See, thereâs this joke going around among the other civilized species of the galaxy about the way humans have domesticated this one animal into so many different types that itâs hard to tell which Earth animals are, and are not, dogs. So I really felt like someone must have been messing with me when I looked at the large crate of animal cargo that we were supposed to deliver.
âCaptain,â I said slowly. âThese arenât dogs. Well, one is, and itâs not the one youâd think.â
Captain Sunlight looked up at me, concern on her lizardy face. I could see how reluctant she was to ask me, âAre you sure?â
âVery,â I said, pointing at the Chihuahua. âThat oneâs a dog, one of the smallest kinds. But that is a ferret, that is a capybara, and that is a bear cub, and none of these should be in the same cage. Please tell me theyâre going somewhere with an accredited zoo?â
Captain Sunlight turned to look at the client who had brought us the crate. He flicked his antennae and flexed pincher arms, giving away nothing but annoyance. Which wasnât unusual for a Mesmer. âI was told they were dogs,â he insisted.
âThey are not,â I said, pointing at the bear cub. âWhen that one grows up, it will be bigger than you, and able to rip the door off this ship.â
Captain Sunlight looked up in alarm. âHow fast does it grow?â
âNot that fast,â I reassured her. âBut itâs a bear. One of the biggest land predators currently living on Earth. Not a dog.â
The Mesmer hissed in irritation. âCanât you just take them anyway? My supervisor wanted this to be handled quickly, and theyâre contained safely enough.â
I was a little skeptical of that, but the four unlikely bundles of fur were behaving for the moment. The ferret was zipping about in a normal ferrety way while the bear cub and Chihuahua snuggled up to the capybara like it was an adoptive parent. Which it could have been for all I knew. We hadnât moved the crate into our cargo bay just yet, pausing on the busy spaceport between their ship and ours. I asked, âCan I talk to your supervisor real quick?â
This hiss sounded exceptionally put-out, like an aggravated teenager forced to clean his room. âWe need to take off.â
I retorted, âAnd I need to make sure these arenât being sold as companion animals to someone unprepared for getting their ship ripped open.â
Captain Sunlight nodded, tapping the tablet with the details of this particular delivery. âThe destination is a hub world with many species cohabitating. That tells us nothing.â
âUgh, fine. Wait here.â The Mesmer stalked off back to his own ship, where he rapped on the door with a folded pincher and had a hissing conversation with someone just inside.
We waited. The ferretâs antics caused the bear cub to tumble over onto the Chihuahua, and now the three of them were roughhousing while the capybara watched calmly. This was clearly not the first time theyâd shared a cage. Now that I was looking, I noticed that all four had collar dents in their fur, though they werenât wearing any at the moment. The bear cub even had dents at its little wrists, and I did not like the look of that.
Someone left the other ship. I relaxed a bit at the sight of another human: a no-nonsense middle-aged woman who hurried over for a quick word with me specifically. I obligingly stepped aside, curious about what she had to say.
Her whispered explanation made it all better.
âI stole them from a circus,â she said. âTerrible place. I have a contact waiting to take them back to a sanctuary on Earth.â
âOh, good!â I said in immense relief. âI was worried someone actually thought they were all dogs.â
She shook her head once. âThatâs just for the paperwork. The circus owners are still looking for them. Think you can get in the air soon?â
âYes I do,â I told her, giving Captain Sunlight a thumbs-up. The captain saw it and moved to finalize things on the tablet with the Mesmer. I told the other human, âThis is not too different from how I got my cat.â
âGlad to hear it,â the human said with a smile. âIâll be leaving them in good hands, then.â She didnât press for an explanation of the cat thing, because we were all in a hurry here, and the circus types could come by at any time, and who needed that? Not us. She gave me a nod and a wink, then hustled back to her own ship.
I glanced around in what I hoped was a casual way. Not that I would necessarily recognize a representative of this particular terrible circus, but Iâd encountered enough in my time that I felt like Iâd sense the callousness rolling off them. There were entertainment groups that incorporated animals in a respectful way, of course, but those tended to not be the kind described as âterrible,â which inspired random humans to stage a spontaneous rescue.
I could relate.
Captain Sunlight asked me, âAll good?â The other human was disappearing back into her ship while the Mesmer activated a hover lift under the cage.
I nodded. âTheyâre dogs for today. Fido, Ursula, Cappy, and Fairy. Weâll want to leave quickly.â
âI trust Iâll get an explanation once weâre up?â
âYeah. You remember where Telly came from.â
Her expression turned stern. âUnderstood. Iâll tell Eggskin to get out the medical scanner, and Kavlae to prepare to leave immediately.â
âThank you. Maybe Telly can say hi through the bars once theyâve cleared the health check.â
Already walking towards the cargo bay, Captain Sunlight gave me an amused glance. âI thought dogs didnât like cats.â
I shrugged. âWho can say, with these four? A sniff through the bars should be fine. Theyâll probably have lots to talk about.â
Captain Sunlight just smiled and hurried ahead.
I hoped they were healthy, and as tame as they looked. I was planning to spend a significant part of this trip in the hold, keeping our animal cargo comforted and calm. It wasnât every day I got to pet a bear cub, much less a capybara and a ferret as well.
Pardon me, several dogs with absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about them. Even if one looked exceptionally cuddly, another had little ratty feet, and a third was long and lightning-fast. Totally normal dogs heading back to Earth where they belonged.
~~~
(The cat thing is a reference to this story: Bargains at the Space Market)
~~~
EDIT: There's a Part Two!
~~~
These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.
Shared early on Patreon! Thereâs even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.
The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadnât thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but theyâre too much fun to leave out of the second).
What I dislike about âHumans are Space Orcsâ is the depiction of humans as the gung-ho, guns a-blazing species that kills first asks questions later because, in most cases, thatâs not really us.
Humans arenât fearless. Not by a long shot. We can be brave and courageous for sure, but fearlessness isnât what helped us change and adapt and survive.
If we were fearless we would have jumped into the crocodile infested waters to catch the fish with our hands rather than developing fishing poles to catch them from safety on the bank.
We would have stayed fighting each other with tooth and nail instead of developing weapons to kill our enemies faster than they can attack us, developing shields to protect us from their blows, developing long range weapons to keep ourselves further from the battlefield proper.
A lot of human ingenuity is brought on from the natural fear of dying. Of getting hurt. We want to live longer and the best way to do that is to see everything as a threat until proven otherwise. We have Fight OR Flight instincts. We will run if we can.
What kind of situations most commonly bring on the biological miracle that is âHysterical Strengthâ? Life threatening ones. Situations where a human is fully convinced that they are going to die.
Humans, in the eyes of the galactic community, are seen as fearless and therefore incredibly dangerous creatures you do not want to be the enemy of.
But, in reality, there is nothing more dangerous than a cornered human that is very, very afraid.
Aliens of the universe are multitudinous and endlessly varied.
When the first aliens found Earth, they werenât very impressed. Itâs a dangerous, volatile environment, not really worth the danger of exploring until it was a real concerted effort from a dedicated research ship with a whole team of all sorts of species, itâs just⌠best to wait. The little planet seemed to have enough life to keep going for a few hundred solar revolutions, it seemed stable enough in its horrible nature of continuous tumult and awful cloud and storm systems and tectonic activity⌠if it hadnât imploded by the time it was discovered, it could wait a few more decades before a research ship could slot some time for it.
Except, they had perhaps waited a little too long. Or underestimated how quickly that deathtrap of a world could evolve technology.
The next time a ship wandered into the Sol system, it was met by a combustion-propelled machine, and a few terribly odd-looking creatures that jabbered unintelligibly in what seemed to be positive excitement, despite the bared teeth, and lots of generally non-threatening gestures. (They were 100% accurate in this assessment; the creatures were extremely excited.)
After some time, the creatures pulled out a shiny sheet and little marking sticks, and one began to draw crude pictographs for communication. Awfully creative for such creatures. They hadnât even developed antimatter propulsion! But they were at least creative enough to fire themselves off their planet, and to try to communicate with more highly evolved species. Very commendable!
After some tinkering and pulling parts from their shipâs stores, the creatures cobbled together a program on a little touch-tablet, and the device went to work on translating.
These creatures called themselves âhumansâ and there were many on their planet. The teeth-baring was a âsmileâ and it usually meant they were very happy when paired with the wrinkled upward foreheads. They had been looking into the stars forever, and dreamed of reaching out. They sent messages for decades, probes to take images of the further reaches of their system. They built telescopes to see out into the stars, and they hoped that they were not alone.
All in all, a very nice little surprise, this dangerous planet and its inhabitants being so affable compared to the place they came from! They had great thinkers and theorizers, they had many engineers, and they were making faster and larger strides in technology all the time. With the pace at which they accelerated, they would soon match most of the developed galaxies in progress.
For such a horrible world filled with of terrible things, the humans seem very well-adapted. They were only mildly inconvenienced by the horrors, almost blandly adaptive. Like their DNA slithered around all the bad things for survival and survival alone, and was not bothered with anything else.
Almost like the slime creatures on Calto Sixâs eighth moon. Except humans were surprisingly⌠solid? Ish?
They seemed boring.
They adapted to anything. Both quickly and seamlessly, rarely noticed in the instance.
Until they met the wider universe, that is.
Humans reflected.
Humans absorbed.
Humans mirrored their surroundings to blend, to survive, to make friends, to identity resources⌠humans were not boring.
They mimicked.
Humans were an amalgamation of sixty different species abilities, no great master of anything they did, yet adaptive enough to get by anywhere they landed.
Swimming? They were horrible at it. Not built for water at all. No webbing, small lungs, no flippers, no gills⌠some humans made their whole lives about swimming in water.
They made competitions for everything. All of the things humans should never do, from running for long times, to swinging dangerous weapons at each other, to riding insane creatures, imbibing dangerous substances, to jumping off of high places or out of flying craft, to eating far more than they would never need to eat in one sitting, to sleeping, to not blinking their eyelids, humans would do anything âfor funâ.
And it wasnât that no species in the codex did any of these things⌠but no species did all of them! Sometimes more than one at a time!
Humans had no business being so voracious with their living, had no call to strive for insane goals, no reason to be so uniquely determined to survive anything and everything that came their way, and they had no reason for all the dangerous places they set their minds on exploring and surviving to write journals on. Nothing but that acursed phrase âI wonder ifâŚâ which led them into all manner of trouble and madness.
No other species did so many different things to the galaxy. Most picked one avenue to specialize in that complimented their capabilities.
Humans only seemed simple and boring. But an empty slate begs to be filled. So humans filled their life-slates with all variety of things, and no two were identical. As though the realm of possibility were a challenge to follow every path, meet every end.
They seemed normal among the pleasant variation of the galaxies, until one realized they werenât. The crux of ânormalâ was a meeting point at which further familiarity with the human species only ever seemed to widen as time went on. Not parallel, but converging and immediately shooting off in some wild direction.
Humans would do anything, try anything, say anything, go anywhere, speak to anyone⌠or at least try to communicate, and they never stopped. They never once, as individuals or as a species, stopped moving or doing, until they were dead.
As funny as it is that rocky sees grace and complains about grace and humans in general as a terribly inefficient blob of water and fluids and teases constantly...
I REALLY think this should be a relatively rocky-exclusive perspective. He's watched this incredibly stressed human drip all kinds of tears and goos while they were floating around in space, and grace let down basically all of his guard around rocky personally, have discussed and understood eachother over life threatening missions. To Rocky, grace is Grace!
But grace does have some naturally combative push to him (see, the commentary that got him stonewalled in the scientific community in the first place, and being able to keep up with and handle Eva stratt) and further more, when an eridian is Not Rocky, i.e. not incredibly socially withdrawn and traumatized and maybe on their own spectrum of divergence before his ill fated mission and was very susceptible to latching onto a strange and unusual creature in just as much crisis as him...
That is to say. The eridians are going to meet grace with wildly different priorities and expectations. And what they're going to get is a human dangerously close to deaths door, and cornered and dying humans aren't always the most friendly or cooperative and friendly, even the Nicest Humans You Can Get.
So they get a dying human. And as tumblr loves to say, humans are terrifying to aliens, and fuck do they persist. Rocky's so-described "pathetic space blob" grace is terrifying to most eridians, especially the scientists studying him.
He drinks solvent and breaths combustion. Instead of simply dying when his body runs out of nutrients and calorie stores, it has begun to Digest Itself. His body is pumping chemicals they do not understand and every chemistry panel they run shows new levels of new chemicals and hormones. The human body replaces most of its cells constantly because even breathing, especially at a higher atmospheric pressure, is destroying their own lungs.
This thing "hears" things they cannot comprehend and he is unable to describe beyond "color" and "brightness" which are things you can not contextualize, and calls the strangest things beautiful. It has no entirely discernable traits you can understand ecologically as a predator- no armor, no weapons- and yet it eats meat and that is one of the many nutrients it needs to survive. You as a resident of erid do not have many creatures with "eyes" and so have no idea that the strongest mark of a predator is neither claw nor fang, but forward facing eyes, all the better to catch your prey, to meet a foe head on and fearless. You just know it "sees" and that it eats meat, and many other complicated things.
And in place of not receiving all those nutrients, it's body will litterally digest itself and keep going without them. Oh, this new chemical in it's latest blood panel allows it to ignore it's own pain to the point it won't realize it's injured. It can wake up from a dead sleep if you are too loud or too "brightness" around it. It speaks in an archaic graveling noise and is capable of imitating the strangest things, including a haunting near-vocalization of the eridani language of its own, which it calls "singing" and it does this at the strangest of times, when happy and when nervous. It is neither fast nor slow, but over time and observation, you realize this strange towering bipedal creature expends an entirely minimal amount of energy to walk, a process of controlled falling turned mobilization. You hypothesize that for lack of predatory weaponry like claws or sharp teeth, this thing simply evolved to follow you. To "see" you with it's forward facing eyes even in total stillness, total silence, and follow for as long as it takes: it won't spend much energy, and it won't starve waiting for you to exhaust. It'll start digesting *itself* while waiting for it's prey to lay down and have to sleep. It will "watch" you sleep with "eyes." You cannot wake up the way it can, and it will eventually catch up to you.
Also sometimes it cries excess amounts of saline rich solvent when you compliment it's latest research paper. Rocky calls him an idiot and the overseeing eridian scientists watch on with a sense of morbid eldrich horror. Right, right, just a "leaky space blob", sure.
They're kind of terrified of the future delegations with this planet. They litterally get to space by explosion. Not only are they scary- they're INSANE. And they're told the one they have is "a push over".
Humans having the incredible ability to fall asleep pretty much anywhere. So long as isnât actively on fire or made of broken glass and wasp stingers, itâs good enough for a human to conk out on. It not exactly good sleep, but itâs sleep either way.
Which is very odd to the galactic community.
Rest comes in all sorts of forms across the galaxy, some having sleep similar to ours, some having hibernation/brumation cycles, some going into meditative states, some retreating to cocoons, some photosynthesising, some even being technologically advanced enough to simply just plug themselves in and literally recharge. But the seeming inescapability of human sleep isâŚa little concerning.
If a human is tired enough, they will be able to sleep just about anywhere. Bed, sofa, armchair, the floor, a table, three chairs lined up, propped up like a doll against the wall, on top of another person, on a rock thatâs even vaguely flat, on a gnarled tree branch, sometimes even floating in water or suspended by a harness. Wherever. So long as we can breathe, we can and will fall asleep.
The same canât be said of aliens, theyâre a bit more picky by comparison, or they can stave off their exhaustion through emergency chemical reactions long enough to find somewhere appropriate to rest. Some are so specialised that they require their environments to be utterly perfect before their body allows them to rest. Those aliens are deeply jealous while waiting around at the Spaceport for their shuttle to start boarding and seeing humans clumped together on a bench in a very uncomfortable looking pile, snoring away.
And then, an alien species named the KhakâCthrax, a species known for their aggressive behaviour and bodies covered in rocky scales and dangerous barbs, discovering this aspect of humans.
One KhakâCThrax soldier being deployed to assist in saving some human civilians from a war zone and ending up having to carry a teenager for a while due to there not being enough gurneys. The juvenile human ends up nodding off in the soldierâs hands and at first he thinks the teenager has perished because the KhakâCThrax are not the type of person you would consider comfortable to rest on much less feel âsafeâ around inherently, but after the field medic explains that the child is only asleep, unsurprisingly from the day they had had, the soldier practically becomes a broody mother hen for the human. This little one trusted him??? Enough to rest while held in his arms??? They are his baby now???
Made worse by the fact that humans are half the size of the average KhakâCThrax when fully grown, so a scrawny juvenile was practically the size of a newly hatched whelp to the soldier. All tiny and soft and squishy. The soldier nearly took another KhakâCThraxâs arm off for trying to poke his new human baby.
Just watched a video of a guy playing an ABBA song on a bunch of PVC pipes, followed by a âhumans are space orcsâ post andâŚ
Humans will make music with anything. Sheep guts (bagpipes), sticks (drumsticks and didgeridoos), hollowed out logs (drums), industrial garbage (steel drums), bits of bone (one of the oldest known musical instruments is a flute made with a leg bone).
Two thoughts came to me:
1) scanning some kind of anomaly that causes a repetitive sound and suddenly every human on the bridge has started tapping their feet and drumming their fingers and humming and suddenly there is music!
2) non-human crew member is sent to find out where the noise is coming from and discovers some of their human crew members have used bits of broken ship parts and cleaning implements, and have started a band.
Aliens are gonna be gobsmacked by our urge to pack bond with everyone and everything on the ship, but just wait until humans are pack bonding with THE SHIP ITSELF. Giving her a nickname. Insisting on âshe/herâ pronouns for the ship because âtraditionâ. Saying âouchâ in sympathy when the ship takes damage, and saying âthere you go, all better,â after patching her up. Hell, I bet there will still be animists meditating and connecting with the spirit of the ship on a regular basis and thanking her for doing such a good job.
Humans are space orcs idea ive been tossing around in my head, but what if aliens were creeped out by human hands the way humans are creeped out by arachnid legs?
Like, we have absurdly dexterous and nimble fingers, theyre a big reason why we were able to forage more food, make better tools, and advance as a species. Theyre a vital part of how we interact with the world and each other.
But what if aliens saw us typing something or tying shoelaces even and were immediately put off by how these appendages move? Too fast, too disjointed, and each finger can do its own thing? It just strikes them as wrong, unnatural movement the same way we look at arachnids moving and have a visceral reaction to it. (I know not everyone is freaked by how arachnids move, even im not usually upset by it. But sometimes ill see one run and it just.... ugh)
Imagining alien horror movies about humans, and it becomes a trope that the human plays piano or something similar and the shots just focus in on the humans fingers gliding across the keys.
Imagine human diplomats having to wear mittens or something similar to cover their hands when first meeting new species to avoid disturbing or scaring them.
I like to imagine a scenario where humanity just never developed energy guns and has stuck to kinetic weaponry forever and at some point some alien species thinks about messing with the wrong apex predator species.
Alien 1: "Captain, I assure you, our ships can't be breached by anything weaker than a concentrated proton beam. They barely have lasers. We'll be fine."
Alien 2: "Sub relativistic projectile incom-" gets hit by a railgun shell at mach fuck
Human: I don't get this whole "Earth is a death world" thing. Like, obviously it wouldn't seem like one to us, but why is it one to you guys? Are your home planets *that* much more free of disease and predators and stuff?
Alien: Oh, yes. Earth is far more hostile than our home worlds.
Human: Huh. Wonder why.
Alien: I suspect it's due to Earth's high iron content blocking the fae from disposing of such minor threats.
Human: Yeah, I guess that
Human:
Human: what
Tiny fairy in alien's translator headpiece: Shut up, they think we're mythical, it's *hilarious*.
Humans entering space and realizing we are so small. We are mice compared to these giant races with their advanced machinery and technologies and experiences beyond us- except that we're humans. And our engineers dive into the new tech and once we learn the principles we also soon realize how Inefficient everything is. Their "microchips" are the size of cars, their storage drives are basically buildings, and they somehow store less data than ours. So, human companies take advantage, and tech starts rolling out. Massive and there's a lot of wasted space so that it can be managed with larger hands/pincers/claws/tentacles, but also so much more efficient than anything the galaxy has seen before.
Human technicians start hopping ships and upkeeping the general maintenance, the stuff that most aliens put off or don't notice because they never access the crevices of their ships. As human companies become more popular and lead the tech world in everything from warp cores to game stations ("it's so compact! How are the graphics so good?" Says a 60' tall grimbleback, holding a new VR headset that has all of its components included because it's so BIG by our tech standards), soon many things have accessibility ports for humans to be able to use as well. This means that these shiprats hoping ship to ship cause such a huge improvement in everything running smoothly, and there's a huge downtick in pests on ships because those "pests" are not only big enough and aggressive enough to bite a pitbull or a person in half, they're invasive to so many planets and humans hate nothing more than dog killing planet overrunning monsters.
All the while, from the Aliens perspective, humans are an elusive race that don't fraternize much with them. You almost never see a human as most places aren't exactly safe for the little things to run around in. They do export so much stuff though, and the custodial staff at the Central Galactic Outpost insists that there's more humans around than any other race if you just know where to look.
And sure it's somewhat known that some of the little daredevils hop ships and help out in exchange for room and board, usually without permission, but that can't be that common, can it?
Maybe your ship is running better this cycle ever since you stopped at the last station, that just means that tuneup was better than you thought. And maybe for some reason that program you were working on last night is finished when you wake up, but you're so tired maybe you finished it before you passed out. Somehow that faulty light in the galley has fixed itself as well, which is odd, but maybe the Engineer finally got to it. You'd know if there was someone else on your ship.
Right?
... You leave a little bowl of berries out as a thank you, just in case. You're not sure what humans like but you've heard they have a sweet tooth.
I think my favorite thing about humans are space orcs-style musings is that while the thought exercise is ostensibly about humans being unique in relationship to aliens, in practice it is mostly just an excuse to celebrate the things that we appreciate about ourselves as a species and the world in which we live.
Like yes, you could make a valid argument that "death worlds" are probably common or that other species are also batshit and it's honestly pretty likely that we would consider truly alien environments to be as mindblowing as we imagine ourselves being to other species.
But most of the time when I see people posting in the HASO tag, it's just something cool they noticed about themselves or the people they love and celebrating the joy they feel in being human.
Because really? We don't know what aliens will be like. We have no idea. They could look like anything. But we know that humans poison ourselves for fun, risk our lives to save deadly creatures, pack bond like nobody's business. We're the best endurance runners in the as-yet-known universe. Our brains are so coded for tool use they treat cars and planes and cranes as extensions of our bodies; and so coded for social bonds that we see faces in rocks and trees and teach our robots to sing themselves happy birthday.
And our planet? It has so many kinds of spiders and so many kinds of fungi and so many creatures that like to get pets and SO many animals that will get themselves drunk on fermented fruit or jellyfish zaps if given the chance. Dihydrogen monoxide, the universal solvent capable of dissolving more substances than any other liquid we know, falls from the sky and we dance in it. Our world is deadly as fuck and beautiful in its danger and in its wonder.
At our best, we imagine a future in which we are a benefit and a joy not only to our planet but to the universe. We dream of meeting alien species and inviting them home to meet our parents. We make art imagining all the ways we could be part of a galactic community.
It is sometimes not easy to be proud of being human or to take joy in the world we live in. But then you imagine someone taping a knife to a Roomba and you remember that sometimes, actually, humans can be kind of awesome and it is a privilege to live on this planet Earth.
I think we found the perfect enrichment for human crew members.
Our humans really enjoyed this area we provided for them.
They can run, fall, climb and more, to their hearts content.
They really enjoy being lifted and thrown into a large pit of foam blocks, or plastic spheres.
Note: our crew is mostly Xarnian, so we possess the necessary strength to lift the average adult human despite the density they have evolved on their deathworld.
Human larvae enjoy it the most, but even the mature humans are also thrilled by these activities.
Incidents involving "acts of human" are down 18% in the first cycle alone since we installed the enrichment chamber.
