Bo'okdu'ust was a Lanaktallan researcher, and as far as he was concerned, a damn good one. He had spent the majority of his fairly long life (at 530 years, he was still spry enough to go for daily walks) researching histories of neo-sapient species.

For the most part his research was to catalogue how they had developed before they met the Great Herd, so that their history could be preserved even as the Great Herd assisted the species in avoiding extinction through their own actions.

Almost three years ago, when the sporadic encounters in the Great Gulf were happening, he had been assigned to try to come up with a history for the new species. Since they were space-faring, he would need to figure out exactly how long they had been space-faring so that the Lanaktallan could estimate how many colonies the species might have and how far they had spread.

When the Terrans had vanished for nearly a year after only a handful of meetings, Bo'okdu'ust was sure that all of the encounters was with either a tight group of very similar species or perhaps one species all together.

Of course, his work was ridiculed and he found himself moved from his coveted offices to temporary lodging in preparation for him to be exiled somewhere.

Then the Terran Ambassador Corps had arrived.

Bo'okdu'ust had never approached the Terran diplomatic team directly, instead he had simply made document requests.

He quickly became adept at the Terran love of official documents. He had quickly learned that with Form TGF-482742-33-344A he could cross out "High Velocity Rail Gun Magnetic Rails" and write in "Historical Information Request" and gain access to military history documents. That Terrans preferred that he sent in forms in triplicate. He registered with a Historical Document Researcher and Historical Investigator number.

That got him exobytes of data from the Terrans, including membership into scholarship societies.

Of course, that also got him information requests.

During his studies, he began noticing that the majority of the data requested were less of a military nature and actually regarded Lanaktallan history.

It was soon apparent to Bo'okdu'st that there was very little in the way of Lanaktallan history that he was able to access, even with historical access.

Out of curiosity he began trying to line up the various neo-sapient histories with Lanaktallan and Terran histories.

Fire? Check. For the Lanaktallan, it was "Precursor Era"

Bronze Working? Check. For the Lanaktallan it was "Precursor Era"

and on and on.

Curious, he began doing what his Terran collegues called "A deep dive" into Lanaktallan history.

Not the expansion of the Great Herd. Not the species they began to protect and attempt to shepard.

No, the actual history of his people.

He was shocked to discover that there was virtually no data. Everything was covered under the heading of "Precursor Era", which was largely lost as far as records went.

According to Lanaktallan history, the Lanaktallan people had exited the mythical Precursor Era with battlesteel, molecular circuitry, jumpspace travel, FTL communication, and minor labor robots and advanced manufacturing techniques.

Where other species had their discoveries listed, the Lanaktallan people seemed to try to fit it all under "Precursor Era" and "We've always had it."

Another curious thing he discovered was the almost complete lack of culture. No real written works of literature, no entertainment media, very very few things that could be considered cultural.

Bo'okdu'ust was starting to become annoyed at the fact that as far as he could tell, the Lanaktallan people had no culture beyond absorbing and shepherding other species. There were references, in early Post-Precursor documents, to works, but he could never find the works themselves.

Most of his fellow historical researchers blamed the march of time for the loss of the works.

When Bo'okdu'ust pointed out that other works, including unintentional emulations of previous works, should have shown up to fill the gap, his colleagues simply laughed and informed him that the answer was obvious.

The Lanaktallan people had evolved beyond the need to entertainment media, as entertainment media was obviously a resource drain with no function or purpose.

That bothered Bo'okdu'ust.

He had heard of Cyberlife and had experimented with it. He saw how quickly the game introduced the player to history and then immersed them in actual culture. Warring corporations competing for attention and resources and monetary compensation. Government vying for resources and support. Groups of 'people' struggling for resources, money, and recognition.

Again, that bothered Bo'okdu'ust.

A simple virtual reality game featured a world more real than actual reality due to simulated culture, history, and society.

While SolNet and GalNet were linked, Bo'okdu'ust began examining even more.

Again, every important historical point in Terran history was lauded and shrouded in legend and myth.

From M'Tumbo, who had been born with copper colored skin in his land where people's skin was obsidian and wrested the secret of smelting and working copper from the very Gods. Now, Bo'okdu'ust knew that there weren't any actual Gods and was an excellent researcher, but he also knew that wresting secrets from the Gods was mythical reference to not understanding that a mortal could devise these technologies through sheer thought and observational data.

M'Tumbo was joined by Han-Li, who had bested a dragon of the Middle Kingdom for the secret, and of Ordus-Rex who had tricked a spirit of the underworld and on and on.

Standard pre-scientific method oral history tradition speech.

Bo'okdu'ust had to admit, the story of M'Tumbo and the quasi-trickster God Spider was both funny and enlightening.

He filed more requests, got access to more data, and kept examining Terran history.

One thing that often made his hands shake was the rapid progression of technology. Rather than the slow and steady growth it was nearly logarithmic in its expansion and growth. From copper to iron in roughly 3,500 years.

His fellow researchers believed that the fracturing of the Terran Protocontinent must have occurred due to Terran made disaster or the attack by the Mantid, however Terran archeology, a field that Bo'okdu'ust was familiar with as a historical researcher, had postulated that the proto-continent had broken up due to volcanic activity 200 million years prior to Terrans developing the use of fire.

He managed to acquire a map of the Terran homeworld, by requesting data that showed the breakup of the protocontinent.

There was something intellectually arousing about watching the continent break up and then shift positions around the globe of Terra.

He requested information on species prior to the Terrans when he discovered that Terra had undergone multiple extinction events. Most species had them in their history, roughly every twenty to fifty million years after the dominant species had discovered they were unable to maintain their civilization and retracted.

Humans had evolved on a world with multiple events that had destroyed the dominant life form and had given rise to the next.

Bo'okdu'ust had found this fascinating.

The most contentious research field even among the Terrans was the spread of Terran humanity.

Bo'okdu'ust spent nearly two months talking to researchers through the GalNet/SolNet link about the spread of humanity from primitive days, discovering that at one time there were multiple genetically distinct versions of humanity that were eventually wiped out to lead to Terran Descent Humanity.

He found it fascinating.

What he did not find fascinating was the fact that the Lanaktallan people seemed to have no history, no culture, beyond "We are the winners of the Precursor War" and "We are the dominant life form of the galaxy."

Bo'okdu'ust was startled to discover that Lanaktallan and Terran history converged five times before the Terrans ever met his species.

Of course, the Terrans had found Precursor Autonomous War Machines on their side of the Great Gulf and engaged in open warfare no less than five times before encountering them on the Lanaktallan side. That was one.

They had encountered the Mantid and fought them. That was two.

Bo'okdu'ust noted that the Terran defeat of the Mantid was more complete than the Lanaktallan defeat of the Mantid species.

The Terrans had destroyed their Hive-Mind Culture, liberated their slave castes, and made them allies.

Bo'okdu'ust found this fascinating.

He, unlike the majority of this fellow researchers, had made a simple discovery.

"Blood to Blood, Sword to Sword" was a Terran saying that echoed back into their Pre-History.

There was nothing like that in Lanaktallan culture.

To be honest with himself, the Terran definition of loyalty and friendship was far more involved, complex, and deeper than the Lanaktallan version.

The saying "Curse your sudden and obvious betrayal!" and "How could my fighting dog bite me?" were two human sayings.

Bo'okdu'ust found himself spending hours every day talking on GalNet/SolNet linkages.

The third was startling.

A Precursor Race, ancient beyond belief, of great power and fearsome ability, had grazed the edge of Lanaktallan Space. They had eliminated entire worlds, strip mining them to nothing in mere months with giant ships that were Dyson Spheres controlled by a single powerful entity.

The Lanaktallan people had lost nearly two hundred worlds to the Devourers.

Terrans had lost three.

Which amused Bo'okdu'ust, as this was the third intersection.

Bo'okdu'ust was not surprised that apparently the Terrans had just planet-cracked the Devourers and went on with their lives.

It made Bo'okdu'ust laugh that a young race of primates, with barely 3,000 years of faster than light travel, had destroyed a race so ancient it had devolved into only a bare handful of members as if they had been little more than inconsequential insects.

The fourth intersection was one that his fellow researchers insisted was not applicable no matter how many times Bo'okdu'ust pointed it out.

The discovery of how to work Substance W.

Bo'okdu'ust had pointed out that the only race that had been able to work it with any success had been the Third Precursor race, yet humans could use it down to making complex machinery out of it.

His colleagues said it didn't matter.

Bo'okdu'ust put it up as the fourth intersection. The invention of Substance W and mastery of it.

Something the Lanaktallan people had been unable to manage even with examples by the Third Precursors.

According to Bo'okdu'ust's metrics this meant that the Terrans had exceeded the Lanaktallan people's history before every leaving their solar system in great numbers.

He also had his suspicions.

He wasn't privy to too much data on the Third Precursor species. Nobody was. The records were almost all lost, something which struck Bo'okdu'ust as strange.

However, they had been the race that had put the most pressure on the Mantid.

To Bo'okdu'ust there was only one reason the previous race had put so much pressure on the Mantid, who were well documented (Especially recently) to be powerful psychics with the ability to overwhelm the minds of others.

The Third Race must have been psychic themselves.

Bo'okdu'ust had researched the "Mantid Liberation" and found that touching warsteel broke them free of the psychic control of their Hive Queens.

Bo'okdu'ust felt that his conclusively proved that the Terrans of that time were psychic. Powerful psychics.

His peers claimed their wasn't enough evidence.

Bo'okdu'ust countered with the fact that his colleagues frequently made assumptions about entire societies based on a handful of shards of broken pottery while he could point at the two massive Terran combat cyborgs. When the massive Mantid Speaker had overwhelmed an entire planet's minds, the two cyborgs had immediately moved to attack the Mantid, unfettered by the Mantid's control.

His colleagues slunk away to chew on their livers.

The Fifth Intersection was one that Bo'okdu'ust wasn't sure of himself.

During the Lanaktallan 100+ million year reign over the stub of the Orion-Cygnus Arm, they had encountered vast creations. Entire stellar systems broken down into rings and tubes. The rings were walled high enough that atmosphere could not escape. The face of the rings, and the interior of the tubes, all matched planets from nearly three hundred million years ago to as little as thirty million years ago.

They all were in the darkness between stars.

It was largely ignored by the Lanaktallan. An artificial system such as that was dangerous, someone else had wasted the stellar system's resources creating the tubes and rings. They were superficially examined, but there was no resources, just the strange high-tensile metal that was completely inert and proved almost impossible to work.

The Terrans had something called "The Ring Wars" in their history.

Data was scarce. Most of his requests were returned with heavily redacted sections.

Something, somewhere, had caused the Terrans to go to war with something directly related to the Stellar Rings and Stellar Tubes.

That was Bo'okdu'ust's fifth point of intersection.

The Terrans had discovered that five rings and two tubes had been built recently enough that they possessed geological imitations of Terra itself as little as a hundred thousand years ago.

Bo'okdu'ust was not a Lanaktallan who believed in coincidences. He understood happenstance, he understood that correlation did not equal causation, and all the good things a historian knows.

The Terrans and the Lanaktallan people suffered a breakdown of diplomatic talks.

Unlike his colleagues, Bo'okdu'ust knew that Lanaktallan people were not wholly innocent.

His research into Terran psychology, history, culture, and society showed that above all the Terran people abhorred slavery by any means.

His colleagues had all harumphed and nodded. Of course they did. They were the dominant life form in their section of the Great Stub (And what was with his people's naming everything Great? He had always been curious about that. The Great Stub. The Great Herd. The Great Society. The Great Sunrise) so of course they would strictly avoid slavery.

Bo'okdu'ust knew that in reality, humanity hated slavery with such a passion because it was less than 10,000 years ago that they had enslaved themselves.

Bo'okdu'ust had read historical documents that a genetic slavery war had been fought between bitter combatants only a few centuries before the Terrans had met the Lanaktallan.

He knew there was no bigger opponent of something that a being who had indulged in that thing and discovered the horrors within it because they had exposed themselves to that horror.

He called it Bo'okdu'ust's Seventeenth Law.

"There is no greater fanatic than a former addict."

Bo'okdu'ust knew that the Terrans and the Lanaktallan people's current culture was completely incompatible.

The Terrans had a saying that Bo'okdu'ust called "Bo'okdu'ust's Twenty-Third Law."

"One cannot survive while the other exists."

Bo'okdu'ust was annoyed by the Lanaktallan Great Herd going to war with the Terrans.

It interrupted his research.

Bo'okdu'ust had recently began to gather evidence to provide proof of a theory he had slowly created, a proof he called "Bo'okdu'ust's Nineteenth Theory."

"Every culture has an equal and opposite culture."

He had been able to show that while every other species took millennia to advance between each scientific discovery the Terrans had undergone a mathematically provable technological arc. He had contrasted that the various races of the Unified Species Councils. Had shown that as the other species had advanced technologically, they had lost culture.

The invention of the printing press often led to complete cultural collapse within a thousand years as information led to stagnation.

The discovery of the series of genes to adjust biochemistry to create happiness resulted in social stagnation as the species could barely muster up the effort to support itself.

The invention of the electronic age led to social breakdown and information overload.

The invention of atomic power led to atomic war.

Yet with the Terrans, it seemed as if challenge was approached through multiple cultures to settle out as a benefit after the drawbacks were made into benefits.

His papers on "The Terran Question" had resulted in academic screaming.

He had proven, with mathematics and social equations, that the Terrans were superior to the Great Herd in the fact that their culture was still expanding, evolving, and adapting.

Bo'okdu'ust had invented entirely new socio-mathematics to prove and solve each section of the Terran historical growth and adaptation.

Even proving why the Terran willingness to engage in wholesale warfare advanced that highly adaptive culture.

Terran warfare had made it so that the Terrans were uniquely able to handle deprivation and hardship that would destroy any other culture. Bo'okdu'ust had proven that Terrans were as to warfare as certain trees were to fire. Warfare allowed technological growth, eased social and economic and technological stagnation, and increased the desire for peaceful lulls between wars.

He had submitted papers to the council with proof that a war between the Great Herd and the Terrans would do little but introduce the Terrans to the various species that made up the Unified Councils, allowed the Terrans to absorb them and reintroduce culture to those species.

Where other enemies of the Great Herd had faltered at absorbing the species, Bo'okdu'ust had theorized that the Terrans would, instead, gain strength through the absorption of the other xenospecies rather than become weakened.

Part of his proof was the fact that the Terrans uplifted species on their homeworld before ever meeting any other species, that they had created genetic variants of their own species before ever encountering another species. That the subspecies and uplifted species, and even the xenospecies were so far ingrained into Terran society and culture they were even members of the military and society.

His detractors pointed out that the neo-sapients and near-sapients were allowed the same thing.

Those detractors, of course, ignored the socio-mathematics that showed that there was a difference between the Great Herd's application of xenospecies inclusion and Terran xeno-species inclusion.

The months that followed Bo'okdu'ust watched as world after world fell to the Terran military machine.

On a whim he weighed his advanced age against the possibility of more data. There was a chance the Terrans would kill him outright.

But they might not.

So he had boarded his private ship, filed the correct paperwork, and left Council Space for Disputed Space.

Bo'okdu'ust sat in the command couch of the lavish and expensive spaceship that only needed himself to pilot and travel. He was nervous, as he had exited jumpspace and immediately stopped. He had cut his engines, his shields (except the debris shield), and began to broadcast his historian credentials, including his Terran credential numbers.

There were a thousand reasons for the Terrans to blow him out of the sky, the very least that he was Lanaktallan and his people were at war with the Terran Confederacy.

But, he mused as he slowly chewed on a wad of nutricud, there was a simple reason for them to not blow him out of the sky.

He was a noncombatant academic researcher.

His instruments showed that he was going to be visited by five ships.

Bo'okdu'ust nodded. Terrans had five digits on each hand, which had made it easier for them to develop Base-Ten Mathematics. Five ships would feel much more... organic... to the Terrans.

The largest, Bo'okdu'ust noticed, had seven engines stacked two-three-two. The other ones had the engines stacked two-three.

Lanaktallan vessels were often pointed ovals, egg shaped with a pointed end.

Terran ships were a wide variety of designs, which told Bo'okdu'ust that they had not felt it necessary to use optimal for all purposes designs.

The lights aboard his ship flickered and Bo'okdu'ust leaned back.

He knew he had just been boarded by the highly effective Terran Electronic Warfare systems.

He idly wondered if it was a Terran enhanced virtual intelligence or a full on digital sentience.

He had upgraded his computer systems to far beyond what he would need, increasing power, storage, and computational ability to the point he could have hosted nearly two dozen Lanaktallan shipboard virtual intelligences.

His viewscreen clicked on and he found himself looking at a Terran face made up of chrome and neon.

"Good afternoon, Doctor," the face said. "If you submit to a physical inspection of the ship, the Terran Confederacy welcomes you."

Bo'okdu'ust smiled. "It is expected."

It was time for in person research.