'Sentience'

Leading us in another direction, the three of us stopped at what seemed like a random spot. Josh then pointed at a tree, which upon closer inspection had a triangle carved into its bark.

"Since there are very few landmarks in this dense forest, most of its trees have inconspicuous marks on their barks to help us navigate. These marks are all placed like street signs, as in heading left or right means you are walking along the trees. A lot of trees have more than one mark engraved in their barks depending on which side of the tree you are facing. Like this one, it has another mark on its bark at its side. This means this tree is at the crosswalks between two routes. So walking along either one of these paths will lead you to a place. What place it is, unless you have the map, or its legend, you will only find out after reaching the end."

After Josh said that, he patted the bark of the tree familiarly. Looking around the tree, we finally spotted a star carved onto the bark perpendicular to the triangle mark.

[I guess this is the 'star path'.]

Turning my head to where Sazzy's voice came from, I saw her pointing to another star mark on the tree towards our left.

Moving on from the tree, we changed direction and headed to another spot. At this spot, Josh signaled for us to be quiet before we moved forward just a little bit. Suddenly, in front of us, there was a large clearing. However we didn't move into the clearing, mainly because it was occupied. In the clearing were large birds, large enough that if they allowed, we all could probably ride them. But looking at those fierce eyes as well as the bones making up the infrastructure of their nest, they probably would eat us if we went any closer.

"These are our landlords. Since far back, we have come to a mutual agreement with these predators. They allow us to thrive in their tertiary, and exclude us from the menu or hunting list, and we help gather food from the ground for their chicks. Since although the adults are large, the children are light enough to be carried away by other predatory birds."

Gesturing for us to stay there, Josh took several materials out of his bag and stepped out of the clearing. Immediately, one of the big birds started walking towards him. I looked at Tim, and he was fiddling with his personal terminal. Once he noticed I was looking at him, he immediately lit up.

"I was muting and blacking out the stream. Since this scene does not seem to be safe to show to the public."

Looking at that smile, I nodded my head, then asked.

"Are these predators registered on ASCI? I mean it seems that Josh is talking to them. If so, how do they move to other planets? I haven't seen any vehicles that could fit creatures that size."

At my questions, I could feel Tim's smile freeze, as well as a slight confused look start to form. Just in case, I quickly inserted the 'fact' that I was an 'amnesiac' in. But this didn't seem to help anything.

After a heartbeat of silence, Tim finally gave out a sigh and answered.

"Well the predators on this planet aren't really considered 'sentient' according to ASCI. So there isn't any way they can leave this planet."

I furrowed my brows.

"But they can speak? Isn't that considered sentient?"

Tim scratched the back of his head and shrugged his shoulders.

"Even though ASCI has the word sentient in their name, their definition of sentient is a little 'different' from what we normally think it would be. I mean, they were created before the Loser's War, so they are kind of filled with stuck up Colonizers, and unless you can be 'partnered' up with the Colonizers, you weren't really considered sentient."

Masking my surprise, I nodded my head and pulled up my personal terminal to ask Sazzy.

"Does this mean that anything non-person shaped would not be counted as 'sentient'?"

[Probably. It also probably means that anything that cannot carry the Colonizer's genes would probably not be counted either.]

"... Then how do we know whether the organization is from before or after the war? Certainly there must be a way to tell?"

[It's probably from the naming sense. If I'm not wrong, any organization that is a 'headquarter' should be from after the war. You should probably ask Tim though.]

I closed my personal terminal.

"But Tim, wouldn't this limit a lot of species?"

Tim pulled out his personal terminal as he explained.

"Yes it does, but there's not much most species can do about it. The only good thing that came from the war would be that the population of Colonizers decreased a lot because of it. So thanks to that, apart from ASCI, most of the associations that were created before the war have been reformatted and changed. Like the Headquarters for Intergalactical Travel used to be the Authority of Travel in the Universe (ATU), which would segregate the Colonizers from everyone else. But after their population dwindled, various species managed to get into powerful positions in the ATU and rebranded plus changed many things about it. Although it's image is still tied to the original Colonizers."

Tim pulled out the information page about the ATU, and offered to send me the link.

"After the war there were also other intergalactical organizations created, like the Headquarters for the Standardization of Currency (HSC). The Colonizers used to get everyone to use their coins, which failed since their pieces of metal and plastic didn't have any meaning outside their planet. But after the war one of the Colonizers had this idea to create an alternative currency, just for international trade. Since there were about a couple thousand currencies running around. And that was the base for which the UC, as well as the organization, was created."

Tim pulled out another page with a very upstanding looking person titled the UC's founder.

"In fact, a lot of organizations were created by the Colonizers. So we can't say that all of them were bad."

At that line, I could feel the grudge in Tim's voice.

"But they definitely cause a lot of harm."

Tim pulled out another picture. This one was of a barren planet, whose land was dry and a horrible shade of brown, and no form of life could be seen.

"This was my home planet. I used to live here until I was 7, when the Colonizers had exploited all the resources from our planet. We were then all ordered to be rehomed to another planet before everything crumbled. This is what it looks like now. Of course, all the 'non-sentient' creatures couldn't escape the planet with us."

Tim swiped to another picture, this one of a vibrant planet filled with lots of green and purple.

"This is what the planet looked like 200 years ago, before the Loser's War took place. At that time the Colonizers had just barely started their Colonization of our galaxy. My father had given my mother this picture during that time. Then after the war, my father gave it to me."

"So your father was a Colonizer?"

Tim scratched his chin and closed his personal terminal.

"You could say he was. But when the war broke out, he stayed with our planet. Although my mother was the one who fought since she was stronger. My older brother said that my father helped take care of the children whose parents went to war. "

Taking a stick from the ground, Tim started to draw circles.

"Although when we mention Colonizers we are usually referring to the species that came from the planet Bellum, not everyone from Bellum was a Colonizer, and there were also some other planets that joined the Colonizers later on. The nickname is just to include the certain groups of people that started the war by pillaging several planets all over the galaxy."

"Our planet didn't consider my father a Colonizer, and there are many planets that have people from Bellum that do not call them Colonizers. It's mainly due to the war that ideas between race, species and ethnicity have kind of separated from each other. Like for planets associated with the Alliance, many races have had to mix due to the war, and most of them consider themselves as sharing an ethnicity but do not come from the same race, or even the same species. Especially those races that have a lifespan on the shorter side. For them, they and their parents and even grandparents have lived sharing cultures and more with a group of people with different races and species, so they all call themselves a new name that encompasses their new ethnicity."

On the ground there were several circles that Tim drew, that I chose to ignore due to the fact that I think it would make understanding it harder. They were literally just Venn diagrams that had labels but meant nothing.

Once Tim finished explaining all this, we saw shadow overcast the words, and looked up to see Josh back from his talk with those predators.

Tim stood up and used his foot to erase the circles he drew, as Josh gestured for us to follow him into the clearing.

"The Avis have allowed us to enter their nests to pick out some ingredients. Follow me."