Our Cousins Came With Us

Writing prompt: Humans encounter aliens but have uplifted the great apes along the way. Hilarity ensues.

Our cousins came with us.

When humanity finally reached the stars, we were scared. There was a lot of empty space found and not just between the stars, but on their planets and moons. And emptiness scares us.

So what we did was to look around Earth and see who would be good to take with us.

We took our cats, dogs and other pets with us but while they gave us companionship, it wasn’t enough. We needed companions who could hold our hand when the emptiness was too much and could talk to us when we were scared and would walk beside us as we explored the unknown.

So we uplifted the great apes. The Gorillas, Orangutans, Chimpanzees and Bonobos. These were our cousins and with a lot of work, effort and some failures we learnt from, we had companions who could walk with us in to the great unknown.

It took us close to 370 years to go from stepping forth by ourselves to being in a group of friends and pets as we explored. We still found a lot of vast emptiness but with our friends with us, we were no longer as afraid as we were.

And then we encountered the Ghantrus Empire.

It was more of an accident than anything, like so much in our past, where a ship had to drop out of jump space to fix a harmonic error in their jump drive and they found an outpost of the Empire.

Of course they were panicked along with the captain and crew of the hauler but someone had thought of this possibility and had left instructions for any crew who had a first encounter with intelligent alien life. Pull back to the edge of the system, send a message to the nearest fleet base and don’t do anything.

But of course ‘monkeys being monkeys’, their curiosity got too much and they set to trying to communicate with the outpost and they actually did so. A rudimentary lexicon of ideas and language was able to be constructed and translation software was created that didn’t screw up too often.

By the time the fleet got a couple ships out there, they were able to communicate with the Ghantrians. They were an empire of three species who were relatively close to each other’s home worlds so after a few small wars, they decided to join together to face the great darkness. Thus the empire was born.

The empire had three species;

- Ghantrians, a small feathered quadruped species that had tentacles for manipulators giving them great dexterity.

- Sortus, a slow moving but strong species that looked like a tortoise crossed with a snake with three manipulators. They were the muscle of the empire literally.

- Warentoph, a quick moving furry heptapod that somehow crossed a six legged rabbit with a kangaroo’s tale and made it a true limb and all seven limbs had manipulators. They were the brains of the empire.

Somehow they were able to make their empire work with complimentary strengths and they had been exploring and expanding slowly for a few hundred of their years before encountering humans.

And this is where things started to get a bit strange.

When the Ghantrians were able to communicate, we worked on establishing visual communications as well. We are a very visual set of species and rely on visual clues to determine if we can trust someone.

So imagine the first good visual communication between the Ghantrian outpost with their three species all looking on and the humans on their ships and we saw their three distinct species and we instantly knew that there were three of them.