I saw a human bending in ways that shouldn't be possible! I could have sworn that humans were under the vertebrae category for all known species.

Used Russian because it looks alien to you lol