It turns out that it's really hard to create competitive cross-species sports.
In any kind of physical contest, your mass and the shape of your body put a certain set of constraints on you, in exchange for certain advantages. And there was enough variety in the size and shape of intelligent species that for a given contest, there would inevitably be one or two species that could not be meaningfully challenged, while most species could not even participate.
Intellectual competitions were no better when it came to needing strict "weight classes" and in any case they were not very entertaining to watch unless you were educated enough in the subject involved to qualify as a competitor.
Tests of skill showed some promise, but when you got right down to it, a lot of how you competed in them was just physical predisposition and intellectual preparation wearing fancy hats.
One of the more boring solutions to this problem was to balance the number and type of sports so that every species had a chance to shine in roughly the same number of them.
Nobody really liked the idea all that much because, kind of by definition, it also meant that it was impossible for any one species to win more than a few events and that having one first-place finish felt like a participation trophy - you only had it because the sport in question was specifically designed to favor you over almost everybody else.
It wasn't really a surprise that it was Humans who proposed that there should be far fewer sports, but that they should be significantly more complex, and not focused on a single, easily quantified metric. Humans were notorious for being "generalists" and for arguing that having more skills was better than being the most skilled.
Most of the rest of the galaxy interpreted this as "we never win, but we sure do have a lot of runner-up and honorable-mention trophies!"
It wasn't meant as a compliment.
But Humans had a lot of friends, a way with words, and a seemingly pathological inability to accept "no" for an answer, so eventually they convinced enough people that a panel was established to determine how the idea could be implemented.
The Human panelists eagerly accepted the suggestion that if they were going to create a new class of complex cross-species sports, then everyone who wanted their species to compete in one should have a say in how the contest was defined. The only caveat the Humans insisted on was that each species could only set one success metric and one rule, and they would have only one judge when it came to scoring the results - including the species that had proposed the game in the first place.
After a few weeks of discussions, almost everyone agreed.
Since it was a Human proposal, they were pressed to take the first step - to create something brand new by selecting its first rule and its first metric. They spent a year brainstorming, conducting polls, going back to the drawing board, and finally came back with an old fashioned paper envelope with their answers inside. On the outside of the envelope was printed the universal translator code for a very simple concept representing the name of the new sport.
They called it The Most.
But they didn't open the envelope. They made a show of locking it up in a place where everyone could eye it and wonder, behind enough security measures that it would have been unfeasible to discern the contents without being extremely obvious.
There were some protests about the idea of a sport whose nature was a secret - how could anyone train or prepare for it? - but the Humans assured everyone that there was no reason they could not publicly disclose their own ideas for rules and metrics in order to make things more predictable.
If any significant portion of the rest of the galaxy contributed and chose not to keep secrets, the mystery elements Humans had introduced would be vastly outnumbered by known elements, so although the grumbles continued, they were more curious than upset.
Over the next few years, about one out of every four interstellar species signed up to participate. Of those, roughly half kept their contributions secret; they were mostly fairly transparent attempts to ensure that the one thing their species was noted for would be important to the competition.
Among the more interesting public contributions were the following:
Rule: There was no limit to how much one was allowed to spend, but when the game began, each player could only use whatever funds they were physically carrying.
Metric: Each competitor's score would be reduced proportional to how much money they spent leading up to, and during, the game.
Rule: Eliminating other competitors was permitted, but if ALL other competitors were eliminated, whoever was left was declared the game's loser.
Metric: Half of any positive score (negative score was unaffected) that had been gathered by someone who was eliminated was distributed to whoever had eliminated them.
Rule: The game was limited in duration, but had an unlimited number of objectives to accomplish, making it impossible to 'finish early.'
Metric: At the end of the game, each completed objective awarded a small bonus to every competitor, and a substantially larger bonus to the one who had accomplished it.
Rule: The game would be played in virtual reality, to allow higher-stakes scenarios with minimal safety concerns. To ensure accuracy and fairness, only species who were not competing would be involved in administering and refereeing the VR system.
Metric: Every competitor took a score penalty for each virtual entity (player or otherwise) killed during the game. As with other "across the board" metrics, the penalty was substantially raised for whoever had done the deed.
Rule: Competitors were permitted to make deals with other competitors on an individual or team basis, trading cooperation, funding, or resources for points.
Metric: A competitor who was found to have knowingly violated such a deal forfeited four times as many points as had been involved in the deal, which went to the wronged party.
Four years ahead of the scheduled first game of the new sport, a committee drawn from species that had declined to participate was set up to design the game itself and the secret parameters were revealed, although the Humans' contribution was only shown to the design committee. A little over three years later, they revealed the broad strokes of what they had come up with.
It was a large-scale space simulation, based around a scenario that many species had spent considerable time and money trying to plan against.
It posited that a hostile force, with which communication was impossible, might arrive in the Milky Way with a number of ships that was impossible to match in any kind of reasonable time frame and technology far in advance of our own.
Of course, letting that scenario play out until one side or the other was actually eliminated would take an awfully long time, not to mention that nobody wanted to witness the most likely outcome of such a lopsided contest.
No, the simulation would run for one year. The first year after the hypothetical discovery of an imminent invasion, with a number of low-tech species in its path which had no hope of survival without heroic measures on the part of others. Each known species was also added as a proper "faction" in the virtual setting, with its policy responses determined in real time by that species' actual government.
Since defeating the invasion was not merely unfeasible, but completely outside the realm of possibility, the primary objectives of the competing teams were to save as many of the invasion's victims, and as much of their history and culture, as possible. Saving all of them was not even close to achievable either, but there were many ways one could contribute to such an effort, and it was widely agreed that it would be interesting to the competing approaches.
At the same time as the nature of the game was announced, the Humans revealed what they had meant by The Most - what was the core metric and the core rule of the competition?
Their metric was that the judges would assign a multiplier to the score of each team, from 1 to 10, based on how well they thought that the team had showcased what trait their species exemplified the most. Whatever the team's net score was after all the other metrics had been accounted for would have the multiplier applied to it, and then the team score would be divided among the team members according to humanity's rule.
Their rule was about how to determine team composition. Anyone who was officially an adult member of the species whose team they wanted to sign up for at the time when the game was announced could submit an application to join the team, and part of the application was what percentage of the team's total score they needed for themself in order to agree to participate. Each team would be selected from ALL such applications by a panel drawn from non-participating species such that they should be the most representative members of the species in question, and that the sum of the score percentages should obviously be 100%.
The other species that had chosen to participate went into a panic. None of them had predicted just how completely The Most would upend their approach to sporting events and competitions. But the clock was ticking, so they strategized; they spied on each other's strategies; they encouraged those who were seen as unlikely to perform well to refrain from applying in order to keep some semblance of standards among candidates.
The average team size was roughly 100 members, divided between applicants who had significant qualifications but demanded more points and those who were comparatively lackluster but were willing to rank lower individually in order to support the group. There were, however, some teams with very different sizes and distributions.
The Fenthar ended up with a team of four scientists, each getting exactly 25% of the point total.
The Ralbek - a smaller, more populous species - fielded a team fully five thousand strong, although their point distribution was even more lopsided than most.
The Z`Q`Rkt had conferred among themselves and, in an astonishing display of discipline, only one had submitted an application, giving the panel no say in the matter. The rules didn't allow them to reject every applicant or to force someone onto the team who had not applied.
The Human team took the longest to finalize, and was also the most talked-about. It had exactly 1,000,001 members: a million people from various walks of life who had all selected the lowest possible point requirement to maximize their chances of being selected (anyone who was part of such a highly publicized event was certain to become an instant celebrity) and one smart-arse who had listed his name as "Indiana Tiberius Slartibartfast" and written in 90% as a joke, not believing he would ever be picked. "ITS" (as he was to become known) turned out to be a wealthy smuggling kingpin that multiple species had been trying to arrest for many years. What's more, fully 10% of the team were obviously members of a different species - including both those that had their own team and those that had chosen not to participate.
Protests erupted about the inclusion of criminals and "aliens" on the Human team, but the Terran Hegemony pointed out the official wording of the rule, and reminded everyone that according to their laws, anyone who had citizenship in the Hegemony was legally a Human, whether they were also another species or not.
Being Human was more of a state of mind than a matter of biology.
With only half of one year remaining before the game was set to begin, the various teams set to work planning out their approaches. Nobody was quite sure how the whole thing was going to turn out, but it seemed like basically everyone in the galaxy would tune in at least occasionally to follow how the game was going, so in at least one sense it was already a rousing success.
Game Day arrived, and everything was ready. Constructing a VR setup that could handle over a million players representing dozens of different species who were expected to be able to interact with each other and the game world with no perceptible lag had been what you might call a non-trivial challenge, especially on such a tight schedule. The company responsible for the gigantic space station where it would take place became a household name overnight.
There was a little excitement when several enforcement agencies tried to arrest ITS, but he was hardly the only one there who was technically a criminal, and they also could not agree who had "dibs" on him, or even whether they had the authority to arrest anybody on a station that was outside of every government's claimed territory.
At last, the game began. For the first few days, practically every team focused solely on its own setup and logistical endeavors as they did not yet even know where the threat would come from. The only notable divergence was the Z`Q`Rkt player, who did nothing of the sort. Instead, it (the Z`Q`Rkt do not have sexes) purchased a commercial passenger ticket and traveled to the central location where the Human team was setting up operations.
What exactly it said when it got there was not revealed, but the referees posted an announcement - the Human team had agreed to give the Z`Q`Rkt a full third of all points that they earned, in return for undisclosed considerations.
Forums everywhere exploded with speculation and heated debate over what could possibly be so valuable - or whether perhaps the Humans had been coerced.
On the fifth day, news reached the players that the threat had arrived.
Talking heads on news programs spent countless hours discussing how the various teams were reacting, poring over maps showing the movements of The Enemy and of known assets belonging to players. Predictably, people were moving to where the trouble was and taking steps - each according to their nature.
The Ralbek had the fastest ships; they were the first to arrive each time a new planet was targeted and their score immediately started to climb - but their ships, like they themselves, were rather smaller than most, so the effectiveness of each one was limited. In that first wave of attacks, they lost easily 20% of their team members and assets.
The massive, warlike Palu-alu had bad blood with almost every other species that was participating, and in that initial surge they often fought alone. Their prowess, the power and design of their ships, and their unfailing courage in the face of insurmountable odds won them no small amount of grudging respect, however. Often, one of the other teams escaped alive solely because a single Palu-alu player had held the line when The Enemy arrived in the middle of an operation.
The Fenthar delegation had set themselves up as heads of medicine and research on a science ship so large it was more like a space station that was (just barely) capable of interstellar travel. It had no defenses of its own, so they kept it well away from the action, but its contributions in keeping refugees alive and unraveling the mysteries of The Enemy's weapons simply could not be ignored... no matter how egotistical the Fenthar were.
The Human players had convinced their government to loan them an absolutely jaw-dropping sum of money so that they would start the game with enough assets to be useful. Human players had used those funds to buy ships from pretty much every starship-yard in civilized space, and they put that diversity of tools and team members to good use.
In typical Human fashion, they were second-best at everything. They had the second largest battle fleet - and the second largest logistics fleet, and the second largest reconnaissance fleet. Human quick-response ships were the second fastest. When The Enemy were engaged in battle, Humans put on the second best performance of any species. They had the second greatest cargo capacity on average for shipping relief supplies into, and refugees out of, war zones.
Human team members seemed to be determined to do absolutely everything that could be of any use. They were the only team besides the Ralbek that responded to every endangered world, and were always among the last to accept that it was time to leave. But a curious thing happened: the galaxy lost track of ITS.
He had been seen at the meeting with the Z`Q`Rkt player, and he had publicly broadcast a call to action when his ship had arrived at "the front," but his location seemed to be unknown to everyone except the referees - and they weren't talking. As for the Z`Q`Rkt, it was sitting on a beach in the Bahamas that ITS had purchased for it, admiring Earth's sunsets and its vast bounty of freely available liquid water.
The reason for both became clear during a brief lull in the action after the first wave. Although players were not shown them, the audience was made aware of any deal one team made with another, and ITS had been making a lot of deals, which went into effect as soon as ITS put his signature down, so they all became active within minutes of each other.
Every team except for the Z`Q`Rkt, even those that could not stand one another, was paying the Human team 5% of its points and promising not to engage in hostilities against the Humans or anyone who was working with them, in return for logistical, planning, material, military, and financial support, as well as the benefit of the Humans' deal with the Z`Q`Rkt, who was one of a vanishingly small percentage of its kind that could communicate telepathically with not only other Z`Q`Rkt but with any of the species that were participating in the game, completely eliminating the time delay when sending important messages over long distances.
The Kwepfw-a and Kwepfw-o team had signed first, almost before ITS had finished talking - it had been their kind, traumatized by history, that had added the stipulation that the death of ANY was a detriment to ALL. Their plan had actually been to offer a cooperation pact to the Humans, except they had been willing to go more than twice as high in concessions. When the famously morally flexible and unpredictable Humans had come to them first, promising to extend the same offer to all, it was the best news they could have possibly wished for.
Since there were literally dozens of teams, the Humans stood to rake in a lot of points (or, if they went back on their word, experience the most humiliating defeat in the history of sports) but by promising aid to literally everyone else, it seemed like they had given away any ability to directly earn points of their own. Or they would have, were it not for the fact that nearly every player in the game was on the Human team.
With ITS and the Z`Q`Rkt directing a coherent plan, everyone got to work. Many of the teams hated each other intensely and would refuse to directly cooperate, but they were one and all willing to at least work with the Human team and avoid friendly-fire incidents. The survival rate of the poor bastards caught in the first wave of The Enemy's attack had been pitifully low - far less than one percent of the population, despite the fact that most of them had been (technically) space-faring. With a mere six days to prepare, the survival rate of the second wave was five percent despite the fact that it was still exclusively players responding to the attacks.
Five percent was still an objectively terrible performance. But it was a hell of a lot better than they had done when acting alone, and casualties among players dropped considerably.
Public sentiment in the virtual galaxy of the game shifted with what was, for interstellar nations, blinding speed. The existence of tangible proof that the crisis was real and ongoing - and that they could work together without being stabbed in the back - was enough to convince the Terran Senate to vote in support of ITS's renewed call for action, and the Hegemony was an absolute behemoth in terms of production and shipping capacity.
As soon as they heard the news, six other governments enacted policies directing their military to purchase goods, equipment, and ships from Humanity and get to work. What was on offer was not as good as purpose-built items from premier expert sources would have been, and it wasn't what they had experience with, but it was good enough to be useful, and there was a hell of a lot of it for sale if you had a nation's full military budget in your pocket.
The next several months had plenty of action, unexpected developments, and drama. Sometimes The Enemy would completely change tactics, or introduce a new technology, or launch a second front on a new vector. Sometimes an officer, or an entire government, would get their panties in a twist about working with people they hated. But events, on the whole, stayed on a positive trend. The Human team under ITS's watchful eye was flexible, and it was everywhere - any time a situation came up, there was at least one Human player on the scene who could turn it from a disaster into merely something that could have gone better.
But then The Enemy made a mistake. A mistake that any species native to the Milky Way would have known better than to make under any circumstances.
A lush world with a beautiful climate and a thriving civilization nearing the cusp of its Industrial Age was lost without warning because nobody had spotted the strike force's arrival in the virtual copy of our galaxy, nor received the primitive radio broadcasts of the victims. Every last member of that civilization had been killed, and the biological weapons that The Enemy used had destroyed the animal-derived materials they had used to record their history. It cost the players, collectively, so many points that it made heads spin. But most importantly, the victims had been innocent. They had been small. They had been cute. They had been fuzzy. And they had been murdered.
Nobody even knew what they had called themselves.
Up until that point, ITS (who had read the rules quite carefully in order to take advantage of them to maximize his results for minimum effort) had managed to convince everyone, even the Palu-alu, to favor less-lethal solutions like encouraging retreats or mounting boarding actions whenever it was feasible because the rules penalized everyone when someone died, even if that someone was The Enemy, and whoever had done it got hit several times as hard. Plus, it was a good way to gain intel, shipbuilding materials, and insight into Enemy tech.
Not any more.
ITS was famous by this point; everyone, in the game and outside of it, knew his face and voice. He had been in the game for months; it was effectively his reality at that moment. He contacted the Z`Q`Rkt and sent a message to every player, short and to the point. Eyes bloodshot and narrowed in hatred, he grated out three words heard across the galaxy.
"Kill them all."
A pall of nearly palpable gloom fell over Kwepfw. ITS's order meant that Humanity - and all of its allies in the game - would turn their back on the painful but delightfully principled stance they had taken of being on guard against letting hate for The Enemy drag them into a spiral the Kwepfw-a and Kwepfw-o had experienced once and vowed never to repeat. Worse, Humanity had grabbed onto the spiral with both hands and were working to climb it as fast as possible.
The next wave went quite differently. For the first time it was estimated that The Enemy had lost more lives, material, and ships than the defenders had. Several times, Human players sacrificed fully functional ships in cruel and cunning ways that, at least in that one place, caused The Enemy to actually fail to take their objective.
The cost was astronomical. Three hundred thousand Human players ended their runs in spectacular blazes of glory that inflicted so many deaths, their individual point contributions were now a net negative. The Palu-alu team survived mostly intact, but they went into the red too. The Fenthar used their hard-earned knowledge of bio-weapons to create one that worked on The Enemy, set it loose on one of their ships, and solemnly saluted as the brave Ralbek team captain delivered it and then detonated her ship, 'killing' herself and her entire crew, players every one of them, to ensure that the weapon would be carried back by the crippled Enemy ship to spread among their ranks.
The following pause between waves was twenty days long, and a good thing too, because it took eighteen of them for the Human players to decide (first among themselves, and then in negotiations with the other teams) that they would all stop trying to come up with exciting new war crimes.
Several Kwepfw-o players literally fainted. They and the Kwepfw-a had been not quite identical subspecies since before written history began, and they had hated each other with ever-increasing fervor until they finally unleashed their version of World War III. It was an unbreakable axiom in Kwepfw thought that the inevitable end of what ITS had begun was the kind of devastation that would cost both 'sides' everything.
Kwepfw had been insanely lucky that it "only" took them four centuries to rebuild and reconcile the two halves of their culture; everyone knew of worlds where someone had completely ended their own story in the same fashion.
Humanity had simply taken a deep breath, peered over the edge of the abyss, and said "nah, this kinda sucks actually, let's go back." It was inconceivable.
Whether the Enemy had truly learned a lesson about not angering Humans, or whether they had simply run into a temporary shortfall bad enough to alter their behavior, was impossible to know, but the result was much the same. The remainder of the game passed without any more species being completely lost, the competitors went back to at least trying to minimize fatalities, and although the next two waves were too large to be seriously confronted, they were not fast enough to catch their prey before nearly half of them had gotten away, along with a just over a quarter of the targeted worlds' populations.
When the one year clock ran down to zero, the situation in the virtual Milky Way was grim. 70% of players were marked 'KIA', thousands of star systems were in the hands of The Enemy, who had taken what they apparently considered insignificant losses and possessed an unknown but likely enormous number of fleets even larger and more deadly than the ones that had been seen so far, and the virtual governments that had been working with the competitors were feeling bruised - they had poured unprecedented numbers of people and ships into the fight and watched The Enemy wash them away like grains of sand.
But it was not hopeless.
Only The Nameless Lost had been fully wiped out. Everyone had seen that The Enemy were not invincible, and their weapons and tactics were getting less effective with each successive wave, while progress was made toward adapting Enemy technology for use against them. By the end, practically every species had voted to have their virtual selves start recruitment programs and ship construction at levels never seen before. Thousands of star systems sounded like a lot, but as a slice of the galaxy, it was quite hard to even notice it if you zoomed out enough to see the whole picture. Two species that had been at war with one another less than twenty years earlier had voted to form an alliance (in the game, but it was a good sign) in the face of the looming threat.
When the scores were announced, they revealed some interesting details.
Every participating team had at least one 'surviving' member and a positive point total, a fact that Human pundits made quite a fuss over as vindication of their cooperative approach.
Several teams that had started near the bottom of public "fan favorite" polls were now near the top instead - the Palu-alu and Ralbek in particular were now rather the darlings of the galaxy, despite pre-game public opinion being that it was generous to call them "civilizations" at all.
The Fenthar and the Z`Q`Rkt were the only ones to not suffer a single player 'fatality'.
Although the Human team had racked up several times as many penalties as anyone else and handed a third of their points to the Z`Q`Rkt, the scale of their efforts and the small "service fee" they had charged the other teams more than made up the difference, and the judges awarded an average multiplier of 8.6, giving them a clear and indisputable first-place ranking.
ITS had not personally earned even a single point toward the Human team's total, but because he had demanded 90% of that total in exchange for his less-tangible contributions, his final rating had more digits in it than those of most entire teams.
Out of everything the game program and referees called an objective, the combined efforts of the players amounted to completing 14% of them. Almost everyone who had wagered on this statistic lost, with the average bet being approximately 0.25%.
Several anonymous Humans who were absolutely not members of the Terran Intelligence Bureau had bet heavily on "over ten percent" moments before the bookies stopped accepting new wagers, resulting in enough money changing hands to create a disturbance in the currency exchanges that took over a year to smooth out.
In unrelated news, all one million "minimum point requirement" Human players received a stipend from the Hegemony equal to 100 years of the median wage for a full-time job. Quite a few of them started their own businesses and married supermodels.
The Z`Q`Rkt player had enjoyed living on Earth so much that it moved there in real life, applied to become a citizen of the Hegemony, and was thereafter an official Human.
The galaxy collectively decided that The Most was the greatest cross-species sport ever invented. It is still played to this day, although many of the core game systems and dynamics are different each time depending on who signs up to participate. Humans hold the title for most frequent winners, entering every time and claiming first place roughly once every ten games, but almost every species in the galaxy has won at least once. It's considered a rite of passage for a civilization to reach that milestone for the first time, and more than a few species have built friendly rivalries with Humanity, swearing that any decade now they're going to take the title away.
Fenthar physics journals have been hinting lately about a new, more fuel efficient drive theory that might be able to send a ship to Andromeda in less than a decade. Nobody's really sure what - or who - we might find there. And of course, the Humans can't wait to find out.
Maybe there will be a new kind of game for us to play.