by V R Rutledge

Created on: July 28, 2008

Dal Aaron was a happy man. His wife was with child, a thing that should have been impossible, and all was right with his world. He had learned to avoid having problems with his origins, without lying about them, and could hold a decent conversation in public. He never imagined, before he met Tonya, that the life he was living was even possible, let alone this easy. She had shown him a skill that all of his centuries had not revealed to him. The ability to dissemble when in conversation. To be precise, Dal had been raised primarily by an artificial intelligence aboard the Ship where he had lived, as a young Qed. His race had been involved in a war over thousands of years, against a foe known as Dtarlia, and most of them were gone by the time Dal was born. His parents had perished while destroying a Dtarlian Device, a doomsday machine that represented a threat to sentient life everywhere. He had never actually met another Qed, and mostly because of this, he knew little of how to use the abilities he possessed. His mastery of those abilities he did use was largely a result of trial and error, with heavy emphasis on the error.

As Qed go, he was very young, less than twenty thousand earth years total, and because of that, had never considered marriage before meeting Tonya. She was one of a kind, a three hundred year old earth woman who appeared to be in her early twenties. She had a genetic aberration that caused her to remain young. Tonya had been forced, in order to survive, to learn how to conceal her age and origins from other human beings. She passed this knowledge on to Daolgi Aaron almost as soon as she met him.

Dal was a typical Qed, as the race went. He could not lie, was almost obsessed with accumulating things, had to interact with other intelligent beings to avoid insanity and could not deliberately allow injury to another who was blameless. Qed are like that, all of them. It was the actions of the Dtarl which led to the destruction of the Qed race. Dtarlians considered other races to be inferior, fit only to be possessions or to be exterminated. Qed consider all life to be precious, since it is fairly rare. Qed opposed the Dtarl, in almost everything they did, and this caused the Dtarlians to attempt to exterminate the Qed. Exterminating the Qed was a task that the Dtarl were ill suited to accomplish. They died first. However, the Dtarl created a plethora of machines to use in the war, some of which were highly efficient in extermination of just about

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