Other then "don't save yourself".

Yeah, the story is flawed. There is no way to infer so much terror from so distorted and incomplete a message, and there's not enough of a message to provoke a century of accelerated, fear-driven research and development. And the end? Meaningless. There is no need to destroy a civilization or a species if the goal is to somehow reduce it to a set of mathematical equations. In fact, the opposite is true: reducing a civilization to equations requires significant information, and that information is available only while the members of that civilization are active. Destroy the civilization, destroy the fine detail, and the resulting "equations" are incomplete, low-resolution, insufficient for modeling or understanding with any useful degree of accuracy. But, even if I am wrong about that, reduction of a civilization to being part of a "mathematical equation" is not a horrible thing, as it means the civilization will continue, its members will yet live. It would just be encoded in a different medium, a new matrix. Welcome to the simulation, right? And having advanced warning means an opportunity to adjust the parameters and information that will be ingested into that new matrix, a chance to tweak things so the eventual representation of an entity or species or civilization within the new matrix will be superior.

dementia be like

It is a Secret fleet right? .

Biden wrote it

It seems that The Convergent (the super-aliens) detected humanity's ascendancy when humanity's secret fleet glassed the Narkan homeworld. It's possible that the galaxy was locked in a state of decadent squalor specifically to NOT trigger The Convergent, and that the entire galaxy knew at least vaguely about The Convergent. Hence, the stagnant status quo rigidly enforced by the civilizations that survived the longest. Don't get too powerful too quickly, and you don't trigger an existential threat. Progress means nothing if it brings about destruction and assimilation. Humanity kinda opened up Pandora's Box when they unleashed their fleet and its power. That transmission may have been some desperate Narkan diplomat begging humanity to stop before humanity's justified military action brought doom upon the entire galaxy. "Don'... Sa... Yoursel..." could be "Don't, Save Yourself". Narkan, looking to bully a supposedly technologically weaker species, maybe out of frustration at the walled sandbox they are forced to muddle inside, messed with the wrong interstellar race and brought doom upon everyone. The silence as the Narkan realized the gravity of their mistake was the silence before humanity's fleet opened fire and destroyed the world. The Narkans didn't evacuate, they didn't run. They had every opportunity to do so. They didn't. Perhaps some old children's fairytale equivalent echoed in every Narkan on that planet when they received the transmission of the coordinates from the human fleet. It was too late. They could run from humanity... but they couldn't run from The Convergent. That lack of response was what led humanity to question everything. The Narkan were powerful for an interstellar species, proud and warlike. Them not only laying over and dying without a fight, and even sending a desperate transmission to try and stop some threat that humanity was utterly ignorant of (being new to the galaxy, humanity had no idea about The Convergent, and it's likely they dismissed tales of The Convergent as mere stories to get frightened children to stay in bed and go to sleep. Humans did similar with their young, surely these tales were just the same... right?).... None of it made sense. None of it added up. Thus, humanity immediately put up its barriers and adopted a defensive stance. Whatever terrified the Narkans in their final moments, it wasn't humanity. So humanity would have to prepare for this greater threat. And eventually... they found it.

A publisher, like Tor or Baen?