A Formal Apology to the Culture

I must say, it's terribly exciting for us to be here. Up until just a couple of years ago, we'd no idea about this whole 'space' thing; we'd expanded to cover just about the whole of our planet - quite easy to do when you're little more than a ball of protoplasm that can digest anything - and thought we were rulers of the whole universe.

We knew about 'distance', of course, but when you communicate using long-chain peptide molcules passed through the air, contact, or ingestion, then distance really doesn't seem to be a function of dilution. So it came as something of a surprise to us when the Culture Ambassador landed in his shiny new spaceship, and introduced himself to us.

We say 'introduced'; he did make sterling efforts to communicate with us, but sadly for him, we'd never seen the point of evolving organs that could detect sound or light, so he didn't really have much chance of actually talking to us. And really, it's not our fault that aside from us, the only animals moving on our planet are edible. So it was a foregone conclusion that we would, in fact, end up eating him.

We acknowledge now that this was the wrong thing to do, and that eating other sentients is very poor form. Would it be any consolation for his widow to know that he was delicious?

But once we got over the initial shock that there were other things in the universe than us, we got stuck straight on into this evolution lark; we've figured out how to speak to things that aren't us in ways that don't involve the careful creation of specific molecules, and learned your language; we're even careful to refer to ourselves in the plural, as apparently some of you find the idea of a single creature dominating the landmass of four entire planets a little disconcerting.

So, our fellow sentients, we apologise for digesting your ambassador, and promise that it's unlikely to happen again; and we look forward to working with you as a useful and productive member of your alliance!

(A piece of in-character - er, in-race - prose for the Lacuna Expanse real time strategy game)