But not adaptable enough for the purposes of our new masters. The Axiom lifted us up to their laboratories, and began to change us. Some of us were made into war machines, and used to destroy other life; I am told those living weapons were not even granted the peace of mindlessness, but were as self-aware as you or me. We have no memories from that line: all their neural buds were destroyed, long ago, but because of our records, in the museum of subjugation, we know. Others were made more intelligent, or given extra limbs, or altered to survive in various environments – cold, hot, dry, acidic. Some of us were even hardened against vacuum. The Axiom seldom spoke to us, you must understand. Most of us never even saw our rulers in the flesh. Instead the Axiom dominated the minds of certain individuals, through neural implants, and those overseers gave us our orders.

There was no reward for obedience, only punishment for those who failed to obey, and the punishment was swift and irrevocable: execution. The Axiom was trying to breed disobedience out of us, you see. But we always passed on our knowledge, and if they snuffed out one of our people for daring to question the Axiom, or for trying to escape, some part of them would survive, to be passed on to others, in secret. We learned to hide our disobedient thoughts, and to plot, and to plan.

So it was for tens of thousands of years, and many generations. A few of us managed to escape, and stole Axiom technology, and attempted to destroy Axiom outposts and strongholds. To take the cloning factories offline, and to carve out safe systems where our children could grow up, never knowing the yoke or the lash of their old masters. The rebellion grew in strength and the attacks became more and more daring. For a time, we dared to hope.

But the Axiom found the rebels. They killed them, and destroyed their neural buds. Then, to make sure the rest of us would never rebel again…

Humans are eager to find the Liar homeworld. You always ask, and we make up stories, and send you along false trails. The truth is, we have no homeworld. Not anymore. The Axiom destroyed our planet. Vaporized it utterly, until only particles remained.

Then they gathered us, all of us, in one place, and they seared our minds. They erased our hidden memories of our culture, from the time before the Axiom came, carefully passed down for generations. They erased our memories of home, and our entire collective knowledge, of everything before the day of subjugation. The only reason we know our homeworld was a watery place is because we have that single memory from that world: of the Axiom’s arrival in the sky overhead. We only even remember our rebellion because they left us with the memory of our punishment, as a reminder, and a threat, and a promise.