Ohhhhhh, my head...

"Nick?"

He winced at the sound. This wasn't just a headache. This was the mother of all headaches, much worse than a hangover. He opened his eyes a bit and regretted it instantly, squeezing them tight against the stabbing light. He thought he might throw up. He was pretty sure he couldn't move much.

"Quiet," he whispered. "Dark. Please."

The light beyond his eyelids dimmed, and Sana whispered, "Nick, please say all your names and your planet."

"Nick Tomsun, Earth."

"Do you know where you are?"

"The—" He felt a wave of agony as he tried to say "the Kalash-Quovo" and settled for saying, "yes." He tried cracking one eyelid a bit, but had trouble focusing on anything. From the colors, he guessed that he was in Sickbay. "Sickbay," he whispered.

"What is two and two?"

"Four. Two and two is four," he added in Goldaskian.

"Nick, I think you will be good. I am sorry this is bad."

"Help me sleep?" he asked in a whisper.

"Soon. It will help your brain if you wake up for fourteen minutes. Please try."

Nick drank some water with difficulty and Sana wiped his chin. "Do you want a tomato chip?" she asked.

"Potato chip. No. No food, please." Nick felt the inside of his mouth and found that the Mouthguard From Space was gone.

"Do you remember what happened?"

"Before the sex or after?"

"Sex was very much good, Nick, but I ask after. We talked a lot. Do you remember?"

"Yes." He did remember. The concepts hadn't turned out to be hard at all. Nick had wondered whether he would still find them easy the morning after, but his head hurt too much to try. "Too much head pain. I remember, I think. Talk later."

Sana put him through some cognitive testing, then finally gave him something to help him sleep.

* *

He woke up hours later feeling a lot better, although the headache was still kind of annoying. He furrowed his brow and tried to concentrate on moving his mouth properly. "Fuak!a. Geh!aoa. Geh!kin. Finally." That's at least one thing I gained from this clusterfuck. He called up his notes, and yep, he really did get down most of the periodic table, so he could start saying "vanadium" instead of "element 23." The notes on brain modifications were a little hard to follow, but he'd written summaries and his recommendation to his dumb self.

Apparently Goldaskians all got their brain modifications when they hit puberty. One of the surgical options was to basically implant extra "nerve wiring" that cross-connected lots of parts of the brain, so Goldaskians kind of went through a mix of a repeat of early childhood development and autistic focusing.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The second option was implanting a computer in his head, which was a hard pass.

The third option was to add more gray matter to the brain, put in a bunch more cells, which involved literally cutting the skull open and enlarging it a little to make room. That version was a lot harder on you if your body was done growing. Nick had a mental image of those brainiac aliens from science fiction with the huge heads, even though he knew that the actual visual effect was much smaller.

The chemical options were less invasive, of course, and involved some gene therapy but mostly a lot of rebalancing brain chemicals and changing the body's default levels of them.

The external option was basically a wearable device that did a kind of Wi-Fi connection to the brain. It was deliberately built to be extremely difficult to hack, and you could take it off whenever you wanted. They'd gotten sidetracked into a long talk about mind-control technologies and the history of mind-control wars on various planets, and Nick had some important information for security experts when he got back to Earth. "Hopefully with this warning you can skip a lot of the bad parts of our history," Sana had commented.

Smart Nick had suggested the chemical options, with a possible option on the extra wiring surgery. Nick was inclined to go with that plan, starting with the fix for his depression. A little bit at a time, he had advised himself, and it sounded like good advice.

* *

While Nick had been messing with his brain, the ship had crossed more light-years. They were only about twenty systems away from Galgazor in a straight line. Given their zig-zag path, they would be hitting another hundred systems before finally arriving.

They had passed three more civilizations, and continued to find that about seven percent of worlds had a reasonable oxygen atmosphere. Since Galactic civilization had about a million member races, that wasn't a very surprising ratio.

"Why are the races we are finding all within a few centuries of technological development?" Nick asked Sana at one point. "The stars and planets have been around for billions of years, right? Shouldn't some of them have developed faster?"

"They did," Sana said at once, then stopped and thought about her answer. "Oh, I think I understand what you mean. The galaxy has beep." She sighed and tapped her chin a moment, thinking. "A large city has smaller areas inside it, yes? Those areas have different...ways, different populations, different resources?"

"Neighborhoods," Nick realized. "The galaxy has different neighborhoods? Why?"

"When one civilization gets too advanced, it tends to destroy other civilizations near it."

"You mean conquest? Take control with ships and weapons?"

Sana frowned. "Not much that. More with money and ideas. Also, some advanced societies change things in a neighborhood—from curiosity, from belief in what is good, or for other reasons. They might use a neighborhood of stars like a...place you put plants to look good."

"A garden. We have some that are for food and some that just look good."

"Garden, yes. So, they might reach in and kill off a bad civilization, or when one makes a...gets better at something, they might help the others nearby to make the same...get better at something."

"Advance." Nick thought about that. "Wait...did the Goldaskian Empire meddle...change Earth? I remembered that 'Abaddon' is one of the names of a place demons come from, in Earth mythology."

"Earth is very far from the Empire. We can go there, but there are literally millions of worlds closer, so we have no reason to. Maybe it was an exploration vessel."

"Was your culture very war-like thousands of years ago?"

"Yes, but we did not have star travel thousands of years ago, only hundreds." Sana shrugged. "Perhaps an advanced race meddled both of our races. Maybe they took some Goldaskians and put them on Earth for a test, then brought them back. We have mythology about that."

Nick puffed out his cheeks. "Is there a great big History of the Galaxy somewhere I can read?"

"No."

Nick was surprised. "Why not?"

Sana did a half-shrug. "Secrets, arguments, wars. There is information, but it is incomplete. Scholars cannot agree. And sometimes, when they do, they are destroyed by an advanced race."

"What?"

Sana nodded. "Some of the big races do not want the smaller races to understand everything. So, many people just look at things close to them, important to them."

I can already predict that some humans are going to get themselves squashed in a hurry. Curiosity killed the cat. I wonder if—

Nick's thoughts were interrupted by a message from the Captain. "Ambassadors and Advisors, important meeting in nine minutes. We have entered a system with starships and no habitable planets. This might be what we were looking for."

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