Item Seed: Deorderant.

Deorderant

Description: available in either solid or spray form. Odorless, but tastes slightly of peppermint. Deorderant can be easily transported (it’s highly stable under earth-like conditions), but any attempts to label the canisters the stuff is stored in will rapidly fail.

The Exalted Races officially don’t trade with us mere Galactic species. They don’t do much unofficial trade with us, either — but apparently individual members of hyper-evolved species will still have specific needs that can’t be filled conventionally. There’s quite a few of them among the Hamganda, for example: we trade them copies of humanity’s yearly cultural output* in exchange for whatever gimcracks they happen to have lying around at the time. It’s rarely a bad deal. Certainly Deorderant ended up being handy.

Deorderant is a directed entropy increaser. It eats ‘dead’ information that it comes in contact with, like DNA flakes, the printed word, or digital records; astoundingly, it’s aggressively non-toxic when it comes to living creatures, which in this context includes ‘artificial intelligences.’ Spray some in a room (Deorderant gas lasts a half-hour before dissipating), and it will prevent spying from outside. It’ll also eat the words off the page (or files off the hard drive) of anything that isn’t encased in an element (copper plating will do), so people are careful where they use it. The standard practice is to put two people in vaccuum suits, their communications devices connected by a copper cable; this way, they can talk to each other (and transfer files) in perfect security. The solid stuff isn’t too shabby, either: people picked up on its ability to destroy DNA evidence right away, but it’s also a remarkably good treatment against non-sapient infovores and memetic-based assaults — and, obviously, any kind of psionic attack.

All of this obviously violates multiple physical laws — but then, most Exalted Race tech does. People are used to it by now: scientists in particular treat Deorderant as flat-out magic, and it’s hard to argue that this particular act of memetic self-defense is the wrong idea. It’s never great when a scientist goes stark, raving mad in the immediate presence of multiple high-energy, poorly-understood artifacts. 

*We’re pretty sure they’re just interested in the pornography, but don’t want to say. There’s a strong argument that we’re trading with the Hamgandan equivalent of healthy adolescents.