LF Friends, Will Travel

On Terran Loneliness

Date 68 PST (Post Stasis Time).

"Query: Have the Scythen insulted the Terran?"

The robotic voice caused Johnathan to jump, interrupted from his train of thought as he turned to look at the alien behind him. The Scythen were, even by the rules of the universe, one of the weirder races: a hyper-intelligent bundle of tentacles of oscillating colours, floating in mid-air on a small personal hover disk that allowed such a strange being to actually move around. They couldn't make the noises most species used to communicate, so all of them spoke through a small computer stashed inside the disks they hovered around on.

Not that this bothered Johnathan. He'd been on this Scythen research vessel for about 6 months now, part of a "Student exchange" for lack of a better term. While Terrans had been spacefaring for quite some while, a mixture of their sector of the universe being uniquely devoid of life and a Terran brand oopsie that had forced every surviving Human into stasis for ten thousand years had caused Terrans to be a relative newcomer to the galactic scene, just joining the wider galactic community a little over sixty years ago.

Spending time with the Scythens was frankly a dream come true. They were one of the few species with a technological advantage over the Terran, and their strangeness was alluring. Dr. Johnathan Fletcher had entered stasis all that time ago believing the universe was empty and had woken up to a galaxy filled with sentient creatures more alien than he could have ever imagined.

Although this one was... angry? Scared? Johnathan frowned as he tried to remember what this specific combination of fluctuating fluorescent lights strobing down their tentacles meant. He still hadn't gotten the hang of what they all meant in terms of body language.

"No?"

"Query: Are the Terran Conclave declaring war on the Scythen people?"

The query from the Scythen caused Johnathan's brow to furrow deeper, the light from the containment field to his right bouncing off his face. He wasn't sure where this was going, but he was getting suspicious that he was about to be told off... again.

"No?...." The Terran answered, cautiously.

"Exclamation: Then why has The Johnathan created an unstable anti-matter bomb on this vessel?"

Johnathan immediately relaxed, with this statement, an excited grin spreading across his features. This he could explain, this was science, this was something new.

"No, it's not a bomb. Well, it could be. In this case, it's an experiment. I saw the containment fields you use for the plasma in your warp cores, and I realized that those same Detrunium fields could be the solution to something we Terrans have been working on."

He turned to almost present the containment field, as if he was once again back home on Earth presenting another lecture to a group of students, excitedly gesturing as he spoke.

"If you can contain the reaction of the creation and destruction of antimatter, you can keep the chain reaction going as long as you're gradually giving it more mass. This means you're able to convert matter to energy at a 99.9775% efficiency, blowing all other energy sources out of the water. Heck if you purposefully half breached containment, you could basically turn it into a shaped anti-matter charge. I know you guys don't go for the entire making weapons thing, but blowing a hole in a moon using something the size of a pebble is kind of cool!"

The Scythen turned a mixture of red and green for a moment, the telltale signs of curiosity, before resuming the angry flashing.

"Exasperated Query: Why do this here, where a containment breach would kill everyone on the ship."