Ohhhhhh, my head...
"Nick?"
He winced at the sound. This wasn't just a headache. This was the mother of all headaches, much worse than a hangover. He opened his eyes a bit and regretted it instantly, squeezing them tight against the stabbing light. He thought he might throw up. He was pretty sure he couldn't move much.
"Quiet," he whispered. "Dark. Please."
The light beyond his eyelids dimd, and Sana whispered, "Nick, please say all your nas and your planet."
"Nick Tomsun, Earth."
"Do you know where you are?"
"The—" He felt a wave of agony as he tried to say "the Kalash-Quovo" and settled for saying, "yes." He tried cracking one eyelid a bit, but had trouble focusing on anything. From the colors, he guessed that he was in Sickbay. "Sickbay," he whispered.
"What is two and two?"
"Four. Two and two is four," he added in Goldaskian.
"Nick, I think you will be good. I am sorry this is bad."
"Help sleep?" he asked in a whisper.
"Soon. It will help your brain if you wake up for fourteen minutes. Please try."
Nick drank so water with difficulty and Sana wiped his chin. "Do you want a tomato chip?" she asked.
"Potato chip. No. No food, please." Nick felt the inside of his mouth and found that the Mouthguard From Space was gone.
"Do you rember what happened?"
"Before the sex or after?"
"Sex was very much good, Nick, but I ask after. We talked a lot. Do you rember?"
"Yes." He did rember. The concepts hadn't turned out to be hard at all. Nick had wondered whether he would still find them easy the morning after, but his head hurt too much to try. "Too much head pain. I rember, I think. Talk later."
Sana put him through so cognitive testing, then finally gave him sothing to help him sleep.
* *
He woke up hours later feeling a lot better, although the headache was still kind of annoying. He furrowed his brow and tried to concentrate on moving his mouth properly. "Fuak!a. Geh!aoa. Geh!kin. Finally." That's at least one thing I gained from this clusterfuck. He called up his notes, and yep, he really did get down most of the periodic table, so he could start saying "vanadium" instead of "elent 23." The notes on brain modifications were a little hard to follow, but he'd written summaries and his recomndation to his dumb self.
Apparently Goldaskians all got their brain modifications when they hit puberty. One of the surgical options was to basically implant extra "nerve wiring" that cross-connected lots of parts of the brain, so Goldaskians kind of went through a mix of a repeat of early childhood developnt and autistic focusing.
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The second option was implanting a computer in his head, which was a hard pass.
The third option was to add more gray matter to the brain, put in a bunch more cells, which involved literally cutting the skull open and enlarging it a little to make room. That version was a lot harder on you if your body was done growing. Nick had a ntal image of those brainiac aliens from science fiction with the huge heads, even though he knew that the actual visual effect was much smaller.
The chemical options were less invasive, of course, and involved so gene therapy but mostly a lot of rebalancing brain chemicals and changing the body's default levels of them.
The external option was basically a wearable device that did a kind of Wi-Fi connection to the brain. It was deliberately built to be extrely difficult to hack, and you could take it off whenever you wanted. They'd gotten sidetracked into a long talk about mind-control technologies and the history of mind-control wars on various planets, and Nick had so important information for security experts when he got back to Earth. "Hopefully with this warning you can skip a lot of the bad parts of our history," Sana had comnted.
Smart Nick had suggested the chemical options, with a possible option on the extra wiring surgery. Nick was inclined to go with that plan, starting with the fix for his depression. A little bit at a ti, he had advised himself, and it sounded like good advice.
* *
While Nick had been ssing with his brain, the ship had crossed more light-years. They were only about twenty systems away from Galgazor in a straight line. Given their zig-zag path, they would be hitting another hundred systems before finally arriving.
They had passed three more civilizations, and continued to find that about seven percent of worlds had a reasonable oxygen atmosphere. Since Galactic civilization had about a million mber races, that wasn't a very surprising ratio.
"Why are the races we are finding all within a few centuries of technological developnt?" Nick asked Sana at one point. "The stars and planets have been around for billions of years, right? Shouldn't so of them have developed faster?"
"They did," Sana said at once, then stopped and thought about her answer. "Oh, I think I understand what you an. The galaxy has beep." She sighed and tapped her chin a mont, thinking. "A large city has smaller areas inside it, yes? Those areas have different...ways, different populations, different resources?"
"Neighborhoods," Nick realized. "The galaxy has different neighborhoods? Why?"
"When one civilization gets too advanced, it tends to destroy other civilizations near it."
"You an conquest? Take control with ships and weapons?"
Sana frowned. "Not much that. More with money and ideas. Also, so advanced societies change things in a neighborhood—from curiosity, from belief in what is good, or for other reasons. They might use a neighborhood of stars like a...place you put plants to look good."
"A garden. We have so that are for food and so that just look good."
"Garden, yes. So, they might reach in and kill off a bad civilization, or when one makes a...gets better at sothing, they might help the others nearby to make the sa...get better at sothing."
"Advance." Nick thought about that. "Wait...did the Goldaskian Empire ddle...change Earth? I rembered that 'Abaddon' is one of the nas of a place demons co from, in Earth mythology."
"Earth is very far from the Empire. We can go there, but there are literally millions of worlds closer, so we have no reason to. Maybe it was an exploration vessel."
"Was your culture very war-like thousands of years ago?"
"Yes, but we did not have star travel thousands of years ago, only hundreds." Sana shrugged. "Perhaps an advanced race ddled both of our races. Maybe they took so Goldaskians and put them on Earth for a test, then brought them back. We have mythology about that."
Nick puffed out his cheeks. "Is there a great big History of the Galaxy sowhere I can read?"
"No."
Nick was surprised. "Why not?"
Sana did a half-shrug. "Secrets, argunts, wars. There is information, but it is incomplete. Scholars cannot agree. And sotis, when they do, they are destroyed by an advanced race."
"What?"
Sana nodded. "So of the big races do not want the smaller races to understand everything. So, many people just look at things close to them, important to them."
I can already predict that so humans are going to get themselves squashed in a hurry. Curiosity killed the cat. I wonder if—
Nick's thoughts were interrupted by a ssage from the Captain. "Ambassadors and Advisors, important eting in nine minutes. We have entered a system with starships and no habitable planets. This might be what we were looking for."
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