A warning alarm rang through a large compartment aboard the spaceship. A man sat at the bar table, barely upright — a small gust would have knocked him from the stool.
"Warning…"
He was half-conscious, roused from what felt like a nap caused by too much alcohol.
"Warning…"
What is this sound? What is this headache? His thoughts were scattered. The only thing he managed before dozing off again was to check his hand.
"Warning!!! High level of alc…"
He woke again, eyes fixed on a yellow light flashing on his smart device.
"Warning!!! High levels of alcohol intoxication detected. Please immediately reach the nearest med pod for detoxification."
That was the last thing he heard before he fell off the bar stool and struck his head on the floor.
It would have been the end of him if he had been left there for a few more minutes, but seconds later the compartment door opened, and two people rushed in, grabbed the unconscious man, and dashed toward the medical bay.
There was a popping sound, like a chamber decompressing, and a vertical machine door opened automatically. The man of average height lay inside. As the door parted, his consciousness returned, but the headache remained even though his intoxication level had dropped to zero. The bleeding on his head had been healed, leaving only small bloodstains.
"Where am I?" he asked, clutching his head from the pain. The sensation was unlike anything he had felt before — as if a thousand syringes were poking him and injecting thoughts and memories that were not his.
Each wave of pain brought information that was then stored. It felt eternal; every time he thought it had ended, it came back and hit him like a tsunami. In reality, it lasted only a few minutes while he lay in the machine, holding his head in silence.
When the pain subsided, his first coherent thought was "ooh," followed by "wow," "shit," and "damn." He was reacting to the memories and the reality he was beginning to accept.
In his previous life, he had been an unemployed programmer who spent long sessions playing grand strategy games. From the information he'd received, he now knew he was Ilya Greymor — one of the scions of a prominent family in this new frontier of human exploration.
He stepped out of the machine and looked around. He stood in a long room bordered by two rows of identical machines against each wall. As he absorbed the memories, he realized he was in the medical compartment of the ship's med bay. Before he could decide where to go, someone entered from the far end of the room.
"Sir Ilya, you're awake. We got a notification and came from control room to check on you. Do you feel any pain?" the newcomer asked, producing a pad-like device and started looking for data. Ilya recognized him from the memories — the only medical personnel aboard the ship.
"I'm fine now. I'd like to go to my compartment."
"No problem, sir. The med pod data indicate your health is stable, but the captain asked to see you as soon as you're able," the medic said, frowning.
"Please relay to the captain that I will be at the control room in a few hours. I need time to freshen up."
Ilya needed time to digest the situation and organize his thoughts before doing anything.
The door opened, and Ilya was met with a room that reeked of alcohol. A few empty bottles of what looked like spirits were on the bar table and floor. The floor at the bar table was a mess, blood mixed with alcohol. He felt disgusted and clicked something on the smart device on his hand. At one of the walls door opened and droid stepped out which started cleaning process of the room. the first thing he did after that was to go to the bathroom and look in the mirror.
Ilya had black hair, which, as he knew, was a characteristic sign of the Greymor family, but his blue eyes could be associated with his mother's side. He was quite good-looking if we don't consider the messed-up hair and bloodstains on his head.
"Not bad," said Ilya after looking in the mirror. "At least I am good-looking."
Which was followed by him washing up and going to the main room where a droid was still cleaning up the mess the previous Ilya left. After giving a short glance at the cleaning process, he sat on his bed to sum up the most important information that he would need in the near future.
First of all, he was from the Greymor family. His father was the head of the Messier 61 galaxy's family branch. His family was very powerful, despite the fact that their main strength wasn't here; they still held one-tenth of humanity's territories in the new galaxy.
Humanity left their home planet a long time ago, but nothing was more important in its history than the first manned warp drive travel, which later was called the "Big Change." Why was it so important? Because after the spaceship left the solar system's Oort cloud, some barrier was broken, after which somehow humans started to manifest strange abilities. These abilities were very hard to explain by scientific means, and even after thousands of years of human exploration and scientific advancements, it remains a black box of knowledge and probably will be until the end of dawn. These abilities varied greatly; some improved personal strength in different ways, some were utility abilities, and some were very strange, like a personal alarm clock. But the best thing was that abilities, when awakened, were self-graded, and after years of testing, humanity's scientific community agreed that it was accurate and didn't need human interference. These grades were as follows:
Local Scale – FFF, FF, F,
Planetary Scale - E, D, C,
Star System Scale - B, A,
Star Cluster Scale - S, SS, SSS,
Galactic Scale - SR, SSR, UR, SUR,
Civilization Scale – LR,
After the first awakening, the standard was that humans between the ages of 18-25 would awaken their ability, 99.9999% of which were in the local scale category.
As a prominent family scion, everyone was expecting him to awaken at least a star system scale ability: B tier or A tier, but at the age of 19, he only got a local scale FFF tier ability, "AI assistant." This AI wasn't even good; most smart devices had better capabilities, and as a scion of a rich and powerful family, his device was even better. Of course, it wasn't the end; there were many family members who didn't have strong abilities to contribute to the family, but they did other work like administration and managing its holdings around the galaxy. After the mild disappointment of the family head, Maddax Greymor decided to give his son a way out and after a month sent him to one of the family's colonies to learn administrative work with the governor. This departure moment didn't come; this awakening broke the old Ilya. Two days after awakening, the family found him unconscious in the bar near the family palace with the same intoxication as his final one. He survived but didn't let this bad habit go, which sometime after even caused a conflict with his father.
"Don't come back before you make something of yourself," was the last farewell sentence he heard from his father before getting "exiled" from the family territory.
Ilya's mother was from a prominent family as well, maybe not as huge and rich as Greymor, but the Malone family still held large swaths of land in the new galaxy and back in the local group.
[The local group is a small galaxy cluster where our home Milky Way galaxy is situated. It has a dumbbell shape. On one side, there is the Milky Way galaxy, and on the other side, the Andromeda Galaxy, both with their satellite galaxies.]
She didn't agree with her husband and thought that such action would do him more harm than actually change his state, but in the end, she couldn't persuade him. The only thing she managed to do was that Ilya didn't leave the family empty-handed.
"So at least I have something to lean on," thought Ilya and started thinking about everything he owned currently.
Maddax gave him three ships: one frigate and two corvettes with their skeleton crew. The frigate and two corvettes were standard human spaceships, the first being 1 km long with at least 100 personnel and the second being 600 meters with 50 personnel each.
"These numbers don't make sense." It was hard for Ilya to comprehend that such huge ships can be manned by so few people, but then he remembered history and current standards in human society.
Humans, after inventing the first warp drive in the year 2188 and later the first manned flight in the year 2195, later named the "Big Change," had more than a hundred years to peacefully explore their neighborhood until in the year 2326 when they met the first alien species called the "Arlens." They were a technologically superior race with hundreds of years more in interstellar travel and colonization. Their society revolved around the military, and they were total warmongers and xenophobes. Contact ended with the destruction of our exploration ship and its crew, and later, war broke out.
In the wide universe, humans can be considered at the apex when it comes to creativity and adaptability. At least it was true for tens of thousands of alien species encountered until Ilya came to life, and therefore human ingenuity didn't end well for Arlens before any other alien experienced it on themselves.
30 years after the war broke out, there was already no difference in strength between both sides. Another 20 years, and humans already had an edge over the enemy, and they started counterattacking. It was the year 2442 when the end of what was later called the Arlen-Human hundred-year annihilation war came. The Arlen civilization was the only one that was totally exterminated by humans, and the reason was that after the year 2488, many things changed in human society.