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The Future of Humanity – Science Fiction · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:16
  Speaker 2: To Mars.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: After millennia of earth bound foreplay. Mankind's achievements on a
• 0:22
  noteworthy level began with its political unification and the gradual
• 0:27
  colonization of Mars. While the technology to colonize this world
• 0:32
  had existed for some time, political bickering, shifting agendas, and
• 0:36
  the sheer inertia of comfortable terrestrial usurping had made this
• 0:42
  step seem more distant than it actually was. Only when
• 0:47
  the risks clearly began to present themselves. Only when Earth's
• 0:51
  environment began to buckle under the strain of twelve billion
• 0:55
  industrialized souls did mankind finally take up the moment to task.
• 1:02
  All through the decades, traveling to and later settling on
• 1:06
  Mars had been envisioned as quick, relatively easy affairs, complicated
• 1:11
  but feasible and manageable in short term. As the push
• 1:16
  finally came to a shove, it was realized that this
• 1:19
  was not the case. It had to go step by step.
• 1:24
  Atmospheric bombardment by genetically tailored microbe slowly generated a breathable
• 1:29
  atmosphere in a cycle that took centuries later, a few
• 1:34
  cometary fragments were knocked off course to bring forth seas,
• 1:38
  oceans water. When the weight was finally over, remnants of
• 1:44
  Earth's flora and fauna were introduced as specifically modified Martian remakes.
• 1:50
  When everything was ready, people came from their crowded world.
• 1:55
  They came in one way ships, fusion rockets, and atmospheric lighters,
• 1:59
  packed to the brim, with colonists sleeping in dreams of
• 2:03
  a new beginning. The first steps on Mars were taken
• 2:07
  not by astronauts, but by barefoot children on lush, biosynthetic grass.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: The Martian Americans.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: For several hundred years, Mars remained as a backwater, prospering,
• 2:23
  but still dim compared to the splendor of Earth, which
• 2:26
  was glowing brighter than ever before. Thanks to the relocation
• 2:30
  of environmentally demanding industries to Mars, Earth could usurp everything
• 2:37
  without having to damage its tired biosphere. This was the
• 2:41
  terrestrial Heyday, the climax of economic, cultural, and social development
• 2:46
  on Old Earth. This, however, was not to last. Like
• 2:52
  the gradual separation of America from her European mother, the
• 2:56
  governments of Mars adopted a new Martian identity. They became
• 3:02
  the Martian Americans. The difference between Earth and Mars was
• 3:07
  not only political. A few generations in the lighter gravity
• 3:11
  gave the new Americans a spindily lithe frame that would
• 3:15
  look surreal in their old home. This, combined with a
• 3:19
  certain amount of genetic engineering, took the Martians separation to.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: A new level.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: For a while, the silent schism between the two planets
• 3:29
  was mutually accepted and the balance of power hung in
• 3:32
  an edgy equilibrium. But the Terra Martians standoff did not
• 3:37
  and could not last forever. With limitless resources and an
• 3:42
  energetic population, Mars was bound to take the lead civil war.
• 3:49
  The Martian turnover was expected to occur in two ways,
• 3:53
  either through long term economical gains or by a much
• 3:57
  shorter but painful, armed conflict. For almost two hundred years,
• 4:02
  the former method seemed to take effect, but the gradual
• 4:06
  stretch eventually did break in the most destructive way. Almost
• 4:12
  since its establishment, Martian culture was suffused with an explicit
• 4:16
  theme of rebellion against Earth. Songs, motion pictures, and daily
• 4:22
  publications repeated those notions again and again until they became internalized.
• 4:28
  Earth was the old, ossified home that held humanity back,
• 4:33
  while Mars was new, dynamic, active, and inventive. Mars was
• 4:39
  the future. This ideology eventually reached its semi paranoid revolutionary apex.
• 4:47
  Roughly one thousand years from now. The nations of Mars
• 4:50
  banned all non essential trade and travel with Earth. For Earth,
• 4:56
  it was a death sentence. Without the resources and ans
• 5:00
  industries of Mars, the terrestrial heyday would quickly devolve into
• 5:03
  a pale shadow of its former glory. Since a trade
• 5:07
  of essential goods continued, nobody would starve, But for every
• 5:12
  citizen of Earth, the Martian boycott meant the loss of
• 5:15
  up to three fourths of their yearly income. Earth had
• 5:20
  no choice but to reclaim its former privileges by force
• 5:24
  if necessary. Centuries after her political unification, Terra geared up
• 5:30
  for war. Most thinkers and fantasists of previous times had
• 5:35
  imagined interplanetary war as a glorious, fast paced spectacle of
• 5:40
  massive ships, one man fighters in last minute heroics. No
• 5:45
  fantasy could have been further from the truth. War between
• 5:49
  planets was a slow, nerve racking series of precisely timed
• 5:54
  decisions that spelled destruction on biblical scales. Most of the time,
• 6:00
  the combatants never saw each other. Most of the time,
• 6:04
  the combatants were not there at all. War became a
• 6:07
  duel between complicated, autonomous machines programmed to maximize damage to
• 6:12
  the other side while trying to last a little longer.
• 6:17
  Such a conflict caused horrendous destruction on both sides. Phobos,
• 6:23
  one of Mars moons, was shattered and rained down as
• 6:26
  meteorite hail. Earth received a polar impact that killed one
• 6:31
  third of its population. Barely escaping extinction, the peoples of
• 6:36
  Earth and Mars made peace and re forged a united
• 6:40
  Solar System. It had cost them more than eight billion souls.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: Star people.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: The survivors agreed that massive changes were necessary to ensure
• 6:55
  that such a war never occurred again. These reforms were
• 6:59
  so comprehendhensive that they entitled not political, economical, but biological
• 7:05
  changes as well. One of the greatest differences between the
• 7:09
  people of the two planets was that over time they
• 7:11
  had almost become different species. It was believed that the
• 7:15
  Solar System could never completely unify until this discrepancy was overcome.
• 7:22
  The answer was a new human subspecies, equally and better
• 7:26
  adapted not only to Earth and Mars, but to the
• 7:30
  conditions of most newly terrformed environments as well. Furthermore, these
• 7:36
  beings were envisioned with larger brains and heightened talents, making
• 7:40
  them greater than the sum of their predecessors. Normally, it
• 7:45
  would be hard to convince any population to make a
• 7:48
  choice between mandatory sterilization and parenting a new, fingled race
• 7:52
  of superior beings. However, memories of the war were still
• 7:57
  painfully fresh, and it was easier to in implement these
• 8:00
  radical procedures in the wake of such a slaughter. Any
• 8:04
  resistance to the birth of the new species did not
• 8:06
  extend beyond meager complaints and trivial strikes. In only a
• 8:12
  few generations, the new race began to prove its worth.
• 8:16
  Organized as a single state and aided by the technological
• 8:19
  developments of the war, they rapidly terraformed and colonized Venus,
• 8:24
  the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Soon, however,
• 8:30
  even the domain of soul grew too small. The new
• 8:34
  people who inherited it wanted to go further to new
• 8:38
  worlds under distant stars. They were to become the star people.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Colonization.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Even for the star people, interplanetary travel was a momentous task.
• 8:54
  Early minds had boggled over the problem, and fantasies such
• 8:57
  as faster than light travel and hyper space emerged as
• 9:00
  the only solutions. Simply put, it was impossible to take
• 9:06
  a large number of people with enough supplies to even
• 9:09
  the closest star to make colonization feasible. The existing technologies
• 9:15
  could only slug around at mere percentages of light speed,
• 9:19
  making the journey in epoch spanning affair. Enormous generation ships
• 9:25
  were conceived and even built, but these succumbed to technological
• 9:29
  difficulties or an onboard anarchy after only.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: A few cycles.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: The solution was to first go there and make the
• 9:38
  colonists later. To this end, fast and small, automated ships
• 9:44
  were sent forth to the stars. On board were semi
• 9:48
  sentient machines programmed to replicate and terraform the destination and
• 9:53
  construct its inhabitants from the genetic materials stored on board.
• 9:59
  Is our problem plagued such attempts. The first generation of
• 10:04
  humans to be manufactured sometimes developed a strange affection for
• 10:09
  the machines that made them. They rejected their own kind
• 10:12
  and perished after the massive identity crisis that followed. This
• 10:17
  technological Oedipus complex was not uncommon nearly half of all
• 10:22
  the colony founding attempts were lost through it. Even then, however,
• 10:28
  the remaining half was enough to fill humanity's own spiral
• 10:32
  arm of the galaxy.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: The Summer of Man.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Right after Mankind's colonization of the galaxy came its first
• 10:45
  true golden Age, reared by machine profits. The survivors of
• 10:49
  the Oedipal plagues built civilizations that equalled and even surpassed
• 10:54
  their solar forbearers. This diffusion across the heavens did not
• 10:59
  mean a lfe loss of unity. Across the skies. Steady
• 11:04
  flows of electromagnetic communication linked Mankind's worlds with such efficiency
• 11:09
  that there was no colony that did not know about
• 11:12
  the goings on of her distant siblings. The free flow
• 11:16
  of information meant, among other things, a vastly accelerated pace
• 11:21
  of technological growth. What couldn't be figured out in one
• 11:25
  world was helped out by another, and any new developments
• 11:29
  were quickly made known to all in a realm that
• 11:31
  spanned centuries of light. Not surprisingly, living standards rose to
• 11:37
  previously unimaginable levels. While this did not exactly mean a
• 11:42
  galactic utopia, it was safe to say that people of
• 11:45
  the colonized galaxy lived lives in which labour, both menial
• 11:49
  and mental, was purely compulsory. Thanks to the richness of
• 11:54
  the heavens and the toil of machines, each person had
• 11:57
  access to material and culture wealth greater than that of
• 12:01
  some nations today. During all this development, a curious phenomenon
• 12:07
  was observed. While alien life was abundant in the stars,
• 12:11
  no one had encountered any signs of true intelligence. Some
• 12:17
  attributed this to an overall rarity, while others went as
• 12:21
  far as define influence resurrecting religion. Regardless of the theorizing,
• 12:28
  one question went truly and utterly unanswered. What would really
• 12:33
  happen if mankind ever ran into its equals or superiors
• 12:38
  in space?
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: An early warning.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: During those times, a small discovery of immense implications warned
• 12:49
  humanity that it might not be alone. On a newly
• 12:53
  colonized world, Engineers had stumbled across the remains of a
• 12:57
  puzzling creature considered so because had every hallmark of terrestrial
• 13:02
  animals on an alien planet, justifiably named Panduravis Pandora. The
• 13:09
  colossal fossil belonged to a bird like creature with enormous claws.
• 13:15
  Later research determined it to be a highly derived therizinosaur
• 13:20
  from a lineage of dinosaurs of herbivores that died out
• 13:25
  millions of years ago on Earth. While every other large
• 13:30
  land animal on that colony world had three limbs, a
• 13:33
  copper based skeletal system, and hydrostatically operated muscles, Panderavis was
• 13:41
  a typical terrestrial vertebrate, with calcium rich bones and four extremities.
• 13:47
  Finding it there was as unlikely as finding an alien
• 13:50
  creature in Earth's own strata. For some, it was irrefutable
• 13:55
  proof of divine creation. The religious resurgence, fueled at first
• 14:01
  by mankind's apparent loneliness in the heavens, got even more intensified.
• 14:07
  Others saw it differently. Pandoravius had shown humans that entities
• 14:12
  powerful enough to visit Earth, take animals from there, and
• 14:16
  adapt them to an alien world were at large in
• 14:19
  the galaxy. Considering the time gulf of the fossil itself,
• 14:24
  the mysterious beings were millennia older than humanity when they
• 14:28
  were capable of such things. The warning was clear. There
• 14:34
  was no telling what would happen if mankind suddenly ran
• 14:37
  into the civilization. A benevolent contact was obviously preferred and
• 14:42
  even expected, but it paid to be prepared silently. Humanity
• 14:48
  once again began to build in stockpile weapons. This time
• 14:53
  of the interplanetary potency. There were terrible devices capable of
• 14:59
  no eying stars and wrecking entire solar systems. Sadly, even
• 15:06
  these preparations would prove to be ineffectual. In time, Q,
• 15:16
  the first contact was bound to happen the galaxy, let alone,
• 15:21
  The universe was simply too big for just a singular
• 15:24
  species to develop intelligence in any delay in contact only
• 15:29
  meant a heightening of the eventual culture shock. In humanity's case,
• 15:35
  this culture shock meant the complete extinction of mankind, as
• 15:39
  it had come to be known almost a billion years old.
• 15:44
  The alien species known as Q were galactic nomads, traveling
• 15:49
  one spiral arm to another in epochs spanning migrations. During
• 15:55
  their travels, they constantly improved and changed themselves until they
• 15:59
  became masters of genetic and nanotechnological manipulation. With this ability
• 16:06
  to control the material world, they assumed a religious self
• 16:10
  imposed mission to remake the universe as they saw fit.
• 16:15
  Powerful as gods, Hugh saw themselves as the divine harbingers
• 16:20
  of the future. This dogma was rooted in what had
• 16:23
  been a benevolent attempt to protect the race from its
• 16:26
  own power. However, blind, unquestioning obedience had made monsters of
• 16:33
  the cue. To them, humanity, with all of its relative glories,
• 16:39
  was nothing more than a transmutable subject. Within less than
• 16:43
  a thousand years, every human world was destroyed, depopulated, or
• 16:49
  even worse changed. Despite the fervent rearmament, the colonies could
• 16:55
  achieve nothing against its billion year old foes, save for
• 17:00
  a few flashes of ephemeral resistance. Humanity, once the ruler
• 17:06
  of the stars, was now extinct. However, humans were.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Not man extinguished.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: The worlds of humanity, gardens of terraformed paradise, seemed strangely
• 17:24
  empty to the queue. Often there were no raw materials
• 17:27
  available other than people, their cities in a few basic
• 17:31
  niches of ecology, populated by genetically modified animals and plants
• 17:36
  from Earth. This was because humans had erased the original
• 17:40
  alien ecologies in the first place. Offended by another race
• 17:45
  trying to remake the universe, the que set forth to
• 17:49
  punish these infidels by using them as the building materials
• 17:53
  of their vision. While this led to a complete extinguishment
• 17:58
  of human sentience, it also saved the species by preserving
• 18:02
  its genetic heritage in a myriad of strange new forms
• 18:07
  populated by Ersat's humans now in every guise, from wild
• 18:11
  animals to pets to genetically modified tools. Q reigned supreme
• 18:16
  for forty million years on the worlds of our galaxy.
• 18:20
  They erected kilometer high monuments and changed the surfaces of
• 18:24
  entire worlds, apparently to whim. One day, they departed as
• 18:30
  they had come. For theirs was a never ending quest,
• 18:34
  and they would not could not stop until they had
• 18:37
  swept through the entire cosmos behind them. The Q left
• 18:43
  a thousand worlds, each filled with bizarre creatures and ecologies
• 18:47
  that had once been men. Most of them perished right
• 18:51
  after their caretakers left. Others lasted a little longer to
• 18:55
  succumb to long term instabilities. On a precious few war worlds,
• 19:01
  descendants of people actually managed to survive. In them lay
• 19:07
  the fate of the species, now divided and differentiated beyond recognition.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: The worms.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Their world lay under a scorching sun, its intensity made
• 19:22
  monstrous through the interventions of the bygone queue. The surface
• 19:27
  lay littered with husks of dead cities, baking endlessly like
• 19:30
  shattered statues in a derelict oven. Yet life remained on
• 19:35
  the unforgiving place. Forests of crystalline plants blanketed the surface,
• 19:40
  recycling oxygen for the animal life that teemed underground. One
• 19:44
  such species, barely longer than the arms of their ancestors,
• 19:48
  was the sole surviving vertebrae. Furthermore, it was the planet's
• 19:53
  last air of the star people distorted beyond recognition by
• 19:58
  genetic modification. They looked like pale, overgrown worms. Tiny feeble
• 20:05
  feet and hands modified for digging were all that betrayed
• 20:09
  their noble heritage. Aside from these organs, all was simplified
• 20:14
  for the life underground. Their eyes were pinpricks, they lacked teeth,
• 20:20
  external ears, and the better half of their nervous system.
• 20:24
  The lives of these ersatz people did not extend beyond
• 20:28
  digging aimlessly. If they encountered food, they devoured it. If
• 20:34
  they encountered others of their kind, they sometimes devoured them too.
• 20:39
  But mostly they mated and multiplied and managed to preserve
• 20:43
  a single shred of their humanity in their genes. In time,
• 20:49
  it would do them good.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: The Titans.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: On the endless savannah of a long extinguished colonial outpost,
• 21:01
  enormous beasts roamed supreme more than forty meters long by
• 21:07
  terrestrial measurements. These bohemoths were actually the transmuted offspring of
• 21:11
  star people. Several features betrayed their human ancestry. They still
• 21:17
  retained stubby thumbs on their elephant like front feet, now
• 21:21
  useless for any sort of precise manipulation except for uprooting trees.
• 21:27
  They compensated this loss by developing their lower lip into
• 21:30
  a muscular trunk like organ that echoed the elephants of
• 21:33
  Earth's past. As be steel as they seemed, the Titans
• 21:39
  were among the smartest of the reduced sub men that
• 21:42
  remained in the galaxy. Their hulking stance allowed for a
• 21:46
  developed brain, and gradually sentience re emerged. With their lip trunks.
• 21:52
  They fashioned ornate wood carvings, erected hangar like dwellings, and
• 21:57
  even began a form of primitive agriculture. With settled life
• 22:02
  came the inevitable flood of language and literature. Myths and
• 22:05
  legends of the bygone, half remembered past were told in
• 22:09
  booming voices across the vast plains. It was easy to
• 22:13
  see that within a few hundred thousand years, humanity could
• 22:17
  start again with these Titanic primitives. Sadly, as a catastrophic
• 22:21
  ice age took over the titans home world, the gentle
• 22:25
  giants disappeared, never to return.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Predators and prey.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Devolved predators were common among humanity's feral worlds. Most of
• 22:41
  the time they resembled the vampires, werewolves and goblins of
• 22:44
  bygone lore, hunting equally sub human prey with a combination
• 22:48
  of derived weaponry. Some had enormous heads with large killing teeth.
• 22:55
  Others tore their victims apart with talon like feet. Most
• 23:00
  common kinds or modified fingers and thumbs bristling with razor
• 23:05
  sharp claws. The most efficient of these predators lived in
• 23:10
  one of mankind's first off world colonies. In addition to
• 23:14
  paul like hands with switchable thumbs, they also had gaping
• 23:19
  tooth studded jaws on disproportionate heads with large, sensitive ears.
• 23:26
  All of these served to make them the dominant predators
• 23:29
  on their home planet. They ran the prairies, stalked the forests,
• 23:35
  and ranged through the mountains in pursuit of different people
• 23:39
  herbivore saltators with bird like legs. While their prey lapsed
• 23:46
  into complete animosity, the hunters managed to keep the spark
• 23:50
  of intelligence alive in their evolutionary honing.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: Mantelopes.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: Not all devolved people lapsed in a complete bestiality. Some
• 24:05
  held on to their minds while losing all of their
• 24:08
  physiological advantages to the genetic meddling of the CUE. A
• 24:12
  singular species was a prime exemplar. They had been bred
• 24:16
  as singers and memory retainers, acting much like living records
• 24:21
  during the reign of the queue. When their masters left,
• 24:24
  they barely survived, reverting in a quadrupedal stance and occupying
• 24:28
  a niche as grazing herd animals. This change was so
• 24:33
  abrupt that the newly evolved mantelopes endured only due to
• 24:37
  the forgiving sterility of their artificial biosphere. The mantelopes, equipped
• 24:43
  with full, if slightly numbed, human minds in completely disabled
• 24:48
  animal bodies, lived agonizing lives. They could see and understand
• 24:54
  the world around them, but due to their bodies, they
• 24:57
  could do nothing to change it. For centuries, mournful herds
• 25:02
  roamed the plains, singing songs of desperation and loss. Entire
• 25:09
  religions and oral traditions were woven around this crippling racial disability,
• 25:15
  as dramatic and detailed as any on bygone Earth. Fortunately,
• 25:21
  the selective forces of evolution made their agony a short
• 25:24
  lived one. Simply put, a brain was not advantageous to
• 25:30
  develop if it could not be put into good use.
• 25:33
  A dim witted, half minded manelope grew up faster than
• 25:37
  a smarter one and grazed just as efficiently. The manelope's
• 25:43
  animal children overtook them in less than a hundred thousand years,
• 25:47
  and their melancholic world fell silent for good. Nothing was
• 25:52
  sacred in the evolutionary process the swimmers, Perhaps because their
• 26:02
  life cycle involved in aquatic larval stage, the que had
• 26:06
  transmuted a large number of their human subjects in a
• 26:09
  bewildering array of aquatic creatures, taking care of by specially
• 26:14
  bred attendants. These post human water babies came in every
• 26:18
  shape and size imaginable. There were limbless, ribbon like varieties
• 26:24
  of eel people, huge whale like behemoths, decorative people who
• 26:29
  swam by squirting water out of their mouths, and horrifying
• 26:34
  multitudes of brainless wallowers that served as foodstock. All of
• 26:40
  them were perfectly domesticated, all of them when extinct. When
• 26:45
  their masters left all save a few lightly mutated generalized forms,
• 26:51
  these swimmers still resembled their human ancestors to a large degree.
• 26:56
  They had no artificial gills, their hands were still visible
• 27:00
  through their front flippers. Their feet were displayed affairs that
• 27:03
  functioned like a pair of tail flukes. Recognizably human eyes
• 27:08
  peeked through their blubbery eyelids, and they spoke to each other,
• 27:12
  though not in words and never insentient understanding. For millennia,
• 27:18
  they swam the oceans of their ecologically stunted world, feeding
• 27:22
  on diversifying kinds of fish and crustaceans, survivors of the
• 27:27
  foodstock originally imported from Earth. With the intervention of the
• 27:32
  que gone, natural selection resumed. The swimmers became more streamlined
• 27:39
  to better catch their fast prey. The prey responded by
• 27:42
  getting even faster or evolving defensive countermeasures such as armour,
• 27:47
  spikes or poison. Their evolution back on track, the swimmers
• 27:52
  drifted further and further away from their sentient ancestry. They
• 27:57
  would wait for a long time, indeed, to take least
• 28:00
  that blessing again the lizard herders they were the lucky ones.
• 28:10
  Instead of unrecognizably distorting them, as they had done to
• 28:13
  most of their subjects, the Q had merely erased their
• 28:17
  sentience and stunted the development of their brains, distantly resembling
• 28:22
  their ancient forebearers on Earth, The primitives led feral lives
• 28:27
  for an unnaturally long time. They never regained sentience after
• 28:31
  the Q left, despite having every incentive to do so.
• 28:35
  This was partially due to the total absence of predators
• 28:38
  on their garden world, resulting in no advantage for intelligence. Furthermore,
• 28:44
  the Q had made some small but integral changes to
• 28:47
  their brains, tweaking with the structure of Cerebellum so that
• 28:51
  certain features associated with heuristic learning would never emerge again.
• 28:58
  Once Again, the reasons for the us these baffling changes
• 29:01
  remained known only to the QUEUE. The dumb people eventually
• 29:06
  settled in a symbiosis with some of the other creatures
• 29:09
  that inhabited their planet. They began to instinctively farm some
• 29:15
  of the large herbivorous reptiles, ancestors of which were brought
• 29:19
  from Earth as pets. Soon the balance of this mutualism
• 29:24
  began to tip in the reptile's favor. The tropical climate
• 29:28
  of the planet gave them an inherent advantage, and they
• 29:31
  underwent a spectacular radiation of different species. They encountered no
• 29:37
  competition from the only large mammals on the planet, the
• 29:41
  brain newtered descendants of the starfarers. Faced with a reptilian turnover,
• 29:47
  the only adaptation the sub men could muster was to
• 29:50
  slip quietly into bestial oblivion.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: The tempters.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: In the tempter's case, the remodeling was done with an
• 30:02
  almost artistic enthusiasm. How they managed to survive in their
• 30:06
  bizarre form was not clear. Their ancestors were used as
• 30:10
  cecial decoration, and through some miracle of adaptation they had endured,
• 30:16
  no human would have recognized them as their descendants. The
• 30:20
  females were beaked cones of flesh some two meters tall,
• 30:23
  rooted in soil like grotesque carnivorous plants. The males, on
• 30:28
  the other hand, resembled contorted bipedal monkeys. Unlike their mates,
• 30:34
  they were perfectly ambulatory. Dozens of them ran around the
• 30:38
  female's mounds like so many imps. Some would gather food,
• 30:43
  others would clean the females, while others would stand on
• 30:47
  guard for danger. Although their actions looked purposeful, the males
• 30:52
  had no will of their own. In Tempter society, females
• 30:57
  controlled everything. Using a combination of vocal and pheromonal signals.
• 31:03
  They guided the masculine hordes into any number of menial tasks,
• 31:07
  while mating with the strongest, the most obedient, and the
• 31:10
  dumbest to produce even better drones. On certain periods, they
• 31:16
  would also give birth to a few precious females who
• 31:19
  would be carried away by subservient males to root themselves.
• 31:23
  It was a terribly efficient agemony that would certainly give
• 31:27
  rise to civilization in a matter of centuries, had fate
• 31:31
  not intervened. As a stray comet obliterated the Tempter's mound forests,
• 31:37
  one of humanity's best chances for re emergence was cruelly
• 31:41
  swept away.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: The bone crushers.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Through the deliberate modifications of Q and the blind molding
• 31:51
  of evolution, the heavens came to be populated with creatures
• 31:54
  that would put the myths of their ancestors to shame.
• 31:58
  Their ancestors were hind sized pets of que that were
• 32:02
  bred for the dazzling colors of their tooth derived beaks.
• 32:06
  When their masters left, most of these pampered creatures died
• 32:10
  with no one or nothing left to take care of them,
• 32:14
  but some belonging to the hardiest breeds survived in less
• 32:19
  than a geological eyeblink of a few million years. The
• 32:23
  descendants of such creatures radiated into the evolutionary vacuum of
• 32:27
  their garden world. One lineage led to a profusion of
• 32:31
  human herbivores. These were preyed upon by a variety of
• 32:35
  enameal beaked raptors, each evolved to deal with a specific prey.
• 32:41
  Among these generalized niches were entire assemblages of specialized animals,
• 32:47
  resembling anything from ibys build swamp sifters to splendorous forms
• 32:52
  with bizarre crests that flared out of their toothy beaks.
• 32:57
  There were even secondarily sentient forms in the shape of
• 33:01
  the ogre, like bone crushers. To one observer of today,
• 33:06
  they would indeed be the stuff of nightmares, three meters
• 33:10
  tall and hairy, sporting vicious thumb claws and enormous beaks
• 33:14
  that suited their scavenging diet. Despite their shortcomings, these corpse
• 33:20
  eating primitives were one of the first species to attain intelligence,
• 33:25
  and although primitive a level of civilization, all of these
• 33:30
  proved the fallacy of human prejudice. In the posthuman galaxy,
• 33:34
  a creature could feed on petrifying meat, stink like a grave,
• 33:38
  and express its affection by defecating on others, but it
• 33:42
  might as well be her own grandchildren and the last
• 33:46
  hope of mankind. In eventuality, however, not even the bone
• 33:51
  crushers fulfilled this promise. Their dependency on carrion for food
• 33:56
  limited their populations severely, and their medieval civilizations crumbled after
• 34:01
  a few uneventful millennia. The colonials their world had given
• 34:08
  the toughest resistance against the q onslaught so tough, in fact,
• 34:13
  that they had turned back two successive waves of the invaders,
• 34:17
  only to succumb to the third. And of course, the
• 34:20
  q with their twisted sense of justice, wanted to make
• 34:23
  them pay. Even extinction would be too light a punishment
• 34:27
  for resisting the star gods. The humans of the rogue
• 34:31
  world needed a sentence that would remind them of their
• 34:34
  humiliation for generations to come. So they were made into
• 34:38
  disembodied cultures of skin and muscle, connected by a skimpy
• 34:44
  network of the most basic nerves. They were employed as
• 34:47
  living filtering devices, subsisting on the waste products of Q civilization,
• 34:53
  like mats of cancer cells, and just to witness and
• 34:56
  suffer their wretched fate. Their eyes to get whether with
• 35:00
  their consciousness was retained for forty million years. They suffered
• 35:07
  generation after generation, were born into the most miserable of
• 35:12
  lives while absorbing the pain of all that they were
• 35:15
  going through. When the Q left, they hoped for a
• 35:18
  quick extinction, but their loneliness had also made them efficient survivors.
• 35:25
  Unchecked by the QUE. The colonials spread across the planet
• 35:29
  in quilt like fields of human flesh. After an eternity
• 35:34
  of tortured lives, the human fields tasted something that could
• 35:39
  almost be described as hope. The flyers, they were not
• 35:51
  uncommon at all in the domain of Q. At least
• 35:55
  a dozen worlds sported human derived flying species of one
• 35:59
  kind or another. Most resembled the bats or the pterosaurs
• 36:04
  of the bygone past, dancing through the ether like angels
• 36:08
  or demons, depending on the point of view. There were
• 36:11
  a few bizarre kinds which relied on swollen gas glands
• 36:15
  for flotation as well. Sadly, most of these creatures were
• 36:19
  already too specialized to be anything butt fliers. They had
• 36:23
  forsaken their humanity for the conquest of the sky. They
• 36:27
  had little potential for further radiation beyond their limited rolls.
• 36:31
  The only exception proved out to be a monkey like
• 36:35
  species that flew on wing membranes stretched across the last
• 36:39
  two fingers. Their advantage was a unique turbine like heart,
• 36:44
  artificially developed during the regime of Q. No other human
• 36:49
  flier in the galaxy had such an adaptation. The starfish
• 36:53
  shaped organs sat in the middle of their chests, directly
• 36:57
  funneling oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream in a
• 37:00
  supremely efficient way. This meant that the flyers could develop
• 37:05
  energy consuming adaptations such as large brains, without having to
• 37:10
  give up their power of flight. Not that the flyers
• 37:14
  were going to reclaim their sentience right away. Instead, they
• 37:18
  literally exploded into skies, filling the heavens with anything from
• 37:23
  bomber sized sailors to impossibly fast predators that raced with sound.
• 37:29
  Their world was pristine, and there were plenty of niches
• 37:33
  to play in intelligence could wait a little more.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: The hand flappers, some.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: Flying posthumans, reapproached sentience in an entirely different way. Without
• 37:49
  the augmented metabolisms or the gravitational advantage of their siblings
• 37:53
  on distant planets, they had no choice but to give
• 37:56
  up their power of flight in order to develop further.
• 38:01
  The hand flappers were one such species. Their wings, once
• 38:06
  used for butterflylike flutters in the unearthly gardens of Q,
• 38:10
  had shrunken and reverted back into their manual condition. Their
• 38:15
  legs were likewise readapted, but they bore a splayed awkwardness
• 38:19
  from their perching ancestry. Only a singular and almost sadistically
• 38:25
  simple flaw held them back from developing civilization. In the
• 38:31
  course of their secondary atrophy, the wings of the hand
• 38:35
  flappers had become useless as hands as well. Their flaglike
• 38:40
  appendages were very useful in signaling and mating dances, but
• 38:44
  they couldn't hurl missiles, construct shelter, or even manufacture basic
• 38:49
  stone tools. All that they could do with their useless
• 38:53
  hands was to display each other's sexual availability. So the
• 38:59
  hand flappers did just that, flashing and dancing their way
• 39:03
  to oblivion. The blind folk When the queue came, they
• 39:12
  dug in and dug in deep inside several continent sized
• 39:17
  shelters under the besieged world. They waited for the invaders
• 39:21
  to pass them by. It was a futile gamble. The
• 39:26
  Q located the shelter caves and remade their inhabitants without effort.
• 39:31
  Shelters became home to an entirely different ecology, a realm
• 39:36
  of perpetual darkness, fueled by the trickle of water in
• 39:39
  nutrients from the world outside. A surprisingly complex ecology developed
• 39:45
  on this scant resource. Gigantic pale insects, the descendants of
• 39:50
  common household pests, competed with doliesque birds and rodents over
• 39:55
  fields of overgrown fungi. Predators were not uncommon. Almost crocodilian
• 40:02
  fish patrolled the underground streams, and vast blind bats, echo
• 40:06
  locating with unnerving precision, took their toll on the residence
• 40:11
  of the cave floor. The kilometer high ceilings of the
• 40:15
  shelters glowed in the dark with protein constellations of bioluminescent
• 40:20
  fungi and in some cases animals. People were present here
• 40:27
  as well, albeit in unfamiliar forms. They were more often
• 40:32
  heard than seen as they tried to find their way
• 40:35
  in the dark with bansheel like screams. These albino troglodites
• 40:40
  lived in a realm where sound and touch, not sight,
• 40:44
  was the gateway of perception. They had developed long, tactile fingers,
• 40:51
  enormous whiskers, and mobile ears to live in the dark.
• 40:55
  Where their eyes should have been, there was nothing but
• 40:58
  a patch of haunting, flawlessly smooth skin. Their perfect adaptation
• 41:04
  to the world of darkness had erased the most basic
• 41:07
  feature of human recognition. As adapted as they were, they
• 41:14
  were doomed. Before the blind folk could develop any kind
• 41:18
  of intelligence to crawl out of their geographical graves, their
• 41:22
  glacial constriction of their world's continental plates snuffed out their
• 41:28
  shelters one by one.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: The Lopsiders.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: The Q were grotesquely creative in their redesign of the
• 41:40
  human worlds. One group of misfortunate souls, they transported to
• 41:45
  a planet with thirty six times the amount of normal
• 41:48
  gravity and made them over for life in this bizarrely
• 41:52
  and hospitable realm. The results of these experiments resembled nightmare
• 41:57
  sketchings of bosh Alli or Picasso. They looked like cripples
• 42:03
  squashed between sheets of glass. Three out of their four
• 42:07
  limbs had become paddle like organs for crawling. Only one
• 42:11
  of their arms remained a spindily tool of manipulation. This singular,
• 42:17
  wizened limb also doubled as an extra sensor, like the
• 42:22
  antenna of an insect. Their faces were different horrors altogether,
• 42:28
  All pretensions of symmetry the hallmark of terrestrial animals from
• 42:32
  jawish fish onwards were completely and utterly done away, with
• 42:37
  the bulging eyes stared directly upward while the others scanned
• 42:41
  ahead in the direction of the creature's vertically opening jaws.
• 42:45
  The ears were likewise distorted, monstrous as they looked. These
• 42:50
  ex men thrived in their heavy gravity environment. Once again,
• 42:57
  there was the usual explosion of species in every available niche,
• 43:02
  and the lopsiders consolidated their chances for a renewed sentience.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: The strikers.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: While the lopsiders were redesigned to live under an extreme
• 43:16
  gravity situation, another species had been adapted for life under
• 43:20
  the exact opposite conditions on a Jovian moon with one
• 43:25
  fifth of Earth's gravity. It was a world of wonders
• 43:29
  where even the grass grew almost ten meters tall, and
• 43:33
  the trees were beyond belief, towering to sizes attained only
• 43:37
  by the skyscrapers of antiquity. In these surreal forests lived
• 43:43
  equally spectacular fauna, the descendants of pets, pests, and livestock
• 43:48
  of humans, who in turn had been reduced to animosity
• 43:53
  as well. One could see them in the league tall forests,
• 43:58
  almost dancing among the trees as they reared higher and
• 44:01
  higher to browse. Their arms, legs, and necks had been
• 44:06
  stretched impossibly thin. Great flaps of skin blossomed throughout their
• 44:10
  bodies to dispense waste heat. Sometimes they would even change
• 44:16
  their color in order to reflect light and keep cool
• 44:20
  Overheating was a great problem for their grotesquely tall, thin bodies.
• 44:26
  Although imposing, these wraiths were overdeveloped as to be sickeningly fragile.
• 44:32
  Even on their gravitationally forgiving world, a fall could shatter
• 44:36
  their bones, and slipping down from a branch would prove
• 44:39
  to be fatal. Sometimes, on the open plains, even a
• 44:44
  strong wind could bring them down. Like the toppling masts,
• 44:49
  they survived entirely due to their merciful conditions of their
• 44:52
  garden World, which were about to change drastically. About two
• 44:58
  million years after the que their towering works of human art,
• 45:02
  A lineage of fearsome predators evolved from the terrestrial poultry
• 45:07
  that had gone feral on the planet, Resembling attuned versions
• 45:11
  of their dinosaur ancestors. The predators swept through the garden
• 45:15
  world like wildfire, extinguishing any species too fragile to escape
• 45:21
  or resist. The peaceful, delicate striders were among the first
• 45:27
  to go.
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: The parasites.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: Humanity have diverged into two separate lineages on their world.
• 45:39
  On one hand, there were several races of almost astrolopithecan cripples,
• 45:43
  degraded by the Cue for managing to turn back their
• 45:46
  initial wave of invasion. Yet simple etavism was too light
• 45:51
  a punishment for them. Their twisted relatives, the parasites, made
• 45:57
  up the second part of their sentence. There were actually
• 46:01
  several kinds of parasitic ex people, ranging from tortoise size
• 46:06
  ambulatory vampires to the more common fist sized variety that
• 46:11
  lived attached to their hosts. There was even a tiny
• 46:16
  and no parasitic kind that infested the wombs of their
• 46:19
  female victims, like ghastly living abortions. All of these evolutionary
• 46:25
  tortures were played out under the careful scrutiny of the
• 46:29
  queue for forty million years. The punishment was so baroque,
• 46:34
  so elaborate, that most of the artificial parasite host relationships
• 46:39
  died out when.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: The que left.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: Some submen learnt to cleanse their tick like relatives by drowning, burning,
• 46:48
  or even eating them. Others, like the vaginal parasites, died
• 46:54
  out as their regressive method of parasitism effectively sterilized their hosts.
• 47:00
  Yet one or two varieties did manage to cling on
• 47:03
  to their hosts with abdominal suckers, muscular gripping limbs, and
• 47:09
  sterile pain soothing saliva. But their success did not lie
• 47:14
  entirely in the strength of their parasitical advantages. They also
• 47:19
  learned to regulate their dumb hosts, not killing them by
• 47:23
  overinfestation and thus ensuring their own long term survival as well.
• 47:29
  In any case, totally single sided relations were rare in
• 47:33
  any ecology, natural or artificial. In millennial cycles, the cousin
• 47:40
  species vicious parasitism began to give way into something more
• 47:44
  beneficial for both sides.
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: The finger fishers.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: Their ancestors were trapped on an archipelago world, a planet
• 47:56
  sprinkled with many small continents and countless eyelands over interconnected
• 48:01
  networks of calm, shallow seas, like a magnifying agean. The
• 48:07
  place was a terrestrial paradise in many respects, except that
• 48:11
  after the queue, no mines were left to enjoy it.
• 48:17
  On this vacant biosphere, Evolution was quick to begin her blind,
• 48:21
  unpredictable dance. Once feral, the descendants of degenerate humans adapted
• 48:27
  themselves to every available niche, no matter how exotic, how outlandish.
• 48:34
  One group learned to pluck fish from the lazy shores.
• 48:38
  A millennia passed and they settled more into their pescatarial lifestyle.
• 48:43
  Elongated fingers became ambulatory fish hooks. Teeth modified for a
• 48:48
  less generalized diet became needlelike affairs, lined up neatly in
• 48:53
  a long, thin muzzle. In less than a few million years,
• 48:58
  the finger fishers established them themselves as a prominent lineage.
• 49:03
  There was scarcely a beach, an island, or an estuary
• 49:07
  that was devoid of their pale, lanky forms. As prolific
• 49:12
  as they were, the fissures were still no better than animals.
• 49:17
  Their humanity would come only after another spasm about landish
• 49:22
  adaptations the Heatonists. Even the blissful existence of the finger
• 49:32
  fishers would have seemed bothersome to the Hedonists, for their
• 49:35
  kind was not evolved, but designed for a life of pleasure.
• 49:41
  The Queue had kept them as pampered pets set loose
• 49:44
  in a tropical island world of succulent fruits, bountiful trees
• 49:49
  in calm lapping lakes full of sweet bacterial manna. Furthermore,
• 49:55
  the hedonists were left as the only animal life on
• 49:58
  this place. They had no choice but to enjoy it
• 50:01
  to the fullest. In normal conditions, any given species would
• 50:06
  quickly crowd out such any utopian environment. But normal conditions
• 50:11
  had never been the point of the Q redesign. They
• 50:15
  had altered their subjects so that they could conceive only
• 50:18
  after mating an enormous number of potential suitors continually over
• 50:23
  a period of decades. While this took care of the
• 50:27
  population problem, it also made the species less adaptable. Without
• 50:32
  any point in sexual competition, natural selection would progress only
• 50:37
  at a glacial pace. Fortunately, their stable microcosm remained free
• 50:42
  of environmental catastrophes. Even after the que left. All these
• 50:48
  changes had also made the hedonist's day. Their lives were
• 50:53
  juxtaposed routines of browsing, sleeping, and mind blowing sex. Troubled
• 50:58
  neither by the concerns of day disease or pregnancy, aloof
• 51:03
  and care free, they enjoyed the most pleasurable times of
• 51:07
  all mankinds, albeit with the intellectual capabilities of three year olds.
• 51:13
  It didn't really matter, though, who needed to think when
• 51:17
  having such a nice time? After all? The insectophagi, nondescript,
• 51:28
  quaint human species abounded in the post Q galaxy. Hundreds
• 51:32
  of them lived out simple, unnoticed lives, never developing to
• 51:36
  become sentient, never learning their true heritage as starborn human beings.
• 51:42
  Most of them, when extinct, not to be missed or
• 51:45
  even remembered. Those that lingered on managed to survive in shady,
• 51:50
  quiet niches, never again making an impact on the celestial
• 51:54
  scheme of things. One such species was the insectophagi. They
• 52:00
  had quietly adapted themselves for a diet of colonial insects
• 52:04
  and small animals. They had faces covered with leathery plates,
• 52:08
  claw like hands to dig out prey in worm like
• 52:11
  tongues to scoop them up. In all, they weren't special
• 52:16
  in any particular way, but a combination of galactic invasions, coincidence,
• 52:21
  and pure luck would later make them the longest enduring
• 52:26
  of all unstar men. The meek would inherit the cosmos,
• 52:31
  though not just yet. For now, the insectophagi were concerned
• 52:36
  only with the location of insect colonies and the onset
• 52:39
  of the mating season the spacers. It must be remembered
• 52:47
  that the star people did not succumb entirely to the
• 52:50
  que invasions. While their worlds fell away one by one,
• 52:54
  some star people took refuge in the void of space.
• 52:58
  One after another. In entire communities scrambled into generation ships
• 53:02
  and cast themselves off into the darkness, hoping to go
• 53:06
  unnoticed by the beings that have overrun their galaxy. Desperate
• 53:11
  times made for desperate measures, As the Starmen had observed
• 53:15
  during their initial colonization of the galaxy, life and generation
• 53:19
  ships inevitably led to mass insanity and anarchy. This time, however,
• 53:26
  humans had to adapt themselves or face extinction. Entire asteroid
• 53:32
  fields were confiscated and hollowed out to make spaceships of
• 53:35
  unseen size. These hollow shells cradled bubbles of precious air
• 53:40
  and water, but no artificial gravity of any kind. It
• 53:45
  was discovered that a purely ethereal existence would ease the
• 53:49
  stress of interstellar exile, provided that its inhabitants were adapted
• 53:53
  for life inside such an environment. Furthermore, people were forced
• 53:59
  to change themselves in an atmospherically sealed, gravity free environment,
• 54:06
  their bones were left free to grow longer, thinner, and spindlier.
• 54:11
  The circulatory and digestive systems were pressurized to avoid heart
• 54:15
  problems and congestion. The latter change had another advantageous side effect.
• 54:21
  Humans could navigate through the void with jets of air
• 54:24
  expelled from modified anuses. Such experiments were numerous and usually
• 54:31
  plagued with failure, yet they did succeed in creating a
• 54:35
  future sealed tight in their moon sized, air filled, weightless havens.
• 54:42
  The descendants of the Star people managed to evade the
• 54:45
  scourge of Q. It was an endless diaspora. Even after
• 54:50
  the Q left, they would find themselves too divergent to
• 54:53
  have anything to do with their ancestral lifestyles. The survivors
• 54:58
  of the initial hurdle would never see foot on a
• 55:01
  planet again. The Ruin Haunters, a particular human species singled
• 55:11
  out by its lucky access to the heritage of its
• 55:14
  stellar ancestors, would eventually get to play a leading role
• 55:18
  in the shape of things to come. They had gotten
• 55:21
  through the Que invasion with relatively little degradation. Yes, they
• 55:26
  had been reduced to the level of apes, but their
• 55:30
  recovery had been quick. Apparently, the q had not worked
• 55:34
  as hard at suppressing their intelligence, nor had they made
• 55:38
  a comparable effort to wipe away the material traces of
• 55:41
  the Starman. Even after millions of years, enormous ruins of
• 55:47
  the global urban spaces littered the continents of their world.
• 55:52
  Thus did the Ruin Hunters earn their names. All of
• 55:56
  this development happened in an unnaturally short period of time
• 56:00
  time and sometimes the old technologies were not even understood
• 56:04
  as they were blindly replicated. Needless to say, such a
• 56:08
  pace of development put premature stresses on the social and
• 56:12
  political structures of the Ruin Hunters. They barely survived the
• 56:16
  five consecutive world wars that raked their planet, two of
• 56:20
  which were thermonuclear exchanges. They made it through their baptism
• 56:26
  with fire had hardened and awakened them. The wars united
• 56:30
  them politically and pushed their technological capabilities even beyond the
• 56:35
  level of the Starmen. Coincidentally, they also developed a dangerous
• 56:40
  form of a tochthenous madness. The ruin Hunters had come
• 56:45
  to believe that they were the sole descendants and the
• 56:48
  true heirs of the Star people, and they were ready
• 56:52
  and willing to do anything in order to claim their fictitious,
• 56:56
  bygone Golden Age.
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: Sentience reborn.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: If any sort of periodical arrangement can be brought to
• 57:08
  the history of mankind, the post Q era of emerging
• 57:12
  human animals can be likened to a series of millennial
• 57:16
  dark ages. However, like any dark age situation, these periods
• 57:22
  of silence had finite lifespans. One by one, like stars
• 57:28
  emerging from the fog, new civilizations were borne out of
• 57:31
  the shattered remnants of mankind. In some rare cases, the
• 57:37
  recovery was swift and straightforward. In most other situations, it
• 57:42
  came only after a lengthy series of adaptive radiations, extinctions,
• 57:47
  and secondary diversifications. Within these lines of descent, there was
• 57:53
  as much distance between the initial posthumans and their intelligent descendants,
• 57:59
  as between the first crestaceous fuzzballs and Homo sapiens. Sooner
• 58:05
  or later, human intelligence returned to the cosmos. But except
• 58:11
  from their shared ancestry, these new people had nothing in
• 58:14
  common with people of today or even.
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: Each other extinction.
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: Not all human animals made it through. In fact, it
• 58:27
  must be realized that the majority of post Q humans
• 58:31
  died out during the eras of transition. Extinction, utter and
• 58:36
  absolute death of an entire family, an entire community, an
• 58:41
  entire species was rampant in the galaxy. There was nothing
• 58:46
  cruel or dramatic in all of this. Extinction was as
• 58:49
  common and as natural a speciation. Sometimes a species simply
• 58:55
  failed to adapt to competition or the abrupt change of
• 58:58
  its conditions. In other occasions, their numbers dwindled across imperceptible
• 59:04
  gulfs of time. This way or the other human animals
• 59:09
  faded out. In all of this death, however, there was
• 59:14
  new life. As one species vacated a certain niche, others
• 59:19
  would soon step in to take its place. Adaptive radiations
• 59:23
  would follow, filling in the blanks with myriads of diverse
• 59:27
  and varied forms. Despite the fallen, the flow of life
• 59:32
  would proceed blazing in constant turnover the snake people, descendants
• 59:43
  of the worms. The scorching sun eventually cooled down and
• 59:48
  life flooded back to the surface from her subterranean stronghold.
• 59:53
  As animals of all kinds exploded into the terrestrial niches
• 59:56
  that had been vacant from millennia, so did the de
• 1:00:00
  of the worms. On the surface. They found new opportunities
• 1:00:04
  as entire assemblages of serpentine grazers, swimmers, predators, and people,
• 1:00:11
  one form descended from tree climbing mammalian snakes re evolved
• 1:00:16
  the human intelligence that had lain dormant for so long.
• 1:00:20
  They observed, contemplated, and philosophized with novel, spirally coiled brains,
• 1:00:26
  and handled the world with a singular pelvic hand borne
• 1:00:31
  out from the remnants of their ancestors feet. They looked
• 1:00:35
  nothing at all like their distant human ancestors, but their
• 1:00:38
  social development followed a similar path. Several agricultural world empires
• 1:00:44
  followed by industrial revolutions, social experiments, world wars, civil wars,
• 1:00:50
  and globalization. But then again, socio political parallelism in history
• 1:00:57
  did not necessarily imply a similar or even recognizably human world.
• 1:01:03
  Modern cities of the global snake world were tangles of
• 1:01:06
  pipe like roads branching three dimensional railroads, and windowless, whole
• 1:01:13
  like buildings. Though their knotted architecture deferred from region to region,
• 1:01:18
  these settlements generally looked like kilometer wide balls of glass, metal, plastic,
• 1:01:24
  and cloth, wrapped so tightly that a human of today
• 1:01:28
  would find it impossible to move inside of them. Plazas
• 1:01:32
  and open areas were totally absent, as they presented navigational
• 1:01:36
  obstacles in areas of insecurity. Their evolutionary background in the
• 1:01:41
  trees had made the snake people into borderline agoraphobes. None
• 1:01:47
  of these, of course, was unusual to the snakes in
• 1:01:50
  any way. Their relatively alien lifestyle was so particular to
• 1:01:55
  them as ours is to us. All across their world,
• 1:02:00
  the arterial cities throbbed with people, each with their own joys, sorrows,
• 1:02:06
  and chores, living out lives as human as any other
• 1:02:10
  intelligent beings.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 2: The killer folk, descendants of the human predators.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: The carnivorous, also rebounded in a civilization. Their journey involved
• 1:02:26
  a series of changes during which they lost the adaptations
• 1:02:29
  that had allowed them to endure as the top predators
• 1:02:32
  of their world. The saber teeth became fragile and thin,
• 1:02:37
  useful only as organs of social display. The hook like
• 1:02:42
  thumb claws were also reduced, but not deleted. In their place,
• 1:02:47
  the last two digits rotated perpendicularly to become new fangled graspers.
• 1:02:54
  All this gracility, however, did not mean weakness. Although they
• 1:02:59
  were no longer special for hunting, the killer folk could
• 1:03:02
  still kill with their bare hands, but only if they
• 1:03:06
  really wanted to. What enormous claws and teeth could not
• 1:03:11
  do they could easily achieve with bow, arrow and flintlock
• 1:03:15
  repeater or gas rifle. Their descent from predators gave the
• 1:03:20
  killer folk a unique social profile. Almost all of their
• 1:03:25
  religions had rituals allowing for periods of completely natural, animalistic
• 1:03:30
  hunts and duels. This necessity of venting these atavistic urges
• 1:03:35
  also led to the formation of religious hunter nobilities, privileged
• 1:03:41
  warriors who were skilled in the arts of hunting, war,
• 1:03:45
  and murder. Entire societies were assembled underneath these ruling classes,
• 1:03:52
  orderly communities that erupted once every year into an orgy
• 1:03:56
  of death, sex, and prayer. For thousands of years, nomadic
• 1:04:02
  warriors together with their vast herds of once human livestock,
• 1:04:07
  chased and battled each other across a chessboard of continents.
• 1:04:13
  All of this chaos was to be swept apart with
• 1:04:16
  the advent of modernity, in a development comparable to an
• 1:04:20
  industrial revolution. One nation pack of Killers devised methods of settled,
• 1:04:25
  intensive factory farming, organized state structure. Secularism, and technological leap
• 1:04:33
  frogging were quick to follow. Needless to say, such developments
• 1:04:38
  polarized the world into bands of progressive, developed factory herders
• 1:04:43
  and increasingly fanatical hunting states. While one side condemned their
• 1:04:49
  old animal ways, the other side embraced them with blind zealotry.
• 1:04:54
  This was their crisis of modernity, the balkanization of the
• 1:04:58
  progressive and conservative factions on the road to global unity. Fortunately,
• 1:05:04
  the Killers managed to pull themselves through, even after drifting
• 1:05:09
  dangerously close to global conflict at certain points.
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 2: The tool breeders descendants of the swimmers.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: They used to be simple creatures, descendants of a battered
• 1:05:24
  people that had taken to the sea. The remote Sapian
• 1:05:28
  ancestors would have given such beings no chance of a
• 1:05:31
  sentient comeback, for they thought that technological advances were impossible
• 1:05:36
  in the fluid medium of the oceans, but the swimmers
• 1:05:40
  disproved such predictions by founding one of the most advanced
• 1:05:44
  and most outrageously alien cultures of the entire human lineage. Fire,
• 1:05:51
  the cornerstone of industrial engineering, was almost impossible to sustain
• 1:05:55
  and use under water, but the Breeders simply choose another path.
• 1:06:00
  When complex tool making proved impractical, they began to breed
• 1:06:04
  their tools and machines for them. It it started long
• 1:06:09
  before the species was even intelligent. In the endless variety
• 1:06:13
  of life in the seas, the swimmers always adapted and
• 1:06:16
  controlled the organisms that were useful in some way. Once domesticated,
• 1:06:22
  these creatures were willingly or in unintentionally modified through artificial
• 1:06:26
  selection and conditioning. The process was slow, but once underway,
• 1:06:32
  its effects were formidable. A modern city of the Breeders
• 1:06:37
  was a sight to behold. Huge heartlike creatures pumped out
• 1:06:41
  nutritious fluids to a network of self repairing living conduits.
• 1:06:47
  This was their equivalent of a power grid, and it
• 1:06:50
  reached every single one of the breeder's huge exoskeleton dwellings,
• 1:06:55
  powering bioluminescent lights, flickering cephalopod skin, televisions, medicinal sea sports,
• 1:07:03
  and countless other devices that had been bred from living creatures.
• 1:07:07
  The advances in biology had risen exponentially until genetic engineering
• 1:07:12
  was completely mastered. Modern breeders did not even need to
• 1:07:16
  use animals. A simple manipulation of cultured tissues and stem
• 1:07:20
  cells could give solutions to any problem at hand. The
• 1:07:24
  mastery of genetics had conquered many obstacles. The yawning ocean depths,
• 1:07:29
  as well as the planet's few tiny land masses, were
• 1:07:33
  now firmly within the breeder's grasp. However, they were not
• 1:07:38
  content with mere planetary dreams. New forms and bizarre creatures
• 1:07:44
  were still being developed, and daring attempts to conquer the
• 1:07:48
  one realm that was most hostile to life. Sealed in
• 1:07:53
  their living ships, the breeders wished to return to the stars.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: Sorrow Sapiens livestock of the lizard herders.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: One of humanity's eventual inheritors, was not even human. They
• 1:08:11
  came from the reptilian stock that had proliferated during the
• 1:08:14
  demise of the lizard herders. Theirs was a true case
• 1:08:19
  of a world turned upside down as the humans degenerated
• 1:08:23
  into witless animals. The cold blooded reptiles prospered in the
• 1:08:27
  tropical climate of their planet. Millennia passed, and they began
• 1:08:32
  to produce increasingly smarter forms, one of which, distantly resembling
• 1:08:37
  featherless versions of the predatory dinosaurs of the past, actually
• 1:08:42
  crossed over the threshold of scentiens and built up a
• 1:08:45
  series of civilizations. These fledgling cultures were quick to understand
• 1:08:50
  the true origin of the monstrous ruins littering their planet,
• 1:08:55
  ruins that until then had been considered natural aberrations of
• 1:08:58
  timeless memorability of gods. Now, however, they saw the intermingled
• 1:09:05
  ruins of the que and the star people for what
• 1:09:07
  they really were. It was through this understanding that the
• 1:09:11
  biologically unrelated sauruses took up the cultural identity of humanity.
• 1:09:18
  In their archaeological efforts. The sauruses began to understand that
• 1:09:22
  the animals they used for food and labor were descended
• 1:09:25
  from the founders of their very existence, and somewhere in
• 1:09:30
  the stars lurked the forces that malformed them, forces greater
• 1:09:34
  than the star people, dark forces that might someday return.
• 1:09:39
  The human animals served as a reminder, just as Panderabus had,
• 1:09:44
  that if the sorrow Sapiens wanted to assure their continued
• 1:09:48
  existence in the cosmos, they had to be watchful. The
• 1:09:53
  pressure of such a reality put their cultures under enormous stress.
• 1:09:58
  Some factions turned to made up really religions and remained
• 1:10:01
  ignorant under an umbrella of comforting fantasies. Others acknowledged the
• 1:10:05
  threats of the galaxy, but reverted to a paranoid rhetoric
• 1:10:09
  of conservationism. The galaxy had scared them greatly. Finally, there
• 1:10:16
  were those who acted to face the odds, however great
• 1:10:19
  they might be. Conflicts and even wars were not uncommon
• 1:10:23
  between these three factions. In the end, the centuries long
• 1:10:28
  dispute began to resolve in the progressive faction's favor. As
• 1:10:32
  they expanded their spheres of knowledge, influence, and activity, the
• 1:10:37
  sorrow Sapiens became as human as any other civilization opening
• 1:10:42
  up to the galaxy.
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: The modular people, descendants of the colonials.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: The blind workings of evolution, followed the unlikeliest paths, made
• 1:10:56
  use of the most fleeting opportunities. The very existing distance
• 1:11:00
  of the Modular people was testimony to this fact, their ancestors,
• 1:11:05
  the colonials, would have been seen as helpless cripples by
• 1:11:09
  almost any observer. They lacked coherent organs, and their existence
• 1:11:14
  was limited to carpeting water shores like mats of algae.
• 1:11:19
  But as degenerate as they were, the colonials were resilient survivors,
• 1:11:24
  able to hold on to life in the harshest of conditions.
• 1:11:29
  As time passed, they began to organize themselves in differentiated colonies.
• 1:11:34
  Instead of homogeneous mats. In the colonies, each human cell
• 1:11:40
  could perform a singular function and benefit from the union
• 1:11:43
  of others. Thus began the Great Age of Organization, during
• 1:11:48
  which different colonies competed with each other by developing specialized
• 1:11:52
  human cells that would give them an edge in the
• 1:11:55
  struggle for life. Some colonies grew enormous tap roots that
• 1:12:01
  were able to siphon resources from far away Others abandoned
• 1:12:06
  roots altogether and began to move themselves on starfish like
• 1:12:09
  foot segments. Some colonies came up with units equipped with
• 1:12:14
  claws and poisons, taking competition to a brand new deadly level.
• 1:12:20
  Others responded to the threat with armour plating or watcher
• 1:12:24
  cells equipped with enormous eyes. The eventual winner of the
• 1:12:29
  colonial arms race was a sentient colony organized around hyper
• 1:12:34
  specialized units whose entire purpose was to direct the others.
• 1:12:39
  These colonies spread around the planet as they adapted the
• 1:12:42
  parts of their rivals to function within themselves. Thus were
• 1:12:47
  the modular people born, living in fully industrialized megalipollai. They
• 1:12:54
  came in an indescribable variation of shapes and sizes. Anything
• 1:13:00
  from castle like guardian forests to diminutive scuttling couriers was
• 1:13:05
  a member of the modular whole. They could combine with
• 1:13:10
  each other and split up or exchange parts as needs
• 1:13:14
  presented themselves. The only thing constant in all of their
• 1:13:19
  protein existence was their mental and cultural unity. Due to
• 1:13:24
  their biological structure, these people had managed the impossible. They
• 1:13:29
  were actually living in a world of peace and utopian equality,
• 1:13:34
  where everybody was happy to be parts of greater united holes.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: Ptero sapiens descendants of the Flyers.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: The Flyers' supercharged hearts had given them an evolutionary winning hand,
• 1:13:57
  and they diversified to fill up the heavens. It was
• 1:14:01
  only a time before the competition in the skies got
• 1:14:04
  too intense even for their own souped up metabolisms. Some
• 1:14:10
  lineages gave up their wings and returned to the ground,
• 1:14:13
  living as deferring sorts of predators, herbivores, and even swimmers.
• 1:14:20
  Their aerial adaptations gave them an edge on the ground,
• 1:14:23
  and they produced forms of stupendous size and agility. There
• 1:14:27
  were wonderful beings, but no sentience came out of the
• 1:14:31
  terrestrial skybeasts. Instead, civilization flowered in the skies. One species
• 1:14:39
  from a line of wading storklike predators evolved a brain
• 1:14:44
  that was large enough to imagine and act upon the world.
• 1:14:48
  Their feet, already versatile to catch slippery swamp dwelling prey,
• 1:14:54
  got even more articulate and assumed the roll of their
• 1:14:57
  hands as a comp sensation. They lost some of their
• 1:15:02
  aerial streamlining, but what they could not do with their
• 1:15:05
  bodies they were more than able to make up with
• 1:15:08
  their minds. Their power of flight made the Ptero sapiens
• 1:15:13
  a global folk. Before they could invent nations and borders.
• 1:15:18
  With such an inherent ease of travel, ideas and individuals
• 1:15:22
  diffused too fast for social differences to ossify. Acting with
• 1:15:28
  a planetary awareness, they farmed their gigantic terrestrial relatives raised
• 1:15:34
  cities of perches and flooding towers, harnessed the atom, and
• 1:15:40
  began to gaze up to the stars without having to
• 1:15:44
  compensate too much from the average individual's social welfare and
• 1:15:50
  without dividing up into quarrelsome factions. As egalitarian as their
• 1:15:57
  life seemed, they paid a stunting, inevitable price. Their hearts,
• 1:16:04
  even in its boosted state, had trouble supporting their power
• 1:16:09
  of flight and grotesquely large brains.
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: At the same time.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: As a consequence, their species had an ephemeral lifespan. A
• 1:16:19
  pterosapian was sexually mature at two, middle aged by sixteen,
• 1:16:24
  and usually dead by twenty three years of our time.
• 1:16:29
  This grim cycle caused them to appreciate every moment of
• 1:16:33
  their existence dearly, and they pondered upon it with a
• 1:16:37
  feverish intensity. A shelf of scrolls by Pterosapian philosophers would
• 1:16:43
  have been the envy of every human library in their cities.
• 1:16:49
  Life blazed away with unreal speed, rushing past to meet
• 1:16:53
  fleeting deadlines. As a species, the angelic fliers were victims
• 1:17:00
  of heart disease.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: Asymmetric people descendants of the Lopsiders.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: Although contorted by gravity, the Lopsiders managed to regain their
• 1:17:16
  sentience and develop a civilization in a short few million years.
• 1:17:22
  Squat pancake like buildings spread all over their planet. These
• 1:17:27
  constructs looked like squashed bunkers, and they were never more
• 1:17:30
  than a few meters high. They did not seem like much,
• 1:17:35
  but such structures were entrances to underground homes, schools, hospitals, temples, universities,
• 1:17:43
  but also embassies, prisons, asylums, command centers, and arsenals. They
• 1:17:51
  lived strange lives, but the Lopsiders were human in all
• 1:17:55
  of their virtues and evils.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 2: Thus, it was.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: Only natural for them to expand outwards and look for
• 1:18:02
  new frontiers to colonize. Fortunately, their Solar system harbored other
• 1:18:08
  planets similar to the Lopsid homeworld in almost all respects,
• 1:18:14
  all respects except gravity, but they weren't willing to let
• 1:18:20
  such trivial details stop them. Throughout their history, humans had
• 1:18:26
  always risked changing themselves to preserve their future. It was
• 1:18:31
  a risky gamble, but it had paid off since the
• 1:18:33
  days of the Martian Americans. But re engineering the flattened
• 1:18:38
  Lopsider body for a benign gravity was a monumental task. Indeed,
• 1:18:43
  suffice it to say that the experiments took millennia to
• 1:18:47
  achieve even limited success. After countless attempts, the Asymmetric people
• 1:18:53
  were born, or rather made. Their bodies were changed considerably.
• 1:18:59
  What had been shovel like toes to slither through the
• 1:19:02
  high gravity dirt had become centipedal legs, and the singular
• 1:19:07
  grasping hand was elongated to an extreme degree. Their grotesque
• 1:19:12
  faces had been inverted and turned upside down. After reverting
• 1:19:16
  from a flounder like existence. Twisted as they were, members
• 1:19:22
  of this new race enjoyed tremendous advantages over their flattened forefathers.
• 1:19:27
  Their social development also paralleled that of the bygone Martian Americans.
• 1:19:33
  Once again, there was a golden age, followed by increasing
• 1:19:36
  tensions and interplanetary war. But unlike the Martians, the Asymmetrics
• 1:19:44
  ruthlessly exterminated their parent race and went on to rule
• 1:19:48
  the Solar System alone. On the way, they stumbled across
• 1:19:53
  the remains of the Queue and the star people, and
• 1:19:56
  they advanced immensely. Jumpthened on their own realm, they turned
• 1:20:03
  to the heavens for further exploits, symbiotes, descendants of the parasites.
• 1:20:16
  As time passed, the relationships between the parasites and their
• 1:20:20
  hosts got connected to such a degree that it began
• 1:20:23
  to involve a cooperation of the individuals. There were no
• 1:20:28
  longer single sided relationships. In exchange for their host's nutritious blood,
• 1:20:34
  the parasites offered their heightened senses as early warning against
• 1:20:38
  predators and other hazards. A great arms race of symbiotic
• 1:20:45
  relationships thus commenced. Certain parasites offered their host's larger eyes, others,
• 1:20:52
  sharper senses of smell, hearing, or even additional defensive weapons
• 1:20:57
  in the shape of venomous saliva, malaterant sprays, or an
• 1:21:02
  extra bite. The hosts returned the favor with longer running legs,
• 1:21:08
  stronger bodies, and specialized ergonomic nesting sites, rich in blood
• 1:21:14
  vessels and covered in insulating fur. Different complexes of parasite
• 1:21:20
  and host species evolved, compatible only amongst themselves. The development
• 1:21:26
  of such creatures was in a way reminiscent of the
• 1:21:28
  great modular colonies thriving on their own world light years away.
• 1:21:34
  But unlike the modulars, the components of the symbiotes belonged
• 1:21:37
  to different species instead of modified versions of the same
• 1:21:41
  basic organism. In eventuality, both relationships led to the same
• 1:21:46
  point sentience. In the secluded forests of a certain continent,
• 1:21:53
  a new parasitic species developed. They did not have the
• 1:21:57
  ballistic poison sprays, infectiousnes stings with a grossly hypertrophied arm
• 1:22:03
  clause of their relatives. Instead, these parasites offered a simpler bargain,
• 1:22:10
  an ability to think in return of total submission. Initially,
• 1:22:16
  this relationship was more like a horse and its rider,
• 1:22:19
  but after a few hundred thousand years, the symbiotes could
• 1:22:22
  manipulate their hosts like puppets through a combination of tactile
• 1:22:27
  in olfactory signals. A few more millennia in these combined
• 1:22:32
  beings developed in order not unlike our own, complete with countries, politics,
• 1:22:37
  and even war, albeit reduced in the newly globalizing world culture.
• 1:22:44
  In this age, technology filled most functions of the hosts,
• 1:22:49
  but a thriving husbandry of these creatures still remained due
• 1:22:53
  to tradition and simple efficiency. An average symbiote would begin
• 1:22:59
  the day on his business host and move on to
• 1:23:02
  a more comfortable domestic one when he returned home after work,
• 1:23:07
  and perhaps on the olfactory television, he would smell news
• 1:23:11
  of the excavations of the million year old q ruins,
• 1:23:15
  of the marvelous discoveries salvaged from the starman rex Or
• 1:23:21
  to the enormous radio arrays that rose everywhere to listen
• 1:23:25
  to the stars. It was a pattern that was being
• 1:23:30
  repeated all over sale people descendants of the finger Fishers.
• 1:23:41
  The finger Fishers were already among the most divergent of
• 1:23:44
  the posthuman races. With harpoon like digits and almost crocodilian muzzles,
• 1:23:51
  they looked nothing like their parental stock, but even this
• 1:23:55
  form would look conservative to their sentient descendants. With many small,
• 1:24:00
  scattered islands, isolated subcontinents, and differentiated niches, their home world
• 1:24:07
  was an evolutionary cauldron where isolated members of certain species could,
• 1:24:12
  under the right circumstances, evolve into wildly different forms. This
• 1:24:19
  condition was similar to the island realms of Madagascar, Galapagos,
• 1:24:24
  or Hawaii on Old Earth, except this time it was
• 1:24:28
  on a global scale. Some descendants of the Fissures, trapped
• 1:24:33
  on lonely islands, grew smaller and developed their fishing claws
• 1:24:36
  in a graceful wings others took directly to the sea
• 1:24:41
  and became analogous of whales, dolphins, and mosasaurs. Within this
• 1:24:47
  evolutionary bubbling, one particular lineage gave rise to the ancestral
• 1:24:53
  sale people. They too elongated their fingers into wings, but
• 1:24:58
  these were not used for flo Instead, they became saals
• 1:25:02
  that drove them effortlessly across the oceans. With fingers turned
• 1:25:07
  into sails. They used their mouths in extended tongues to
• 1:25:10
  catch their pelegic prey. These organs eventually assumed the role
• 1:25:16
  of the fisher's long, atrophied, dexterous hands. The need to
• 1:25:20
  better navigate the endless sea put an inevitable pressure on
• 1:25:24
  their memories, and the sailor's brains grew correspondingly. It was
• 1:25:30
  only a matter of time until one of these navigators
• 1:25:32
  became smart enough to think. Even when sentient, the sale
• 1:25:39
  people still needed a long time to achieve any sort
• 1:25:42
  of social stability. Their scattered world made for a tremendous
• 1:25:47
  diversity of cultures, which competed and fought just as resiliently
• 1:25:54
  across generations. Untold flotillas of tribal warriors battled each other.
• 1:26:00
  An epoch spanning pointless conflicts. Nomadic warriors and pirate societies
• 1:26:07
  inevitably came into being, prolonging the uncontrollable cycle of violence.
• 1:26:14
  Only when a certain warrior tribe developed warfare on an
• 1:26:17
  industrial scale and the state society needed to support it.
• 1:26:21
  And then only when this notion of modernity gave rise
• 1:26:25
  to an idea of peace, did the Sale people finally
• 1:26:29
  manage to unify. Generations of blood had stained the oceans
• 1:26:36
  for far too long.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: Bug facers, descendants of the insectophagi.
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: Over time, their insectivorous ancestors came to resemble their prey.
• 1:26:52
  Hardened leathery face plates, once used for defense against stings
• 1:26:56
  and bites, ossified and became integrated into the structure. Their
• 1:27:02
  hands and feet, with reduced numbers of fingers and toes,
• 1:27:06
  developed into pincer like affairs. Even their metabolism reverted partially
• 1:27:11
  into ectothermi in the balmy, lazy climate of their planet.
• 1:27:17
  But it was none of those adaptations that gave them
• 1:27:20
  the edge in survival. Simply put, a congenital defect allowed
• 1:27:25
  them to regain their sentience even after the smothering of
• 1:27:29
  the queue. The genes of the Star people remained dormant
• 1:27:33
  in their cells. Through pure coincidence, one lineage of the
• 1:27:37
  Insectophagi developed an atavistic throwback, resulting in larger brains which
• 1:27:43
  just happened to be useful, and cracking open insect nests
• 1:27:47
  with crude stone tools. It was all downhill from there onwards.
• 1:27:54
  Although millennia long in itself, the development from stone acts
• 1:27:57
  to spaceship was an eyeblink and geologic time. Like many
• 1:28:02
  other species, the bug Facers passed through a consecutive cycle
• 1:28:06
  as agrarian, in their case, high farming empires, colonial endeavors, industrialization,
• 1:28:15
  massive world wars, and finally globalized world states. But there
• 1:28:22
  was one thing that set their development apart from all
• 1:28:25
  other posthuman species. They faced another alien invasion. History does
• 1:28:33
  not record much about the invaders, except that, unlike the Queue,
• 1:28:37
  theirs was a singular effort and it was beaten off
• 1:28:41
  in an intense cycle of orbital and terrestrial wars. Although vanquished,
• 1:28:47
  the invaders did succeed in leaving behind their traces. They
• 1:28:52
  introduced their own flora and fauna, which flourished on the
• 1:28:55
  bug Facer home planet long after they departed. More in port,
• 1:29:01
  they imbided the poor bugfacers with pathological interspecies xenophobia, to
• 1:29:07
  the point that they were fearful even of their posthuman
• 1:29:10
  cousins on other stars. Through an ironic twist of fate,
• 1:29:16
  their fears would be more than justified, though not just yet.
• 1:29:21
  The bug facers still had time aster Morph's, descendants of
• 1:29:31
  the Spacers. Initially refugees, the Spacers were quick to master
• 1:29:37
  the vastness of interstellar space. Their isolated space arcs joined
• 1:29:42
  together and multiplied to form a gigantic, interlocked artifact that
• 1:29:46
  was large enough to contain entire worlds. But no planets
• 1:29:51
  lay inside the Astromorph capital, only cavernous, gravity free bubbles,
• 1:29:57
  where the inhabitants could finally developed to the fullest. Freed
• 1:30:02
  from the constraints of weight, their bodies grew spindily and insectile,
• 1:30:06
  with individual digits extending into multitudes of thin, versatile limbs.
• 1:30:12
  Other than these, the only developed organs were their derived
• 1:30:16
  jet sphincters, which went on to become the principal means
• 1:30:19
  of locomotion. But above all were their brains. Their bulging,
• 1:30:25
  swollen brains. With no hindrance from gravity, the human brain
• 1:30:31
  could grow into unprecedented sizes. Each generation devised experiments that
• 1:30:36
  produced offspring with greater cranial capacity, giving rise to beings
• 1:30:41
  who went through their everyday lives thinking and concepts and
• 1:30:44
  structures scarcely comprehensible to people today. The physiological limitations of
• 1:30:51
  the human mind had long been debated. Now it was
• 1:30:55
  established that these limits were indeed real, and individuals who
• 1:30:59
  could bring them would likewise conquer new grounds in philosophy, art,
• 1:31:04
  and science. Everything changed, yet some aspects of humanity, such
• 1:31:12
  as the basic desire to expand, remained. To this end.
• 1:31:17
  The astromorphs built great fleets of globular sub arcs and
• 1:31:21
  spread their influence across the heavens into every stellar cluster
• 1:31:26
  in every star system. Within less than a thousand years,
• 1:31:32
  the galaxy was straddled by a new and far more
• 1:31:35
  intelligent alien empire of Man. Strangely enough, its dominion included
• 1:31:42
  none of the newly emerging posthuman species, for its masters
• 1:31:47
  had completely lost interest in planets. Though stunting gravity chain
• 1:31:52
  balls of dirt and ice, the newborn arcs settled comfortably
• 1:31:57
  in the outer rims of solar systems, observing the lives
• 1:32:01
  of their struggling relatives. For the first time in history
• 1:32:06
  there were actual gods in the myriad human skies. They
• 1:32:13
  were silent and weren't even noticed for most of the time,
• 1:32:17
  but their watchfulness was ultimately going to pay.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 2: Off second Galactic Empire.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: Over time, the sentient posthumans began to reach out to
• 1:32:32
  the galaxy. They inevitably stumbled across the ruins of the
• 1:32:36
  Starmen and figured out their interstellar ancestry. These discoveries were
• 1:32:42
  followed by a realization that there might be others like
• 1:32:45
  them unimaginable distances away. Thus, the fledgling civilizations set about
• 1:32:51
  to probing the skies. The contacts, all established by radio communication,
• 1:32:58
  were not spread out evenly. The empire began little more
• 1:33:01
  than a few million years after the Q left. A
• 1:33:05
  few thousand years later, the initial species were joined by
• 1:33:09
  the tool breeders, hailing out from the ocean depths through
• 1:33:12
  living radio arrays. The second wave of sentient species joined
• 1:33:18
  in during the following ten million years, as the modular
• 1:33:22
  whole pterosapiens and the fledgling asymmetrics contacted their celestial cousins. Finally,
• 1:33:30
  in the next twenty million years, newly evolving civilizations such
• 1:33:34
  as the Saurus snake people, parasite symbiotes, and the sale
• 1:33:39
  people successfully contacted the burgeoning galactic Empire. The bugfacers were
• 1:33:46
  aware of the whole process, but due to their xenophobic experience,
• 1:33:50
  they only opened up after a staggering forty million years
• 1:33:54
  of silence.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: This union was.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: An empire of speech, for actual travel between the stars
• 1:34:02
  was too difficult to be practical. Like the bygone colonies
• 1:34:06
  of the Starman, the pos humans cooperated through the unrestricted
• 1:34:10
  exchange of information and experience. Although covering every aspect of
• 1:34:16
  an astonishing variety of cultures, the Empire's efforts focused on
• 1:34:20
  two main issues, political unification though not homogenization in galactic awareness,
• 1:34:29
  constant readiness for possible alien invasions. Everybody had come across
• 1:34:35
  the remains of the mysterious que nobody wanted a repeat
• 1:34:40
  of the same scenario. When the Second Empire ran into
• 1:34:45
  aster Morphs, who had silently saturated the galaxy of their
• 1:34:48
  own Empire of Man, they feared the worst, but luckily
• 1:34:53
  for them, the godlike beings were not interested in the
• 1:34:57
  Second Empire nor any of its world. The aster Morphs
• 1:35:02
  were given a wide berth and accepted as they were incomprehensible,
• 1:35:07
  omnipotent forces of nature. This coordinated effort lasted for almost
• 1:35:13
  eighty million years, during which its member species attained previously
• 1:35:17
  unimaginable levels of culture, welfare, and technology. Each species colonized
• 1:35:24
  a few dozen worlds of their own, in which nations, cultures,
• 1:35:28
  and individuals lived to the fullest potentials of their existence.
• 1:35:32
  Needless to say, all of this was possible only through
• 1:35:36
  constant communication and a total openness to the galaxy. Most
• 1:35:41
  communities took this for granted and dutifully participated in the
• 1:35:44
  galactic dialogues. But there were others, silent, darkened beings who
• 1:35:49
  refused to join in. Through them would come the Ruin
• 1:35:54
  of the Empire.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 2: Rather tall descendants of the Ruin Haunters.
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: After the lesson of the Q, second Galactic Empire, kept
• 1:36:09
  a constant watch against alien invasion. Ironically, they neglected to
• 1:36:14
  look among themselves. The second great invasion of the galaxy
• 1:36:18
  came not from outside, but from within. The Ruin Haunters,
• 1:36:24
  who were lucky enough to inherit the secrets of the
• 1:36:26
  starmin and Q when other species were mere animals, had
• 1:36:30
  experienced a tremendous advance in technological prows. All in all,
• 1:36:35
  they were a sophisticated as, if not more than most
• 1:36:40
  aster morphs of the void, but their ascendancy was not
• 1:36:44
  a sane one. Recall that most Ruin Haunters were already deranged,
• 1:36:49
  with a twisted assumption of being the sole inheritors of
• 1:36:52
  the starmin They refused to communicate with their relatives on
• 1:36:57
  other planets and kept to their own affairs. This neurotic
• 1:37:01
  hubris assumed truly dangerous proportions after the Ruine Haunters modified themselves.
• 1:37:08
  The origin of this modification lay in an early catastrophe.
• 1:37:13
  The ruin haunter's son was undergoing a rapid phase of expansion,
• 1:37:17
  and the species, advanced as it was, could do nothing
• 1:37:21
  to stop it. So the haunters did the best thing
• 1:37:25
  they could and changed their bodies. The infernal conditions of
• 1:37:31
  the solar expansion meant that a biological reconstruction was totally
• 1:37:36
  out of the question. Thus the haunters replaced their bodies
• 1:37:40
  with machines, floating spheres of metal that moved and molded
• 1:37:45
  their environment through subtle manipulations of gravity fields. In earlier versions,
• 1:37:52
  the spheres still cradled the organic brains of the last Haunters,
• 1:37:57
  but in successive generations ways of containing the mind within
• 1:38:01
  quantum computers were devised and the transformation became absolute. The
• 1:38:07
  ruin Hunters were replaced by the completely mechanical gravitol. While
• 1:38:14
  not even organic, the gravitol still retained human dreams, human ambitions,
• 1:38:20
  and human delusions of grandeur. This, combined with the mechanical bodies,
• 1:38:27
  allowed them to cross space with ease and made interstellar
• 1:38:32
  war a frightening possibility.
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 2: The machine invasion.
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: It took a long time for the gravitol to prepare.
• 1:38:47
  Propulsion systems were perfected, and new bodies capable of withstanding
• 1:38:51
  the interstellar jumps were devised, but when they finally decided
• 1:38:55
  that the time was nigh, nothing survived their slaughter. The
• 1:39:00
  invasions followed a brutally simple plan. The target world's suns
• 1:39:06
  were blockaded and their light was trapped behind specially constructed
• 1:39:10
  million mile sails. If the dying worlds managed to resist,
• 1:39:17
  an asteroid of two finished them off. Enormous invasion fleets
• 1:39:22
  were built, but it was rarely necessary to deploy them.
• 1:39:26
  The machines had caught their cousins completely off guard. The
• 1:39:31
  great Dyeings, all of which occurred in a relatively quick
• 1:39:35
  ten thousand year period, stretched the boundaries of genocide and horror.
• 1:39:41
  Almost all of the new human species. Unique beings who
• 1:39:45
  had endured mast extinctions, navigated evolutionary knife edges and survived
• 1:39:51
  to build worlds of their own, vanished without a trace.
• 1:39:57
  Even the que had been loyal to life. They had
• 1:40:02
  disorted and subjugated their victims, but in the end they
• 1:40:06
  had allowed them to survive. To the machines, however, life
• 1:40:11
  was a luxury. Such thorough ruthlessness was not ironically born
• 1:40:18
  out of any kind of actual hatred. The Gravitol, long
• 1:40:22
  accustomed to their mechanical bodies, simply did not acknowledge the
• 1:40:26
  life of their organic cousins. When this apathy was mixed
• 1:40:31
  with their insane claims as the sole heirs of the Starman,
• 1:40:36
  the extinctions were carried out with the banality of, say,
• 1:40:39
  an engineer tearing down an abandoned building. Under the reign
• 1:40:45
  of the machines, the galaxy entered a brand new dark
• 1:40:49
  age when considering the invasion. The machine invasion brought on
• 1:41:02
  the greatest wave of extinctions the galaxy had ever seen,
• 1:41:06
  for it was not a simple act of war by
• 1:41:08
  one species against another, but a systematized destruction of life itself.
• 1:41:15
  When considering such a vast event, it is easy to
• 1:41:18
  get lost in romantic delusions. Is almost as easy to
• 1:41:22
  write off the gravitaal as evil as it is to
• 1:41:25
  consider the entire episode as a nihilistic end of everything
• 1:41:29
  kind of scenario. Both of these approaches are as they
• 1:41:34
  would be in any historical situation monumental fallacies. To begin with,
• 1:41:41
  the Gravitol were not evil, at least not to their
• 1:41:44
  own perception. These beings, although mechanical, still lived their lives
• 1:41:49
  as individuals and operated inside coherent societies. They had surrendered
• 1:41:55
  their organic heritage, but their minds were not the cold,
• 1:41:59
  caulating engines of true machines. Even after giving orders that
• 1:42:04
  would destroy a billion souls, a Gravitol would have a
• 1:42:08
  home to go to, and, as incredibly as it might sound,
• 1:42:12
  a family in a circle of friends towards which it
• 1:42:16
  felt genuine affection. Despite being endowed with compassion, their harsh
• 1:42:22
  treatment of the organics was the result of, as mentioned before,
• 1:42:26
  a simple inability to understand their right to live. Furthermore,
• 1:42:32
  the Gravitol did not constitute a singular, indivisible whole whose
• 1:42:37
  entire purpose was to wreck the universe. True, their technological
• 1:42:43
  advancement had allowed them to form a pangalactic entity, but
• 1:42:47
  within itself, the Machine Empire was divided into political factions
• 1:42:52
  and even religious faiths. Superimposed over these fault lines were
• 1:42:57
  the daily lives and personal affairs of Fai families and individuals.
• 1:43:02
  Like any sentient being, they had a sense of identity
• 1:43:06
  and thus deferring agendas. Nor did the machine invasion mean
• 1:43:11
  the end of everything. There certainly was a widespread destruction
• 1:43:15
  of life, but what was lost was only organic life,
• 1:43:20
  consuming energy, directing it for reproduction, thought, and even evolution.
• 1:43:26
  The machines were as alive as any carbon based organism.
• 1:43:31
  Despite the turnover, life of a sort survived, and as
• 1:43:37
  would be seen, this life even preserved some of its
• 1:43:41
  organic predecessors subjects many descendants of the bug Facers. The
• 1:43:54
  bug Facers, racially shy and xenophobic due to their background
• 1:43:59
  of repeated a Lie invasions, became the first species to
• 1:44:02
  face the gravital onslaught. As ironic as their fate seemed,
• 1:44:07
  the bug Facers were the luckiest of the posthumans. Instead
• 1:44:11
  of being exterminated like the rest of their cousins. They
• 1:44:14
  survived as the only organic beings in the machine empire.
• 1:44:18
  The precise reasons for their retention remain unknown to this day.
• 1:44:23
  Perhaps the machines hadn't perfected their ruthless apathy by then,
• 1:44:27
  or perhaps they pitied the poor organics and allowed them
• 1:44:31
  to maintain a stunted parody of an existence. Whatever the reason,
• 1:44:36
  the bug facers endured, but they hardly resembled their original
• 1:44:41
  ancestors anymore. Genetic engineering, the lost art of the galaxy
• 1:44:46
  threading Q and later the tool breeders as well, was
• 1:44:51
  mastered almost as comprehensively by the machines. Not hesitating to
• 1:44:56
  warp the beings which they did not really consider to
• 1:44:58
  be alive, they spliced their way into the bugfacer DNA,
• 1:45:02
  producing generations of literal abominations. Would a woman or man
• 1:45:08
  of today show any apprehension towards resembling a computer or
• 1:45:12
  even recycling trash. Such was the attitude of the triumphant Gravitol.
• 1:45:19
  Thus multitudes of subjects were produced, distorted to such an
• 1:45:23
  extent that even the meddling of the cue seemed comparatively timid.
• 1:45:28
  Most of them were used as servants. Caretakers and manual laborers.
• 1:45:33
  These were the lucky forms. Some submen were reduced to
• 1:45:38
  the level of cell cultures, useful only for gas exchange
• 1:45:42
  and waste filtering. Others were molded into completely artificial ecologies,
• 1:45:47
  baroque simulations that served only as entertainment. Some machines, with
• 1:45:53
  their still human ambitions, took this practice into a new
• 1:45:56
  level and produced living works of art, doomed one off
• 1:46:01
  creatures who existed purely as biological anachronisms, be it as
• 1:46:08
  a tool, slave, or entertainment. Humanity narrowly held on to
• 1:46:13
  its biological heritage, while its machine cousins reigned supreme for
• 1:46:18
  an unbelievable fifty million years. The other machines recall that
• 1:46:32
  despite its galaxy cradling might, the machine empire was not homogeneous.
• 1:46:37
  It contained dozens of deferring factions that did not always
• 1:46:41
  agree on everything, including the treatment of their downtrodden biological subjects.
• 1:46:48
  Some machines, over a process involving several religious, social, and
• 1:46:52
  philosophical doctrines, began to comprehend the universality of life and
• 1:46:58
  the common origin of our mechanic and mechanical humanities. Initially,
• 1:47:04
  such individuals lived in seclusion or withheld their beliefs from
• 1:47:08
  the world. They secretly engineered lineages of subjects that would live,
• 1:47:13
  move and think as freely as they could. In a
• 1:47:17
  few memorable instances, the engineers fell in love with their creations,
• 1:47:22
  and their martyrdom inspired other machines to think just a
• 1:47:26
  little differently. Eventually, the ideology gained enough momentum to be
• 1:47:31
  practiced openly in everyday life. However, the sect of toleration
• 1:47:37
  soon ran into odds with their hard line pan mechanical rivals.
• 1:47:42
  The seething and tolerance between the two factions finally broke
• 1:47:45
  free when some tolerant machines wanted to set several worlds
• 1:47:50
  aside for the unrestricted development of biological life.
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 2: All hell broke.
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: Loose, and the Machine Empire, the apparent seamless monolith of
• 1:48:01
  the Galaxy, experienced its first, short, bitter civil war. The
• 1:48:09
  war did not cause any lasting damage, but it plainly
• 1:48:13
  illuminated one fact. The greatest entity the galaxy had ever
• 1:48:18
  seen was not without its problems.
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 2: The fall of the machines.
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: In the longer run, the internal struggles of the Machine
• 1:48:32
  Empire just might have led to its downfall. But there
• 1:48:36
  was no need to wait that long, as the empire
• 1:48:39
  died a shorter but immensely more cataclysmic death. For a
• 1:48:44
  long time, the Machine and the Astromorph empires had been
• 1:48:48
  eyeing each other nervously. They hadn't yet run into open confrontations,
• 1:48:53
  as the Astromorphs kept mostly to their outer space arcs
• 1:48:57
  and the Machine Empire occupied the planets. In almost every
• 1:49:01
  inhabitable solar system of the galaxy, the same upside down
• 1:49:05
  tension built up between organic beings living in the void
• 1:49:09
  and machines inhabiting perfectly terrestrial worlds. Power was evenly balanced
• 1:49:15
  between the two rival empires. Moreover, this balance involved forces
• 1:49:21
  strong enough to destroy planets in mass. Each side knew
• 1:49:26
  that any kind of war would result in mutual annihilation,
• 1:49:30
  and only insanity could start such a conflict. Well, the
• 1:49:36
  post Civil War Empire of the Machines did go insane
• 1:49:40
  in a sense. In order to divert attention from internal struggles,
• 1:49:45
  it needed a new enemy to consolidate its rival factions against.
• 1:49:50
  How unwise that this enemy came to be the aster Morphs.
• 1:49:56
  It is unnecessary and nearly impossible to describe the carnage
• 1:49:59
  that followed. The conflicts lasted anywhere up to a few
• 1:50:04
  million years, and the resulting loss of life, both mechanical
• 1:50:09
  and organic, made the initial machine genocide seem irrelevant. When
• 1:50:15
  the cosmic dust settled, the winners displayed themselves. The conquerors
• 1:50:20
  were the astromorphs, changed beyond recognition after fifty million years
• 1:50:25
  of continual self perfection. Their grossly hypertrophied brains stretched out
• 1:50:32
  like wings on either side, and their finger derived limbs
• 1:50:37
  formed an intricate set of sails and legs. Endowed with
• 1:50:41
  superior technology and limitless patients, these beings almost completely destroyed
• 1:50:48
  the machines, despite losing a substantial number of their own species.
• 1:50:54
  The conflict also thrust the astromorphs into the affairs of
• 1:50:58
  their long neglected human cold. As impossible as it seemed,
• 1:51:03
  some of the machine's subjects had survived the ordeal. Now
• 1:51:07
  the astromorphs could no longer look away. With the machines gone,
• 1:51:13
  it was up to the astromorphs to clean up after them.
• 1:51:16
  They took up the subjects and used their genetic heritage
• 1:51:19
  to populate entire planets. During this age of reconstruction, which
• 1:51:24
  lasted for another two million years, many astromorph world builders
• 1:51:29
  emerged as true gods, creating inhabited worlds almost out of scratch.
• 1:51:36
  Their subjects meanwhile, became the inheritors of a truly new,
• 1:51:40
  war torn phoenix of a galaxy, the post war galaxy.
• 1:51:52
  When replenishing lost worlds, the astromorph gods also took measures
• 1:51:56
  to ensure the continued safety of their creations. The abrupt
• 1:52:00
  rise of the machines had shown that, unless carefully regulated,
• 1:52:04
  the wealth of the stars could always host a race
• 1:52:07
  of pangalactic usurpers. The astermorph's watchful but ever transparent, did
• 1:52:14
  not want to interfere directly. Instead, they produced terrestrial versions
• 1:52:19
  of their own kind to regulate the galaxy. They adapted
• 1:52:23
  their delicate ethereal fingers into spidery limbs and shrunk their
• 1:52:27
  brains considerably to readjust the rigors of gravity. The resulting
• 1:52:32
  sideline was stunted by astromorphs standards, but still it produced
• 1:52:37
  demi gods in every sense of the word. These beings,
• 1:52:42
  known often as the terrestrial Spacers or simply the terrestrials,
• 1:52:47
  nurtured and controlled the development of the post war civilizations
• 1:52:51
  on many planets. They acted as caretakers, prophets, kings and emperors,
• 1:52:58
  but also as grim reapers as the occasion dictated. The
• 1:53:04
  endeavor did not always proceed as smoothly as planned. Of course,
• 1:53:08
  most of the time the newborn races refused to heed
• 1:53:12
  their mentors, and even in several cases rebelled against them.
• 1:53:19
  Needless to say, this crime was always punished with a
• 1:53:22
  swift extinction. Furthermore, even the terrestrials grew corrupted. Instead of
• 1:53:30
  offering guidance, terrestrials on many planets simply played god, weaving
• 1:53:36
  contrived religions around themselves to shamelessly exploit their subjects. It
• 1:53:42
  was not ethical or even productive, but this method seemed
• 1:53:46
  to guarantee more stability than actually trying to bring up
• 1:53:50
  the new races. This way or another, organic sentience reclaimed
• 1:53:55
  its dominance in the galaxy. The new empire, managed by terrestrials,
• 1:54:01
  populated by a myriad descendants of the subjects, and overseen
• 1:54:06
  ultimately by the omniscent aster morphs, achieved greater progress and
• 1:54:12
  a longer lasting calm in a galaxy than all of
• 1:54:16
  its predecessors combined. The new machines, long after their fall
• 1:54:27
  from grace, the machines still clung on to existence. During
• 1:54:32
  the initial aftermath of the war, the Asteromorphs had planned
• 1:54:37
  to exterminate every last one of them, only to discover
• 1:54:40
  that the machines were simply too useful to destroy. For
• 1:54:44
  millions of years, they had perfected the interface between mind
• 1:54:47
  and machine to such an extent that they could live
• 1:54:50
  and operate in the most inhospitable conditions. Such beings, deprived
• 1:54:56
  of their galaxy straddling power, would make invaluable contributions to
• 1:55:00
  research and exploration in the new Empire. There was a
• 1:55:05
  sense of poetic justice in all of this. The machines,
• 1:55:09
  who once distorted biological life forms to their whim were
• 1:55:13
  finally treated to a similar fate to begin with. To
• 1:55:17
  begin with, the Asteromorphs completely scraped their ability of self
• 1:55:22
  contained gravitational manipulation, the very force that had rendered them
• 1:55:27
  invulnerable in the first place. They were given finite lifespans
• 1:55:32
  in slightly numbed imaginations, so that history would not repeat itself.
• 1:55:38
  The degradatory nature of these changes, however, did not imply
• 1:55:43
  an overall regression. Unlike their ancestors, the new machines were
• 1:55:47
  endowed with nanotechnological bodies, that could remodel themselves continuously, which
• 1:55:53
  meant that they could come in every shape and size imaginable,
• 1:55:57
  and then some that could not. A machine citizen could
• 1:56:01
  live for some time in the void of the space
• 1:56:04
  conducting research, and then transform into a completely different body
• 1:56:08
  plan for a holiday on a commentary halo, tropical jungle,
• 1:56:13
  or a methane ocean. He or she would also make
• 1:56:16
  the trip personally by growing temporary hyperdrives and ramjet engines.
• 1:56:23
  Despite their breathtaking versatility, the machines were never as common
• 1:56:27
  or prominent, even after completely accepting their role as Lily's
• 1:56:31
  citizens of the New Empire. The greatest wars in conceivable
• 1:56:36
  history had ingrained the organics with too deep a mistrust
• 1:56:39
  of their mechanical neighbors, and the new machines were always
• 1:56:43
  treated with a degree of discrimination. The sins of their
• 1:56:47
  fathers had come to shackle this most splendorous of all
• 1:56:51
  human species.
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 2: Second contact.
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: With success waves of machine aided discovery and colonization, the
• 1:57:03
  New Empire grew exponentially. Such was the growth of wealth
• 1:57:08
  and progress that its description would need the use of
• 1:57:11
  concepts that remain unexplored today. To talk with a man
• 1:57:16
  of today, about the comings and goings of the new
• 1:57:18
  empire would be akin to giving lectures of twentieth century
• 1:57:21
  geopolitics to a hunter gatherer. This magnificent entity was not
• 1:57:27
  blind to the universe around it. It tuned in its eyes, ears,
• 1:57:32
  and censors, and probed the events of the surrounding galaxies.
• 1:57:37
  The new galactics suspected that the surrounding nebula might also
• 1:57:42
  have their indigenous folk, and it was wise to contact
• 1:57:46
  them before a misunderstanding or conflict could occur on a
• 1:57:51
  darker side. These observations also served as lookouts for potential invaders.
• 1:57:57
  Even then, the memory of the queue was not forgotten.
• 1:58:03
  The discovery was eventually made. One of the neighboring galaxies
• 1:58:07
  was showing patterns of activity that were the unmistakable signs
• 1:58:11
  of a sentient organization. Some thinkers reveled in the discovery
• 1:58:16
  of a new civilization, while others feared a return of
• 1:58:19
  the que Fortunately, this second encounter with an alien species
• 1:58:24
  proved to be a peaceful one. Perhaps the intelligences of
• 1:58:28
  both galaxies were finally mature enough to meet without quarreling.
• 1:58:35
  The other galaxy was dominated by connected unions of different beings,
• 1:58:39
  presided over by various kinds of amthhysiphali, bizarre creatures that
• 1:58:45
  resembled giant snakes with heads on both ends, one of
• 1:58:49
  which bore a secondary, retractable body that they would use
• 1:58:53
  to interact with the world. Apparently they had undergone alternating
• 1:58:58
  series of regressions, evolutionary radiations, and self imposed genetic makeovers,
• 1:59:05
  just as humanity had with all of their wild difference.
• 1:59:10
  The Amphysiphali were welcome. They were the first, but surely
• 1:59:15
  not the.
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 2: Last, Earth rediscovered.
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: The purpose of this work is not to describe the
• 1:59:27
  limitless progress that followed the cross galactic contact. One could
• 1:59:32
  go indefinitely chronicling how the United Galaxies re encountered and
• 1:59:36
  subdued the queue, how they cradled their suns with artificial shells,
• 1:59:41
  multiplying their inhabitable zones a billionfold, how they crisscrossed interstellar
• 1:59:46
  space with wormholes and made travel a thing of the past. Ultimately,
• 1:59:53
  descendants of those beings even conquered time itself, prolonging the
• 1:59:57
  existence of their minds indefinitely via rejuvenating technologies. For a
• 2:00:03
  time all men were gods. But from your vantage point,
• 2:00:12
  one discovery truly stood out in this orgy of advance
• 2:00:17
  compared with gargantuan achievements like the taming of space in
• 2:00:21
  the construction of star shells, it was a mere blip,
• 2:00:24
  a revelation of long forgotten trivia. This was the rediscovery
• 2:00:30
  of Earth, a birthplace of humanity, where the omnipresent asteromorph,
• 2:00:37
  the star gliding machine, and the millions of humble resident
• 2:00:41
  races could all trace their origins. It was made quietly
• 2:00:47
  by a singular researcher combing the vestiges of forgotten history.
• 2:00:51
  Decade after decade, millions of years of wars, invasions, and
• 2:00:58
  extinctions had buried the evidence thoroughly and comprehensively. When she
• 2:01:04
  finally came across irrefutable evidence, nobody was around to celebrate.
• 2:01:09
  That would come later.
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: The return the.
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: Discovery sparked a certain amount of interest, though nowhere as
• 2:01:22
  much as other breakthroughs had to most humans of the
• 2:01:25
  cosmos to their ancestral birthplace was simply an interesting piece
• 2:01:29
  of information, a piece of trivia with which they had
• 2:01:33
  lost all ties. Still, a ship was sent forth, and
• 2:01:38
  it landed without ceremony. For now, there was no intelligence
• 2:01:42
  left on Earth. Too far away from the main centers
• 2:01:45
  of population. It had been completely ignored, gone stagnant and feral,
• 2:01:50
  but still it was home. When the explorers stepped out,
• 2:01:56
  human feet trod on old Earth once more, after an
• 2:02:01
  absence of five hundred and sixty million years, mankind was
• 2:02:06
  back home.
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 2: All tomorrows.
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: I must conclude my words with a confession. Mankind, a
• 2:02:20
  very species which I've been chronicling, from its terrestrial infancy
• 2:02:24
  to its domination of the galaxies, is extinct. All of
• 2:02:29
  the beings which you heard of in the preceding recordings,
• 2:02:33
  from the lowly worm to the wind writing sale people,
• 2:02:38
  from the megalomaniac Gravitol to the ultimate galactic citizens, lie
• 2:02:44
  a billion years dead. We are only beginning to piece
• 2:02:49
  the story together. What you read was our best approximation
• 2:02:54
  of the truth. Why did they disappear? Perhaps it was
• 2:02:59
  a fire unimaginable war of annihilation, one that transcended the
• 2:03:04
  very meaning of conflict. Perhaps it was a gradual breakup
• 2:03:08
  of the United Galaxies, in every race facing their private
• 2:03:12
  end slowly afterwards. Or perhaps the wildest theories suggest it
• 2:03:19
  was a mass migration to another plane of existence, a
• 2:03:23
  journey into somewhere, sometime, something else. But the bottom line
• 2:03:30
  is we honestly don't know. Ultimately, however, what happened to
• 2:03:37
  humanity does not matter. Like every other story, it was
• 2:03:41
  a temporary one, indeed long, but ultimately ephemeral. It did
• 2:03:48
  not have a coherent ending, but then again, it did
• 2:03:50
  not need to. The tale of humanity was never its
• 2:03:55
  ultimate domination of a thousand galaxies or its mysterious exit
• 2:03:59
  into the unknown. The essence of being human was none
• 2:04:04
  of that. Instead, it lay in the radio conversations of
• 2:04:09
  the still human machines, in the daily lives of the
• 2:04:13
  bizarrely twisted bugfacers, in the endless love songs of the
• 2:04:18
  care free hedonists, the rebellious demonstrations of the first true Martians,
• 2:04:25
  and in a way, the very life you lead at
• 2:04:28
  the moment. Many throughout history were unaware of this most
• 2:04:34
  basic fact. The cue in dreams of an ideal future
• 2:04:39
  distorted the worlds it came across. Later on, the gravitaal,
• 2:04:45
  with their insane desire to recreate the past, created the
• 2:04:49
  biggest massacres in the history of the galaxy. Even now,
• 2:04:54
  it is sickeningly easy for beings to get lost in
• 2:04:58
  false grand narratives, living out completely driven lives in pursuit
• 2:05:03
  of nonexistent ultimates, ideals, climaxes, and golden ages. In blindly
• 2:05:11
  thinking that their stories serve absolute ends, such creatures almost
• 2:05:16
  always end up harming themselves, if not those around them,
• 2:05:21
  to those like them. Look at the story of man
• 2:05:25
  and come to your senses. It is not the destination,
• 2:05:29
  but the trip that matters. In what you do today
• 2:05:33
  influences tomorrow, not the other way around. Love today and
• 2:05:41
  sees all tomorrows.