You're wondering who I am.
Yes, I am a Teleon, the same as you are. Well, not exactly the same. You're a high government official, a thinker-caste. I'm about as far from a government official as it gets, and as for caste, well I know I look like a warrior...
Do you remember what determines if a Teleon hatches as warrior- or thinker-caste? The egg-caring drone deposits a secondary specialization jelly onto the egg about 3 days after the first. You covered that in school. Do you know what happens next? Two completely separate regulatory cascades – a metabotropic one for the central nervous system and an ionotropic one for the rest of the body, both resulting in transcription factor cascades. Maybe you didn't cover that. I have a single base insertion in the first receptor only. Completely mangles the protein.
Long story short: I was laid to be a warrior, and I have a warrior's body, but I have a thinker's brain. Sucks to be me.
You have no idea how much it sucks to be me.
I spent the first ten years of my life in warrior training. Boredom raised to the level of torture. And none of the intellectual stimulation that young thinkers need to develop properly. It took me ten years to make contact with an authority figure sentient enough to understand I had been misplaced.
So I started thinker training. Vastly behind. And looking like a warrior.
I can't count the number of times someone tried to gently lead me back to warrior training. It always took a dozen tries to explain that I wasn't a warrior. They didn't listen. After all, warriors never say anything worth listening to, right? Even “I am not a warrior”?
But the worst was discovering I wasn't exactly a thinker either. Personality isn't entirely in the central nervous system. I enjoy physical activity. I enjoy defeating people. I can't not enjoy those things.
I majored in engineering, to avoid interacting with other people, but it wasn’t enough. Halfway through I gave up and got a transfer to officer training. You don’t want to know what it took to get that transfer. They say an officer is halfway between a thinker and a warrior, so maybe I could fit in there.
I did well there. I got the highest scores ever. Maybe you remember me now? But I didn't actually fit in. I didn't instinctively trust thinkers' orders, or place the lives of thinkers and drones above my own.
The motto of the Teleon government is “A place for everyone and everyone in their place.” But there was no place for me. I looked ahead to a future I couldn't accept and I knew drastic action was called for.
I picked the drastic action which left me the most future options. I left. The day after I graduated, I simply departed the planet. I didn't say goodbye to anyone; there was no one I wanted to say it to. I took service on a freighter as a mechanic, and soon joined a mercenary company.
Living among aliens was an improvement. At least no one thought they knew who I was. Ignorant beats wrong. But I was still alone. Even in polyspecific spaces, people tend to associate with their own species, or at least their own culture. People who share some customs, some references, maybe even a perspective: things I didn’t share with anyone. And mercenaries don’t make friends easily. Too likely that you'll be on opposite sides of the next fight.
Once I had enough money stashed away, I quit mercenarying and went in search of a home. My co-workers said I was crazy to quit just when my career was really getting lucrative. But I've been called crazy my whole life.
I searched. I visited hundreds of worlds. I spent so much time sorting through sociological libraries and databases that I was offered an assistant professorship. I tried it briefly – alien sociologists think they know things about Teleons. I sought enlightenment with the warrior-monks of the Qonst and the logician-monks of Audentior. I lived on farms and in forests and cities and space stations...
You want me to get to the point? Too bad. I spent half my life being patient with you. Your turn.
But I'll skip ahead a little. I settled on Earth. Humanity's homeworld. Relations between the Human and Teleon governments were shaky even then, though nowhere near as bad as they are now. I was nervous going through immigration, but it was no big deal. I checked off the “unaffiliated” box on the form, showed my finances and gave a pair of character references, and they let me in.
I settled in one of the major cities, in a neighborhood with a history of people who didn't fit. It was founded about a century before alien contact, by humans who were driven out of their birth communities for disagreeing on sexual mores (as is common among monomorphic species, the vast majority of humans have sex drives, and most human cultures have rules about it). That conflict is basically over, but the spirit of the neighborhood remained.
The heart of the spirit is a simple human saying: “You are not me and you are okay.”
Or a more common saying, that the Human dream is “To be judged not by the color of your skin but by the content of your character.” That's a pre-contact saying, but it expands to my mottled green-brown skin just fine.
Humanity has so much internal diversity that they've developed customs for dealing with that. For taking people as they come instead of putting them into boxes. These customs aren't practiced everywhere, but enough places. Earth's biggest cities average only 60% human. What's the Teleon number, 99.9%?
I'll give you a concrete example. Living among sociologists, I heard many arguments on how to refer to non-drone Teleons in languages that use gendered forms. And sometimes I was asked for my opinion. But only on Earth was I asked for my preference. How would I like people to refer to me, because making me comfortable as an individual is more important than getting the boxes right. And I don't even care about grammar!
Or how about a more personal example? For years I’ve been annoyed at tournaments calculating second place. They all do it wrong. Thinkers said, “It’s just a silly tournament.” Officers said “Don’t you plan to win first prize?” Even mercenaries mostly said “Stop thinking so much and play.” I raised the matter on Earth and got forwarded to the director of tournament structure, who’d actually thought about this. He took me through the various restrictions in terms of computational complexity theory. Not only was I not alone in the universe for having thought about this, someone else had come up with ideas I hadn’t! He finished by challenging me to do better by his metrics. I did and he adopted it with no resentment whatsoever. Because he would rather have a good idea than keep me in my place. I don’t think the latter even occurred to him.
Something deeper? One of the most painful things growing up was people insisting that by entering officer training I was rejecting my “natural role” and “betraying the hive” and therefore evil. So as a mercenary I went as far from that as I could and signed on with an Entzian captain. They never call anything “evil”. My first mission would have been the orbital bombardment of a civilian population. I refused, and resigned before we even left port. He called me a sentimental fool. I told these stories to a warrior-monk and he told me I was seeking balance, and this was good. I was sure he was missing the point. I told all three stories to a human and she got it. “There’s a difference between different and wrong,” she said, “but don’t resent them too much for not getting that -- it took us a long time too.” I believe every priest and philosopher in the galaxy would benefit from that wisdom.
Something physical? Earth gets too hot for me. I wear an earth-made cooling suit. Cooling suits are nothing new to me. I’ve worn Teleon-made ones: they’re not very good. They’re worn by warriors who need to fight on hotter worlds, and warriors can’t explain what’s wrong with the suits. Or at least no one goes to the trouble of figuring out how to listen. I’ve worn General Products’ generic hexapod coolsuits too; they don’t fit well either. I spent most of a day trying things on and being measured and answering questions about how I move before this one could be made, and it’s perfect. Oh, and the person who made it? Not actually a human. Just a Svata who’s picked up human values. And, yes, Svatas are chlorine-breathers. He can’t leave his apartment without a full environment suit. And he wouldn’t even consider living anywhere besides Earth.
So, the point is, Earth is my home now. The only real home I've ever had. I will do anything to protect it.
I know things are looking very dark between the Teleon and Human governments. And I know the Humans offered you some very reasonable compromises that you turned down. And I know you, so I bet you're thinking the humans are too merciful to worry about. And humans are pretty merciful. Most of the time, anyway.
But if you make war on Earth, you make war on a thousand species. Earth's adopted children, if you will. We who know what the humans themselves don’t. What the humans can't. That humanity is more worthy of survival than any other species. We who, in many cases, have very little mercy.
That includes me. The all-time valedictorian of your own officer college, who also knows your military hardware inside and out. I will gladly wipe you from the face of the galaxy to protect my adopted family.
So make a deal with them while you can. Because if you can't you'll be dealing with the rest of us.