Notes in my personal secret diary, to be released publicly 135 years from now.

It all started really about ten-eleven years ago when I started to notice a rising number of humans in many high skill jobs. Jobs held by many other races before.

That was about fifteen or so years after first contact with humans. I remember the contact because it was unusual in that when found the humans already had a wide colony network of more than a hundred inhabited planets.

Normally a species is found when they first use or attempt to use a warp drive as that leaves a clear trace detectable across the galaxy, but humans had never developed warp. Instead they had first spread by generations ships and later by sending probes that contained what the humans called a “gate seed” that allowed them to then transit instantly between two spots in space as long the “seed” had traveled to the other end at below light speed. The contact was when one of the probes entered a system held by the Grotcha.

So I was curious, when all of the other more than 1830 known species were found either when they used warp travel the first time or when a warp mishap caused a ship to be diverted to their system, how the one species that had a totally different FTL system would integrate into the galactic society. After all the society has existed for more than a thousand years and most new species find fairly quickly a niche or few niches where they are very good at and usually many more where they are fairly good.

So it was unusual to see humans in such varied jobs.

At first I did not pay much attention beyond “That is curious”.

But 3 years ago I started to notice something truly weird: In almost any complicated job, it had come common knowledge that a human in the job was almost as good as the race best known for that task.

So I started looking into it, going through profession after profession, checking poll after poll, conducting randomized questionnaires as a control to my finding, reading the research on the topic and so on.

What I found shocked me: After controlling for random fluctuations, sampling error and such, it was commonly thought that humans were second best race at everything.

Want the best astronavigator: Hire a Astalomanic, but if you want to spend a little less but still want good performance, a human is almost as good.

Want the best driver: hire a Talak, but a human is almost as good. Best accountant, Kerx, second human. And the list goes on.

I checked a total of 12 421 job titles, out of them every one of the 11 320 top paid jobs was the same story: Some other race was considered best, but the humans second best. For the 1001 lowest paid ones humans were not considered at all suitable.

There were no bleed over, no overlap, just a clear line. Such things do not happen, it is statistically so unlikely that the real world never has such events. So I continued my search to reasons to what caused such, finding the truth became an obsession for me.

About a year ago I started asking humans directly, and did not seem to get any replies that indicated even knowledge of such. I tried interacting with humans in many settings and indeed became friends with quite many of them after many a nice moment spent in everything from a bar to hang gliding.

But then three days ago I was contacted by a human who said he knew my research and knew the answer and was willing to meet with me.