Chapter thirteen-Reveal

Many of these anomalies are clearly artificial in nature, as they seem to either defy the laws of physics or exist in ways that could not have naturally occurred.

Khy’thal’eten had been extensively trained in reading the body language and negotiating with every known sapient race. He had to, he was an ambassador after all. He had not been trained, however, in negotiating with a being with no body language. Or recognizable body, for that matter. No one had expected him to have to negotiate with an AI, of all things. Every single AI ever made had gone insane, with the (apparent) exception of the one in front of him.

It was technically an Uploaded Consciousness, not an AI. Not that it made much difference to him right now, beyond possibly having emotions he could influence.

“Our first proposal is a trade of information. You answer some of our questions and we answer some of yours.”

“I will answer all of the questions that I deem fit to answer, and no more. There are things that I cannot tell you, for your sake.” The body at the other end of the table said. It was a large hovering sphere, with what seemed to be a large camera in the middle. It spoke in perfect Standard.

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“Very well, we will start with that. My first question is: Who are you?”

“I was a member of the race you call the Ancient.” Everyone in the room sat back, stunned. We were talking to a genuine, living (sort of?) Ancient! We could learn so much from this! I had to choose my questions carefully.

“How and why did you all disappear?”

“We were wiped out by a cosmic disaster. I cannot tell you any more than that.” Shock. What kind of disaster could wipe out a race with buildings that could withstand a GRB untouched? It had to have been a universe-ending disaster.

“Are you the only surviving Ancient?”

“Sort of. I am the only surviving member of my race, but there may be survivors from other races of approximately equivalent power left.” That was bad. There could be extremely powerful races barrelling down on us at this very moment! We had to prepare. But first we needed to know how to prepare.

“How powerful was your race in relation to the other ones?”

“I’ll explain to you the ranking system we used. We ranked races from G to S. G rank races are still stuck on their home planet. F rank races control their home system and maybe a few surrounding ones. E rank races control up to a star sector. D rank races control up to a galaxy, C rank races control a few galaxies, B rank and A rank races control multitudes of galaxies, and S rank races can control up to an entire universe. Your race is currently a low C rank race. We were a high A rank race, one of the most powerful ones. Thankfully, there were no S rank races in existence when the disaster happened. Probably only races above peak B rank could survive the disaster in any way." As we were trying to process the information we were interuppted by it.

"By the way, you don't need to answer any of my questions because I pulled one peice of information of eqivalent value from your computers for each answer I gave."

We were silent the whole way back. We had just graduated from being a big fish in a small pond to being a shrimp in the ocean.