Chapter 6: lecture

Professor Lu'Ka stood alone at the center of the Grand Lecture Hall, surrounded by silence. The doors hadn't opened yet, but already he could feel the energy—like static building before a storm.

The Grand Hall was an architectural marvel. Hundreds of meters across, it rose like a dome of woven light, the ceiling displaying a slowly orbiting starfield pulled from real-time galactic positioning. Each seat was specially designed for its occupant—organics, synthetics, aquatic, atmospheric, multi-limbed, even incorporeal forms. Thousands would soon fill it.

He adjusted the cuff of his long robe, tracing the edge of his worn lecturing band—smooth from years of absent-minded handling. The weight of the day pressed down on his shoulders, heavier than usual. It wasn't the work. It was the subject.

Humans.

Even the name sounded like fiction. A ghostly syllable passed between generations.

He tapped the control glyph beside the console. A glowing panel appeared in midair, softly displaying the lecture title in dozens of languages:

Myths and Lost Civilizations – Lecture 14.7: The Forgotten Ones

Lu'Ka allowed himself a quiet breath.

Not long ago, he would've approached this lecture with academic detachment. A careful string of dates, sites, disputed relics, and laughable conspiracy theories. But something in him had changed.

The doors parted with a thunderclap of gravity-shift. A ripple of motion passed through the room as the students began to pour in.

Some floated in tanks. Some slithered across the floor or clambered down the walls. Some glided in silence, shadows wrapped in containment fields. They came from every quadrant of the known galaxy—and nearly all of them had heard of the species no one had ever proven existed.

Humans.

And they were here to hear the story again.

Lu'Ka raised his hand.

The room quieted almost instantly. The rustle of feathers, the hush of neural taps syncing, even the occasional glottal chirp of aquatic processors—all fell into respectful silence.

He didn't speak right away. He let the anticipation breathe.

On the projection sphere behind him, a massive symbol began to rotate: an angular glyph stitched from ancient lines, said to be pulled from half-buried temples no one had built.

"This," he began, "is not a confirmed language."

His voice echoed clearly. Translations followed instantly in the minds of the students—thanks to implants, implants that hadn't existed when the legends began.

"This is not a dialect. Not a recorded code. It has no digital origin. It was never officially deciphered. And yet… it appears on six different worlds. Across three sectors. With no known connections between them."

The glyph rotated slowly.

"This is a human sigil."

He let that settle. A few students shifted—curiosity piqued.

Lu'Ka walked a slow circle around the central dais.

"For thousands of years, our archives have collected fragments. Half-melted data cores. Unknown alloys. Machine parts that refuse to corrode. Genetic templates built for functions we still don't understand."

He paused.

"We have no body. No voice sample. No written language. And yet... we find the traces. The echoes. The aftermath."

He gestured to the data stream now spiraling overhead—pictures of impossible ruins, floating stones, machines embedded into cliff sides with no seams, no access panels, no doors.

"Every species in this room has a myth. A name. A whisper passed from parent to child. Of the race that disappeared before we arrived."

He turned slightly, catching the edge of the console as he leaned.

"And yet none of it is real—if you ask the Council."

The room stirred again. Lu'Ka smiled faintly.

His datapad buzzed silently against his forearm. A single update. A document still pending review. Still unsigned.

He didn't glance at it. Not yet.

Instead, he focused on the students—and the story.

"Let's talk about the race no one wants to find."

A scaled hand rose near the front—a student from the Xal'Thri system, one of the more eager participants.

"Professor," she asked in a bright, rippling voice, "why would an advanced species erase itself completely? Not even the S'Rali did that, and their planet imploded."

Lu'Ka gave her a nod of approval.

"An excellent question. The S'Rali left remnants, yes. Genetic drift. Gravitational scars. Even cultural imprints in nearby colonies. But with the humans…" He trailed off, then turned to face the massive projection.

"…nothing. Not even a corpse."

He let that sink in.

Another student—a crystalline intelligence formed from living mineral clusters—flashed blue as it spoke through a voicebox perched on a stand: "Could they have transcended material form?"

Lu'Ka tilted his head. "That's the dominant theory. Ascension. Transfer to pure data. Or some form of temporal retreat. But the problem with that theory is consistency."

He stepped toward the class, his voice lowering.

"If you examine each myth, each account of human contact, you'll find variations. In appearance. In behavior. In purpose. But there's one constant."

He raised a finger.

"They were always afraid."

Silence rippled across the hall.

"Not the humans," he clarified. "Us. Every story. Every echo. The civilizations that spoke of them did so with reverence, yes—but also with fear. They were gods and monsters. Builders and destroyers. Symbols of what happens when evolution forgets to stop."

A student near the middle—a being of shifting plasma, its shape pulsing like fire—spoke up: "If they were real… what did they want?"

Lu'Ka looked at them for a long moment.

"We don't know," he said finally. "Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe they didn't want at all. Maybe they simply were."

His datapad pulsed again. A new update. Still unsigned.

Still waiting.

He continued.

Lu'Ka shifted the display again.

The dome dimmed. New projections emerged—rotating holograms of worn relics and broken devices. Some looked like tools. Others resembled weapons. A few had no obvious purpose at all.

"These," he said, "are the artifacts that shaped an obsession."

He stepped closer, eyes locked on one relic in particular—a curved metallic shard etched with patterns that no AI had ever decoded.

"We found this on Elikar's moon, embedded in bedrock older than the star system itself. It emits a low-frequency hum, unpowered, unchanged for centuries."

A student clicked a set of mandibles and asked, "How do we know it's not natural?"

Lu'Ka raised an eyebrow. "Because the same shard—with the same exact markings—was found on the other side of the galaxy. Inside a derelict station orbiting a black dwarf."

Whispers spread across the auditorium.

He changed the display again. This time to a press release:

"Suspected Precursor Artifact Proven to Be Fraud."

Lu'Ka didn't hide his disdain. "And then... they were debunked. Quietly. Efficiently. Discredited by unnamed experts using methods that were never released."

"Professor," a voice interrupted—a soft, trembling tone from one of the younger students—"are you saying the truth was buried?"

"I'm saying," Lu'Ka said slowly, "that someone has spent a very long time making sure we never get closer than whispers."

He gestured across the hundreds of relics now spinning slowly above them. "Some of these were discovered in sealed environments. Some disappeared from archives. Some were stolen."

The room quieted again.

"I've chased this for decades," he admitted. "Not to prove they existed. But to understand why we're not allowed to ask."

His datapad buzzed a third time.

He ignored it.

"We are taught to think of the unknown as dangerous. But what if the danger isn't the humans?" He looked at them, all of them. "What if it's the knowing?"

The atmosphere inside the Grand Hall had changed.

The curiosity was still there—but now, it was laced with unease.

Lu'Ka could feel it. He had felt it himself, in late nights poring over ancient maps, in the silence of locked archives, in the data that always vanished too cleanly.

He tapped the console again.

A new series of symbols emerged—less elegant, more brutal. Primitive weapons. Bone-embedded blades. Relics of war that had no energy signature but had cut through alloy like organic tissue.

"In many myths," he said, "humans weren't described as architects or philosophers. They weren't gods. They weren't teachers."

He paused.

"They were predators."

The word echoed.

"In every version—whether they appeared as flesh, machine, or something between—they adapted. Quickly. Ruthlessly. No ecosystem outlasted them. No rival remained one for long."

Another student, voice modulated through a vocal processor, asked hesitantly, "But no apex predator survives without balance. Wouldn't they have collapsed under their own weight?"

Lu'Ka nodded.

"They may have. In fact, some legends imply exactly that. Civilizations devouring themselves. Wars that scorched entire systems. A hunger for expansion that outran their resources."

He raised a hand, pulling up another relic—an organic-metal hybrid shard marked by what looked like both scorch damage and deliberate cutting.

"But others suggest something worse. That they didn't vanish. They left."

The room chilled.

Lu'Ka's eyes met the students again.

"What if the reason we've never found them… is because they never died out?"

He stepped forward, his voice soft now.

"What if they're simply waiting?"

The final slide appeared behind him—a blank black screen with one phrase written in ancient code:

'We remain.'

No one spoke.

Even Lu'Ka fell silent.

For a long moment, all that could be heard was the low hum of the archive's orbiting projectors.

And the faint ping of an authorization document waiting in his inbox.

Lu'Ka extended his hand toward the holodisplay.

The lights dimmed.

In the center of the room, a fragment of dark, ridged stone spun slowly in the air. Carved into its face were angular lines—too intentional to be natural, too strange to resemble any known language.

"This," he said quietly, "was recovered from the ruins of an uncharted vault discovered beneath the collapsed crust of Driatek II. It has no matching inscriptions. No repeating pattern. No known linguistic root."

He walked around the projection, his voice dropping just enough to make the students lean closer.

"We've scanned it in over five thousand dialects. We've tested for neural imprinting. Psychic residue. Even ancient machine code. The result…"

He paused beside the glyphs.

"...is nothing."

A ripple of silence passed through the lecture dome.

"No translation. No consensus. Just this shard. Unmoved. Unchanged. Unread."

The characters flickered under the light of the dome's simulated stars.

Lu'Ka turned back to the crowd of students, thousands of forms gathered from hundreds of worlds.I'm assigning this to you," Lu'Ka said, his tone shifting from storyteller to scholar. "Form theories. Challenge boundaries. Cross-reference it with your homeworld mythologies, structural linguistics, neural intuition—whatever tools your species possess."

The projection shifted—now frozen on the full glyph.

"Tell me what it might say. Or why we're not meant to know."

He gave them one last look.

"No answer is too strange. Only silence is forbidden."

At that moment, his datapad pinged quietly against his wrist.

> Clearance: Approved.

He didn't look at it. Not yet.

Instead, he dimmed the lights, nodded once to the room, and said softly—

"Class dismissed.".