Transcript

NARRATOR: Admiral Manyara Emm's secure briefing room aboard the U.N.S. battleplate Morokweng, five AU "south" of Earth...

GASCA: In 2821 the Tausennigan Kssthrata completed construction of an annie plant with a three-hundred-and-two kilometer diameter.

GASCA: It still holds the record as the largest annie plant ever created.

... Or destroyed.

Imperfections in the extruded supermolecule resulted in catastrophic failure.

GASCA: But in its fifteen seconds of glorious operation Ssthra's Folly demonstrated that the annie plant power curve holds true. Bigger is exponentially better.

GASCA: And now for the point of this history lesson...

GASCA: Oisri appears to be an annie plant over ten times the diameter of Ssthra's Folly, and close to a thousand times the diameter of the largest plants we can confidently build.

Unlike Ssthra's Folly, Oisri is operational, and has been since before your ancestors left the trees.

Simply put, this artifact, roughly the size of Luna, is a weapon that could win us any war. Do you want to take the galactic core, Admiral? Give me Oisri, and show me where the trigger is.

EMM: You talk about it as if it's just a big gun, Captain Gasca.

GASCA: Maxim 24, Admiral: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun."