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The pogroms began everywhere, all at once.

On the worlds where humans were a minority population, local Federation species ganged together and acted swiftly. Human storefronts were smashed, homes were burnt to the ground and lynchings became commonplace. On thousands of planets – like Zorte 9, a Hiddrell satellite colony with a small contingent of human workers – every human being was swiftly put to the blade within a week of the destruction of Palthurian.

However, aliens did not hold a monopoly on anti-human violence. Far from it. Perhaps it will not even surprise the more cynical among you to discover that the overwhelming bulk of human deaths were caused by other humans, and for all sorts of idiotic reasons.

To be sure a great deal of blood was spilled over the simple distinction of veteran versus non-veteran. Ex-War Dogs certainly found themselves at the forefront of the Galaxy’s cumulative fear.

But, being human, once the floodgates of violence were opened, we could not help but indulge our basest instinct for prejudice. The same ancient capacity for bigotry which lives on in us even now, alive and well – perhaps not in the individual human mind, but certainly in that immortal and thoughtless moron, the mob.

On every human planet, violence erupted between groups of human beings dividing each other along whatever flimsy line seemed most important to them. The destruction of Palthurian acted as a widespread and universal catalyst to violence between all human people for all conceivable reasons.

For instance, take the human settlers of the fiery moon Lona. They declared war against the human settlers of the world around which they orbited, Paralax, as revenge for the centuries-old slight of exiling Lona’s long-dead pioneer, a man known to no one beyond the backward populace of that isolated star system. Or consider the planet Gagarin, where human settlers sourced predominantly from the steppes and hills of northern Asia and Siberia, cut each other’s throats in droves over the interpretation of fewer than a dozen contested words in an ancient Orthodox text.

On thousands of worlds, the human poor broke into the homes of the human rich and pillaged what they could, murdering the occupants. On thousands of worlds, the young purged the old as intellectually and culturally backward, while on thousands of other worlds the old crucified the young as a threat to stability and societal values. Here people killed each other over the color of their skin, there over the color of their eyes, yet elsewhere over the length of fingers, the number of toes, or the timbre of voices.

All across the galaxy, the hastily built, loosely connected house of cards, the so-called “Empire of Humanity” fell apart at the seams in a self-destructive blood bath Psychologists have come to call The Unmooring. Everyone agrees that it was the nuclear annihilation of Palthurian which sparked the violence, but this only answers half the question. A spark is only dangerous if there is fuel to burn. The question that really matters is where did all the fuel come from? If humanity was a bonfire waiting to burst into flames, who built the bonfire?

Based on the books I’ve read and the experts I’ve spoken to, as well as my own stark experience with the depravity of our species, the most compelling theory can be summed up as follows: When the Loloth picked us up on Earth and quickly spread humanity across the galaxy, all in under a thousand years, they fucked up our natural development.

Making the interstellar jump from a home planet onto other planets is not just a practical or technological leap, but an evolutionary one. Left to our own devices, without Lima Bean interference, human beings were not yet ready to colonize the galaxy. Our brains had not developed enough to do so successfully under our own power.

Nonetheless, the Lima Beans did it anyway, dragging us off our world and dropping us all over the place, all at once. On account of our fast reproductive speed and efficiency, we populated these worlds quickly. However, since we never underwent the natural changes evolution would normally bring about before a species left their homeworld, we were doomed to recreate the same broken society we left behind on Earth.

In order to understand what I’m talking about, just look at the Trylixians. Each individual Trylixian might look the same to the untrained human eye, but pay closer attention and you can see lots of differences. Trylixians come in a variety of skin tones, weights, and musculatures. Their limited body hair comes in a variety of colors and textures. Their voices sound different, one from another. Their eyes are different colors. Yet, there are very few harmful internal prejudices among the Trylixians.

The same can be said for every naturally developed interstellar species. Some of them homogenized – like the Loloth with their genetic engineering – a few developed unbreakable social/biological hierarchies – like the Hiddrell or Klatsu – while the majority retained their physiological differences but nonetheless psychologically evolved beyond internal prejudices altogether. This is why you never hear about a Trylixian killing another Trylixian because of the color of their skin or a Plo enslaving a fellow Plo over the shape of their skull, or a Hiddrell caste rebellion, or a Loloth insurrection.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what I’m getting at here. Before the Lima Beans “rescued” humanity from Earth, human beings were still up to all their old, shitty habits. On old Earth, even right before The Seeding, prejudice of all kind was alive and well. Sure, we’d gone through small shifts toward true equality here and there, but these social experiments were all limited to specific nation-states or fiefdoms. In the history of the human race, even now, in the middle of our present crisis, we have never actually abandoned our backward, “terrestrial” bigotry.

That’s the difference between us and the Lima Beans, or us and the Hiddrell, or us and the Trylixians. That’s the difference between a fully evolved species and a fucking evolutionary child.

So, yeah, no surprise, when we were dropped all over the galaxy, infecting world after world like a virus, the societies we built were carbon copies of the only society our immature brains knew how to build – an unfair, unbalanced society, crisscrossed with fault lines along idiotic and simple-minded divisions. The only reason we survived through the war with the Gorax was that we shared a common, Galactic goal. Our species-wide excitement acted as a temporary proxy to actual evolutionary change and stopped us from indulging our animal instincts and cutting each other to shreds.

But once the war was over, and the majority of us came back traumatized and cynical – once our shared goal was achieved and our grand, joint efforts were at an end – all we had left to fall back on was our petty differences and our vestigial, vicious habits.

Which is why I said before that everything was likely to have turned out like it did no matter how the Lima Beans treated us after the war. Humanity had not sufficiently changed. Simple as that. And when those rabid War Dogs blasted Palthurian into oblivion, it was like the gun being fired at the start of a bloody, bloody race. Humanity bent over backward to destroy itself, like a spring wound too tight, and, in doing so, we solidified our reputation as the most bloodthirsty, mindless race of creatures the galaxy had ever birthed.

When the bulk of the frenzied infighting was done, in less than a year, fully half of the galactic human population was dead. It was estimated that non-human Federation species caused approximately 3% of those casualties. That official number may be low, but not by more than a couple of percentage points. That means fully 95% of the human deaths during The Unmooring were caused by other humans.

Before turning the page, stop here and ask yourself whether any of this is really surprising. What, really, is new about Humans killing other humans? What’s new about Humans being exceedingly good at it?

There is a tendency since being shut in our cage, to curse our captives – the despicable Loloth and the coward Federation. And yes, I curse them as loudly as the next human being, and, as I have discussed and will discuss more, their sins against our species are innumerable and unforgivable.

But before we shed a tear for our lost brothers and sisters – before we make that age-old mistake of idolizing our dead – let us not forget who they were, and what they did. Remember them, mourn them if you feel compelled, but never lose sight of their role in our fate. Their only legacy is the starless sky.

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