10
I started with Union history, which originated with the Emissaries, originally known as Pleiadans.
When it became clear the lights of their dying home star were about to go out permanently, they’d begun a scramble to move their population somewhere other than the Pleiades. Of course there could never be enough ships to move a whole planet’s worth of people, but the construction continued until their sun exhausted itself. They got everyone they could out, but in a tragic display of Darwinian selection, this didn’t necessarily mean it was women and children first.
They were advanced, but not so much so that they could afford to take just anyone aboard. Each colony ship was a small, self-contained city with limited resources. That meant every soul aboard had to be productive. Children were a necessary burden, but they could only bring so many. The problem with that was for any society to grow and thrive, there has to be a sustainable replacement population. If not, they’ll eventually die out. The Pleiadans needed to start making new babies pronto, but first they needed a habitable planet to settle.
This problem was somewhat alleviated by their long lifespans. A regular-Joe Pleiadan without gene tweaking could easily live for a hundred and twenty human years. They could last over twice that long with genetic enhancements, so there hadn’t been an immediate danger of their kind dying out. But they were still in a race against time, because it’s a big galaxy and it was taking them way too long to find a new home.
The first civilization they encountered was the gray guys, the Reticulans. And while both races would develop deep bonds that laid the groundwork for the Union, that initial encounter was the first in a string of disappointments.
The Reticulans’ planet was livable, and therein lay the problem. Their home was bursting at the seams with its native population, and the Grays were already in the process of scouting out new worlds for themselves. They didn’t have room to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees. And to their credit, the Emissaries’ forefathers didn’t want to lay claim to a world that was already spoken for.
They were both on the same quest for different reasons. And where the Pleiadans’ original colony ships had been immense, nuclear-powered slow boats to nowhere, the Reticulans had by then figured out how to manipulate gravity. Their much smaller flying saucers (and that’s exactly what they were) could zip around like mad, bending space and time to their will. This had been a revelation to the Pleiadans, and a source of great hope.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last because every other compatible planet they found was occupied. Most of the civilizations they’d met had all been understanding of the Pleiadan’s dilemma, and many offered to let them stay. But this still didn’t sit well.
Without a permanent place to settle, they weren’t making babies at the rate they needed to carry on. Still aren’t to this day, but they keep finding ways to extend their lifespan. Some of them think it’s possible to live for a thousand years given the right combination of gene editing, diet, and exercise.
The Grays were finding the same problems on their scouting expeditions, and together the two races came to the same conclusion: If a planet was capable of producing life, it would. If that life was capable of achieving sentience, it would. Therefore any habitable planets they might find were presumed to harbor life, which they would not disturb to make more room for themselves.
Their restraint was remarkable, given how desperate their situations were. Despite being so physically different, the Pleiadans and Reticulans recognized their shared values and complementary traits. They took what they’d learned to map out their corner of the galaxy, and got to work. If they couldn’t find unoccupied planets to settle, they’d have to get busy building a place they could call home. Maybe several of them.
Even with their combined resources, the two founding species needed help. They brought in beings from a handful of worlds they’d explored, all with different talents. Some were wizards at construction. Others knew the galactic neighborhood well enough to protect the others from races who couldn’t be trusted to behave themselves. The Pleiadans’ empathic abilities made them particularly good at diplomacy, which is how they became known as the Emissaries. Eventually, every race they’d contacted was invited into this mutual support alliance, the Galactic Union.
The whole story was fascinating and heartening. They could’ve easily gone primitive and started killing each other over territory. We’d certainly done enough of that on Earth. It gave me hope that we humans had the same potential. It also made me wonder how the more well-behaved races in the Union must have seen us: like precocious toddlers, constantly looking for creative ways to get ourselves killed.
The primer on Union law was predictably eyewatering, though it was amusing to see that other species apparently suffered from the same legalese we did on Earth. Lawyers had a way of making the simplest concepts sound like brain surgery. Boiled down to its essence, it in fact sounded like their code of law was lifted straight out of our Ten Commandments: no killing, stealing, or slander, and mind your own business. That last part was couched in the language of “respecting the customs of member civilizations,” which on the surface sounded like a libertarian paradise.
The part about “thou shalt not murder” was interesting. I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t want their members going around killing each other; that’s a basic requirement for any functional civilization. The unexpected part was that it extended to most “non sentient” beings, so alien deer hunting was apparently not a thing. Fine with me, I never much cared for it. The most we did on the farm was go after nuisance animals like groundhogs and coyotes, though it made me wonder about the Union’s food sources. Were they all militant vegans, or did everyone rely on the same kind of food synthesizer Bjorn had shown me?
When I got to the section on business and commerce, it became considerably more intricate. They’d devoted an awful lot of thought to this, which I supposed was necessary. That kind of thing could get complicated in a hurry. My exposure to business dealings had been limited to our farm and Dad’s veterinary practice, but that was enough to turn me off. I wasn’t planning to start an extraterrestrial McDonald’s franchise, so I skimmed over this part and moved on.
There was more complicated legalese on “interspecies relations,” which was kind of amusing. It led to many more questions, though: apparently they were concerned about different races getting frisky with each other, and what that might result in. How many of them shared similar enough biology to make crossbreeding possible?
I closed the law primer and opened up the section I was most interested in: the Union’s different member species. This was going to be the meat of my job and I was anxious to get a head start, as medic school with this bunch promised to be challenging.
The first species happened to be the one I was most curious about. I’d already encountered Reticulans at the crash which kicked off this whole improbable chain of events. I’d seen them, touched them, struggled to find their vital signs, and was keen to learn more.
The lesson started with information on their home world. Zeta Reticuli is a double-star system, both stars comparable to our Sun. It has a scattering of what we’d call “minor” planets, and a single rather small one orbiting the second star of the pair, in our language Zeta 2 Reticuli. Its orbit regularly brings it almost dead center between the two stars, so for several months the whole planet is in full daylight. Not that the Reticulans saw much of it.
Their home planet, “Reticuli Prime” as translated into English, is about two thirds the size of Earth. It’s rocky like ours, but has almost no surface water except at the poles. Being regularly baked between two suns, its surface temperature is too high for life to flourish. Everything evolved underground, where there are vast subsurface oceans, and this is where their civilization took root.
Once I read this, their appearance made perfect sense. The small stature, grayish skin, and those big, black, almond-shaped eyes would’ve been a natural evolutionary path for a race of cave dwellers. What led them to think there was something more above the rocky ceiling they’d lived beneath in the first place?
I recalled what Bjorn had said about their role in the Union: observation. The Reticulans were unusually curious and shared something akin to a “hive mind” like ants, only much more intelligent and self-directed. It seemed like an impossible combination.
The “Grays.” That’s what the UFO nuts called them, and knowing that they’d been right all along didn’t make it seem any less improbable. I’d touched one of these strange beings with my own hands, and now here I was reading about their culture and biology.
Average height, one and a half meters. Five fingers, five toes. Exceedingly long fingers, I should add, with a secondary distal joint. How had I missed that? It was like having a fingertip that could fold back on itself. What benefit would that provide? They’d lived beneath the surface, perhaps that had something to do with it. Scrabbling around inside caverns, they had evolved with what amounted to prehensile fingertips.
They were mostly herbivorous, with oxygen-based metabolism. Of course there had to be more than just rocks underground; they needed a food source, and for them to evolve as they had it would’ve been exceptionally diverse. An advanced civilization couldn’t get by on moss or whatever else grew down there. Their brains needed protein.
Turns out their subsurface environment was remarkably diverse. Their light source, such as it was, came from bioluminescent plants growing from the roofs of their caverns. And their underground seas were teeming with life, much of it also bioluminescent. They had explored every nook and cranny of their subterranean world until someone had decided there had to be more, so they started looking up. What must that time have been like for them?
Our civilization had looked to the oceans and wondered what lay beyond them. The Grays had looked up at the stony roof of their world and wondered if there was something more on the other side. For a race that had been accustomed to the pale glow of luminescent plants, it must have been shocking to find shafts of sunlight blazing through the granite above. Someone had eventually gotten the nerve to climb up through it; to them it must have felt like ascending to heaven itself. How many had attempted, but not survived?
That could not have been an easy leap to make. Combined with an innate curiosity and what amounted to a type of collective consciousness, it made sense that they would be the exploration “drones” of this galactic civilization. They readily volunteered for duty not many others were drawn to.
I wanted to understand their shared consciousness, as this was completely foreign to me. How did this work for an intelligent race—was it a way of absorbing and sharing information, or was there more to it? Could they sense each other’s feelings, feel each other’s pain? This seemed important if I was ever going to be called on to treat one of them again.
I flipped past the overview and dug deeper into their anatomy. Those big heads housed sizeable brains, and I wanted to know more about them.
Their brains weighed about four kilograms on average, roughly twenty-five percent more than your average human, in bodies that weighed a little more than half of ours. That implied a lot of potential. It was connected to the rest of their nervous system through a spinal column and network of neurons and ganglia that looked a lot like ours.
I touched a floating diagram, which popped out into a three-dimensional view of a typical Reticulan’s brain. What immediately caught my attention was the cerebrum—this is the largest part of our brains, divided into two hemispheres of densely folded tissue called “gray matter.” Theirs was not only larger, it was structured differently. There was a third hemisphere, which I suppose made it a “semisphere,” nestled near the brainstem. It was like a bridge between their information-processing, “thinking” region and their sensory region. According to the text, this was the key to their collective consciousness.
The primer said damage to this region would almost invariably lead to death; even if everything else was functioning normally, being cut off from their peers eventually led to the individual’s body shutting itself down. That was perhaps the strangest part of their biology, and there was plenty of strangeness to absorb.
Their digestive system held more notable differences which piqued my interest. While small compared to humans, they had a remarkably complex stomach. It was like a cow’s, with multiple compartments. Most people think cows have four stomachs, but that isn’t quite correct: It’s better to think of it as one organ with four separate compartments. They’re classified as “ruminant” animals, along with horses, goats, giraffes, and so forth. Think about what they eat all day: grasses and grains. Their bodies can’t digest all of this plant matter immediately, so it happens sequentially within all of those different stomach chambers before moving on to the intestines.
Finding similar features in what I was loosely terming “humanoid” wasn’t that surprising. If these beings had lived off of a diet of whatever they could find underground, their digestive systems would’ve adapted accordingly.
Their circulatory system was what I’d expect from beings which weren’t far removed from humans: one heart, located in the center of the chest cavity, squarely behind the sternum, not offset to the left like ours. Their respiratory system included two lungs, much like ours, though they appeared even more complex. The lung tissues were folded in on each other, almost like an accordion. What aspects of their environment would’ve driven this kind of evolution?
I finished with the “naughty parts,” their reproductive systems. This was fascinating. They were hermaphrodites, each containing both male and female organs, though individuals over time tended to develop traits belonging to one or the other. Combined with their hive-like shared consciousness, I could picture millions of short, gray humanoids going about their daily lives underground, communicating telepathically and getting frisky in whatever way seemed appropriate for the moment. How did that work when everyone essentially knew each other’s business?
I set aside my prurient interests and moved on to something more familiar, the Emissaries. They shared an awful lot in common with us humans, down to having the same number of teeth, though a few oddities stood out like a sore thumb. Like the Grays, their brains were among the most obvious differences. Largely similar to ours, their frontal lobes were actually smaller, which was surprising for an advanced intelligence, but it didn’t tell the whole story. I noticed the folds were smaller, tighter and more numerous, so there was more surface area crammed into the space. It suggested more efficient information processing, but it also seemed like this would make them more vulnerable to head injuries—think of it as having all of the most important stuff concentrated in a smaller area.
On the other hand, their parietal lobes were considerably larger, a good twenty percent. This is where spatial reasoning comes from, which I supposed would be important for a race of spacefaring geniuses. I once read about studies of Albert Einstein’s brain, that it held some small but significant deviations that were thought to have enabled him to make associations that “normal” people couldn’t. Could the Emissaries visualize the physics that enabled them to do what they did? A race of Einsteins was simultaneously awe-inspiring and a little frightening. It implied an awful lot of concentrated brain power.
This carried over into the rest of their nervous system. It was robust, to say the least. Two separate spinal cords extended from their brain stems, encased in vertebrae that were radially larger than ours for obvious reasons. If you were going to have two spinal cords, the bones protecting them had better be big enough for the job.
So was this redundancy, or did each cord have different functions? It looked to be the former. Their nerve endings were densely packed and more evenly distributed than ours, which was consistent with an enlarged parietal lobe, because that’s also where our senses of pain and touch are processed. It implied their entire bodies were as sensitive as our most delicate parts, which made me wince. Every bump would feel like smacking your funny bone.
Having a couple years of veterinary school might have prepared me for this new gig more than I’d imagined. Now that I’d had a glimpse of what made them tick, it was a lot easier to understand their demeanor and anticipate their behavior. They possessed a degree of empathy and understanding that made them perfect for their “emissary” role, and their stoicism may have been cultivated as a way to cope with having such heightened sensitivity. I might have been drawing conclusions that weren’t exactly right, but it fit with what I’d seen.
My stomach started rumbling and I took a quick glance at my watch. Time tended to get away from me while studying, and I’d been at this for almost six hours. I skimmed over the remaining files to get an idea of what else I was in for, and it only got weirder. A few were downright frightening: reptilians, insectoids, the “hextopods” I mentioned earlier, and a translucent blob which seemed impossible to possess any intelligence.
One was especially improbable: a race of whale-sized beings that lived in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. They were enormous creatures but exceptionally light, essentially living hot air balloons floating among the clouds. Not spacefaring, but still intelligent enough to be offered citizenship.
What did that say about us, that whale-sized floaters were more deserving of Union membership than humans? Maybe we had a longer way to go than I’d thought.
I put away my crystal and headed for the door, trying to remember which direction their kitchen was in.