"So a little while later, we hired a human programmer." The sapient with a body a blend of a crocodile and a spider spoke. Of course, the actual syntax was nowhere near that, but the translators had learned excellently over time. "Their job was basically just to keep all the systems running, maybe optimize a few programs if they could."

"I bet the government grant for hiring and observing humans had no impact on your decision-making at all." The avian at the table chirped, taking a sip of their beer. It wasn't actually alcohol of course, but the effects were similar. Even then, they were a bit of a lightweight. "What can a human programmer do anyway? They can't even do 133-digit division without a computer in their head."

"I'll admit, our expectations weren't very high. First thing he did though? He drew a weird shape on a processor unit with a tiny bit of his blood. A five-point shape, bunch of lines crossing each other. I stared thinking we'd hired a crazy person, then the piece of hardware started working about half again as fast."

The amphibian snacking on fries (the potatoes the humans had introduced were quite good, albeit also very deadly until modified to be more suitable) spoke up. "How did that work? I believe you, you lot are terrible at lying, but how?"

"He explained it as guiding the nanites in his blood to fix a few faulty connections and manufacturing errors. No idea how he knew of them. He looked at the programs running and shook his head in disgust. Couple cycles later, half of us had half the work to do. Now I'm certainly not a software engineer, but I can at least guess my way through what a script is doing. The human's code though? I'd have called it raving gibberish if it didn't work. Anyway, we were pretty much all sad to see him go, but he left for a different job. Project reality restaurant or something like that."

They stopped eavesdropping on that conversation and went back to what they were reading.

"We, somehow, got a tour of a human "heavy patrol ship." Considering we are yet to see a bigger ship in their navy, or anyone else's, we presume, and hope, that the name is a joke and that is in fact the biggest warship they have. Presumably. The Vigilant class, informally known as the "not a gas giant" class, has an impressive array of capabilities and weaponry, though a fair bit of it is classified.

Starting off, the direct weaponry:

30,000 planet-cracking kinetic launchers, for redundancy in critical functions. 3,000,000 anti-capital-ship weapons, a mix of kinetics, missiles, and lasers. 30,00,000,000 anti-corvette weapons, again a mix of kinetics, missiles, and lasers. Finally, it has anti-personnel weapons scattered across the hull. By anti-personnel, we mean it shoots someone across a star system, and through a planet or three, and leaves only a small hole through anything in its path, with minimal collateral damage. All of that's the standard anyway, crews are encouraged to add their own personal touch.

Defense:

There are at least 30,000 point defense weapons, both for taking down fighter craft and missiles, covering any given point on its hull. Each point of its hull. As in, there's a whole lot more in total. The armor itself is, I'm afraid to say, incredibly classified. The warp-blocking and EW suites are... excessive. As for the shielding? They had to, relatively speaking, massively lower it so that we could get within hundreds of thousands of kilometers of it without hallucinating being made of berries. The shielding is quite strong.

Movement:

The movement is done entirely by gravity manipulation so that there are no exposed engines. Such devices are also responsible for making sure that the mass of the ship doesn't de-orbit anything in the star system it's in.

Utility:

This thing isn't only an unstoppable juggernaut, it's an unstoppable juggernaut that can repair itself and churn out entire fleets. It utilizes a combination of mining vessels and stellar lifters to acquire material. Considering its fabrication capabilities, it can, theoretically speaking, patrol an area of space for essentially forever, until the heat death of the universe. Oh, and, given a bit of time and a lot of raw resources, it can make more of itself."

They could only assume it was a joke, not something serious. Their attention wandered over to a display showing a news report of some form.

"-and reports have continued to rise of people being able to conjure a blue gas-like substance from their fingertips or analogous appendages if they concentrate on it. Scientists still have no idea what is, why this is happening, what side effects there may be, or how it is that the pseudo-gas seems to more or less ignore several laws of physics. Efforts to study it, or even contain it long enough to study, are ongoing, but estimates aren't optimistic." There had been quite a lot of unrest when it first started happening two days ago but by now everyone had gotten used to it and gotten back to their jobs. Not like they had an option otherwise. The blue gas phenomenon hadn't yet been used as a reason for a wage cut so really they couldn't work up the energy to give a damn about it.

The vaguely crustacean-like reporter paused for a second before continuing. The warbling trills would be translated to a hyper-specific language designed to be translated into any other number of languages with minimal issue, with such translation taking place on whatever device plays the video, with the pronunciation of names being as close as feasible.

The image behind them changed to a simplified diagram of a several-thousand-kilometer device designed to create and maintain spherical portals between solar systems. "Negotiations have more or less concluded, and the Terran Government Coalition, or perhaps Tera Governance Coalition, we're still not sure which, has agreed to assist in the creation of gate devices in several important systems, notably the travel hubs of Drvll Prime, Ghaluot, and DGHC. This should drastically decrease travel time between vastly separate sections of Union space."

The image changed to a shuttle-sized ball of mechanical limbs with hundreds of various attachments on the ends of them.

"The general purpose fabricator, Hephaestus Mk 4 will start being available for sale in Union space. Interesting enough the origin of the name is unknown, the information apparently having been lost to time. The company which designed it is so confident in the capabilities of the devices, that they are offering the Teran equivalent of around 17,500 Union credits to anyone who can find something the device can't create when given the blueprints and raw materials."

"With the ability to create circuit boards from scratch, agile manoeuvering, and the extensive durability we've all come to expect from human products, one could construct a dreadnought using it if they have the materials and time. Unfortunately, there will likely be something of economic upheaval as a result of several industries, such as personal computer creation becoming largely obsolete, but the General Economics Board says that the effects shouldn't be overly detrimental. Overall, however, the standard of living should increase a fair bit. After all, it's not like there haven't been several times I wished I could simply download a ship."

"Various people, mostly industry executives and others with a vested interest in the status quo remain heavily outspoken against more or less any interaction with the humans. If nothing else, however, we've gotten some rather amusing bits of attempted fearmongering from it. For example, one politician, Troolp, claimed that humans caused star 345jhl74dfh0 to go supernova slightly ahead of schedule. For reference, that star exploded 257 years ago and was expected at the time to explode a few months later than it did. That has got to be one of the most boring conspiracy theories ever, but some have used that as 'evidence' that we should pre-emptively attack important Terran star systems."

"If you are eating and or easily disturbed, we recommend looking away now" they stated before the image behind them turned to a picture of a rainbow of blood, flesh, and bone fragments.

"A group of speciesists was literally torn to shreds after bombing a human's house on Drvll-3, killing their pet, and shooting at them when the explosives didn't work. The human, Jack Svar, was for obvious reasons determined to have been acting in self-defense. Jack received third-degree burns from the point-blank military-grade high-explosives but has since made a full recovery. Their dog, however, has not, as both the primary and backup brain (something which apparently they didn't have before the humans genetically engineered it so) was completely destroyed. Investigations into the origins of the explosives are still ongoing."

They returned their attention to their drink, bloody expensive thing that it was. They had to sit in the best-ventilated part of the bar and have a sign warning people off lest they inhale the minute fumes from it. It was because of such that they were rather surprised when someone sat down across from them. They started to warn away whoever it was but stopped when they saw it was a human drinking what appeared to be the very same sort of drink. She appeared mostly baseline aside from her eyes and hair lightly glowing violet.

"Huh, kinda orangey. Anyway, what's a pretty person like you doing sitting all alone?"

It took a moment for them to overcome their surprise at someone finding them pretty. Another cruel joke? No, surely not, this human had no reason to even know of them. They couldn't honestly say they weren't at least a little bit interested. The night seemed like it would be an interesting one.