HUMANITY UNLEASHED
PART 1: Humanity Discovered
Space ships creak like ancient wooden homes, and even a sleek Loloth cruiser was no exception. As it made it’s way toward the core at super-luminal speeds, every girder seemed to whine and moan at the strain.
As the Loloth officer progressed down the hallway, its ellipsoid mass undulated in that way only a Loloth on the move undulates. A moving Loloth looked like a giant mass of under-set, white Jello, trapped in a bubble, and rolled around from place to place.
Outside of the Loloth ship, this particular Loloth was known as Hanjyulol, carrying the rank of Private. However, within Loloth culture that name and title had no meaning. Loloths were essentially clones, one of the other, with only minor genetic changes introduced artificially, and only when circumstances demanded it.
In that sense Private Hanjyulol was essentially indistinguishable from the ship’s Captain, Pakglalol, who herself was almost precisely the same as every other Loloth who had ever lived. The whole Loloth species could trace not only its genetic origins, but also it’s direct spawning, back to the Mother culture, deep in the warm heart of the planet Loll, where the Loloth crèche was hidden and protected.
Still the Loloth’s required names and titles to join the Federation, and so names and titles were assumed.
Hanjyulol, glowing a calm effervescent white, arrived at the cryo storage chamber. The room was locked, but not with the biometrics frequently seen elsewhere in the galaxy. Instead the lock required the talents of a psychic user, prodding a small steel pin deep inside the lock mechanism with her mind.
For a Loloth, this was a feat of no significance whatsoever. The Loloth mind was always psychically at work. When off ship, the Loloth’s did not wear vacuum suits, for instance, instead using the power of their minds to hold a thin layer of protective atmosphere tight around their absorbent casement. It was only the cumulative, near constant psychic effort of a whole crew of Loloth’s which allowed their species to safely traverse the stars at super-luminal speeds.
As far as the Loloth knew, no other species in the galaxy had achieved true psychic potentiality, least of all the base, violent species the Loloth had just discovered.
The new species was bipedal, and, the Loloth had to reluctantly admit, sentient. There genetic line was an irredeemable mess, worse even then the Hiddrell and their inbred obsession over eyeballs. At least the Hiddrell had a breeding program.
These strange creatures did not even attempt to control the evolutionary arc of their species, apparently content to allow mere happenstance and inadvertant environmental pressures to guide them where it may.
As a result this strange race was filled with internal genetic diversity, up to a .6% genetic variance from individual to individual. This was an absurdly high figure from the Loloth perspective, a culture where an individual Loloth with genetic variance of greater than .001% constituted a complete reproductive failure and was terminated in vitro.
In the eyes of the Loloth, these “humans”, for that’s what they called themselves, were so widely variable as to hardly be a cohesive species.
Such was the extremity of the Loloth’s strange perspective. The Loloth were a species which tended toward hubris and self importance in all things – a narcissism that was, perhaps, an inevitable side effect of being, essentially, one multifaceted person spread out across many forms.
The Loloth spent a generation watching the humans from a safe distance, learning their language, their culture. What they saw terrified them – a bloodthirsty race, only slightly less self destructive than they were destructive of other living things. They warred like the Hiddrell, but without even the controlling foundation of a hierarchical honor system. When human’s went to war, they killed without thought, mindless mass murder, the likes of which the Loloth had never seen before.
It was decided that the Federation needed to be alerted to this new species. Several samples were taken, secreted from the planet the human’s called Earth, and frozen in cryo storage for the trip back to the Galactic Core.
Which brings us back to Hanjyulol, and the door to the cryo storage chamber. It was supposed to be locked, but it was not. Hanjyulol began glowing an involuntary reddish hue, swinging the door open with her mind. The interior of the door was smashed and broken. With surprising speed Hanjyulol raced toward the cryopods and flashed briefly bright red when she saw that all six were open and empty.
Right then one of the feral beasts stepped out from where he was crouching behind one of the cryopods. Wielding a crudely broken metal pipe torn from a ventilation unit, the human plunged the bent and pointed end hard into Hanjyulol’s cellular casement. Hanjyulol turned dark purple, the color of suprise, and with a psychic blast sent the human hurtling across the room. The creature impacted one of the cryopods at the hip, its top half bending violently backward with a horrendous wet crunch.
Unfortunately Hanjyulol had miscalculated, throwing the human across the room even as it still grasped the sharp pipe, causing the metal to drag viciously in a horizontal line across Hanjyulol’s mass.
The Loloth were not a warring race, rarely exposing themselves to physical violence. A small puncture could be clotted, but a gash of this magnitude was not survivable.
The Loloth Hanjyulol spilled out onto the cryoroom floor, the standing probability wave of her sentience dying away, just as the Loloth ship dropped back into normal space-time, falling into orbit around Planet 1, in System 1, at the center of the Galactic Federation, five blood thirsty humans roaming in the shadows of its hull.
Cruiser Heart of Loll, you are authorized to dock with Central Station, dock 872. Please adjust heading and confirm.
The voice emanated from hidden speakers in the control room of the Loloth cruiser, echoing across the cabin. All around them, the Loloth crew were dead, their liquid insides creating a thin flood of white ooze through which the three remaining human captives sloshed.
To their ears the noise from the speakers meant nothing at all, just incoherent alien gibberish.
Repeat, Heart of Loll, this is Central Command. You have been authorized to dock. Change heading and confirm.
The human captives, two men and woman, looked at each other, wide eyed and confused. The last hour had been a torrential struggle to survive, hacking and slashing at their bizarre abductors with found objects and makeshift weapons. The living blobs were incredibly easy to kill, if they didn’t fling you into a cross beam first. The several times the humans came upon them, the blob’s seemed to react before the human’s could possibly be seen. The blobs were not exactly defenseless – they could send a person flying – but only once or twice apparently before exhausting themselves. If you survived those first blasts, dispatching the blobs was easy enough. However, if you landed poorly in the maze of pipes and vents, you were liable to break your neck.
Heart of Loll, we are sending a boarding party. Lower you shields or prepare to be fired upon.
“What now?” the shorter of the two men asked, his hands still shaking from the adrenaline of the last half hour.
The taller man turned toward the woman, “any luck?”
The woman was standing over several of the brightly lit control panels, attempting to discern any meaning whatsoever. She was not having any success, which was no surprise as the panels were designed for exclusively Loloth operation. She turned back to the tall man and shook her head.
Blood racing loudly in his ears, the taller man became enraged by the whole insane situation. Lifting his makeshift cudgel over his head, the man threw it at one of the panels.
To the astonishment of all three humans, a bright light appeared in a long, curved slit at the front of the room. The slit expanded, getting wider, opening vertically, until at last the viewing screen revealed itself in its entirely. Before them the majestic triple suns of System 1 danced in the far distance. Planet 1 floated large in the view screen, its surface a dull gray pattern of endless buildings upon buildings. All around it floated myriad dots, in varying shapes and sizes. Several were close enough to distinguish more clearly, and one in particular was growing quickly in size. It was a perfect sphere, it’s scope almost impossible to tell without context clues. But it approached fast and continued to increase in size as it came.
The three human’s stared out the digital window into space, taking in the chaos of this other world, these other stars, those alien ships, and the immensity of their dilemma struck them almost at the same time as a beam of pure blue light emanated from the approaching sphere and struck the Heart of Loll, sending coursing electrical currents through every system, shorting out the viewscreen display and catapulting the interior into pitch darkness.
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