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"This is it," Vilem asked.

Vilem was a sort of squid/crab monstrosity who was acting as my liaison to the Doormish fleet because his species was known to get along with humans pretty well. When I'd first seen him I'd nearly wet myself, but he was actually a pretty decent sort: easy to work with and pleasant to be around.

I held up the repurposed Pixel Pro 9 and nodded.

"Amazing. To think that such a small thing will be able to coordinate all fleet movements, run shipboard operations, do orbital calculations..." He trailed off looking a little starry eyed. Well, I assumed that was what he was looking. I couldn't really read his expressions, but I thought maybe the small black orbs at the top of his eyestalks looked starrier than usual.

Honestly I felt a bit bad as I handed him the phone and he carefully slid it into the FTL comms interface we'd built for it over the preceding weeks. It wasn't even new! T-Mobile had a promo running where you could turn in a working phone from an earlier generation and get a new model and a free month of service. I was pretty sure this had come out that.

"How do you guys not have this technology already?"

"Huh," Vilem asked. It wasn't quite a human 'huh' but he'd learned to manage the sound pretty well.

"Computers, phones, the whole mess. How don't you have them? Your tech is mostly hyper advanced, but you haven't cracked something simple like this. It doesn't make any sense!"

Vilem waved a tentacle dismissively. "It'll make more sense once you humans get used to the wider galaxy. Two things make it possible. The first is that you humans are unique."

"Humans are unique?"

"Don't get fat claws. I mean every species is unique. You have aptitudes and weakness. Once humans start going to galactic universities you're going to see that there are species that get concepts that absolutely stump you with trivial ease, whereas things that seem basic to you will utterly stump others. You've got time, right?"

"Time for what?"

"No, like, the basic concept of time. The universal translator isn't growling at me so you must. But, anyway, there are species that don't. They have an understanding that things are changing when they are changing, but if you ask them to imagine 'time passing' in an empty, all white, room they wouldn't be able to do it. Time as a basic concept independent of motion just doesn't really exist for them."

If I sort of mentally squinted I could imagine that a little. Strange though.

Vilem continued, "So whatever scientist you've got that came up with relativity was probably thinking about time, right?"

"Oh, sure. I'd have to look it up to get the details right but I think Einstein was sleeping on a train going by some pastures with electric fences and cattle in them. He dreamed about the fence getting turned on and the cattle being shocked one by one. Then he started thinking about how the apparent time they'd get shocked would change if the train, and the cattle, were all traveling with or against the flow of electricity at near the speed of light."

There was a long pause while Vilem gave me a nonplussed look. Well, again, I assume. But this time he nearly managed to transcend the barriers of species. "That is... surprisingly specific. But maybe that's another human thing. Scientific revelations in strange dreams."

"I don't think..." I started, but then I trailed off because Einstein was neither the first, nor the last, scientist to start traveling down some research path due to a dream. Huh.

"Other species also have advantages like that. They each come up with their technological advances based on the ways their species is unique. But in the wider galaxy it all gets mixed together. That's why we have so many advances."

"So we had something that made us understand computing, and some other species out there understood time really well and gave you FTL?"

"Yeah, basically. But the species that crack FTL almost never have a concept of time."

"Wait, really?"

"Well, sure, relativity is why you can't go faster than light in a conventional way! Knowing why you can't do something makes you a lot less likely to find the way to do it. Or, at least, it works that way for a lot of species."

I nodded along starting to get it for the first time. All these strange and wondrous miracles of hyper-tech. It all depended on where you were standing.

Then something occurred to me, "You said two things?"

"Sure." He looked at the phone and gave it a soft, loving, stroke. I noticed the touch screen didn't really react to his shell and I wondered if anyone was working on a version that would. "Once you had this beauty I expect you started working with miniaturization a lot. The vacuum tubes alone must be astoundingly tiny! That's got to open so many doors."

"There aren't really..."

"I'm sure. But there are very small components, right? And that pushed you in a certain direction, right?"

I nodded. "Of course; nano-tech."

"Nah-no-teh-kek," Vilem said laboriously making the real sounds rather than letting the universal translator handle it. "I'd best learn to say that. I expect, it's how you humans will change the galaxy."

"Huh," I answered him.

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Submitted by crumjd on Sat, Jun 04, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

As it turns out, 70-s scifi was right. Aliens have all sorts of unimaginable technology, ftl, teleportation, even moving planets. And yet, the human smartphone is by far the most capable handheld device, rivaling the computational power of entire fleets.