"I will solve you if I must."
Arkinot knew what humans looked like. They were half his size, soft, pink, and easily bullied. He knew this because he’d spent the last two weeks terrifying a team of human diplomats sent to negotiate trade deals. It was something of a science to him at this point: Small but weak species sends in their diplomats, he spends a week or two terrifying them in close quarters, then he offers them some dogshit trade deals in exchange for getting to leave early. They take the deal, he gets richer, and in a manner of speaking, the universe becomes a better place. Being a coward was the kind of thing that really should be taxed, and he liked to think of his negotiation style as exactly that: A coward tax.
Still, that was far dominating his thoughts at the moment. The conundrum his brain was struggling to untangle was that he knew what a human looked like, and the thing in front of him was not a human. It wore human robes, but underneath the robes, it appeared to be a tank that someone had glued several monitors to. Maybe even an antennae of some kind. It was such a chaotic jumble that it was almost funny. The one part of it that really seemed to be going too far was the badge sewn into the front designating it as an official diplomat.
He stepped a few feet closer to inspect the possible art piece. He barely had begun to reach his hand forward to lift the tent sized robe when a mechanical claw pushed forward and clasped around his arm, painless but implacable.
He didn’t hear the voice from the thing, nor did he hear it in his mind, as he’d felt with some of the telepathic races. The voice of this abomination felt like it was being physically projected directly inside his own ear, as if its mouth was just a fraction of a centimeter away from his ear drum.
He threw up. The words weren’t loud but they seemed to have some kind of disproportionate effect on his balancing organs. The world was sent spinning and he could barely tell up from down. A second bolt of pain blossomed, this time from the back of his head. It took him a good moment to realize that he’d fallen flat on his back. He didn’t know a simple sound could cause so much damage.
“You make threats you have no ability to back up. You will learn.”
Even with his senses scrambled, he could feel something cold and metallic pressed into his hand. He was too incoherent to guess what.
He wasn’t sure if the voice retracted from his ear out of pity, or because it knew that it had proved its point, but he was grateful to hear the rest of the message without feeling like someone was trying to jam stakes into his brain.
“A copy has already been sent to your high command. Your ‘diplomacy’ has already been bypassed. This is simply a personal education on the nature of human violence. Summon me when you understand.”
He rolled over to see the thing lurching down the hall. Even in his disoriented state, he could see something human in it, something imperceptibly satisfied with the message it had delivered. Part of him wondered if there was some small lump of flesh buried deep inside that horror, or if it was just mind made metal, an engram with form.
Perhaps sensing his gaze, it paused. It didn’t turn around, but he doubted that its vision was as limited as eyes were. The voice projected forward again, mercifully short of his ear, but still too close for comfort. He could almost imagine the hot breath of it bouncing off his face, mere millimeters away from his face.
“I will know when you are done. Do not make me find you.”
It had taken him half an hour to work up the will to pull himself up from his pool of stale vomit, and another ten minutes to stagger back to his cabin. He’d needed to lean against the wall for the entire walk back. He was genuinely concerned that his balance had been permanently damaged.
He did his first inspection of the object he’d been gifted. It was, technically, a data slate, but that was somewhat akin to calling a reactor a steam engine. The specs on it didn’t even make sense to him. What the hell was an exaHz? What was a Bekenstein limit? How could storage be at 137% of it? Couldn’t be much of a limit if it went over 100.
The device seemed to recognize it was being inspected and raised a query of its own.
He nodded dumbly. The slate whirred for a few seconds, genuinely struggling to process what it was about to do.
Arkinot stumbled out of the room seventeen hours later. He wasn’t terrified. He’d run out of the emotional energy needed to feel fear after the first two hours of calm, methodical instruction presented to him by the dataslate.
He had learned about the nature of human violence. It was no hot blooded slaughter, no prayer of eternal vengeance. It was an industrial event to them, something to be mass produced until the market flooded over and peace became the new commodity of choice.
And they could do that. Easily. He’d seen blueprints for factories that built factories that built factories. Replicating swarms of mining bots.
The smallest time vs. production curve he’d seen was for their assault cruisers, and it was still a fourth order polynomial. If for some reason they needed to wage war for over a year, they could feasibly consume more than 30% of the mass of their first three industrial worlds.
And they had more than forty left in reserve.
He’d assume earlier that he was arguing from a position of strength because they didn’t have an active armada. He realized that the reason they hadn’t bothered was because they’d be able to produce one as large as his entire species fleet in under 48 hours.
His balance was back. He barely noticed. He followed the same path he had before, noticed in an offhanded way that the vomit had been cleaned. The human diplomat must have called that in. He certainly hadn’t.
He was now in the human section of the station, and while he could sense a wariness in the steps of the pink things around him, it was hardly the full blown fear he’d managed to instill just 24 hours before. They knew that they’d managed to summon a stronger predator than him.
The door that he’d been summoned to was a repurposed garage. He supposed nothing else would fit someone so large. He knocked twice on the corrugated steel before it began to roll up.
The robes were gone. Still no visible flesh, but at least with all the machinery in sight he had a better idea of what he was looking at. He still didn't see any pink skin there, but he didn't have to when he could see rack after rack of eletroneural interfaces.
So there was a brain in there. A human brain. Probably very little else.
A faint twitch of its insectoid legs gave away its impatience. Ah. So it was waiting for him to speak.
“You didn’t need… Damn. How large was that presentation?”
The voice was almost offhanded in its response.
Arkinot’s brain skipped over the scale of that number. It was absurdly massive. Apparently, everything that the humans really put their minds to turned absurdly massive.
“You didn’t need 208 yottabytes to say that you could kick our asses.”
The faint twitching gave away, replaced by an uncanny stillness. It wasn’t the frozen stiffness of a robot, it was the tense, rigid posture of someone showing a considerable amount of restraint.
“No. You certainly didn’t when you said that to us. What I needed 208 yottabytes for was showing you how I would ‘kick your asses.’ It is worth considering how much scarier that is than your empty words.”
There was a brief noise, like rustling through the speaker, and he realized that the machine had done the purely auditory equivalent of taking a breath. The action was somehow more unsettling than the purely mechanical affect he’d seen before. It made him realize just how close any of the other soft pink things running around the halls were to becoming something like this, something that could crush him with a thought.
His thoughts were interrupted by the man-machine’s closing words, tired but dangerous.
“Do not threaten our diplomats again. It is their job to be patient. It is my job to solve problems. I will solve you if I must.”
That same tired voice spoke again, millimeters from his ear.
“Now, don't let me detain you.”
He did what any sane sapient would do.
