“The First Thing You Need to Know”
Report filed by Zak Bowman, Grade 740, earth intel, to whom it may concern, position somewhere in sector Kappa Bravo 2799: The first thing you need to know about the Daulians is that they’re just like us, human to the nth degree, except for one little detail. They show their emotions in the color or their eyes. And they run through the whole spectrum, with red irises indicating extreme agitation.
I’ve seen orange in the eyes of a Daulian working on his taxes. Daulia has the worst bureaucracy on the planet Citheron, and that’s saying something. A Daulian can’t even get out of bed in the morning without filling out a form. And don’t get me started on the Daulian parliament. The paperwork and the grandstanding in there make for a lot of yellow eyes.
The default color of Daulian eyes is green. A beautiful pellucid green to be sure, but it tells you absolutely nothing about a Daulian’s state of mind. The best Daulian gamblers can keep their eyes locked in the green mode for days at a time as they bluff their way into staggering fortunes in iridium futures.
Blue eyes—well, that means a pretty good day, one in which nobody gets hit by some kind of projectile. Lobbing incendiary devices at each other has been a way of life among the Daulians and their neighbors for centuries.
Even during such events, some Daulian monks can achieve indigo irises just by thinking serene and pleasant thoughts.
As for the ultimate–violet—ah, that’s the color of undying love and friendship, or so I hear.
The color change is the one thing that the creators haven’t been able to duplicate. They can produce an interactive three-dimensional solid holograph, euphemistically called an echo, with basic emotions, just a little short on humor and imagination. But they haven’t been able to mimic the emotional spectrum shift of Citherian eyes—not yet at least.
As for the recent incident in the fourth polar quadrant of Citheron, you can imagine that there were a lot of yellow and orange eyes in the Daulian parliament, which deadlocked at once over how to handle the crisis, neither party wanting to buckle down to do the paperwork to authorize a recovery mission. To be fair, they didn’t have all of the facts, but listen, if the Daulian prime minister’s head caught fire, the parliament would argue for a month over how to put it out.
So when earth intel got word that one of our PFK-480s had gone down in a meteor shower in sector Kappa Bravo 2799, they were fit to be tied because they knew the Daulians weren’t going to do anything about it, not until it was so late that the Gramlings or, worse still, the Holloi had swooped down and grabbed the thing, sucked all the codes out of it, and reverse engineered it, putting us right back on square one when it comes to defending this sector of the galaxy.