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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Dagoonite on 2024-12-24 08:32:53+00:00.

Do not listen to that one. You have to be careful with humans.

Yes, they are extremely resilient. They will do things that you think that their bodies cannot. They will seemingly bounce back from things that would kill most races. And they will pursue a person or goal to the point of madness if they find it important. They will weather situations that would make a Trask give up.

However, I have seen a human shrug off a blow to the head, continue to perform their job with only their customary complaining, then die in their sleep. Did it save lives? Yes. But the human did not even seem aware that they were actually injured, let alone severely.

Humans are frighteningly fragile like that, despite their hardiness. No, do not look at me like that. I am serious.

The human body is evolved to have thresholds. Some thresholds will leave them incapacitated, but others… They may be actively dying, but their bodies are evolved to push all that to the side to make them function. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. Until they developed tools, they were far from an apex predator. Their bodies evolved the dangerous survival trait of ignoring wounds so they could get to safety.

That, however, is not their true fragility. That comes from their minds. Many of the traits that we admire can be just as much of a bane to them as a boon. They may focus to the point that they become completely unaware of their physical condition. Conversely, they may become so hyperaware of everything around them for sustained periods that their own bodies cannot support the strain of such awareness for extended periods, yet they cannot, as they put it, shut off. They will push themselves to the point of collapse, and still try and do what they must. They will put themselves in situations that they psychologically cannot handle. Or, worst of all…

Well, let me give you an example.

There was a human that I served with. Her name was… I should not say out of respect of her family. But she liked it when we called her Azure. It had something to do with her hair, but I did not understand. She was a technician on my crew. A good technician, not the best, but valuable. Reliable. Trustworthy. Capable.

It was not just her reliability that endeared her to us. She made it a point to learn at least a little of every member’s culture. She knew all the truly important dates of everyone on our team. She knew how to speak to any one of us. She knew how to make our stress more manageable. While she may not have been able to do everything that others could, she could enhance all of us just a little bit.

She called it force multiplication. Making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. A rare thing, even among humans.

The after report said that the DNL coupling on the slip reactor failed. We did not know what happened at first. Who has ever heard of a DNL coupling failing while a slip reactor was active? I never had, but then again, I would imagine that the majority of vessels that suffer it are never heard from again. In the time that it took to seal the reactor room, eight crew members died.

When we had a guess as to what had happened, a wrong guess I might add, we found that the drones were inoperable. Something for smarter people than myself. Someone would have to go into the reactor room to initiate repairs. Our crew chief began to prepare a random way to see who would do it, when she said the two most fragile words in her native tongue. The phrase is… crass, and not able to be repeated in polite company.

You must understand, for humans, they are two words that, when together, indicate a complete failure. It means that logic must now go by the wayside, that there is no good answer, but action must be taken. They are the two words of ultimate defeat. For any other people, those two words would mean that all is lost.

For humans, it means casting aside logic and reason and taking whatever course they view is the only one in front of them.

Azure insisted that she had this. That she was “good.” That she could handle this. It was her expression that I remember the most. She was not showing her teeth in the ways humans mean is pleasant. She did not look focused, she did not look concerned. She looked… blissful, her family said.

We gave her what protections we could, despite her complaints that they were unnecessary. We asked her for words, and she said we would have them. And she gave them to us. She uttered one of her musical poems the entire time, one about returning home to a place called Mingulay.

Our doctors figured up the amount of time that she could be in there. Would you believe that she finished the repairs in time? She did!

And she stood there, staring at a still-active reactor, repeatedly reciting her poem. Saline falling from her eye sockets, or so I am told. We could only listen, the reactor room too dangerous to pull her out. She would have survived if we had, even if we would have died in the process.

The Gnell were the first to repeat parts of her song with her. They would not let us turn off the audio; the last words of a soul carries weight with them. I do not understand the bulk of the poem, and at first I thought it was directed to us. Let her go was an often repeated phrase in it. She repeated the poem many times rather than leave to safety. Eventually, we all repeated it in her stead.

She was long silent by the time we could safely enter. Her skin was blackened by that point, and we had to take care that her corpse would not contaminate anyone on the trip back. And yes, we all were there when her remains were returned to her kin. One does not save your life and you not be present when their remains are returned if you can help it.

It was her kin that explained. Explained how fragile she was. How her brain did not let her see the good of existence without chemical assistance. How, despite an average life, she knew misery like an old familiar acquaintance, and fought to keep others from experiencing it. And of how her last moments were happy. Happy that she was being liberated.

Ask others, and you will find many tales. How a human will see death ahead of them, and commit themselves to it. But in many of those tales, you will find them performing the impossible. The last stand of the 8th Drop Battalion, the survival of the Zhuak, the evacuation of Dnok. All of them, impossible feats. All of them, by humans who gave in to the fragility of probable death and decided…

…

Humans are fragile in ways that make them dangerous. Sometimes to themselves. Sometimes to others. A human who utters those two words is doomed to failure or the impossible. You will know it when you hear it. But for that reason, you must be careful with them.