Coming out of my shell for the first time in years I addressed the U.N. and called for a vote of military action. They looked at me precisely as I had thought they would. Our people did not conduct war, it was unspeakable. Still, what little reverence they felt for me apparently counted for something. Knowing that there could never be peace on Earth so long as the radicals were allowed to continue to harm others they gave in. I retreated back into the ship and pored through the archives, I ran exhaustive data retrieval algorithms on the computers looking for anything that would give us an easy advantage in armed confrontation. Something that could bring the fight to an end as quickly as possible so that no more than absolutely necessary had to die.
Find something I did. Whatever world we had come from had not been our home, at least not the one our species had evolved on. The form which I had only assumed the machines had designed for Earth's environment, to allow us to take hosts, was no custom creation at all. It was our natural form...and the machines had hidden that fact from me. We had always been a symbiotic species. The world we left had resisted us, and we’d not always been so peaceful in our methods it seemed. Our kind had gone there, to Gris, in the constellation Pegasus, and tried forcibly to take it for their own. The native inhabitants defied and fought us for generations. Our bodies did not dissolve into the hosts like they do with humans, they were able to remove us by force.
The records were still quite jumbled and I couldn’t make it all out, but I came to understand that there was a very good reason why all of us on Earth were so gentle and well-meaning. We were the pacifists on Gris, we'd taken the ship and left our more aggressive brethren behind to die in a war of attrition. At least that seemed the most obvious answer. Still I had questions. Had the data loss even been due to cosmic rays or had we done it ourselves? Corrupted the ship’s data and our own memories so that we could start anew somewhere else?
It didn’t matter, at least not at the time. Peace was possible, at least here on Earth. There seemed to be something in the archive, fragmentary data about a biological weapon that targeted only hostile individuals in a designated population. It didn’t kill them, simply rendered them sterile and incapable of passing on their aggressive genes. I found the entire notion of such a weapon extremely distasteful, but my people had brought violence to Gris, and humans had brought violence upon themselves since the beginning of time. I began to wonder if that was my reason for existence, to help craft a world that knows only compassion.
I had no idea whether it had been done before on Gris, who it had been original designed to target, or if it would even work at all but I set the machines to task on it and within a few months they'd produced a workable weapon. I hated that word at the time and I still do. That's all I saw it as at the time, an instrument of yet more violence, but I came to, in time, see it as so much more.
The world listened to me, like it had before. They deployed the device into the upper atmosphere and it spread its payload precisely as it was designed to do. The gene bugs replicated until not a soul on Earth could avoid breathing them in. As much as I would like to say that was the end of it, it wasn't of course. We could have simply used bombs to wipe out the clusters of radicals but that was unfair to those among them who were only being coerced into that way of life. Every human that could be saved I felt we had an obligation to protect. In a decade of bloody conflicts hundreds of thousands of sentients, both human and joined, lost their lives. For a time I feared, greatly, that my people would develop a taste for fighting but they never did. Many required years of therapy to ever be functional again and even then they were never the same. A brave sacrifice, I thought, made to secure peace for all of the generations to come, from then until the end of time.