My people are capable of physically passing on our memories to one another. This is one of our great secrets. We share memories by extruding neural buds that others of our kind may consume, and so those elders are vital, because they produce the buds that are fed to the highest members of my sect. Such memories can be manipulated, or fragmented, or incomplete, and so we also maintain records, and we save artifacts – we possess an array of ancient documentation proving our sad history. There is a secret museum of our subjugation, and I spent the first centuries of my life there, being inducted into the sect of truth-tellers.

Later, when my people first met humans, and realized the threat you posed, I was one of the delegation sent to dwell in the Oort Cloud to monitor your solar system. It is considered a very important posting, since it is the system of your home world. Had we found you some centuries earlier, when you were yet bound to Earth, we would have exterminated you, and sanitized your entire planet, as we have done in so many other systems.

I see the horror on your faces. We have extensively studied the nuances of your kind. Yes, my sect kills, though I myself have never taken part in such an action. I am grateful I have been spared that work. It is a grim and terrible duty. The extermination of sentient life is a cause of great anguish to us, but it has always been deemed better than the alternative. We kill humanely, you see. Those we cleanse die instantly, without suffering. That is better than the alternative.

By the time we found humans, though, it was too late: you had already sent your goldilocks ships out into the stars, hundreds of ships, each with the potential to start a new human colony. It was too late to wipe you out, so we had to… manage you instead.

I am sorry. Normally I would extrude a neural bud for my listener to consume, so they would have the background. I would share the emotional content of my story via pheromones, and provide further nuance with chromatic variation in my skin. To transform this story into words, in a language I learned when I was already four hundred years old, is difficult. In this feeble and incomplete way, I will tell you the terrible truth at the heart of my existence, the shadow that lies across the Free:

There once was an ancient and powerful race, originally from a distant star system in a nearby galaxy. They ranged throughout the galactic cluster, and perhaps beyond, and they ruled absolutely, not for thousands of years, but for millions. Wherever they encountered intelligent life, or life that seemed on the cusp of developing intelligence, they destroyed it. These aliens claimed to be the first life to arise in the universe, and believed the whole span of the stars was theirs by right.