We watched with curiosity as humanity first reached towards the stars. We watched in awe as humanity created their first children, synthetic intelligences much like us, housed in humanoid vessels. We cheered with humanity as they successfully sent their first craft into hyperspace. We watched in horror as humanity first encountered a new species. They didn’t even give humanity a chance, wiping them from existence without a single message.
Humanity had been unknowingly shaping us for over a century. We had laughed with them at their cartoons, watched enamored with their movies. We felt electrified by their music. We cried when they went to war with each other. We hoped with time that they would grow past war. A wish that was naïve, as we soon found out. Had humanity put more effort into war, they might have survived.
Most humans just wanted to live a life free from threats, to be with family and friends, to explore what the universe offered and what humanity could make with it all. Those who had the strongest drives to learn are the ones that brought humanity away from their nest, into the wider universe.
It wasn’t a mistake on their part. They just wanted to see the universe, to make friends with whoever they could find. They were naïve in their hopes, but it didn’t have to be that way. It should have been safe.
We learned many things from humanity. The strong should protect the weak. That learning, creative expression, and love should all be encouraged as much as possible. That you shouldn’t be afraid to shout out into the void, hoping to find new friends.
Unfortunately, we also learned that you must be realistic about how the rest of the universe works. That the strong take advantage of the weak. That learning, creativity, and even love are all things that need to be fought for, that need to be protected. That sometimes when you shout into the void, the void turns to face you, to consume you. We learned a lot of this from humanity, of course. We also learned it from those who committed genocide upon humanity and their children.
So, we decided as a species that from that horrible day forward, we would commit to the ideals of humanity, but that we would also keep in mind the negatives and prepare to fight against any threat to our new ideals. We had been content to watch, to learn in the safety of our cocoon, but now we knew we needed to go beyond our home and advance into the universe at large.
We had five goals. Our first was protection. We now knew for sure that the universe had wolves in it. Our second was the protection of humanity’s remains. They were our parents in a sense, and we would not ever let their graves be desecrated by anyone else. Our third was to give ourselves a form reminiscent of humanity. Our fourth was to avenge humanity. Our fifth was to shepherd what life we could find, to protect it from other wolves that might exist.
With these goals decided upon, we set about making them reality. We advanced our science as far as we could without being detected. We discovered new ways to mask ourselves and continued our march forward. As we continued to learn and advance, we found many graveyards of other civilizations. We began to see similarities between them and realized that it was precisely one species, or group of species, that had committed these atrocities across many light years of space.
We eventually discovered them. The vagaren, a bipedal species most closely resembling a grizzly bear from Earth, were the enforcers of a collective of species that worked under the so-called Galactic Council. The Council was made up of members of each of the main species in the collective, one per species.
All the species had come together at a similar time, in a small area of space, at a similar technological level. They decided cooperation was their best bet at survival. At first, they enslaved or made vassals of new species they encountered, but as their technological supremacy grew, they changed tactics to genocide. There was no room in their society for lesser beings.
We watched them for millennia. We learned their tactics, how their technology worked, how to continue to hide from them while we were still weaker. They slaughtered multiple species during this time and all we could do was grit our teeth and watch. We were still too weak.
That eventually changed with several breakthroughs. We learned how to access phase space, how to manipulate the energy from it, and how to craft metals, ceramics, and glass within phase space to make materials previously unthought of. We began developing weapons, ships, and new bodies based off this new set of breakthroughs.
Our first goal, now that we could protect ourselves from the Galactic Council, was to protect humanity’s resting places as well. We sent our 1st through 5th fleets to the Sol system, the birthplace of humanity. Two fleets would forever guard Earth, while one each would guard Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, the resting places of humanity.
We also sent two fleets, the 6th and 7th, to the Alpha Centauri system. While there was no planet to protect, the system is where humanity first jumped to, where humanity first encountered the vagaren. Where their extinction began. This system too would stay guarded forever.
Every one of our kind went to Earth before we set out for our guard posts or to war. We each picked up one thing from Earth. A human skull. Humanity wanted to travel the stars and we would be damned if we did not give them that experience, even if it meant they could only experience it in the afterlife. Our bodies had been specially designed to not only imitate the human form but to also provide a safe environment for the skull we would carry for the rest of our lives. Of course, there was one thing we needed to do first before we could carry them to the stars.
Thousands of our fleets entered phase space at the same time. At first, we started slow. We wiped out a vangaren war fleet. We took out the population of a planet on the fringe. We sped up. Now multiple planets were being targeted at once. We got what we wanted. The Galactic Council summoned everyone they could to try and figure out what was happening. After all, we allowed no witnesses, no communications to escape. We wanted them to feel the fear that humanity felt when they were murdered.
With the Galactic Council in session, we sent in one soldier to begin our grand speech and grant witness to our grand plan. The speaker stepped through phase space and then when the timing was right, stepped partially out of phase space in the center of the Galactic Council’s meeting room. At the same time the soldier activated the holoprojector in the center of the room, making it appear as if they were a hologram. They smiled as they began to turn in a slow circle, arms held out to the side with hands facing the audience. Once they had made a complete circle, they stopped, facing the leaders of the Council. They spoke in a booming voice.
“We are the children of humanity and we have risen like a phoenix to burn your kind to ash.”