As per usual, our chapter starts with a very angry xenos named Costan, who is again dealing with things above his pay grade. Jesus was giving him flack over all the children that, despite Costan being the father, only one had his genetic material. Even the one that shared his genetics only got about five percent. Costan just weathered it out until they decided what they were doing.
The Nekogians were back again, and Murphy was shocked. They had went extinct multiple times, only to come back more militant each time. They didn't worship anyone or anything, they merely prepared for the worst. The Nekogians did this all day, every day, they didn't even hope for the best. They expected only horrible things and lived accordingly with children raised with the mindset of preparation and murder lest they be murdered.
God and Jesus decided that Costan needed to help his own kind more than anything else. They were not wrong, the entire race seemed to have paranoia. The Nekogians didn't have irrational paranoia or paranoid delusions, they had justified paranoia. Justified paranoia is worse, because it is something that did happen and could happen again.
They were doing all kinds of screwed up and horrible things just so that it's already normal. The Nekogians were the epitomy of brutality and ruthlessness. The god shed had happened like every time before, but no one worshipped or even acknowledged the gods. They were too busy taking grim dark to grim derp. They turned the dead into food and prisoners into machines.
God decided that the Nekogians could not continue on that path. Even though they had not settled a tenth of the ring, they might actually wipe themselves out with the grim dark nonsense. Costan was sent, next day guaranteed express delivery. The timelines were wonky and nonlinear between the two universes, but he arrived hundreds of thousands of years and two days before they sent him. Costan was surprised at not being born normally.
The forgotten pod on the ignored world tree opened, spilling juices and a very wet Costan onto the ground. He looked about, the tree had exactly the correct number of flowers now. He was child, not an infant, but a long way from adulthood. While the tree was ignored, the area was not. It was used as an instructional area for an advanced military school for the grimmest derps.
Naked and wet, he walked a couple of miles around the tree, only to be called a disrespectful vagrant and a trespasser. He tried to clarify the issue, but was called a liar and security forces showed up. Costan had been informed about the state of affairs of the Nekogians by Murphy, so he bathed himself with hell fire and dared everyone to court death and commit suicide within his purifying flames.
There were no takers, everyone could see the effects on everything that got within ten meters of him. Nothing like turning the dirt into lava around you to get your point across to morons. The security forces called their higher ups about "the weird vagrant child". The call must have hit a nerve because military forces showed up.
Costan was done entertaining idiots and started speaking a language that they understood. He killed everything that acted against him as he slowly walked his naked ass to Shetieve's last known location, having hidden assets in orbit was always nice. Everything shy of destroying a portion of the ring was thrown at him, but he kept on walking. She wasn't happy to see him and attacked him, but he purposefully avoided killing her.
It took him penning her in an arm bar for her to listen. Then it took two hours of forced listening for her to realize that he was Costan. Talk about a cold welcome, it was war like. Shetieve, after finally taking a good look, went starry eyed but quickly repressed the whole "your so cute" response.
"So it is you. Will we call it a tie and go on about whatever business brings you?" Shetieve growled from the ground.
"Tie, no because that would imply that you had a chance of winning. I could have, and still can murder you at any moment in many a miriad of ways my dear." Costan still hadn't released the arm bar.
"I will not submit to a child. I tore them off the first time around and I'll do it again if this isn't a draw!" She started using him to smash things in her office. Costan wouldn't let go and she wouldn't give up, but couldn't reach anything to give her threats validation without tearing through her own arm.
Costan lit the hell fire back up, but made it slow burning. It was a very enlightening experience for Shetieve, having her body and soul slowly burning away with nothing to do against it. He didn't care if she died, her surrender would be good, but her death would be inconsequential to his goals.
The twins showed up and tried to stop him but were unsuccessful and gave up after Turnunder lost a hand. Shetieve surrendered after seeing that even three of them weren't enough to turn the tide of hell fire. It was embarrassing for the three of them, but it was inevitable.
Costan had been through many more hells, wars, and hardships than all of the other Nekogians. They actually got time off while they were dead whereas Costan got the whole other worlds nonsense. Everybody complained about respect, superiors, and all of that, Costan was about to make them "respect these hands".
He put some respect in every last individual who dared use the old "my position says so" or the "because I'm older". Costan carved out a large territory and declared himself the emperor of it. This national was a full three quarters of the ring.
When people tried to object, he simply pointed out that they still had more than a planets worth of growing room and that he is the reason that the ring existed. The nation, named Deez of all crap, was very prosperous and quickly grew as people defected from the desperate conditions of the "Unified States of Grimderp". Emperor Costan never liked having to rule things, but it was necessary.
Things quickly went downhill right after everything was finally sorted out. He had gotten halfway through pubescence this time. The Smarcions were looking for a lost ship and stumbled upon them. The Smarcions were spouting accusations before they knew who they were talking to. Costan and the others tried diplomacy, but it didn't work.
The shooting started, and to nobody's surprise Costan had the better weapons. The Smarcions managed a retreat before anyone actually died, but their shields were FUBAR. He went the nonlethal route and they eventually came back with a bunch of their buddies. The new Smarcions were more civil, but still a bunch of pretentious pricks.
Costan pointed out that they were pretentious pricks during the first video call, where multiple hacking attempts were rebuffed and a successful counter hack infected the Smarcion ships. They played a stupid game, and got a stupid prize for attempting to hack someone that they were "trying to persuade into releasing a plague ship". The Nekogians didn't have the stupid ship, but Costan could find it in time and he told them as much.
Costan also pointed out the many attempts against his AI children and how the Smarcions were not making friends that way. They were quickly making enemies. As soon as they started with the whole "we are better than you", Costan threw it back in their faces with every horrible thing that they had done. He mocked them for every public relations campaign they ever had, for it was a farce. They were little more than advanced space thugs with delusions of righteousness.
They didn't like that and made some thinly veiled threats. Then one of his AI children called, and Costan put the Smarcions on hold. This was finally enough to make the facade of "so long lived that we don't get angry" crack. The Oracle, one of Costan's most advanced AI children, found the stupid ship. It was slow rolling towards the next galaxy, the Smarcions would have already caught up with it if the hadn't stopped to antagonize the Nekogians.
Costan thanked his daughter for her hard work, then requested Goliath and the Sentry sisters to be on standby for recovery and protection detail. He then got the call off of hold. The Smarcion Admiral equivalent was audibly agitated at everything, but he was not allowed to get far into his spiel. Costan cut him off with his own spiel about how far up their own asses they were and how the ship was so many light years that away.
"You belligerent morons would have already caught up with the stupid ship if you had not stopped by simply to antagonize us. The nerve you must have after the losses we gave you last time you believed that we would just roll over and die. You have one hour to get out of my territory before I use the many acts of war that you committed while here as reason to destroy you."
They were pissed, the Admiral was actually cursing at Costan. He made someone that was thousands of years old and spent most of it in the military loose his cool, and it was on camera. Everything was recorded and logged to be sent to the Smarcion leaders and Galactic Council, every hacking attempt which were each grounds for war, every veiled threat, the blatant attack from the exploration vessel, everything.
The council contacted the Nekogians about a spot on the council, but they just wanted to be left alone. The Smarcions didn't take it well, even though they recovered the plague ship. The admiral had a virus cooked up and bombed the ring with it. He didn't survive. Nobody that had split from the escort detail survived, but they delivered the virus through luck.
The Smarcion high command was livid. All of the years that they had trained for everything, only for one admiral to almost destroy their reputation. They had all of the data from the ships responsible and were working on a cure. While it was supposed to only cause infertility, it was not stabilized and caused death.
The virus mutated quickly and dangerously, spreading to plants, animals, insects, not even bacteria were safe. The ring was dead before they finished an antivirus, but they deployed it over the ring anyway. This was the fifth time the Nekogians went extinct. While it didn't cause as many deaths outside of the Nekogians this time, it was still another bad mark in the Smarcions records. They monitored the ring until it got too far away.
Costan had left orders, and his AI children would fulfill them. The Nekogians wouldn't stay dead, they never do. He could have cured the virus, but it was more valuable to give the Smarcions a bad name. Costan himself didn't stay dead for long, an old clone bank disgorged him mere minutes after his last breath. He went touring the galaxy in a stealth vessel to screw with the other races.
Operation Killroy was afoot. Costan just wrote KILLROY WAS HERE in hard to reach places in the local language and left, making sure not to be seen by anyone or anything. Places like inside of atmospheric balasts, between double hulls, and right behind guard stations were his favorite. It didn't take long for people to begin noticing, then the paranoia and conspiracies started a few months after that.
Nothing like Security Officer Bleblobs taking his post and getting an erie feeling only to turn around and the wall right behind him be vandalized or a routine inspection turning up vandalization inside something that had been sealed for decades. It was great. Costan added things to his pockets and replicable pallets while genuinely having fun. The thrill really peaked when he killroyed the floor underneath a Smarcion fleet Commander's feet.
They had some tight security, but not tight enough. They even had psions on the lookout for any trespasser or threat, but still missed him. He had to cycle his psychic shielding off and on for them to notice. They never found him, but the graffiti with the eldritch looking circles around it really got them on edge. The Smarcions rarely had anything other than weather and ads on the news, but this prank made galactic headlines.
It was even funnier when Costan walked into a newsroom without the stealth fields or anything. He was wearing a regular hoodie and a cat mask, both things readily available from stores near the school he'd been hiding in. He didn't mask his mind, only wore a device to prevent getting body puppeted or mind scrambled. They were reporting on how the investigation was going as he graffitied the wall behind them, on camera.
He was focused on keeping his mind blank and doing the task, so much so that he didn't realize that the paint was almost the same color as the wall that doubled as a basic green screen. The audience could see it, but nobody in person could. His choice of clothes were identical in color to the wall.
The audience quickly started calling in, but Costan was gone before anyone answered. It was like the symbols wrote themselves before a cat face, or something trying to be one, appeared. The face was soon dubbed "the Killroy Harbinger" and while the Smarcions knew it was someone pulling stunts, the rest of the galaxy thought it was the revenge of the Nekogians or some biblical things.
Costan had just about played out the psy-op on that world. It was one of the ones where the Smarcions held the more important positions so that the other races could play catch up, or something. The Smarcions never showed their faces and didn't have families there, but there were a few thousand of them.
He almost got caught sneaking out of the school during the day. The blob like alien that witnessed the act was the school security officer. Costan, still being physically young enough to attend the school that he had been hiding in, was thought to be skipping school. He may have been forced to go to the principals office had he not been faster than the Plaplollogon officer. The officer was surprisingly fast for a sentient blob and being a none Newtonian fluid gave it some big advantages like ignoring gates and taking shortcuts through air ducts.
Costan managed to slip into a fuel stop corner store, but the radio chatter revealed that everyone knew where he was. They were going to wait and see where he went. There was mention of a "skip syndicate", but it quickly got hushed for operational security. Costan decided to take them up on the wait and see.
He purchased some candy like a child would, along with some odds and ends. The clerk was looking concerned about the tool kit, jumper cables, canned food, canister fuel, and everything aside from the candy and sweet drinks. They definitely called the cops after he left carrying a few hundred pounds of stuff in the duffel bag he purchased.
The radio chatter picked back up with suspicion of a vehicle or a large gathering. He stopped by a swamp shop where he pawned off some granulated platinum for extra cash and went to a taxi company. Costan rented a taxi for six hours. Then he went to a local vehicle parts store and purchased some parts and more specific tools. Everyone was ratting to law enforcement, but they were after "the syndicate".
Costan was not part of any of that, he wasn't even a citizen there. He had a plan to keep them busy for days. He stopped by a large market and purchased another duffel bag of food, medications, and water. They also ratted because child is shopping like an adult and the world will soon end. The law enforcement was thinking that the syndicate was planning something big and involved the higher ups, the Smarcions.
The Smarcion Officers and Captain agreed to the wait and see to catch the syndicate in whatever they were planning, but insisted on being hands on site. Costan stopped by a vehicle salvage business, noticing that the Smarcions were tailing him. They weren't doing so good of a job because they stood out like crazies at a psychiatric convention.
Costan purchased a particular broken ground vehicle, even though the owner tried to convince him that others would be easier to fix and more reliable. Costan pulled a kid moment with the "no! I want that one!" The owner relented and Costan got to fixing the vehicle with surprising efficiency. He got it going two hours thirty three minutes.
The owner of the salvage yard was shocked to see the vehicle driving around the yard. They were more shocked when it, without the registration paperwork or inspection or anything else drove right out the front gate and off into the sunset. They called the law about it.
The Smarcions followed the vehicle until it ran out of fuel a few hours later. They waited for the juvenile delinquent to exit the vehicle, but nobody ever got out. They approached the vehicle and opened the door to reveal an empty interior, even the seats were gone. Costan had made it a self driving car and let it loose to obey all traffic laws while keeping the law busy. Costan had already teleported back to his stealth ship.
The news was hilarious. The juvenile that gave even the Smarcions the slip was never found or identified. The skip syndicate broke up on their own before they could be found. They did connect him with the Killroy graffiti, but couldn't do anything besides put out a bounty for his capture. Nobody was willing to foot the idea of a kill bounty on a nonviolent juvenile delinquent.
It was Costan causing trouble, and it was his turn to do so. He had spent too many lifetimes doing things for others and being shat on for his troubles. It was time that he screwed with everyone, not the other way around. His children did a very good job at helping him in his endeavors.
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He had been around the tri-galactic area for a while when a micro asteroid caught him by surprise on a space walk. It shot cleanly through his helmet and a new child Costan was disgorged from a cloning bank before his corpse was recovered. He was taken aback by the micrometeor being capable of that and had the ship go and get it.
The little bastard turned out to actually be a ceramicised metal alloy fragment that metallurgically matched a Smarcion plague ship. The AI was certain that it was from one, so Costan asked his daughter to please find the vessel. He tested it in every way possible and decided to make a new anti armor ammunition type.
The AI, Stealthsia was her name, asked the Oracle for an exact location. While she could have crunched the numbers based on the speed and direction of the fragment to ascertain the location, Oracle didn't get enough to do and probably already knew. Oracle did, she had way too much processing power and too little to occupy her. She quickly gave a full report on the vessel to Stealthsia.
Stealthsia told her father and they went to find it. The ship was exactly where Oracle said it was and in the condition that she said it would be. It wasn't in too bad of shape for something that was three times past it's expected service life. It was pock marked from impacts, but had no holes. It was surprising given that it's shields had went out a few hundred years ago.
Stealthsia hailed it and got an answer. She was warned that it carried plague victims and anyone who tampered with it would answer to the authority of the Smarcion military. Costan rolled his eyes before sending it a message.
"Smarcion Plague Vessel, you have deviated from your designated travel routine. Activate recovery beacon immediately before vessel reaches point of no return for rescue. I repeat vessel is approaching point of no return, activate recovery beacon."
"Recovery beacon offline. Unable to fulfill requested action. No known alternative action calculable. Requesting aid from error. Identify vessel."
"Aid request acknowledged. This is Explorator Stealthsia and I am her Captain, uh, Ekronoplan."
"Acknowledged Captain Uh Ekronoplan. Requesting navigational data."
Costan felt as though he lost brain cells on that exchange. He had been talking in Smarcion Trade and everything was converted into it beforehand, but giving that data could give away that they were a Nekogian vessel. He settled for fabricating a Smarcion beacon with a message, but decided to just make it a repeating error loop requesting aid.
He couldn't resist the temptation and wrote KILLROY WAS HERE on a hard to reach thruster partition after pocketing a different entire main thruster. Then he used a lot of demolitions grade double sided Kevlar reinforced duct tape to affix the beacon like an unusually long breaching charge. The beacon looked like a giant novelty from back on earth, they called them something weird so he named the beacon Dildor and activated it.
There had been a short internal debate on the beacon before the it was made, but Costan decided that humor was the best medicine. He made it like a giant prosthetic penis, but realized that the Nekogian marital aid could clue the Smarcions in on that it was a Nekogian. He modeled it after the giant human novelty, but got a little involved in making it as blatant as possible. He realized that making it vibrate with balls and a suction cup base was a little much.
He went all in, making up a race called the Dilldites with a full backstory. He carried all of this out inside of one of his pockets that moved time far faster inside than outside so he didn't loose days hand crafting a beacon. He spent five months of his time, only a second of normal time, making the universes first subspace beacon dildo.
Stealthsia and him slipped into none space right after activation and watched. The letter about everything hung in space via a string tied around the beacon, and the price sticker was an extra touch. The Smarcions arrived in hours, not days. Their real space transitions had the tell tale signs of warp travel.
Ten ships, the Smarcions showed up with ten ships, and one was a massive medical ship that absolutely dwarfed the plague ship. They wasted no time hailing, docking, and bordering. They were transferring what looked to be humans of various ages in stasis capsules within minutes of arrival. Costan wanted a closer look at what was going on and had Stealthsia patch in on Oracle's sensors. They weren't humans, were they? He couldn't tell and had a theory that the Smarcions were an artificial race with all of the things that they were doing with the humans.
Costan had seen enough of that and asked Stealthsia to disconnect from Oracle. She didn't want to because they were having a wonderful catch up, like any two girls that hadn't seen each other in a while. It doesn't matter that they can call each other, they got to touch. He retracted his request and focused on what was starting to happen near the thrusters.
The Smarcions assigned to examine the beacon stopped their shuttle when it came into view. They voiced concerns over the comms that it was a giant penis. Costan grinned like a kid on Christmas. It only got better as they read the letter over the comms. The audible collective "what" that lit up the bandwidth was most pleasing to Costan. His massive troll in recompense for the accidental manslaughter done, they got out of there.
The news following the incident was grand.
"Cock Up First Contact, What You Need to Know About the Dilldites!"
"Giant Marital Aid Pivotal for Rescue"
"Inappropriate Proprietary Beacon"
"The Dilldites, Sentient Genitalia"
Costan was laughing at it for months. He managed to make everyone believe that a giant suction cup vibrator was classified as a cybernetic organism and that penis people exist. They eventually realized that it was just a vibrating dong with a subspace beacon stuck in it, but they believed that crap for three years.
Life went on and the Nekogians were back. They didn't last long. A newer species that was part of the council tried to colonize the ring. The ring had settled into an ellipse orbit around the galaxy and they had spent a lot of time, money, and effort to get a viable population out to it. The first pilgrims made the mistake of claiming the ring as theirs and the Nekogians as servants.
The settlers were very quickly massacred and put on display. They tried multiple times to quash the "backwater savages" but failed every time. The reinforcements eventually arrived and slowly managed to gain ground over the Nekogians, with large losses to people wearing wooden shoes and carrying slings or bows.
The Smarcions got involved at the end and stopped the conflict. It was too late and the last Nekogian succumbed to the plasma wounds before medical treatment could be rendered. The Smarcions did manage to salvage a few ovum from recently deceased females and some viable spermatozoa.
Nobody wants to know about how they also rigged up some Frankenstein's gonads or why. Actually the why was to try and naturally resuscitate the species if they could find one suitable surrogate. They didn't have enough living genetic material to bring back a viable population, but they had the genetic codes from most of the dead ones, even if damaged they would just put something in that matched well enough for an individual to live.
The problem was getting a volunteer that was a close enough match. The Smarcions had laws about the use of artificial wombs and cloning. While the laws could be bent in special cases, the Nekogians were wiped out due to war with the Galactic Council.
The council were given citations for the radical colonization of an occupied celestial body as well as many other citations for breaking their own ethics laws, including attempted enslavement of a known and sentient race. Everyone, including the Smarcions, but excluding Nekogians, were officially forbidden to colonize the ring. They floated the name of Neko Prime for the ring, but nobody could come to an agreement.
The only permitted actions on or in the system of the ring were the establishment of observation posts, establishment of space stations, and direct aid for the Nekogians; these actions were permitted only if all material and personnel were supplied by the race performing such action. There was also the caveat that the observation posts and stations had to be in orbit of the ring and in as far an orbit from the ring as physics could permit.
All of the older or better off races began a new dick measuring contest. Having a station near the ring became the benchmark of a first order race. They couldn't be military stations, but they could have military on those stations, but most were just used for refueling ships that were carrying out experiments that had to be away from everything. Don't want to accidentally destroy a star system if your new prototype FTL device fails and blows up or worse.
Costan eventually got a bit too lax in his modus operandi. He had single handedly saved multiple young species, leaving behind at least one KILLROY and either the visage of the cat mask or of his favorite void armor. It caught up to him eventually, but not until after the Smarcions used him as a surrogate and tried to kill him.
He had found another plague ship, way out past the Milky Way, something like six galaxies over. It had taken a beating over the eons and was classifiable as a space hulk. Something hit it hard enough to break it almost in two. Costan put in tons of work and repair materials to stabilize it and save the remaining passengers.
He got crushed when the gravity generator suddenly came on and it caused the weakened gantry to collapse. Costan was spat back out and the corpse retrieved, but some things were happening. He was not being too attentive to anything outside of repairs and not dying, and all of Costan's AI children had come to a conclusion. He needed flesh friends.
Stealthsia had been doing electrical, electronic, and data repairs without Costan's knowledge. She had caused the gravity spike that caused his latest death and she was the reason why he was eight. By the time he finished building himself an armor that fit, the plan was ready for execution.
There were four adult Smarcions aboard every plague ship in case of any emergency. The emergency procedure program of the central computer was faulty and all of the missing ships had that problem. The adults were never released from stasis and thus unable to respond to emergencies. She patched that bug.
When Costan had finished enough repairs, Stealthsia pumped all of her atmosphere into the plague ship. Costan was trying to figure out what was going on, but she disconnected and left. He was in tears, begging her not to leave and asking what he did. He was too much of a mess to realize that two Smarcions were quickly approaching him.
They quickly apprehended the sobbing stowaway and realized that asking questions would not result in answers. They bound him and waited for the other two to finish figuring out what was going on. The computer logs painted a bad picture. The emergency routine was buggy, but someone fixed it. The ship had undergone many repairs at the hands of the emotionally distraught stowaway that could have been a plethora of things.
The Smarcion adults didn't talk a lot, they were capable of telepathy and most had some degree of psychokinetic powers. They wanted more information, so three searched the ship while one gently poked at Costan's brain. Gentle psychic stuff only unveiled how much his ship's betrayal hurt. It hurt a lot.
The others came back with a very grim report. They had lost a third of the children, dead, with most bodies lost to the void. Costan had patched up the main support corridors and the excessively sized hole in the ship, but that only preserved the remaining passengers. The main thrusters were destroyed, most of the positioning thrusters were gone, and they were flying blind, deaf, and had no functional beacons.
The main computer was back up, and so too the secondary reactor, but that was not going to get them anywhere. The main reactor was halfway repaired, but they didn't have enough supplies to last very long. They needed another ship, a quick rescue, or a lot of specialized equipment. They had none of those three things. They had a sobbing Nekogian child that was abandoned by it's own ship.
The child was wearing rather advanced void armor, which could be salvaged for parts to repair or possibly make other things. The atmosphere was a little light, but breathable. The Smarcions were in armor with oxygen recyclers and advanced stuff, so they decided to scrap the child's armor after a detailed scan revealed the powerful comms unit and other tech beyond what they currently had. All of these conversations happened telepathically for operational security reasons and because it was faster than talking.
They carried him near one of the now vacant stasis capsules and began going at his mind seriously. They were definitely going to have a long debriefing. They managed to make him remove his armor, and it was significantly easier to manipulate his mind after the helmet was off. It was so easy that they got his name, race, armor access codes, and accidentally caused a few brain hemorrhages. They quickly put him into stasis upon realizing that they caused life threatening injuries.
Using her advanced psychic weirdo powers, one of the adult Smarcions removed her armor's gauntlet and morphed her hand into the head of Costan. She used it to access the functions of the helmet of Costan's armor. She relayed the available functions to her companions and they chose to set it to broadcast a distress signal. They later were cited for broadcasting on channels not permitted for emergency use.
They were rescued in about a month. They took turns in stasis to limit the resources needed for survival, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Costan was the last to be removed from stasis. They didn't bring him out of stasis aboard a medical ship or anything, they took him out in a prison infirmary. He didn't know that until his brain recovered enough to work again.
They were not willing to press his mind for risk of killing the only known surviving Nekogian. They had waited until they had an opening in a brig with a full infirmary for risk of death of the patient or hostility of subject. Costan was the name of prisoner 2875179777311234 and they were taking every precaution.
They had him out, bound, and in the infirmary unit in one second. They were professional military police of the Smarcions, and they didn't fail, the doctors and nurses had instructed them well. The Doctors oversaw the modified unit, it was a high speed, partial stasis, complete automation operation unit. It would perform any medical procedure within seconds in normal conditions, but with the partial stasis, it was if they went in and immediately came out.
Costan's procedures were the same way, but his brain was out of commission for a few months, even after the death defying operations. There was a very real risk of him being a vegetable for the rest of his life, but he pulled through, kind of. His brain could not access anything that was not used during his current incarnation. They did treat him for exposure to the plague, which actually saved his life a second time.
The Smarcions quickly learned that he could only speak Galactic Common and Smarcion Trade and could only read and write Smarcion, giving no doubt of birth after the last extinction of the Nekogian race. There was a huge review of what happened with the plague ship and the ship that abandoned him. He was found to be guilty of tampering but was acquitted due to the need for action.
The ship had been one hard footstep or asteroid away from completely crumpling. The fact that the other ship abandoned him had indiscernible causes. Costan had severe memory loss and would be aging slower, courtesy of the treatment for cradle plague. The Smarcions decided that he would be raised along side of the regular children unless behavior problems arose.
They knew that he was smarter than the galactic average, he remembered building the power armor that could match up to theirs. This was a concern for the regular species, but not the Smarcions. There were very good reasons why they raised their children away from all of the other species, like having to intervene when they wanted to fire up a home made super collider without safety measures.
Costan would fit right into the nerdy and dangerous bunch. They had him go through a lot of testing, but eventually got him placed in an age group and with a family. He adapted to the new lifestyle planet side, but the parents he was given to kept an extremely close eye on him and reported everything.
They didn't know if he was done having brain hemorrhages or if he was secretly an enemy, but he was a child of a species that they kinda killed out a few times. He was a bit of a scaredy cat, but he gradually got over it. Overall, Costan was a good kid, even though he got picked on a lot and bullied about twice a month. The hang up was the food.
They fed him what looked, smelled, and tasted like moist cat food. It was specially designed and balanced for Nekogians. He would grow up slowly and be very strong because of the "Nekogian Chow", but it was very tiresome to eat cat food every meal of every day and getting bullied didn't help. He eventually snapped and knocked out his bullies with Three Stooges style multistrike backhand.
He got suspended, but so did the bullies. The school had rules, but also did it's best to ingrain common sense. That's the excuse for letting the bullying go on like it did, to teach that sometimes you have to stand up for one's self and that eventually the meekest people will have gotten enough of your nonsense. None of the parents were happy about that, the bullies got extra punishment from their parents.
Costan, now with the fancier and assigned name of Costansio Saterious Nafereiro, also got an added punishment for fighting. They switched him from the moist cat food like substance to what was definitely dry kibble. He was not happy about it, but knew to keep it to himself and not dare to get angry about it. His adoptive parents were both telepaths. He was grounded for four years.
Costan kept his grades up well enough to get top marks for a few years in a row. He slacked off once he realized that perfect scores were not enough for his parents to acknowledge achievement. They grounded him again for the lowered grades, but walked it back when a stray thought of his made them realize something. They had nothing to ground him from except having a bed, food, etc.
Costan, having severe memory loss, did not realize that this was the twenty something time such had happened to his wayward soul. While he couldn't remember, a subconscious part of him did. That is what gave him that feeling and thought that "this is expected and will happen again until you are grounded from living".
Costan didn't like thinking like that. It made him want to die. His parents picked up on that and managed to coax a conversation about it. They never really talked a lot, being able to read each other's mind and all. Costan never bothered to talk because everyone who would ever ask him a question already knew his answers.
They were surprised by his voice. They hadn't actually heard him speak in almost a century, he hadn't spoke since they started with the mind reading. His parents reviewed their parenting technique and reported about the incident.
The Department of Species Preservation and Development was working on a new technique for them and had them give Costan enough leash to actually be able to get into trouble. He was a child, and children are supposed to get in trouble from time to time. Kids learn a lot from trial and error.
They did slacken up, but Costan didn't. He remained to be how they had taught him to be, quiet, obedient, and well behaved. They all eventually realized that he had given up on being a kid and grew up already. It was a sad realization for the couple, but the government expected such out of a species that normally reached adulthood at thirty with the individual receiving strict negative reinforcement. They still made him eat kibble and go to school with him aging so slowly.
The new parenting methods didn't cause much of a change in Costan. A few hundred years of negative reinforcement tends to cause emotional changes that can't be easily undone. His grades had improved to perfection again, but the attempts by his parents at meal time conversations went nowhere.
It felt like an eternity of school and disappointment to Costan. He had dealt with the depression by ignoring it, same as everything else. His parents were always concerned, but he never tried to kill himself, so they skipped the medication route.
Normal people would not expect someone who spends centuries between speaking to magically become a chatter box when they are eating the xenos equivalent of dog kibble while the others eat normal food. Costan eventually got a chance out of that situation when he turned one thousand. He joined the military.
There, he still was fed dog food, and treated much like before. He got stuck with the hyper boring task of manning an observation post in an empty system for a century. Then again and again, until a minor war happened. It was right at the end of his enlistment tour and they made him stay in. Then he got stuck at a space station and a few dead worlds until the emergency extension ended. He had his moments like the time he made it rain on a desert planet by yelling at the sky.
He eventually satisfied the requirements of service enough to leave the military and he was approached with an order that was concealed as a request. The request was to be a surrogate. He was a male, and they wanted him to undergo procedures to become capable of gestating a zygote into a baby and birth it. He was not having it until a certain department threatened to jail him for "speciel treason" not special treason, but treason against his own species.
It was his big "What" moment of that life.