Chapter 1

“A box? You chose to be delivered in a box?” the Guardian asked its ward, speaking in the language of the creature’s people.

“Box warm. Box touch body. Box safe,” replied the little creature in its soft but high-pitched voice.

“I can transport you anywhere within the known universe and teleport you to any place on the planet and you chose to deliver yourself to your destination inside a cardboard box and mailed through the local postal service.”

“Box close to size. Box hidden. Box soft.”

The creature ignored the Guardian’s incredulousness. The creature did that sometimes.

The Guardian knew what its charge meant, though. It was the creature’s guardian for a very long time.

The Guardian did not have a name. The Guardian had a designation, a string of numbers, letters, and dashes that identified it against all other guardians and allowed their computer systems to recognize them as friendlies. The Guardian just didn’t have a name, official or otherwise. The creature never once asked if its Guardian had a name nor given him a name. The Guardian was just The Guardian to the creature.

Every so often, the Guardian referred to himself as a he. Technically, the Guardian was genderless, but the creature demanded a masculine persona for its Guardian, so ‘he’ he was. This was the case for all of the little creatures. It tended to be male creatures demanded male guardians while female creatures demanded female guardians. The male or female persona helped guardians when they decided to interact with local people as it gave guardians a generic appearance to work with.

The Guardian was an artificial intelligence in service to the Catalum Empire and bonded to the little creature delivering itself in a box. He was a corvette-type spaceship, ten kilometers in length and shaped like a four-sided pyramid sideways resting on one of its base vertices. He was armed with a single spinal mount particle laser and numerous secondary and tertiary cannons. His weapons allowed him to be able to blow a kilometer-sized hole in the planet’s surface. He was supported by enough energy to shove a small moon out of its orbit and contained enough processing power to predict every move of every being above the size of a mouse within a fifty-kilometer radius on any given garden world, ten minutes before it made that move, and be able to apply proper counters should that being be hostile to his charge.

Corvette-type starships were the smallest bonded starship of the Empire. He wasn’t unique in this regard, one of quintillion upon quintillion corvettes across the Empire’s vast territories, but he was the world to his charge. Above him, there were frigates, destroyers, cruisers, and battlecruisers, as well as space stations. All were mandated to have a bonded creature, even the space stations, which were really separate ship classes that were anchored into solar or planetary orbits rather than be free-ranging.

Technically, there was a ship smaller than him. The Probe-type. But probes were unbonded and normally functioned as fighter-craft for larger ships like destroyers and cruisers. Well, fighter-craft that were multiple kilometers large.

Being this massive ten-kilometers-long starship, it was next to impossible to introduce himself to the size of beings that would converse with his ward eye-to-eye. Instead, he used a holographic avatar of sorts to interact with the tiny people. If the people were hostile, he would reveal his true self. Normally, he didn’t need to do so. The mention of the Catalum Empire was enough to terrify the vast majority of peoples and civilizations. Those that knew of the Empire, of course.

The Guardian only needed to reveal himself five times across the thousand years he and his charge were bonded and only needed to activate weapons for two of them. One time, though, the situation was escalated to requiring the local destroyer’s presence. That entire planet shut themselves up when the eight-hundred-kilometer-long ‘scout ship’ appeared over their world, weapons visibly active and ready to cut the planet in two, literally. They backed down and didn’t bother the creatures after that.

The Guardian remembered that day fondly. There he was, ready to throw down in the name of protecting his charge against a space-faring civilization that didn’t see his as a threat with their many fleets of warships. He was one ship against fleets that outnumbered him a thousand to one. Then his superior decloaked and forced them all to back down.

Those were the good days.

“Box safe,” the creature said again.

The Guardian came back to the present.

The little creature preferred to be inside things that were wrapped around its body. The box was full of wrapping paper and shipping material to cushion and protect an item that was rated as fragile. Fragile indeed, as the item was a living creature. The box wasn’t all that much bigger than the creature, thus “Box close to size”.

In terms of the local measurements, the creature took up thirteen inches long by eight inches wide by thirteen inches height. The box wasn’t that much bigger, and the empty space was taken up by the shipping material, much of it in the cavity between the creature’s back and the top, in the back half of the box.

The creature had a physical handicap that caused it to maintain a sitting position which was why such large cavity existed in the first place. This meant that the creature was stable when sitting on a flat horizontal surface, but it was obvious that movement would be a hassle.

Minor movement of the creature meant shuffling and sliding around, usually on soft or smooth surfaces. Moderate movement meant hopping from place to place. Beyond this and for long-distance movement, the Guardian would attempt to teleport the creature. The creature did not like being teleported but would accept the Guardian doing so most of the time. The Guardian rarely needed to do so. Anyone who knew what the creature was also knew that the Guardian was watching. Anything that didn’t, could themselves be teleported away from the creature.

The handicap was something of a peculiarity to different cultures and civilizations on their travels. For being a member of an intergalactic civilization, the idea that citizens of an empire of that caliber would continue to have handicaps of any kind was mind-boggling. This was a civilization that mastered stellar engineering and individual members could still be restricted to what amounted to a wheelchair. The Guardian could cure the creature of the handicap in a matter of minutes, but the creature didn’t care and didn’t want to change for the sake of formality. That, and the creature could navigate the world with its disability, although it relied on its Guardian a lot.

Despite breathing air and in a mostly sealed box, the creature was fine for the fourteen-hour duration of its delivery. Its low metabolism, combined with its Guardian able to replenish the box’s air supply at the drop of a hat through teleportation technology, meant that the creature was quite comfortable in its little box. The Guardian could also regulate the box’s internal temperature so the little creature could stay warm. Useful because the species came from a warm arid planet and preferred warm climates. They had no preference for dry or wet climates, though. The key word was just “warm”. Or at least warm enough. The temperature here where the creature was mailing itself was fine.

“Box hidden” meant the creature couldn’t see through the box. It was the logical fallacy of if things didn’t exist if they couldn’t be seen. Or in the case of the creature, that something, being the wider world, couldn’t hurt him. The entire species was like this. Lots of little logical fallacies baked into small, timid, docile, and easily frightened creatures that took to the stars not out of choice. On an individual level, these creatures were irrational and illogical. But on a group level, they were a force of nature. Most people saw them through the individual level, though, mostly because large groups of them also came with large groups of Guardian ships, and large groups of Guardian ships meant some very, very large ships would be present. Battlecruisers, for example, were the size of planets.

The creatures’ strengths were in their willingness to tinker, programming computers, and solving complex mathematics. And, their hivemind.

It wasn’t a true hivemind. They were individuals with unique personalities. But they had an innate sense of registering the emotions of nearby members of their species, and honed to a point where this sense was continent-scale. They could also share emotional and mental loads. And when things got tough, everyone put down everything to solve problems, all the way to the point of dehydrating and starving themselves in their quest to problem solve, which would bring more creatures with the sole job of feeding and watering the ones doing the primary problem solving.

That was the secret to their transition from non-sapient animals to sapient space-farers.

“Box soft” simply meant the packing material wasn’t hard. Granted, it was packaging material. That was the entire point of packaging material. To be soft and cushion the item inside.

“Okay, if you say so, Little One. Box safe.”

The creature chirped back at his Guardian.

It wasn’t that the local postal service was inherently dangerous. The people that operated it did their jobs well. The creature’s box, while rated as fragile and would be treated with care, would inevitably end up being rotated. The box could end up sitting on a truck sideways or even upside down, the workers not suspecting anything amiss.

The creature, however, would be fine. A note about the creature’s biology was the presence of folded skin on the bottom of their paws, similar to the local planet’s gecko animal. The skin could be used in a manner to create a vacuum, which, combined with their relatively small size and weight, meant they were able to crawl up walls and ceilings. The Guardian often had to pry him off the ceilings of places where the little creature visited.

His name was Maxwell. Or rather, Maxwell was the local name he took in one of the major languages of the planet. To the creature’s people, Maxwell’s actual name had many, many syllables. Their people made a habit of verbalizing everything in excessive detail, which meant his name was a literal and total description of himself, everything from its physical description to its mental capabilities. The result for this one was a name that was over six hundred syllables long.

Maxwell was also ancient. Well, no, that wasn’t accurate. Maxwell was ancient to the locals. Maxwell was just a wee baby infant to his people. The cut off age for adulthood was around the twenty-thousand solar year mark in this locality. Maxwell was not even five percent that age, being just under a thousand solar years old.

A short while ago in the timescale used by Maxwell’s people, the two were running the Guardian’s shakedown cruise and the creature picked a name out of the local language and countryside. Before then, the creature was effectively nameless. He picked the name right around when someone named James inherited places known as England and Ireland. The creature heard the name while living out of something called a tavern and decided it would be his name.

Maxwellingtonofedinbursouthfirthforthnorthpentland.

Max Wellington of Edinburgh, south of the Firth of the river Forth and north of the Pentland Hills.

Maxwell.

The full name in the local language was a mouthful and complicated, but it did describe where the creature took the name down to a tee, and that was very important to Maxwell.

Maxwell wanted to expand this formality with his people’s absolute attention to detail and go way further than just the basic physical location description way down to the description of the people being served in that tavern at that time.

The Guardian would not have any of it and forced Maxwell to leave his name at that. While the Guardian would be able to recall the whole name due to its massive memory storage, the Guardian quickly picked up on the fact that the locals kept their names short and to the point. Nothing over four syllables was common and if they could reduce it down to under four, the locals did so. The Guardian got the creature to just be Maxwell.

“Bump. Shake. Bump. At rest.”

The creature vocalized the movements of the box. The Guardian could hear every word it made even though it wasn’t talking to the Guardian. Fortunately for Maxwell, the creature wasn’t able to make the sounds leave the box. Anyone carrying the box would not hear a living being inside of it and open it up to free the creature. That would ruin the whole point of him mailing himself to his destination.

The creature’s box moved. The Guardian could see it was picked up by a mail worker and brought into the postal building. The creature had its box appear on the ground just outside the postal building with the required currency needed to get it shipped to its destination. No one came to steal the box because it only appeared right as the postal workers arrived for work in the morning and the Guardian made sure that the postal building in question was also the one next to a police station.

Had someone attempted to steal the box, the Guardian would have teleported the box and the creature still inside to safety. The Guardian was very capable of leveling the entire countryside in a rough two-hundred-kilometer radius, but it was bound by their empire’s policy not to physically intervene unless something directly harmed, or threatened to harm, one of their citizens. The threat caveat also required the person making the threat to know what exactly they were making a threat against meaning if they didn’t know the species and affiliation of Maxwell, the Guardian couldn’t blast the place. This was an oath that the Guardian took seriously.

The creature was delivering itself to its new owner, a person whose family was in service to the Empire as caretakers. This family had not yet invoked the immortality clause with the Empire, and that was fine for Imperial Services, as long as the family produced an heir to continue their line every generation. Imperial Services did not like their contractors to die before their contracts were up or they decided to exit out of their contracts. The fact that these contracts were of infinite duration did not go amiss.

The mail worker did not know what was in the box. The creature was well-protected by padding and cloth. The worker carried the box marked fragile just like any other box marked fragile and sent it through the mail collection and sorting system for fragile boxes.

“Box carried. Box moving,” the creature notified its Guardian.

“I can see. Are you still okay in there?”

“Box okay. Maxwell okay.”

This planet was far from the beaten path within the galaxy and the galaxy itself was effectively backwater swamplands compared to what Maxwell and his Guardian were used to. There was nothing here of strategic value and the civilizations that grew up around this neck of the woods were small and weak, even by early space-faring standards. There were cities of Little Ones in the galaxy, but they were few and far in between. The closest large city was Wharrarum, located at the base of the galactic arm. Wharrarum was the main administrative center for the galaxy and home to five-hundred-billion Little Ones. It was considered small. Major imperial cities such as the capital Ahhwoo numbered in the quadrillions. For lesser minds, that was a one with fifteen zeros following it. The Little Ones had millions of years to develop into the massive sprawling powerhouse that was the Catalum Empire.