He made two other races beside the humans, the Nel and one more that they hadn’t encountered yet. For all they knew the third race never had the chance to evolve into intelligent beings. Nel and humans on the other hand managed to evolve and survive. The brilliance of what Axull Darr did was not lost on Seo-yun. She would often tell Tomas that humanity’s greatest strength was their genetic knowledge, but compared to the father of their race it was nothing. Axull Darr managed to imprint a highly advanced and compressed DNA into a less evolved life forms, to change them and lay out an evolutionary path for them to follow, while he also took into consideration the environment that the organism would evolve in. He made sure that his genetic programing would allow for evolutionary variation, and that was most apparent in the DNA of Nel and humans.
They were closely related, their foundation was the same, but their home planets shaped them differently. Humans had lost their tails long ago, while Nel tails remained. Human eyes were different than Nel, who could see a lot better at night, their night vision coming on almost instantly when they went from light to dark. Their strange eyes with many small pupils that constantly shifted were in fact secondary eyelids that were highly reflective, giving them their superior night vision. But their vision was overall worse than that of humans. Their eyes had less focus, they didn’t have peripheral vision, and they saw everything in the direction their eyes were turned in at the same clarity. Human eyes on the other hand were much sharper, at least at the point they were focusing on, and able to see a greater range of the visual spectrum.
Nel were almost color blind, an effect of evolving in the caves of their home planet. And when they finally left their caves they were met with the bleak skies that blocked almost all of their sun’s radiation, resulting in them having pale gray skin. Humanity on the other hand evolved on the world were developing different defenses against solar radiation was a necessity.
There were other differences of course, Nel claws for example, a leftover from a time when they had to have strong and sharp tools to open hard shelled fruits that grew on their world and hunt smaller animals. Their mentality was also different, humanity was shaped by struggle, and later war. While Nel evolved at the top of their planet’s food chain with no competition. Humanity had to claw its way to the top of the food chain. But none of these differences were so big that they could deny what the sphere and the computer representation of Axull Darr told them. They were the same race, or rather sub races of the original race, the People.
When they let their people know the truth, it wasn’t as big of a problem as they first anticipated. The people accepted it, once sufficient proof was given. Things changed of course, what it meant to be human didn’t. Religion adapted, it became much more adept at doing that since they left Earth. The hand of God worked through Axull Darr, the core values of different religions stayed the same. People accepted and moved on.
And the sphere whispered of knowledge unlike anything they could imagine. But the program that kept the knowledge, while in some ways not as advanced as an Ai, and in some far more so, was not stupid. When it came in contact with humans, its higher functions unlocked, as per its programing in the event that the separated races find each other.
It realized that Nel had found the sphere by accident, and that humans haven’t found the sphere on their home world, nor possessed the technology to hear the sphere’s beacon. So it refused to give them technologies that they didn’t possess, but it did agree to share the knowledge it had on technologies that the Empire already possessed. It broadened and reaffirmed the knowledge they had, which in turn usually led to them inventing new things on their own. In a way Seo-yun preferred it that way. It made their advances more valid somehow. The knowledge wasn’t given to them, it was earned.
Seo-yun reached her and Tomas’ quarters and entered slowly, Tomas was probably already asleep and she didn’t want to wake him. As she made her way across the living room towards the bedroom, she noticed a light coming from the direction of Tomas’ private office. Seo-yun sighed and made her way to the light.
“Still awake?” Seo-yun asked when she entered the room.
Tomas swung his head to the door startled for a moment, and then after he realized it was Seo-yun his head turned back to the screens projected above his table. He glanced at them for a moment and then he leaned back into his chair, rubbing his eyes with his left hand. “I didn’t realize what time it is.” Tomas said.
“So, what is keeping you from sleep now?” Seo-yun asked.
“Sowir.” Tomas said seriously, “Ships are still arriving at their staging system. And not only warships, there are transports, support ships, repair ships. They plan on sieging Nelus.”
“We always knew that they would do that.”
“Yes… I thought that with our fabricating technology we could out manufacture them, but those numbers mean that we are still behind them. Our projections put their remaining forces at around two hundred ships at the point we arrived in this region. Their border worlds are protected by one hundred and sixty ships, and the fleet they are amassing already numbers more than a thousand. That means that their production is at least fifty percent larger than ours, if not more. We have no way of knowing what they have deeper in their territory. Not to mention what we now know they really are.”
“Our technology does give us an edge. But remember that they had most of the infrastructure of the Consortium, that’s dozens of worlds. Not to mention anything that the Sowir built in secret in their territory before they started the war, or maybe even outside it. Their industrial base was far larger than ours. Thirty years ago we were two systems, now we have sixteen and our industry grows by the day, as does our work force.” Seo-yun said.
Tomas nodded, “I know, but I also know that as soon as Sowir deal with Nelus they will start planning their attack on us.”
“Again, we knew that already. And even with their greater numbers, they have very little chance of taking us now, our technology has advanced, even with what we know about their genetic knowledge, our shipbuilding capabilities are such that we could replace any losses much faster than they could. What is really bothering you Tomas.” Seo-yun said.
Tomas looked her in the eyes, “The ‘why’ bothers me Seo-yun.” Tomas said.
“‘The Why’?”
“Yes.” Tomas nodded gravely, “Why are they doing this? There is no sense in anything that the “Sowir” do. Their first incident with the Consortium could be looked at as an isolated incident. As far as we are aware it was their first contact with alien life. So they attacked, perhaps they were frightened to discover a life form so different than them, and then when the Consortium showed its power they changed gears, asked for peace and eventually joined the Consortium. They prospered and grew, and then they turned on the other four races. Why? There was no reason, I looked over the records from that period there was nothing to set them off, they just attacked for no reason. They refused to communicate for years, decades. They just killed anyone in their way.” Tomas shook his head.
“And then we come along, we had better ships, better technology, we protected one Nel colony. They knew nothing about us other than that we defeated their forces in a battle. And they had records of that battle, they knew that our ships were better, but not by that much. So we send ships to their system trying to intimidate them, hoping to open talks. And what do they do?” He asked.