There is no such thing as a human city.

In 2073, something unexpected happened for the inhabitants of a mostly unremarkable star system in an obscure little offshoot of what they called the Orion Arm of the galaxy: They met people who were nothing like them. Or at least, that's what they thought at first.

The people who stumbled on heavy Terra and her strange single moon called themselves the Sculpted Minds, and they could be quite different from each other but generally only in very particular ways. It was, they told themselves and this new species they'd discovered and all their friends neighbors and enemies in the vast turning length of this galactic arm, a matter of efficiency. A person should be a fit for what that person was for.

The odd species they'd encountered, on the other hand, rarely even seemed to fit particularly well with their own close relatives, let alone their societies at large. But the humans soon decided that they liked many of their new Sculpted acquaintances. Not all of them, of course, as in, not all of the humans conquered the free-floating xenophobia that still flitted about here and there in their psyche, and even when they did, not all of the Sculpted were liked. But enough did, and enough were.

The Sculpted found this very strange, at first, just as the humans had thought the Sculpted were nothing like them, at first. But it quickly became clear to those in the know that this was wrong. The Sculpted being like the humans, that is; strangeness is always a matter of opinion and taste. This was partly because the humans soon discovered and, strangely indeed in many a Sculpted opinion, rather cherished bits of common ground with their utterly foreign visitors.

That was part of it. The other part was that the humans were thieves and, from a certain point of view, terrible corruptors. They stole means and ways and perspectives from the Sculpted, and had a strange way of communicating that led to some, though by no means all that many in these early days, of the Sculpted to consider new avenues of thinking as well.

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This almost led to a war. It would have been a very short one, too, the humans had a learned a great deal but were still a species that had, up til very recent times, been barely able to plop themselves down anywhere outside the orbit of their homeworld's single moon. But they'd manage to contact a few others of their neighbors, had in fact bent much of their technological effort toward doing so, and the Sculpted were told to stand down by several peoples with whom any prospective war would decidedly not be short.

And soon Terra had a few thousand Sculpted living on it.

And soon Terra had others living there as well.

Time passed. Many Terran years. The humans learned with astonishing speed. This seemed, to the many other species of the galactic arm, because they were barely a coherent species themselves. Which was strange, because according to their biological markers, they were barely distinguishable from each other, easily the least genetically diverse sentient species ever recorded. But in other ways...well. They'd learned to learn from each other, they'd had to.

And now they were learning from everyone else.

Soon they were nearly caught up. This was concerning. Concerning enough that an unstable coalition decided things should go the other way. To the Stone Age, maybe.

By then, it really was true: There was no such thing as a human city. Human-majority yes...but only a few. It couldn't even be honestly said that the Terran coalition was even a "human" institution anymore. They were a minority on every one of their handful of colony worlds.

Which meant something else: There was no such thing as a human army.

And the war went very badly indeed. And the Terran Coalition, which was soon to rename itself as simply the Spectrum, gained a number of new colony worlds. The spoils of war. They did not bother to kick out any of the inhabitants. They could stay, if they liked, or leave, if they wanted. Most left.

But some stayed. Soon they were a minority on their own worlds. But they knew they could not really complain.

After all, there is no such thing as a human city.