A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, overlaid and mirrored upon itself
Somehow, the star system above – or at least, the locals' representation of it as an alien with mildly humanoid features and truly lovely eyes and voice – did not get blown clear off the stellar map, and I was privy to the unofficial discussion about why.
“It is really easy for you to talk about good faith relations with all sentient beings and organizations, Benjamin, because you are a good person – but you've only lived to be 82 because there are not-good persons including me assigned to protect your rear half the time!”
Sometimes, full fleet admiral Chenggis Chulalaangkorn got a little frustrated with rear admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson, and the rear admiral just played into the frustration.
“Well, the protection of being a good person – or more specifically, a not-good person following the tenets of a good faith with a Good Savior – goes with the package, and you know you are deeply appreciated, Chenggis.”
Commodore Wilhelm Allemande – also more of Adm. Chulalaangkorn's belligerent mindset – cracked up laughing on the other end of the line.
“I told you there was no point, Chenggis!” he said. “You're not budging him, even in the face of a disaster!”
“I'm not worried about budging him, Wilhelm! I'm tired of him budging me!”
“Well, that also goes with the package sometimes, Chenggis … .”
This hilarious moment between high-ranking old humans was the only laughing matter in the situation that had actually drawn Adm. Chulalaangkorn and his fleet from the Ventanan frontier to face the kind of problems that it usually takes a more belligerent type of admiral with 20-100 starships to solve. It's out of being classified at last, but that took more than 20 years.
In short, humans have discovered hypnotism in just the last 5-6 centuries, but there are beings that have been on top of manipulating the the sub-conscious and the nervous system of bodied sentient beings for millennia. So if you wandered into the Syreneyes System with no particular good reason to be there, how badly you fared depended on your crew's particular allowed vices.
Humanity by that time had lost more ships than any other sentient race in the galaxy – and enough got to be too much when the fleet ship Dionysus, known for being the “party ship” of the fleet, almost did what hundreds of others had done in the Syreneyes System: drifted right off into its star after some weeks of lost communication. However, the “boring” members of the crew managed to get control of the ship and get it to Star Base 4.
The stories the survivors of the Dionysus had to tell about what happened to their crewmates after every screen and audio portal on the ship filled with the beautiful sights and sounds of the view of that star system were chilling. The whole system had projectors set up for being scanned on all well-known bands of communication and then sending back that beautiful and intriguing image with the associated greeting … crew members froze right where they saw and/or heard, and could not be pulled away by those not affected. That was the beginning of the horror, because those crew members then started to hallucinate and then die after all kinds of shocking bodily changes – with a twist.
“They were literally begging for more, to the moment they died,” one crew member reported.
Of course, my uncle looked at the data since a different emergency had gotten us added to Adm. Chulalaangkorn's fleet. He checked back over an additional century of data to discover something of importance.
“Yes, they have been destroying us at will, along with other sentient beings, by blowing out the pleasure centers of the brain weakened by addiction and thus overstimulating the body to the point of death,” he said, “but if you check the data, they haven't destroyed everyone. If you check the record, everyone on a peaceful transit through the system has been spared, over the last century.”
By peaceful transit, my uncle meant three things: just passing through on the way somewhere else, just studying the system from a discreet distance, and not trying to claim territory or resources. The captain of the Dionysus was heard on a ship's recording giving his opinion that the consortium of star systems should just annex the Syreneyes System for certain strategic purposes. The Syreneyesians were, as it happened, long-range telepaths.
“Unless you know that all your crew members on all 20 of these ships are men and women without significant private compromises, sir,” the rear admiral said to the full fleet admiral, “it may be costly to subdue the Syreneyesians if we go in there to fight – we don't know for sure how they are overwhelming our communications. There is, however, a better way.”
So: he talked Adm. Chenggis Chulalaangkorn into making an approach with just 20 ships with hand-picked crews of superior-rated discipline and a bunch of personnel borrowed from the ever-logical Vulcan exploratory fleets, on the purpose of discovery: “We are amazed by how you have defended yourself from all belligerent actors over the last century, and we would like to study what you have done in order to make sure we protect our own people by only allowing them in the sector on good faith.”
And this was why Wilhelm Allemande was cracking up, because he and Chenggis Chulalaangkorn would have taken 20 or so planet-wreckers and targeted the projection generators and the planets they were on from half a light-year away and been done with all that. The commodore knew Adm. Benjamin Banneker-Jackson's words were coming out of the full fleet admiral's mouth!
“And, after all, should our galactic imperial rivals come this way,” the rear admiral said to sell this idea, “how convenient it will be for our new friends with the beautiful eyes to greet them?”
“We can probably set something like that up,” I pitched in as captain. “I mean, surely our rivals know what the captain of the Dionysus knew, so, they will think we are weak here by withdrawing without blowing the Syreneyesians off the stellar map -- but if they take that as bait, it could be to our advantage.”
“Listen, Captain Biles-Dixon, I'm good and tired and sick of your uncle doing this to me – I don't need you as another echo, although it is a great idea and we will be sharing it with the high command immediately!” Adm. Chulalaangkorn growled as he took notes and Cdre. Allemande just kept on laughing. “Your whole family is just overrun with ideas to keep everybody and everything alive and well unless they really mess up, and your definition is so lenient, but also lethal on the sly side!”
“Well, remember, I told you: we're not good people either,” my uncle said with a smile, “but I raised my niece in the good faith, too. That is, we'll try everything else first, but if you've proven you mean no good, we will take you out with the quickness.”
Some of our galactic rivals really messed up. Couple of grand fleets, lost, and the possibility of interstellar war from those directions was delayed for a couple of decades.
Also, the Syreneyesians were kind enough to tell us that some regional pirates had copied what they understood of their projection system and were going to use it to rip off a local shipyard we didn't even know existed, with some things in it that we didn't know were there... so we were soon off to put out the next fire …