We Thulu are a logical sort. It does not do well with us to feel empathy, for by our very nature to be empathetic would in fact be a serious burden. Spending time in so many people's heads, sometimes involuntarily, requires a bit of emotional disconnection on our part, elsewise we would be caught up in everyone's tragic story or illogical impulses. Given the sheer size of the population in the galaxy, to do such a thing would cripple my species through triviality, a problem we have dealt with back before we even left the boundaries of Yuggoth, where the Ivallu and Migou nearly overwhelmed us with an emotional load from their constant prayers. We learned from this and have since refined our mentality since. To that effect we only look for two things when peering into one's mind: what we can learn and what can we use. You make think it a harsh way to use abilities, but it is a necessary measure to ensure the safety of my species. Many conflicts, many wars have been avoided using this method, and even if it has resulted in the Thulu's dominance of the Poros systems... then that is a price we are willing to pay. But I am getting sidetracked, what has resulted from this adjust in mindset among my species is what we have come to see as the galactic system.

When looked at from a broad perspective, it is easy to predict the ebb and flow of galactic society. Person A says X, Person B responds with Y. Given how simple minded the Empire was, this made it all the easier to manipulate and bend them to our needs whenever they interacted with us. Their Sect of the Divine was a more complicated beast, seemingly adjusted to the shadows as much as ourselves, but even they still held the weaknesses that many Rezenaga held at the time, and that was their simplistic view of the world, which was to conquer everything they deemed weaker than themselves. As you would imagine, such a mindset is bound to create a certain degree of resentment among those that were conquered. If one were to say... heighten this sense of anger among the populace, what do you think you happen? The First Galactic Civil War was very much a product of our own machinations, though I will commend the Empire on its ability to quell such an uprising so quickly. However, what they failed to realize is that the mere act of rebellion scarred the perceptions of the Empire. It showed to the general populace that an uprising was in fact possible, and even if it failed, in the end it created martyrs for the downtrodden.

The Empire may have quelled the rebellion brought about by our own influences, but in doing so they had created the foundations for a second rebellion, one driven by a refined, if not overly pure, ideology rather than inflamed hatred. What the founders of the Coalition, who now head its Council, had done was imagine the heroes of the First Galactic Civil War as warriors that fought for the same ideals they held, and they strove to complete what they had started. In reality, the rebels of the first rebellion were in fact more brutal than the Empire themselves. But history tends to muddy as time goes on, and in the end all that is remembered of the first rebels is that they fought the Empire, and that gave the Coalition the drive it needed to break from them. We predicted such a thing would happen, because due to the countless number of minds my people have read, we learned that people, regardless of species, tend to project their own biases out into the world. By creating that first, albeit brief, rebellion within the Empire, we further sowed the seeds of discontent among their populace, and even if the rebellions ended up never succeeding, it disrupted the Empire enough to keep them from becoming overly powerful while we made a profit from the shadows. It was all part of the galactic system, one that in part was of our own design.

It goes without saying that humanity has disrupted this system, but to explain the extent at which they have done so is a fairly long and arduous process that, frankly, is too tedious to explain. The most obvious example, as I have already mentioned before, would be their entry into the Second Galactic Civil War and how their sudden thrust into the center of attention caused a mental shift among the general population that has taken some time to adjust to. But it goes beyond just that.

I suppose I should first provide a background to what I wish to talk about. We Thulu are the first species, as far as we are aware of, to develop the Space Displacement Drive, and thus the first to begin intergalactic travel to far off worlds. Now communication is something that the Thulu have never found difficult, considering our own abilities, but as other species, most notably the Rezenaga, started to expand out into the stars the barriers of communication between the species became very evident. Solving this problem was not as simple as learning language, as biological differences between species have caused a number of different methods of speech to develop. Be it from higher pitches of speech that some cannot hear, to purely visual speech that others cannot interpret due to the amount of colors they can or cannot see, to even speaking through smells, communication cannot simply be learned across biological boundaries.

As you can imagine, this inability to understand one another often lead to conflict and misunderstanding, and though we certainly were able to profit off war, there is only so much conflict even we can handle before it becomes too much. Using our understanding of each species' mind, we then developed the Universal Translator Implant, or UTI for short. The UTI, which is implanted into the parietal lobe of the brain, serves as the interpretation device that is used throughout the galaxy. The implant... enhances the translation function of the lobe, which allows the user to pick up and translate the different speech cues from each species. Even if they do not smell certain smells or see certain colors, the implant does and translates these signals into something that the user can register for themselves, which is generally into a language they can recognize. Distribution of this technology, as well as keeping it complicated enough so it was not easily replicable, was an arduous task, but by distributing the technology through trades with the Migou and Ivallu, we were able to spread and sell the UTI across the galaxy. Even the humans, who were pondering their own solutions for communication, accepted the devices eagerly.

This was a particularly profitable venture for us, and most likely reduced much conflict throughout the galaxy, even if most of it was under the foot of the Rezenaga at the time. Following this, our next subject of interest was intergalactic communications. Speaking to one another in the same star system with mere radio waves is not without its delays, but it is still manageable. Communicating across the stars with such a method would result in messages being delayed for quite some time, and that is putting it lightly. FTL communication had been developed at this time, but it was done ship to ship and planet to planet, which made for poor reception across the galaxy due to possible interference between points. At certain times, signals had to be bounced from ship to ship, which was only a moderately better solution, but was unreliable due to constant movement on part of the ships. To transmit the signal, as well as maintain the reception, it was important to install relays at certain points across the galaxy, something we put into effect in the Poros systems. The Empire had come to the same conclusion, but when they had they realized that builing such relays across their far more expansive space was... costly to save the least.

We predicted this, and in fact even hoped for it, for from there, it was a matter of having the Migou offer to build the relays in Empire space, for a much cheaper price than the Rezenaga were willing to do it themselves. Not too cheap, as we still aimed a profit and to offer a lower price would make them suspicious to our intentions. They accepted the Migou's offer and when the Intergalactic Communications System, or ICS, was put into place it managed to shorten intergalactic delays to a manageable scale. It did not eliminate them, however, which was to our benefit. Since the delivery of a message is not necessarily instantaneous, it was possible for us to... let us say examine the contents of certain key messages for potentially vital information before they arrived to their recipient. As useful as our gifts are, we cannot read the minds of people on different planets, making the development of a intelligence community crucial to our methods. To that effect we built an access point into each relay, something only a Thulu may access and peer into as we desired. For you see, information is probably, if not more, profitable than the trading of goods.

We are as much information brokers as we are merchants, selling company and government secrets, even personal information to the highest bidder. We would keep some secrets to ourselves, of course, for our own personal gain. By keeping access to this "backdoor" for only us Thulu, we maintained an advantage on the collection of information, and no one, save the Migou and Ivallu, were aware of our efforts. The occasionally crafty hacker could find these access points themselves, but they were usually dealt with before word could get out. So long as we let the Empire believe at that time that time that the Migou were the ones solely involved in the building and programming of the relays, then they had no reason to suspect us.

You may ask why the Rezenaga never just conquered the Migou and forced them to do their bidding, and our answer related back to the initial conflict the Rezenaga had with the Ivallu. Their defeat in the Poros systems, and they very nature of their defeat, had instilled a sense of fear and caution amongst the Empire at that time. They had never seen us physically, but our touch on their minds told them that there was something lurking in the Poros systems, something that, even with their own military prowess, they would be very foolish to fight. How much of that feeling was instilled by us directly, or indirectly is another matter entirely, but it served as a sort of psychological shield for the Migou. The Empire knew they originated from the Poros systems, and that was enough for the Empire to leave them be. So long as the Migou did their job and left them alone, they paid them no mind, which, again, was to our benefit. It was a good system to maintain, as it greatly benefited us with information and still provided a good enough communication to suit the needs of the rest of the Galaxy's denizens. It was perhaps this very reason that explains why we never thought to develop any superior technology than what we had developed.

Then, of course, the humans intervened.

The demand for government information skyrocketed after the war, and espionage had become a new avenue of business for us. Given that the Coalition was still part of the Empire when the relays were installed, we found it within our best interest to monitor the new fledgeling power. Monitoring both the Empire and Coalition was a simple task, for reasons I have already described, but conducting inquiries on human matters required a different sort of effort. They had rejected the offer to install our relays in our space, instead opting to build their own. A reasonable decision, one that we were not fond of, but reasonable nonetheless. Greasing a politician's palms can only get you so far, and the offer for more information to the lower parts of an organization more than often results in a disgruntled rant on part of a jaded employee that gives at most a sliver of information. Any possible targets we could "read" had received some training in mental defense, meaning that if we were to commit to any one human to analyze, it would have to be timed where a long disappearance would not be considered suspicious. There were some humans that gave information to us willingly, and that was usually in the form of personal information that could be used for blackmail. These were few and far between, for it appeared that humans prefered stabbing each other in the back rather than letting us do it for them.

It is because of this that we first became aware of the human's intentions when picking up a series of messages sent between Empire and Coalition space. As you can imagine, seeing a steady stream of communications between two opposing powers was perplexing to say the least. It was not only the source, but also the very nature of the messages themselves that were confounding. They were dictionaries, accounting for every single species in both Empire and Coalition space. These dictionaries were presented in both auditory and visual formats, and in the case of smell, a list of chemical or pheromone combinations. There were also multiple versions of the same language, but upon closer look we realized that they varied between dialects. They were sharing languages, but for what reason we could not guess. It was not until we intercepted a message from UPN space that everything had become clear. It was a fairly complicated file to crack, but the its contents eventually revealed themselves to us.

Finished up the new translation algorithms, take a look here.

Jon

Attached to this message was a series of algorithms that we recognized immediately. It was the coding of the UTI, which we had purposely hid from most of the galaxy when developing the device. The humans, presumably this Jon, had somehow managed to crack the protections of the UTI and then modified its code. As we explained before, the UTI translated alien languages into a familiar language that one could recognize, but that did not mean it translated it into something the subject would know. To use a human example, if a human from Britannia heard say, a Rezenaga speak, the words spoken could sound more like Japanese than English to them. It was recognizable, but it still required knowledge of a different language to learn. We kept this "feature" of the device, because it still allowed enough of an understanding, along with misunderstanding to keep the discontent amongst the people to manageable levels. There would be no large collapse of discourse, but enough to profit from. What Jon had done was eliminate that source of misunderstanding by not only modifying the code to compensate for these different interplanetary languages and dialects, but also by requesting both the Empire and Coalition to compile a codex of these languages. He created a unifying moment for the galaxy, one that quelled some of the animosity between the Coalition and Empire, at least on the citizen level. We were most surprised by the Empire's participation in the project, as we had reason to believe they still held much resentment towards the humans. Perhaps their new Empress was more... logical than their last.

We obviously prepared for the impending release of this new UTI by producing a version like it on our own, but the humans, Coalition, and Empire all released their new versions of this UTI into the market as we did, effectively eliminating our monopoly over the market. The humans, however, also released this product not too long after the war, which allowed their own products to penetrate the markets of the Coalition by pure association with good will. The Empire was more self reliant, but we managed to maintain a foothold in their society due to some of the populace still holding some wariness for the government. Compared to the time before the development of these new devices, however, our profits had become far... less than optimal.

The humans did not stop there, for soon after the introduction of the new translators we noticed a different sort of shift. One of our agents in human space began to report that the humans had started to develop a faster means of communication than the current system we had set in place. It was not secret project on the human's part, as our agent had only learned of this development from the advertising campaign on part of human companies. We at first considered it nonsense, for while current FTL transmissions were certainly faster than they were before, but one could not simply make them fast enough to make up for the sheer distance these messages had to travel. Then, we received reports of the contrary.

Given the nature of intergalactic delays between communications at the time, most messages took the form of written or pre-recorded audio and visual files that were then sent throughout the galaxy. It was possible for instant or video messaging to occur between star systems that were close together, but eventually the delay would grow too large for the practice to be practical. That didn't really mean anything for my kind, but it was easy to detect the frustrations that the general populace had with such a situation. To know instant communication existed, but to also know that it's capability was limited, made the current system we had set up to be a necessary evil rather than a convenience. Again, we were rather happy with this arrangement, and may or may not have encouraged the idea that there was no other way.

The humans, of course, only looked at this as a challenge.

The first intergalactic video chat aired twenty years after the signing of the Treaty of Itraxy. The humans, being humans, had aired the chat of a mother and her infant son. The backdrop of the son was that of Earth, while the mother had the planet of Yab-Bosasch looming behind her. Now of course you make think this a rather trivial exchange, but what was significant about this was that Yab-Bosasch was located in the Poros Systems, which lay on the opposite side of the galaxy in relation to Earth, and there was no delay. The mother and her son were interacting like they were right in front of each other, the signal clear and instant. Implications of technology developed without our notice aside, the most alarming thing about this exchange was that we could not detect it. The recording of the video arrived to us nearly a week after it had occurred, and even then it was a recording of the the event taking place in a plaza, not the actual recording of the exchange itself. We could not find where the humans had bounced the signal from in our own relays, for such an exchange to have occurred without leaving a trace would have been impossible. That could have only meant one thing, that the conversation was happening off the grid.