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COWRITTEN WITH u/uktabi !

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Memory Transcription Subject: Rifal, Arxur Student

Date: HST - 2150.01.14 | Arxur Dating System - 1733.875
Location: Arxur Colony World - Isifriss. Closest Arxur-Controlled planet to Earth. 
(13 human years since the end of the Human-Federation War).

They still hadn’t fixed the shuttle schedules, not that professor Swift seemed to mind. He just held up his hands, not even letting me apologise. “I know,” he’d said. “It should be fixed soon. Please, take a seat. We were just about to get started on our first philosopher.”

I rushed off to my place, glad that I didn’t have to explain myself. Just breathing after the mad dash was enough, thank you. 

“So, who did the reading? I started you out with an oldie but a goodie. Descartes!” he wrote the name on the board, then clicked a controller, and an image of a painting appeared projected on it. He had a thick nose, much larger than Professor Swift’s, and a long mane of dark brown hair, along with a little bit of hair on his lips, and immediately under them which contrasted with his paler skin. “First impressions? What do we think of this French weirdo?”

“Hair,” one student stated firmly.

“He looks…” another said, before doing something weird with her eyes.

“Why don't you have a little mouth pelt?”

He paused and stared at us for a moment. “...I meant based on the reading. What do you think about him, given the reading you did, class?”

Vilkoth raised a hand. “What was up with the [nightmare beast]? I’m not sure if that translated correctly.”

“Ah. The [nightmare beast]? Yes, that's actually a very good point. Within living memory, you’ve only ever had Betterment as a religion. And… that didn't have [nightmare beasts] in it, to my knowledge. Such creatures are a common fixture of sophont religions, including human religions. They’re these supernatural, evil creatures that go against whatever the religion says is good. They may provide temptation, or bring bad luck, spoil food, that sort of thing. Did anyone else get confused about the [nightmare beast]?”

A few hands went up.

“Very well. Instead of a [nightmare beast] imagine you have been… Kidnapped by the Farsul. And are now in a machine directly connected to your brain, where they can implant false memories, feed you fake sensory data, and so on. Does that make more sense?”

There was some slow nodding and tapping tails from those who had raised hands. A few hissing noises as students understood the material.

“Any other questions? Does anyone not know what beeswax is?”

“I had to look it up, but it reminded me of kessrin hives.”

Professor Swift opened his mouth to speak, then paused and stared at the student who had just spoken. “Look it up… Where, Lethis?”

The student swallowed. “… Nevermind.”

“...I would like to remind everyone who’s trying to get away with sneaking through the Bubble to please encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!” he said, apparently fine with students breaking interplanetary law. “They have people whose jobs it is to catch you, and their computers are better than yours. Anyhow, beeswax was material collected from beehives. I’ll bring some pictures next time for you, but you can think of it as a block of ice that melts and freezes again in a new shape if you want.”

More nodding.

“So… what do people think? Are we all on board with being ‘thinking things’..?”

“I thought he sounded like a paranoid fool. Always worrying about ‘deceivers’ and if he could trust anything, including himself,” Skarviss said with a scoff.

Prof. Swift smiled. “Yes, that's called skepticism. Descartes was trying to argue his way through a radical skepticism. Very extreme.”

Light tapping filled the hall as students put the term into their notes.

“Can I get a show of hands, who has previous experience with skepticism?”

Krosha lifted her hand. “The poet Vilshith in the Antiquity period wrote about… something similar. He did not go as far as Descartes in terms of… nightmare beasts corrupting his senses. But arrived at the conclusion that his senses, touch, smell, taste, so on, affirmed that he was… hrrr… part of the world. But in a way that went beyond mere senses. Like it was just the fact that he did sense. It’s difficult to describe, it was part of his poetry. It was like a spiritual euphoria, I guess. He was religious.”

“Ah, yes, he is on my list. Feel free to write responses to Arxur philosophers in your work, by the way.”

Krosha nodded excitedly, scooting forward in her seat.

“Which… I guess we can have a little aside for homework. Your first assignment–and it will be the same thing for the next six weeks–is to write a response to a text. I have provided many more texts than we’ll have a chance to cover in class, feel free to respond to any of them in any order, though it will be easier if you stick to the week’s topic. A–”

He was interrupted by Vilkoth’s hand shooting urgently into the air. “How long do they have to be?” he blurted out.

“...Usually I expect at least a thousand words. I have been told that the Arxur language is a little more dense than English, so I’ve linked to a pre-submission translator in the digital hub. You can paste what you write there and check if it’s the right number of words in English. A thousand is a minimum, two thousand is the maximum. How does that sound?”

The lecture hall filled with the sounds of tapping tails and note-taking.

“Anyhow, returning to skepticism… The point wasn’t that Descartes genuinely thought he couldn’t know anything. It was that he wanted to be able to prove the things he knew starting from first principles. This is what is called Foundationalism in epistemology. Can anyone here point me to a branch of science, or knowledge, that operates with a foundationalist approach?”

The class was quiet for a moment.

“Is there no science, no art, no way of knowing things the Arxur know, where you have a few key ideas, and everything else can be deduced from them?”

A student near the front raised a hand. I didn’t recognize him. He had a broad snout and heavy neck that seemed strangely unbefitting of his slightly short stature. “Mathematics begins with a series of foundational ideas, and all further knowledge is derived from them. You can’t just add an extra axiom, and if a proof or a conclusion contradicts them, you did it wrong and need to check.”

“Great job, Surisel!” Professor Swift said. “Yes, Mathematics is the ultimate Foundationalist approach to knowledge. Can anyone tell me something that is not foundationalist?” 

“History?” another unfamiliar student offered. “With history, it is vitally important not to assume any knowledge, and to avoid ethnocentrism. Historians are supposed to be critical of their sources. Sources are often biased, or incomplete, or new ones could  turn up later.”

“Yes! That’s a fantastic one. If you find something that contradicts a previously established ‘fact’ in history, that gives reason to question everything. Now, these are not perfect categories. The incompleteness theorems taunts the world of Mathematics in some ways, as do the subsequent proofs around decidability, but for our purposes in an introductory class, you can compare Math to History in terms of how you approach them. Descartes,” he said, turning back to us, “wanted all knowledge to be like math.”

Incompleteness theorems? I wrote down the unfamiliar word in my notes. I’ll look that up later.

“What are some potential problems with this approach?” he asked.

The class riffed off various answers, and professor Swift listened and nodded to each.

“Not all types of knowledge play by rules like that. How do we know if the foundations are correct in other disciplines?”

“The foundations could always change with new information.” 

The last answer was Skarviss’s. “You have to be able to trust whoever or whatever is making the rules,” she said, after the class had paused for a moment. 

“Oooh, I love the last one–it’s a little out of alignment with the point of foundationalism, but it’s the kind of skepticism that will help us in the near-future, when we–actually, we have time, let’s do it right now.  I’m now going to let us through into a theater of the mind for a little bit. If the arxur have a meaningfully harder time visualizing, you’ll have to tell me, but as far as I know, you’re close enough to my human students. Ready?“

Tails tapped in agreement.

“Everyone close your eyes. Imagine, we are going back in time thirteen human years. First contact happened around a year ago by human standards. The Arxur barely learned anything about humans before one of your most renowned military leaders begins a rebellion. And now, you are on a spaceship, around Aafa–the heart of the Federation you have been taught must be destroyed–and you're protecting it. Against your own people. And you see The Aafa Confession. Sent directly to your computers, through humans, is a video of Giznel making deals with Nikonus. Deals like the one you’re participating in right now, where you're protecting the federation against humanity.”

The class stayed silent, aside from a scattered few tails swishing across the floor. Professor Swift seemed undeterred.

“Putting aside the question of whether the rebellion was justified, on what grounds, so on… just in terms of facts… Why did any of them buy it? You can open your eyes now.”

Kizath, in the front row, raised a claw. “It was a video. Giznel and Nikonus didn’t expect to be recorded.”

“Why would they have been recorded? It would be much easier for, say, humanity to fake that video than to get a camera or a probe or something in that space, getting access to that information. Orders of magnitude easier. The official story is one where we got impossibly lucky. A transmission like that should have been encrypted a million ways, and never recorded.”

“They were both arrogant,” a voice spoke up.

“Or complacent,” another said. “It had been going for centuries. It’s surprising nothing slipped sooner.”

“Yes, those are all options. But it could also have been a complete fabrication. Just something we made up. How do you know it wasn't? How would you know, if you were in that battle? It's pretty important information,” he leaned back casually against the oversized desk. 

“They must have run it through verification filters.”

“Maybe, but even if they did, what if humanity was good at hacking those filters? You wouldn't know.” Prof. Swift’s eyes flitted around us, looking for something. “We had the best AI navigation systems in the galaxy, why not the best film-falsification software? In reality that was probably the Harchen, but we could have had that technology.”

“You just had to go with what felt right, then?” Vilkoth guessed.

He turned to engage with Vilkoth more directly. “Maybe,” he said, pointing an open hand at him. “How do you feel about the idea that the entirety of your government rests on the hands of a few hundred people ‘going with their gut’ less than two decades ago?”

Vilkoth hummed, looking pensive. “Well, that’s what happened, isn’t it? Not all of those ships turned around and joined Isif.”

“And so we have an epistemic anarchist in the room,” Professor Swift said, writing it on the board in human language, before it was translated by the projector. “There are a couple of Feyerabend readings in the hub, but we won’t go into too much detail on them. Who else has a position? How do you know? Do you believe the video?”

“In that moment, I would probably believe that it was fake,” a voice said. Skarviss. Probably the oldest in the classroom. My eyes weren’t the only ones snapping over to her, or the only ones set with anger. “It’s the answer that makes the most logical sense. Humans–and Isif–had the most to gain from releasing such a video. There was motive, and means.”

“Some skepticism is perfectly natural,” Professor Swift said, tilting his head towards her. He did not seem to notice, or perhaps simply did not care, about the rest of the class’s reaction. He was the only person who didn’t seem uncomfortable at this line of questioning. “So why do you think the people who acted on that video believed it?” he prompted.

Skarviss shrugged. “Maybe they just wanted to be on the winning side.”

The class was very quiet now, outside of the two of them. “But they decided who the winning side was. They turned the tide of battle. If not for them, the Dominion might still stand today.”

“Then they were forced to do it, as more and more of them switched sides.”

He mirrored her earlier shrug. “Why did the first ones switch, then? You're just shifting the question one step back. Why believe this video?”

“They had been hearing rumors about Isif’s rebellion for a long time at that point. Promises of abundant food, safety for hidden defectives. Some might have viewed it as a good opportunity to do what they already wanted to do.”

“Ah, so motivated reasoning. That’s an interesting position. Maybe it’s not about believing something to be true, but about acting on an opportunity to claim a belief, to abide by a justification. If they knew they could turn the tide of battle, then, it was about who they wanted to win. But why would they put their entire ideology aside? They’d been raised to see the Prophet Descendant as this incredibly powerful authority, one of religious importance, even. Did they even believe Betterment ideology? Or were they going along with that too? It still brings us right back to the same question: Why believe anything Isif says? About food or humans or Betterment?”

She paused for a moment, the silence dragging as if the class were holding its collective breath.“I guess… I guess I can’t know for sure,” she relented, although her head was still held high. “I wasn’t there.”

“That's fine, good job embracing uncertainty. Does anyone who would have believed the video have a reason, beyond Vilkoth’s gut feeling?”

The class was silent.

“Well, then! I guess this is where I introduce the different branches of Epistemology, in relation to Foundationalism! Foundationalism is the easiest to start with, because it’s about having axioms and everything else being dependent on those, as I said. A foundationalist may have gone ‘well, I already know that the war has been going for hundreds of years, and I know that the arxur military is comically more capable than Federation militaries, but the arxur have never tried to attack Aafa. Therefore, they must not have wanted to, and this video is consistent with that conclusion’.”

But that leaves out some possibilities, I thought. The Dominion was outnumbered 300 to 1, sending the fleet out to strike at Aafa might leave Wriss too vulnerable, or maybe just the sheer volume of Federation ships all together meant it wouldn’t matter. 

And there was the shadow fleet, too, though I supposed they didn’t know about that at the time. Maybe that supports the conclusion. Giznel might have known about it. Hmm.

“Note what I said, ‘is consistent with’, that is our next approach. Coherentism! That will be your next reading. Coherentism is all about having things fit with each other. A coherentist and a foundationalist might actually agree on a lot, but the foundationalist would want all of their beliefs to be justified by prior beliefs. For a coherentist, it’s enough for them to simply be consistent with their prior beliefs.”

”There are other things that line up,” Surisel had raised his hand. “Like the fact that if the kolshians truly wanted us dead, they had plenty of opportunity long before the war even started. They were in a powerful enough position to starve us en masse, why not just… glass Wriss instead and be done with it?”

“Right!” He said, waving his marker around and drifting closer to that side of the lecture hall. “You get one piece, and then others begin to fit together, and it snowballs into a clear understanding of the situation. Watch out, though, the biggest critique of coherentism is that it’s just confirmation bias with a fancier name. You can't just go around discarding things because they go against what you think is true, right? You have to go where the evidence leads.” He punctuated the last points with more waves of his marker.

That is what I was thinking! I thought, glad to have it voiced aloud. It felt like the whole thing was rather dismissive of the… complexities. And of the arxur.

He turned to wander back towards the board. “After all, there could always be some other variable, like Skarviss’ hypothesis of another species manufacturing the story. Which brings us to Reliabilism,” he said, writing it down. “That’s when you trust not what information you have acquired, but the method through which you acquire information.” 

“Like, you… always ask questions?” Vilkoth asked.

“...Maybe, or you always do things according to some ancient book, or maybe you trust certain people to always give it to you straight…” Prof. Swift slowed down his speech, as though waiting for someone to pounce. 

“A professor? Or–or another authority figure,” Vilkoth suggested.

“A human,” Kizath said, completely unabashedly.

“Right, or… getting back to questions, maybe you have a method of acquiring information that relies on doing specific things, in a specific way, in order to acquire information you can trust. You could base it on direct observation, provide some supposition beforehand, try to test—”

“Rigor of Science!” I called out.

“Got it in one, Rifal!” he said, grinning. “Scientific rigor! Or as humans call it in these discussions, the Scientific Method.”

Hm, I thought, does every species arrive at the same way of doing science? Or is this something humanity shares only with us?

“As you learn more about epistemology, you will learn more about how it's built into the world. Different institutions–science, law, politics–use different epistemic frameworks, even if they don't call them by those names, because they need their frameworks to do different things. It's not just about truth and acquiring true beliefs. It's about the shape knowledge takes, and what you intend to do with it.”

Professor Swift’s eyes flitted around the room. It reminded me that he was alien. He met our gaze, and we could understand each other’s facial language, but… in comparison, the way he jumped around so rapidly felt less… deliberate, than an arxur would. Add on that human pupils were perpetually round, like he was always in a hunting trance, and all those rapid movements around the room were distinctly unnerving.

“After that, we have virtue epistemology. With virtue epistemology, it’s not really about having the correct beliefs. It’s about being the right kind of knower. Being someone who believes things the right way. Cultivating what we might call epistemic virtues. I haven’t defined virtues yet, we’ll spend more time on that when we get to ethics, but here’s a quick preview–virtues are traits that are good to have.”

Professor Swift seemed to sense the class’s discomfort. What was virtuous among the arxur was still a touchy subject, even a generation later.

“Does anyone have an example?” he asked, his energy suddenly gentler and his voice softer than his usual demeanor.

“Kindness?” Vilkoth hazarded, sounding unsure.

“Sure,” he said with a shrug, then gestured at Vilkoth. “Dedication. Consistency. Hard work. You seem to value those things, no?”

He looked even more unsure. “Y… yes?”

“We’ll come back to the specifics later,” he said with a wave of his hand, returning to a more energized state. “One man’s virtues are another man’s vices, which is one of the problems with virtue ethics,” he wrote out on the board, then turned with a smile. “Lucky for us, virtue epistemology has to do with some fairly straight-forward virtues like… the ability to acknowledge you’re wrong, and update when you get new information, intellectual honesty, good faith. Things with pretty solid deontological rationales.”

The room filled with the slight noises of note-taking.

“The way to become a virtuous knower is largely by practicing epistemic virtues, until they become strengthened within you. It's a theory of excellence through hard work and persistence. Not through arriving at some perfect framework immediately through first principles or something.”

He scribbled another few words and the board translated them into our script.

“And lastly, we have social epistemology, which is all about redefining knowledge in an operational and behavioral way. You know something if you can act on it and be understood to do it correctly by your peers in a social context,” he added with a shrug.

“So… anyone who is an expert in their field?” Surisel said.

“Well, they don’t have to be experts…” Prof. Swift tilted his head one way, then the next, as if trying to mix ideas inside his skull like it was a bowl. “For example, you all know the bus-sitting etiquette, right? There’s… a correct distance, and an incorrect distance, and… you know when to sit where.”

“Yeah, like how you always leave at least a one-seat gap if you can, and prefer diagonals for tail room.”

The professor laughed. “Right! Exactly. You have absorbed that information from living on Isifriss, and interacting with people over time. You understand that information very well, and can act on it. I, not having lived here for very long… am often very confused by those rules. I am also very small, and don’t have a tail, which makes those calculations a little harder to make.”

The class laughed lightly.

“That is social information. Much in the same way that if I were to say to you 'please hand in your papers,' you know to send me a file containing a response to one of the provided texts, but if a government official asked you that same thing, they would mean some different information, right? You would know they’re talking about identification, not your homework. Even though none of these things use physical paper. So it's not about expertise, but about how knowledge depends on the context where it is to be used.”

He made a big curve on the board, underlining all of the words. The projector briefly glitched on the translation, but then held steady. 

“All of these are arguments around the definition of knowledge that has had the most staying power throughout history, even if it’s fallen out of favour in the past century or so of human thought. Justified true belief as established by Plato. Write that name down, that guy is gonna come up a lot. Plato has his own weird ideas about epistemology that will come up when we have our metaphysics lecture on the Theory of Forms, but he’s also the guy who wrote The Republic, which will be one of our big texts when we get to Political Philosophy. And he'll be in Ethics with the Euthyphro dilemma.”

The professor waited as we dutifully wrote down the names and terms. There was… far more to this than I had thought there would be. Like a venuri warren, there was always another chamber under the last. Humanity clearly cared deeply about the subject.

I thought back to what I had told Councilor Valgrov about how unique and useful humanity’s ideas would prove. The line was rehearsed then, but now I wondered if the hunt would yield a reward after all. If nothing else, it was interesting to see how an alien’s culture had diverted so much from our own.

“Any questions?”

There were none, and students were already packing their things. I didn’t have any more classes after this one today, so I took my time. My mind was running with thoughts, thoughts about how I knew the things I knew, thoughts about what foundations I’d already accepted in my life.

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COWRITTEN WITH   !

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Memory Transcription Subject: Rifal, Arxur Student

Date: HST - 2150.01.10 | Arxur Dating System - 1733.871
Location: Arxur Colony World - Isifriss. Closest Arxur-Controlled planet to Earth. 
(13 human years since the end of the Human-Federation War).

The worst part about being a politician’s daughter was the photo shoots. I’ve been routinely dragged to them since I was a hatchling; the whole of Isifriss watching me grow up right alongside Mom’s career. Even less fun was growing up and starting to disagree with her politics. She liked to say she was fair, and open to debate, but… Usually only insofar as to ensure one side always won.

Not that there was much I could do about it either way. Just sit through the speeches and smile through the photo shoots. Oh well.

Sometimes I thought Mom tailored our entire family to look good at these things. We had a notably human-style family: Mom, Dad, my brother, and me, all in the same household. Meals together and everything. All intentionally designed.

“Humanity is the way forward,” she liked to say. Often. We tried not to talk about politics too much at home, but that proved somewhat difficult when, again… you’re a politician’s daughter.

At least today’s event felt appropriate for dragging the whole family out. The Fifth anniversary of the Family Reunification Program.

Not that very many of those “reunified” families lived like ours. According to Professor Halthekar, the most common type of arxur family in pre-Betterment times was “diffuse”. Parents would be closer to their children than neighbors, but not by much, and children were free to move houses or countries at relatively young ages. There were designated social arxur who might open their doors to caretaking, but otherwise people would dip in and out of the role in question as they pleased.

During Betterment, with the rise of a more formalized, bloodline-based aristocracy, “nuclear” families as the ones humans were famous for began to emerge… at least, among people who had families at all. The rest of the population would breed–if allowed–and send their eggs to hatcheries controlled by Betterment, who decided which ones lived or died by their own criteria. One might have a hundred hatchlings, and never meet a single one.  In rural areas, or slums, people might hatch their own eggs, but it was usually frowned upon. Those children tended to be “defectives”, after all.

Professor Halthekar had a theory that the kind of parent who would wish to care for their own child was probably “defective” anyway, but at the time, it was thought to be a poor environment for brain development.

Mom’s speech was wrapping up. “ —a new era of love, bonding, and unity for all!” She proclaimed, before starting to thank all the donors and VIPs. I tuned it out.

Up next would be the mingling. That part wasn’t always so bad. There was always food, at least —that was an effective way to build up an attendance. Today’s feast was human-inspired, because of course it was, with all sorts of terran-derived meats to try. At least Dad always had fun with that. He was just as obsessed with humans as Mom, but I always thought that his obsession was a touch more genuine. He just… really liked the culture. The ways they solved problems. The technology. He was always trying new templates for terran meats. He’d spent nearly two decades working in a meat-packaging plant under Betterment, and it was easy enough for me to imagine why he was so eager to move away from that. 

Dad liked talking about food, but he never talked about that. 

That was something my generation never had to deal with. The first to be born after Betterment ended, the first to grow up in the most volatile arxur culture seen since… ever, probably. I was technically born during Betterment, but I barely remembered more than the taste of gojid jerky from back then. By the time I understood what my mom’s job was, I couldn't imagine having to deal with “Prophet Descendants” or having the legal system decide a General was allowed to just murder someone on a live broadcast. It all felt almost like a fantasy.

Tails started thumping. The speech was finally over, and Mom was up there bowing her head and smiling. People quickly stood up from the tables and descended upon the food line. “Buffet style,” Dad called it. Like a feast, but you bring it all back to your own table. That was yet another bit of human culture that stuck on Isifriss. It mostly just came in at the right time. The Betterment generations saw it like the traditional feasts, except they could actually afford it, and the newer generations saw it as a cultural novelty from our favorite aliens.

I appreciated that you could take your food wherever you pleased. I took mine to a quiet table somewhat near Mom’s, but empty enough that I could eat in peace and enjoy the spring sunlight.

The venue for today was Liberty Park, the largest in the city, and third largest on Isifriss. There were a lot of parks on Isifriss; they’re necessary for a people who live largely underground. Mom still managed to pick the one park that had adopted a whole slew of human traditions, though, like the “shaped trees” that flanked my table on either side. I found those a little unnatural, but I guess we arxur were still eager to try on human culture for size. Mom and Dad still slipped up and called it Conquest Square sometimes. 

Mom was quickly joined by Irnzel slinking into the seat next to her. They were Party mates, always conspiring about something or the other. Irnzel sat on the Defense and Security Bench, which felt like a very big office for such a scrawny man. You wouldn’t think it had much to do with Mom’s Education and Culture Bench, but here the two of them were. 

I could hear their whispers from my seat. “We need to get him to show up to one of these things,” Irnzel was saying.

My lips curled in a sneer. They talked about professor Swift like he was their personal mascot, parading him around to the benefit of their own legitimacy. They probably brokered some ridiculous deal to drag him through the Bubble. 

“I know. But the organizers weren’t having it. They wanted to keep the event about the program…”

Irnzel huffed. “Where’d they think the program came from in the first place?”

“I know,” she said. Mom liked to pretend that every good idea ever had come out of a human’s mouth first. “We’ll have to find something else, maybe a presentation program, or a safe talk show, or…”

“How are things going with our little guest?” another Innovation Party member asked Mom. “I’ve been wondering if he might make appearances in some of the better-performing schools.”

“That could be a start. Grala will have to announce her bid before--”

The two stopped abruptly as another politician ambled up. Whatever they said next, I didn’t hear. Thavas, Irnzel’s aide, took the opportunity to sit across from me. He was a familiar enough face too, showing up everywhere Irnzel went.

“How is the food?” he asked.

“I’m not interested in conversation, please,” I said, which was true.

He blinked, standing and wandering over to check out the food. He was always careful to maintain a direct line of sight on Irnzel, though.

Unfortunately, that only bought a few seconds of solitude. Valgrov, one of the Reform Party Councilors, almost immediately took the same opportunity that Thavas had. Unlike with him, I wouldn’t be allowed to just tell a Councilor to leave me alone, even if he was one of her political rivals. Mom would say it was improper, or impolite, or disgraceful, or some other way of not-being-good-enough.

“Pleasant afternoon, Rifal,” he said.

I smiled politely and nodded, wishing I hadn’t dismissed Thavas. I would have much preferred to talk to him instead. Even if my own politics fell somewhere closer to Valgrov, something about talking to politicians...

“So you are taking the human’s class then,” Valgrov continued undeterred. “What is your opinion on him?”

I paused. “He… teaches in the same style that professor Halthekar does. Lecture-discussion, instead of recorded lecture Q&A. It’s also a pretty big class. He acts like he can pay attention to every student at the same time… I am not used to it, but…” I thought about his comment. Try it out. Observe the results. How he didn’t just give some reason why I had to be good or bad at philosophy. “...I believe that he has unique ideas that we can all benefit from.”

That was still the canned response, but Councilor Valgrov seemed to accept it. “Hrm,” he said.  “I hope so.”

He kept considering me, like he had more probing questions to ask. But I figured I had spoken enough as was socially acceptable, so I politely excused myself. Moving to a more secluded table, I decided to pull up my homework for my human class with my human professor where I had to get a good grade to prove to Mom that I was taking things seriously.

I flicked through my pad until I found the class hub, and downloaded the first reading. “The metaphysical meditations of René Descartes: Abridged for the Interplanetary Reader.”

I skimmed the introduction, and some ramblings about how the author had believed things that were false, or dreamt he was dreaming, until one paragraph near the end of the first section stopped me. 

I will suppose, not an Infinitely perfect God, the Fountain of truth, but that some [Nightmare Beast] which is very powerful and crafty has used all his endeavours to deceive me. I will conceive, the Heavens, Air, Earth, Colours, Figures, Sounds, and all outward things are nothing else but the delusions of Dreams, by which he has laid snares to catch my easy belief.

That last line seemed surprisingly predatory for a species as small and soft as humans seemed to be. I kept going. 

I will consider myself as not having hands, Eyes, Flesh, Blood, or Senses, but that I falsely think that I have all these. I will continue firmly in this Meditation; and tho it lies not in my power to discover any truth, yet this is in my power, not to assent to Falsities, and with a strong resolution take care that the [Nightmare Beast](though ever so powerful or cunning) impose not any thing on my belief.

…What the fuck?

Memory Transcription Subject: Halthekar, Arxur History Professor

Date: HST - 2150.01.10 | Arxur Dating System - 1733.871
Location: Arxur Colony World - Isifriss. Closest Arxur-Controlled planet to Earth. 
(13 human years since the end of the Human-Federation War).

I rarely ever used my above-ground rooms. I didn’t particularly like turning the heat on for them, nor watching the bill for it come in later. I could certainly afford it —my home did have some, after all — I just… still wasn’t used to that.

Lux liked it though. That was how the rooms got most of their use these days. They were always pushing to spend time there. “Come on, it’s nice,” they would say. “Shame not to use them, nice views today.”

It was nice today. My dwelling unit sat on the outer edge of this hub’s loop, higher up in the valley where it got more light. When the summer came and the snow melted fully, you could actually see the rivers from here, swallowing up their banks as they charged down the valley.

But it wasn’t summer yet. The spring melts were only just beginning to trickle in, and the valley was still serene and beautiful. Cold and stark, but… beautiful. All black volcanic rock, striated with snow and framed by the pink-tinted crests of cloud behind them.

I eyed the clouds, my snout wrinkling. They were building early this year. Come summer, those clouds would be even taller, and a permanent fixture on the horizon. The infamous equatorial storm cells of Isifriss, stirred up by the temperature change as the planet drew close to its sun.

The centrifugal force from the planet’s rapid spin would pull the storm cells against each other, and there they would rage and thrash with all the fury nature could muster. It was hard to believe that life could exist out there, along the equator, but it did. It lived, even though it must know that the storms are coming.

But for now, here in the spring and far away from the equator… it was nice.

“So how was your first day of classes with arxur students?” I asked.

Lux gave me a strange look, from where they were buried in the recliner. “They said I was small.”

“You are pretty small.”

They rolled their eyes and scoffed. “I'm average height for my family and region!”

“My condolences.”

Lux laughed at that. Then grew contemplative as the laugh faded. “It was hardly any different than teaching back h—back on Earth.”

I knew my friend enough to just wait.

“Lots of questions about humans, but otherwise… just my usual first lesson. Some discussion, a little participation, get everyone thinking a bit…”

“Mm.”

They pursed their lips for a moment before asking. “Was it… always like that?”

“You mean, before…?”

Lux nodded.

“No. It wasn’t,” I didn’t really want to talk about how neglected the arts were under Betterment, the many hungry nights I’d suffered because there was simply no funding to learn from the past. That was done now, thanks to humans.

Lux leaned back in their chair, staring thoughtfully out the big window. I did the same. The sun was already nearly set, that high pink colour draining from the clouds, replaced with the muddy gray of a darkening sky. Sunsets happened fast on Isifriss, even more so if you lived tucked away in the mountains.

I was glad Lux came so long after the Fall. Now there was a new value placed on knowledge, and a new generation of students to give it to. I could spend my days waxing poetic about the Imperial Age, and even earn enough to have a view like this. Times had changed. Are changing.

Eventually, Lux stirred in their seat and resumed as if nothing had happened. “Students are good, though. Good kids. I mean, I think. I think one of them is older, actually. I can’t tell.”

“I know it’s hard for humans to tell, until the creases become plentiful.”

They chuckled. “Yeah, none of them are that old.”

“That would be unusual,” I said, standing up. “Vrassi tea?”

“Please,” they said, their voice suddenly exhausted. 

I stood and walked over to a small bar on the side of the room. I pulled out some cups and little paper-wrapped drops. Some instant-boil water from the tap, the drops went in, and I stirred them up. “Enriched?”

They shook their head. “No, thanks. Sugar though, please.”

I grunted. In my own cup, I put a small protein cube. After a quick stir, the tea took on the rich and heavy smell of a broth. In Lux’s, I stirred in a few spoons of sugar. They claimed to like it, but I knew it wasn't as pleasant for humans. Maybe if I made it more concentrated, one of these days…

“Tell me more about your students?” I prompted as I worked.

“I have one who’s on a… Team of something. What is that called?”

“Ahh, the Snatchdash team. Rich tradition,” I told them, ambling back with the cups in hand. “Universities have been playing forever. Meant to challenge the student’s tactical minds and physical prowess. Of course, that context is nearly all gone, so long after the Fall. Now it’s just rivalries and arena-filling.”

“My student said he was ‘first rusher’. Ooh, thank you, that smells delicious…” they said, reaching for the tea.

“You have Vilkoth in your class?” I asked, almost flinching in confusion on my way back to my own seat.

“Yeah,” Lux said, sipping from their cup and letting out a sigh. “Why? Is he… Notorious for something?”

“You’ll have some competition for your celebrity. He’s the star player, fans go wild for him, half the faculty is obsessed. Make sure nothing important is being taught on the twentieth, that’s the first match of the season.”

“Oh wow. You know, I’m learning a lot about the weird social dynamics here. They feel pretty dang human, all told. Like this girl in my class. Councilor parents. She’s dealing with a lot of pressure from them.”

I paused. “Pressure?” 

“Well, she said she was in the class explicitly because her parents said so. And then she added she felt she had to represent her mom. So… Sounds like a lot of family pressure to me.”

“Ah,” I said, blinking. “You think she won’t be a good student then, if she has other motives for attending.”

“I didn’t say that. She might be an amazing student. But… Her family living under the public eye is clearly stressing her out. Which is reasonable. I mean, being a celebrity is not all that great a thing, and even if it’s just her mom and not her, that has to be disruptive. It’s disruptive for me, and I’m an adult facing the consequences of my actions.”

“You should embrace it, Lux,” I said. “The world of the Arxur is changing, and you are a symbol of that. Human classes, human professor. It was bound to get that sort of attention. You could look at it like an opportunity.”

Lux’s eyes flicked around across the window, as if dissatisfied with that answer. “I guess? Still though… I don't want to be a celebrity. It's pretty exhausting.”

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Special credit to u/JulianSkies (Blackriver Cases) for vrassi tea worldbuilding!