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DL-Draco-Rex
@DL-Draco-Rex

The whole "Humans are Space Orks"/"Earth is Space Australia" thing was fun, but only certain versions. Some versions were garbage. "Earth is a Death World", "most sapients evolved from prey species"/"none of the aliens are persistence hunters", "humans will pack-bond with anything", "humans are super good at surviving stuff", and "humans are crazy/reckless" were all great. On the other hand, "only humans invented music", "fashion is uniquely human", "aliens don't understand ballistics/explosives/fire", and so on sucked. Basically humans being the only ones to discover or come up with a concept ignored the premise and felt too unrealistic. To be good the thing that set humans apart had to be related to being predators/persistence hunters from a death world and/or being reckless as hell. Humans being underestimated because of infighting, but uniting against a common threat and proving incredibly dangerous works too.

Anyway, all of this was really just an excuse for the following snippet:


The Galactic Federation had made first contact with humanity a few centuries ago. They were a strange, charming, and also absolutely terrifying people. The Federation was still regularly learning new, often disquieting things about them. Recently they'd heard that a cleaning robot with a knife taped to it had somehow achieved the rank of Fleet Admiral and was commanding an entire human armada.

At present, a number of Galactic Federation exploration vessels were surveying the far reaches of known Human Space.

One particular Federation starship was in a particularly mysterious region. Humans seemed to recognize the area as part of their sphere of influence, but rarely ever spoke of it. It certainly wasn't a very populated area. The survey vessel had occasionally encountered small human settlements - usually strange religious sects - but for the most part the only sign of human influence was a string of ancient human relay stations. While still functional, the stations were uninhabited and neglected. They hadn't encountered anything new for quite some time and were about to turn back and regroup with the rest of the fleet to report their findings and possibly plan further expeditions.

And that was when they detected a large ship entering the system.

It certainly LOOKED like a human ship, somehow simultaneously robust in construction and appearing jury-rigged together. It was using the same kind of tech as humans too, with a far greater involvement explosions and fires than galactic standard. But it seemed off, somehow.

The structure looked almost warped, with some areas apparently over-sized, stretched out and bulging out-of-scale with standard human ships. In other places the structure seemed far too small and tightly packed together. The hanger bays were humongous, and what appeared to be small hanger bays were actually massive airlocks. The ship's design was irregular, looking like a number of different human capital, transport, cargo, colony, and utility ships had been haphazardly mashed together and mixed with a space station and a few orbital habitats. A number of strange, possibly experimental structures jutted out of the hull at odd angles, and there were clear signs that the ship had been added to and expanded over the course of its existence. Overall it looked even more cobbled together than normal human vessels.

The iconography was strange too. It resembled human iconography, but ever so slightly different. Certainly none of it contained documented human symbology. Whatever it was, no ship of this sort was in their database.

The mystery ship began attempting to hail the Galactic Federation research vessel. At first it was using archaic human formats. Then it moved on to formats that resembled human communications but couldn't be decoded. Finally the mystery ship tried a modern human communication format that the Galactic Federation could actually interpret and contact was established.

The captain ordered for the hail to be displayed on the main viewscreen. Xey had enough experience with humans by now that xey weren't too nervous. Whatever was up with these humans, xey were sure xey could handle it. The video channel opened...

That was NOT a human. The captain didn't know what it was, but xey knew it wasn't human. Humans didn't bend that way or have that many limbs. And humans definitely only two eyes, set in the front of their faces in an unnerving predatory gaze. Xey almost fainted.

...

It took some time for the Galactic Federation to figure out that they had wandered into the territory of the Transhumanist Collective. It took even longer to figure out what that even was.

Apparently the Transhumanists were an offshoot of human civilization. They resented the "limitations" of the human form, which they considered far too weak and fragile (a frankly horrific concept to wider galactic society). So they'd decided to heavily modify their own forms in a great variety of ways - everything from cosmetic surgery to gene therapy to cybernetic and biotech augments. And no two looked exactly the same. Many considered the reshaping of their bodies to be a form of artistic expression.

They had been in contact with mainstream human civilization the whole time, and the two groups traded regularly - though not along the route of the Federation expedition. "Baselines" would regularly join the Collective, and occasionally citizens of the Collective, especially those born and raised "unmodified" would leave the Collective and join mainstream humanity. They were, however, separate enough that their cultures had diverged slightly.

When asked, the humans explained they hadn't mentioned their estranged kin for two reasons:

Firstly, they'd assumed the Galactic Federation had their own version. It was true that body modding and augmentation were far from unheard of in wider galactic civilization, but nothing quite like this. They rarely went to the same extreme, and certainly didn't have their own separate societies and philosophies.

Secondly, they thought the Transhumanists were weird and "kinda cringe" (a phrase whose connotations would result in several papers and the publishing of an entire book), so they mostly left them to their own devices and rarely discussed them.

Apparently the Transhumanists had splintered off to begin with because of opposition from several religious & cultural movements who considered their existence wrong. Not because of the claws or fangs, mind you, but because their existence was somehow "perverse" and "unnatural". The Transhumanists had never quite forgiven the "Baselines" for this.

The Galactic Federation marked the entire zone as forbidden for colonization and exploitation, and added an entire second volume to their human manual.


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