Day Six

We weren't.

Soon, neither were they.

Link. Armor. All-Core.
Gift of speech, gift of power, gift of knowledge.
An adult can access all three. A child possesses the potential. An animal lacks even that.
Before you protest— before you hunt down my hidden abode and shout, angrily, that you are not an animal, that you can think, that you can reason, that you yourself conceived, designed, and built the dual-mode pulsed laser cannon now directed at my faceplate and have I ever heard of an animal able to do that, Blackscale, huh, have I— please consider.
Animals use tools. Sometimes sticks, sometimes rocks, sometimes space elevators. A tool is simply a means to complete a task more easily. The directing intelligence gives an order, and the tool obeys.
My people have closed that gap.
An animal builds a dual-mode pulsed laser and points it at my head. A Silence Hunter ignores the implied threat, or, if it pleases him, atomizes the offender.
I urge the animal to reconsider.
The Link is first: instant communication at any time, with anyone, over any distance, in as much detail as you please. A child knows only emotion; an adult can exchange reality, fantasy, memory.
The Armor is second: anything one of your Sailfleet plates can do, an armored adult can do also. And more. If this information is unnerving to you, remember that a force of forty thousand vessels keeps watch over my kind and that we number in the millions.
The All-Core is third: loss of this device is why that forty thousand remains intact. Loss of this device is why you are not dead.
Is it, after all, so bad to be an animal?

Please. Put down the gun.